I finally watched Agora on DVD last night. It’s one rioting mob after another interspersed with astronomy lessons.
You have your Pagan mob, your Jewish mob, your Christian mob(s). A Muslim mob would have fit right in, but had not yet been invented.
And did Hypatia really discover that planetary orbits were elliptical, not perfect Platonic circles? No. It was the sort of issue that would have engaged her interest, however.
Here is the historical part: There was a Pagan neoplatonic philosopher-teacher in 5th-century Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of an intellectual father, who was murdered by a sort of Christian Taliban.
There was a Roman prefect (governor) named Orestes and a fanatical monk named Ammonius. And Mullah Bishop Cyril, of course.
And the rest is movie-making. (Military historians will note that the Roman soldiers look more like the 1st century CE than the 5th.) For more on the actual Hyptia—and on the movie version—visit Egregores.
UPDATE: See also Kallisti’s review with its “motivational poster.“
“One rioting mob after another” pretty much sounds like what I know about Alexandria at the time, not to mention early Church history generally. I expect we’ll rent it soon enough. But the real question is, is it appropriate viewing for small pythons, even if they do have a namesake involved?
While I enjoyed the subvert messages of the film, I did in the end feel like I watched a rather violent snuff film. If there’s a bright side to it, I did feel like the message of this film was against misogyny, rather than for it. There was a film of some Oscar Wilde metaplay about Salome’s Last Dance that ended predictably (it was Salome, after all) and in that one, I felt like the message was about the low value of a girl-child’s life.
That whole rotating Taliban thing aside, I think it raises the question over and over again: what’s going on with our lizard brains that makes us fear new ideas?
@Peculiar: No pythons were harmed in the making of the movie, so I think that Hypatia would be all right.
@Diana: Not the lizard brain, but the mammal brain is at play here, I think.
Thanks for the link to Egregores site. I saw Agora when it first came out in NYC and felt there were some historical distortions including portraying Hypatia as a modern atheist. Her dedication to a philosophy which practiced specific mysteries as way to know “the divine” shows she was a deeply spiritual woman. I discuss that aspect of the film in a series of posts on my blog on the events and characters from the film – not a movie review, just a “reel vs. real” discussion.
On the other hand, artists rarely get history or science right. They are trying to entertain or make a comment on society–usually both. For people who want to know more about the historical Hypatia, I highly recommend a very readable biography by Maria Dzielska called Hypatia of Alexandria (Harvard Press, 1995.) I thought Dzielska did a great job of combing through the myths and legends and putting the few historical primary sources in context.