Agora...has anyone seen it?

[cynatnite]

I had heard about this movie and hunted everywhere for it. Since it wasn't available for purchase I downloaded it.

Stayed up late watching it. The movie is about Hypatia, an atheist, a philosopher and mathmetician, and about the rise of Christianity in ancient Alexandria.

It is a disturbing portrayel of Christianity. I know they took a lot of liberties with Hypatia, but as far as how Christianity asserted itself in those days...I'm not sure how accurate that is.

This movie is very compelling and I know I'll watch it again. Hopefully, they give this a wide release. I want to own it.

[onager]

1. Yep, saw it last week.

After a recommendation from here or the Skeptics group. Had the same problem as you with finding it.

I'm also hoping for a wide release. That should happen. It was directed by Alejandro Almenabar, who's not exactly a newcomer or a lightweight in world cinema.

I will gladly buy it on DVD, especially if it has a "Making of..." feature.

I know they took a lot of liberties with Hypatia, but as far as how Christianity asserted itself in those days...I'm not sure how accurate that is.

AFAIK, it's very accurate, though the destruction of the Alexandria Library is a giant historical can of worms.

It is a matter of historical record that, in the Fourth Century CE, the Xian Bishop of Alexandria ordered mobs to destroy all pagan shrines in the city.

By that time, the Alexandria Library was built right into a pagan shrine - the Temple of Serapis, or the Serapeum. This was a "daughter" or "satellite" library - not the original Great Library.

It doesn't help that we have to talk about TWO Alexandria Libraries - the original Great Library built by Ptolemy II around the Third Century BCE, and the much smaller Fourth Century CE library we see in "Agora."

For the Great Library, about all we can say is "nobody knows for sure." A Google will keep you busy for hours. But Xians almost certainly destroyed the daughter library, as shown in the movie.

I lived in Alexandria for nearly 4 years, and read a lot of history about the city, some of it in fairly obscure books written by specialist scholars.

In the movie, I recognized the location of the Library immediately, up on that hill. Nowadays the place is called Pompey's Pillar. It's one of the biggest tourist sites in Alexandria.

It was one of my favorite places to go in Alexandria, because of all the history. In the underground cellars, you can still see niches where scrolls were stored, presumably from the Library. Also a giant sort of conference table made from 3 massive pieces of granite.

What's funny is the way Xians and Muslims point the finger at each other, or the pagans, for destroying the Library. NOBODY wants the blame for destroying one of humanity's greatest treasures.

The original Great Library was built in the Royal Quarter of Alexandria, near the beach. That whole section of the city was destroyed in 365 CE by a massive tsunami and earthquake. Contemporary descriptions make it sound like the Asian tsunami of 2005 - boats in the Alexandria docks were driven on top of two-story buildings.

I would guess that the "daughter library" in the Serapeum was built up with copies of manuscripts from the Great Library. We know the librarians kept multiple copies, and many of those were stored in warehouses around Alexandria, not in the Library itself.

Even without the tsunami, by the Fourth Century CE, the glory days of the Great Library were probably long gone. The last Ptolemy, Cleopatra VII, had been dead for 400 years and Egypt was just another Roman province. As usual, the Romans were most interested in taking cash out of the province, not in maintaining its past glories.