Agora: A film about Hypatia of Alexandria
Still from Alejandro Amenabar's 'Agora'
Finally someone’s made a film about my favorite ancient woman. Hypatia of Alexandria’s story gripped me in my 20s, and I read Charles Kingsley’s historical novel Hypatia: Or, New Foes with an Old Face several times. Romantic and Victorian as it is, the book is chock full of unique characters, and gives you the sweep of Egypt and the Mediterranean at a time of intense cultural upheaval. Philosophical questions abound throughout the book, and it paints a fascinating picture of the influx of the foreign new Christian ways of thinking as they wicked upwards from the poor and downtrodden to influence the upper classes. Christian ideas are contrasted with Pagan Neoplatonism and other schools of thought that Christianity was competing with at the time. 
Naturally, questions of fate, destiny, faith, identity, and love are on every page, and to his credit (Victorian Brit that he was) Kingsley presents the different schools of thought with remarkable even-handedness.
Since I read Kingsley’s Hypatia, scholarly biographies of Hypatia have been published, and I haven’t read a single one. I think I want to keep the Kingsley vision of her intact: heady, single-minded, proud, and pure, a mathematician and astronomer who presided over Alexandria’s great library in the waning days of the ancient Pagan world. (And I’m using ‘Pagan’ in the broad academic sense of ‘Not-Christian’)
Alejandro Amenabar’s film, Agora (not the most catchy title in English), just debuted at Cannes, to mixed reviews. It’s being released in the US in December. I hope the bad reviews are bad for reasons that bother those reviewers and not me. Like maybe, too much philosophy and not enough explosions or something.
June 13th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Wonderful post on Hypatia and Kingsley. A playwright in Second Life has also written a play on Hypatia and we are performing it in early July — I play the evil Cyril
— and it is written mostly as a series of sonnets. if you’d like an essay that I’ve written on this to promote the play just email me.
(Love Rachel Weizs and can’t wait to see her as Hypatia — but suspect that there is not going to be much math in the film
And why call it Agora — she taught in her house?)