Agora

pinksoir

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1186830/

Anybody seen this film? Interesting portrayal of religious tensions, violence and persecution in fourth century Alexandria. It centres around a (female) philosopher and atheist, Hypatyia, who is the teacher of a new generation of Egyptian Romans, some of whom go on to hold positions of power both politically and in the early Christian church. The change in the role of women with the rise of Xtianity is explored very well, as is the idea of the persecuted becoming the persecutors, as is the idea of politicians becoming Christian in order to gain the popular vote.

In many ways the film shows the negative aspects of religion, while also highlighting the hypocritical and equally ridiculous beliefs held by the followers. We see three religions treated in the film - Pagan (Roman), Christian and Jewish, each at different points persecuting one another for blasphemy etc against their own religion. Violence in return for insult.

A line that is repeated in the film, originally taught to the class by Hypatia, is 'We have more in common than we have differences. We are all brothers'. Of course no heed is ever paid to this notion, as religious identity is seen as more important.

There are many other themes explored, but by far the most profound is the value of superstition over knowledge, reason and truth. This is a central theme and is tackled in a very clever way.

hiorta

Seems very interesting and informative. Thank you for the info.

Petrovia

I haven't seen it, but I will now!

pinksoir

It's really good. Great recreation of 4th C Egypt. It shows how little the human race has really progressed since classical times.

Dades

I don't want to belittle the message of this movie - but anything with Rachel Weisz is fine with me.

pinksoir

Dades wrote: »

I don't want to belittle the message of this movie - but anything with Rachel Weisz is fine with me.

She is quite the winner.

robindch

pinksoir wrote: »

The change in the role of women with the rise of Xtianity is explored very well, as is the idea of the persecuted becoming the persecutors, as is the idea of politicians becoming Christian in order to gain the popular vote.

If Edward Gibbon is anything to go by -- and his word is considered pretty good --- then the tradition of the persecution of the christians by the Romans is little more than a pious fiction, especially compared with the far worse persecution that various christian denominations meted out to each other.

pinksoir wrote: »

Agora http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1186830/

I hadn't realized that Hypatia -- one of the last philosophers in the tradition of Ancient Greece -- was considered popular enough to merit a fillum!

Thanks for the heads-up

pinksoir

robindch wrote: »

If Edward Gibbon is anything to go by -- and his word is considered pretty good --- then the tradition of the persecution of the christians by the Romans is little more than a pious fiction, especially compared with the far worse persecution that various christian denominations meted out to each other.I hadn't realized that Hypatia -- one of the last philosophers in the tradition of Ancient Greece -- was considered popular enough to merit a fillum!

Thanks for the heads-up

Well to be fair, they dole out faaaar more than they take in this film.

Having studies Classics I was surprised that I never came across her before. The fact that she discovered that the earth moves in an elliptical orbit in a heliocentric system would surely merit a mention...

Xluna

Sounds interesting. I'm going to check this out tonight....if I can stream it...:pac:

pinksoir

Xluna wrote: »

]if I can stream it...:pac:

Why, whatever can you mean?

Tyler MacDurden

Great find, can't wait to dig this up.

I did Classics myself (my thesis was on Ptolemaic Egypt) and if anything in history ever comes close to making me cry it's the story of The Library's destruction.:o


Here's Carl on The Library, Hypatia and her illustrious colleagues:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jixnM7S9tLw

The Mad Hatter

Wow, that sounds really good. *Puts it on "To Watch" list.*

pinksoir

Tyler MacDurden wrote: »

Great find, can't wait to dig this up.

I did Classics myself (my thesis was on Ptolemaic Egypt) and if anything in history ever comes close to making me cry it's the story of The Library's destruction.:o

It's incredibly depressing. All that knowledge destroyed and for what? Superstition, witch hunts and stonings.

The Classics are a constant wonder to me. As Carl says in that video the advancement of science literature and medicine was regarded as one of the treasures of the Empire by the kings of Alexandria. "An enlightenment shared by few heads of state then and now."

Tyler MacDurden

pinksoir wrote: »

It's incredibly depressing. All that knowledge destroyed and for what? Superstition, witch hunts and stonings.

The Classics are a constant wonder to me. As Carl says in that video the advancement of science literature and medicine was regarded as one of the treasures of the Empire by the kings of Alexandria. "An enlightenment shared by few heads of state then and now."

Heartbreaking indeed, the folly of Theodosius and his ilk.

I will try to dig up a speculative essay by Arnold J. Toynbee which makes for fascinating reading. He imagines a world in which Alexander recovers from his illness and, after further conquest, ushers in a pax Alexandria. He forsees:

The work of Heron and others sparking an early Industrial Revolution, where Carthaginian steamships discover the Americas and railways unite the Eurasian empire of Alexander's successors;

The intellectual heirs of Zeno and Archimides formulating a calculus a millenium ahead of Newton or Kepler;

Monotheism being still-born, a peculiarity of an Imperial backwater, a synthesis of the European Pantheon with Zoroastrianism and Buddhism coming to dominate the world.


Fanciful stuff, but the seeds of something great were there. I anticipate the argument that the overwhelming reliance on slavery held back the technological progress of Classical and Hellenistic civilisation, but that assumes that an emancipation movement was beyond the moral imagination of the ancients.

