No story told about a woman in history can be trusted. The lives of women are reduced to the names of their partners and accounts of what they looked like; their achievements are regularly claimed by contemporaries or simply offloaded to the nearest plausible man to satisfy the retroactive lust of someone who never had a shot at her body.
It is for this reason as much as for the intervening centuries that Alejandro Amenábar’s 2009 film Agora tries and fails to tell us about Hypatia of Alexandria, the 4th century philosopher and mathematician living in Roman-occupied Egypt. It is for this same reason that the film is not named for her, but for the open-air marketplace near the spot where she was stoned to death by Christians for being who she was and knowing what she knew.
Rachel Weisz as Hypatia in “Agora” (2009)
Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) lives during the rise of Christianity in the first few centuries of the common era, and works as a public intellectual on the subject of the nature of the cosmos and mankind’s place in it. Surrounded by other scholars, like her student and future Christian prefect of Egypt Orestes (a young and very handsome Oscaar Isaac), she speaks and lectures about the concept of heliocentrism, prompting conflict with the Christians in her class. Men like Synesius (Rupert Evans) and Davus (Max Minghella) grapple with the problems of a geocentric solar system, because as Christians they believe that their single god created the Earth and made every other celestial sphere to orbit around it.
So, too, do they grapple with their teacher who is a woman and yet does not submit to them, or even to the idea of marriage. When Orestes attempts to court her, she hands him a handful of her used menstrual rags (a story that persists from antiquity about the real Hypatia, because that’s how long a used tampon can survive in human memory: basically forever) and tells him that she’s living her life for science, not for the honor of dying of sepsis after birthing his son.
If we didn’t already know she was going to die by gendered violence, this should be our sign.
The film is gorgeous, taking painstaking time and effort to show the layers of these civilizations on top of one another. Greek, Roman, and Egyptian architecture pile up in every corner of the shots, which are gorgeously lit to look like they’ve never known electricity. Costumes are a bit of an historical muddle, since no film has ever really sunk its teeth into the scaled armor worn by the late Roman troops of occupation and puts them instead in the plate-breasted glory we’ve loved from Ben Hur through Gladiator II. Like most sword-and-sandal films, Agora wants its principals to look beautiful more than it wants the audience to know they can do research on period dress. Weisz is stunning throughout this English-language Spanish feast for the eye, despite a muddled script and a rushed, uneven ending.
The ending of the film does what it must: any woman who is as respected and admired as Hypatia must first be subjected to sexual assault, and then she must either end up being owned by some man or die. Since Hypatia won’t submit to the former, the latter comes around in the form of a public stoning, brought about by Cyril (Sami Samir).
After the film’s release in 2009, director Amenábar was concerned that Christians would not be pleased to see their forebears depicted as the villains of the piece, despite the veracity of the story. Spain is a secular state, and the United States (where the film was destined to be distributed after a debut at the Cannes film festival) has no official religion (with fingers crossed at the time of writing), so there was no legal obstacle to any depiction of Christian murders of Pagan leaders. However, the film hedges its bets: it pointedly declares the real villain to be fundamentalism, and that open-minded freethinkers like Hypatia strove for a pluralist society that included Christians, even then they were loud and wrong.
Open-mindedness does not save the Hypatia of the film, who goes to her death with serenity and a Christlike forgiveness on her lovely face. It did not save her in March of 415 when she was dragged from her carriage and torn to pieces and set on fire by the pacifist followers of a religion of peace and brotherhood. Socrates Scholasticus, a 5th century church historian whose account is still influential with modern scholars, claims that Hypatia was killed for political reasons, by people who were jealous of her power. They claim that it was not her gender, not her religion, not the charges of witchcraft that were regularly leveled against her by her Christian contemporaries, but just the usual employment of the ostracon against someone envied and disliked by the people. Socrates even admits that this act contradicted the stated values of the Christians of that time.
Rachel Weisz at Hypatia in “Agora” (2009) [Focus Features]
We have no record from Hypatia about the circumstances of her life. Letters written to her by men are preserved; none of her letters to them remain. No legal record regarding the fate of her murderers exists. Inventions reputed to have been hers have one by one been stripped from her memory, assigned to someone else. She is described as a philosopher, inventor, and mathematician, but no record of her work survives. Letters written to her ask her to build an astrolabe, a hydrometer, to write a mathematical proof. They are written in the tone of someone asking for help, not someone asking her to name three of Archimedes’ albums to prove she’s a real fan.
We have only the shape of her body, denied the men around her. We have the story of her bloody rags, held out in contempt for their courtship. We have the solved mystery of her murder, for which no one was seemingly punished.
And we have the film Agora: a hollow spectacle that does the best it can with the hollow shape of a well-known Pagan woman of the 4th century, whose voice was stopped long before its time or ours. Despite this effort to dream her real, we will never know her. I hope that’s what she wanted.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.