Agora: a film about Alexandria, astronomy, and a woman of science

Agora is not your typical summer blockbuster.  You may even have trouble finding a theater where it is currently playing.  But the movie is centered on some themes that will undoubtedly resonate with fans of Humanities West, especially those who attended last season's programs about astronomy (in October 2009) and Alexandria (in February 2010). 

This is the story of Hypatia, the brilliant female philosoper, mathematician, and astronomer, who lived and taught in Alexandria at the end of the fourth century and beginning of the fifth century, when Alexandria was being torn apart by factional strife between the Hellenistic pagans, the Jews, and the rapidly rising Christians.  Hypatia, who has been called "the last of the Hellenes", had a devoted following that included members of all three cultural strands, but her dedication to a life of reason and empirical skepticism brought her increasingly into conflict with the faith-based fanaticism of the Christians, who eventually destroyed the multi-cultural cosmopolitanism that had made Alexandria the cultural and scholarly center of Mediterranean civilization for centuries.  The brutal public murder of Hypatia by an organized mob of Christian militants in 415 AD may also be seen as the symbolic end of the Hellenistic era that our program celebrated.  (The image below is from Raphael's School of Athens.)

The film's depiction of factional strife in Alexandria, although sometimes uncomfortably graphic, seems to follow historical accounts rather accurately.  Its re-creation of ancient Alexandria and of everyday life in the streets, as well as in the scholarly precincts of the Library, are impressive and convincing.  The film also depicts Hypatia's intellectual struggle to challenge the assumptions of the dominant geocentric model of Ptolemaic astronomy, and replace it with a simpler, more elegant heliocentric model, a theory that would take more than a thousand years (and the invention of the telescope) to gain widespread acceptance.  This account is credible (based on Hypatia's scholarly accomplishments and on the existence of competing heliocentric theories in the Greek tradition), but is also highly speculative, since little direct evidence of her work survived.

If you enjoy historical dramatizations, this film is worth seeing.  If you are unable to find it in a theater, the DVD can be pre-ordered through Netflix or Amazon, although it will apparently not be available until later this Fall.