Now that I've got that off my chest, I'll leave the last word to Carl once more

If the Ionian spirit had won, I think we - a different 'we' of course - might now be venturing to the stars. Our first survey ships to Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star, Sirius and Tau Ceti would have returned long ago. Great fleets of interstellar transports would be under construction in Earth orbit - unmanned survey ships, liners for immigrants, immense trading ships to plow the seas of space. On all these ships there would be symbols and writing. If we looked closely, we might see that the language was Greek. And perhaps the symbol on the bow of one of the first starships would be a dodecahedron, with the inscription 'Starship Theodorus of the Planet Earth.'

Carl Sagan, Cosmos, p.237.

Jazzy

Tyler MacDurden wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jixnM7S9tLw

almost as inspiring as your sig.









almost

Mervyn Crawford

Hi Pinksoir, Thanks for pointing out this film.

I'll have to look it out.

Isn't it remarkable the complete lack of any serious enquiry into social and historical questions in general?

It's a desert out there, no matter where you turn.

I don't think you can draw any other conclusion except to say society is in crisis.

robindch

Tyler MacDurden wrote: »

The intellectual heirs of Zeno and Archimides formulating a calculus a millenium ahead of Newton or Kepler;

Since 1998 -- years after Sagan's series "Cosmos" was made -- it's generally believed that Archimedes actually did describe calculus in general terms, in the third century BC. Knowledge of this waxed, then waned again, until it was finally obliterated by some zealous Eastern orthodox monk who, sometime during the thirteenth century and short of paper one day, scribbled his omnipresent, stupid, unthinking and banal prayers over Archimedes' utterly priceless manuscript. More on the relatively unknown "Archimedes Palimpsest" here:

http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/

Archimedes may not have understood what he managed to figure out with the basic maths of his time, but we certainly can. And, had the Ionian spirit of inquiry won over the religious need to obliterate all Others, what Sagan wrote could well have been what we have, and not just a distant dream.

Tyler MacDurden

robindch wrote: »

Since 1998 -- years after Sagan's series "Cosmos" was made -- it's generally believed that Archimedes actually did describe calculus in general terms, in the third century BC. Knowledge of this waxed, then waned again, until it was finally obliterated by some zealous Eastern orthodox monk who, sometime during the thirteenth century and short of paper one day, scribbled his omnipresent, stupid, unthinking and banal prayers over Archimedes' utterly priceless manuscript. More on the relatively unknown "Archimedes Palimpsest" here:

http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/

Archimedes may not have understood what he managed to figure out with the basic maths of his time, but we certainly can. And, had the Ionian spirit of inquiry won over the religious need to obliterate all Others, what Sagan wrote could well have been what we have, and not just a distant dream.

Absolutely, he had all the principal elements. In some other alternative past it might have been recognised as the powerful tool that we use today, but that light was snuffed out by the likes of your monk above. Here's a basic overview of the development of the calculus over the centuries since.

I'm perpetually hopeful about the recovery of ancient documents. The papyri I used as source material for my thesis were mostly from the Oxyrhynchus site and were discovered in an ancient rubbish dump at the turn of the 20th Century.

There's a team at Oxford working on restoring the thousands of documents, exciting times for us Greek-geeks:

Oxford's classicists have used it [new tech.] to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

Link.

MikeC101

I thought the history was shaky, but I liked the movie. Roman uniforms stood out as being in the style of a few centuries earlier than they should have been.

My (admittedly limited) understanding of the destruction of the Great Library is that there were several reasons, over a period of time, rather than one single one. It may have even been in decline before the fire during Caesars time, due to lack of funds meaning it wasn't maintained as it needed to be - (scrolls need to be recopied regularly due to their degrading I think?), a fire during Aurelians invasion.

By the time the film is set, it didn't really exist as a "Great" library any more, bar some minor collections that may have remained. The scene in the movie that seems to be the destruction of the Great Library is actually the destruction of the Serapeum, which housed a faction of pagans that were anti Christian, but Hypatia had nothing to do with them. Similarly, I thought her death was to do with politics - that she was caught up in a power struggle between one faction of Christians against another, rather than the simplified reasoning in the movie.

Still though, I did enjoy the movie!

robindch

Saw this the other day as well and enjoyed it. The christians were portrayed desperately unsympathetically, but this seems to have been the way they behaved back then.

Unsurprisingly, one catholic group in Spain (who call themselves a "civil rights organization") got very upset about the film, and it seems that it's been banned in Italy.

A thoroughly well-deserved 8 out of 10!

.

MikeC101

robindch wrote: »

Saw this the other day as well and enjoyed it. The christians were portrayed desperately unsympathetically, but this seems to have been the way they behaved back then.

I'm fine with the christians being portrayed unsympathetically, it's a movie after all, but it's the way it attributes things (burning the library, killing Hypatia) as being done by the eeevil christians as an attack on science / rationality that annoys me.

I don't know, I just think that if it was a Christian movie changing history to score points against atheists, there would be a lot of (quite understandable) annoyance here. I don't find either acceptable, for what it's worth.