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Via Dave Bath, I’ve learnt that leading Spanish director (he won Best Foreign Language Oscar in 2005 for Mar adentro) Alejandro Amenábar has made a film about classical scientist Hypatia. It’s to be called Agora and stars Rachel Weisz. For those unfamiliar with the background, Hypatia (an astronomer) was killed in appalling circumstances by a Christian mob shortly after Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius’ ‘Edict of Intolerance’ in 391AD.
That’s my moniker, of course, but it sums up pretty accurately what Theodosius did: made all non-Christian religions (bar the very limited exception of Judaism, although the stinging slur ‘Christ Killer’ was beginning to make its presence felt) illegal, confiscating their property and giving it over to Christian churches, breaking up community associations and desecrating public structures associated with paganism. The most dramatic of these acts was the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, which although a public building for the citizens of the city, was maintained and paid for by worshippers of the Hellenized Egyptian God Serapis. Theodosius did other nasty things at the same time, like banning same-sex marriage and generally taking what had always been a matter of private contract in the Roman world into the hands of the State. He’s the reason why churches in Italy with names like ‘Maria Maggiore’ will have a Temple of Cybele underneath, or why the crypt is so often a mithraeum.
Here’s a rather bitty outtake from the film; the panicked reaction of library staff once they realise what’s coming is well done.

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jsl32

The Hypatia of History

The real Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, who was famous for his edition of Euclid's Elements and his commentaries on Ptolemy, Euclid and Aratus. Her birth year is often given as AD 370, but Maria Dzielska argues this is 15-20 years too late and suggests AD 350 to be more accurate. That would make her 65 when she was killed and therefore someone who should perhaps be played by Helen Mirren rather than Rachel Weisz. But that would make the movie much harder to sell at the box office.

She grew up to become a renowned scholar in her own right. She seems to have assisted her father in his edition of Euclid and an edition of Ptolemy's Almagest, as well writing commentaries on the Arithmetica of Diophantus and the Conics of Apollonius. Like most natural philosophers of her time, she embraced the neo-Platonic ideas of Plotinus and so her teaching and ideas appealed to a broad range of people - pagans, Christians and Jews. There is some suggestion that Amenabar's film depicts her as an atheist, or at least as wholly irreligious, which is highly unlikely. Neo-Platonism embraced the idea of a perfect, ultimate source called "the One" or "the Good", which was, by Hypatia's time, fully identified with a monotheistic God in most respects.Fanatical Christians still killed her, but the reason was... Also, the Great Library of Alexandria was not burned down by a Christian mob. It was probably done in by a fire started by Julius Cesar's soldiers...Oh. lesbiassparrow comments that thats not accurate either. The library went to its doom in a different manner And the director of the film is Chilean, not Spanish.helenadaxclarifies the identity issue re: the director This entire post is amusing me no end...