Agora (Movie)

edited December 1969 in Random Issues
If anyone has not yet seen the film "Agora" I recommend that you do, even with its flaws, it is nice to see a big quality production about Egypt. But I want to set some things straight about the erroneous history, actually some of it is absent from the movie entirely. The film somewhat places blame on St Cyril for the death of Hypatia AND the violence against the jews who were forced from Egypt. However this is not entirely true. The main cause of the violence against the jews is their constant antagonism towards Christians. The instance the completely set it off, which resulted in their expulsion from Egypt, was the incident with Hierax. He was a close confidant to St Cyril and the jews suspected him of "spying" and had the prefect, who was also a Christian, publicly torture and kill him. This set off the violence against them, not anything stated by St Cyril.

Hypatia was a philosopher. She was close to the prefect and used him to fight a proxy war against St Cyril and influence his decisions, which cause plenty of outrage. While St Cyril and the parabalani are charged with her death it is rather unlikely in any event that either was directly or indirectly responsible for her death. Especially in the way portrayed in the movie, which is one of the ways she is said to die, being stoned before an altar. No true Christian would ever do such a thing, especially such a learned saint. If this is how she died, there is no doubt that another of her many enemies killed her and placed her body there in order to place blame on the Christians.

At any rate the movie does give hints that she influenced Orestes, the prefects, thinking in stating that St Cyril was against him. So while it is a bit biased, it is not all that bad and is a decent movie. The guy who plays Ammonius is awesome and St Cyril is strong and powerful, as I envision him. Just keep those things in mind if you do watch it.
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