An Epic of Ideas

 “If I want to send a message I’ll use Western Union,” one of the old-time Hollywood moguls is supposed to have shouted when confronted by a script with a socially uplifting “message”. This attitude, which was far from being confined to Hollywood, has resulted in thousands of relentlessly trivial movies that were manufactured rather than created. Depressingly, many of these have been very popular. But when vitally important themes—messages, if you like—have been embodied in believable narratives that audiences can identify with, the much despised mainstream can become high art. This is certainly true of a film on DVD that has just reached me from Europe.

Agora—the title refers to the meeting places in ancient Greek cities (in the film it is in fourth-century Alexandria)—tells the extraordinary story of the teacher, mathematician and philosopher Hypatia who was literally torn to pieces by a Christian mob incited for political reasons by the Patriarch Cyril (later one of the saints of the Coptic Church). Sources for the great teacher’s life are fragmentary although there have been some impressive attempts to reconstruct her thought by historians of mathematics, among them Dr Michael Deakin from Monash University; but perhaps the best-known account of Hypatia’s end is in the fourth volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He begins by describing the clash between Patriarch Cyril and the Prefect Orestes over Christian attacks on Alexandria’s Jewish community. This had been followed by an attack on the Prefect and the execution of his would-be assassin—a monk named Ammonius. Cyril, in an elaborate ceremony promptly, proclaimed Ammonius a martyr, “ascend[ing] the pulpit to celebrate the magnanimity of an assassin and a rebel”. Gibbon continued:

Such honours might incite the faithful to combat and die under the banners of a saint; and he soon prompted and accepted the sacrifice of a virgin, who professed the religion of the Greeks, and cultivated the friendship of Orestes. Hypatia, the daughter of Theon the mathematician, was initiated in her father’s studies; her learned comments have elucidated the geometry of Apollonius and Diophantus and she publicly taught, both in Athens and Alexandria, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. In the bloom of beauty, and the maturity of wisdom, the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed her disciples; the persons most illustrious for their rank and merit were impatient to visit the female philosopher; and Cyril beheld with a jealous eye, the gorgeous train of horses and slaves who crowded the door of her academy. A rumour was spread among the Christians, that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the prefect and the Archbishop; and that obstacle was speedily removed. On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her Chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader, and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster shells, and her quivering limbs delivered to the flames.

Agora’s director and co-writer Alejandro Amenabar seems to have employed all the sources and more that Gibbon used plus some legends, conjectures and inventions of his own to create the script. And for all the fiction he is somewhat more tolerant than the great historian. Gibbon’s treatment of Hypatia was one facet of an ironic portrayal of the early Christian churches’ debates over doctrine, with Cyril treated as an ambitious hypocrite. Given this authority it would have been easy to make Agora anti-Christian; and certainly we are a long way from King of Kings, Quo Vadis and Ben Hur with their pious crowds of believers, eyes elevated to heaven. But in Agora the first provocation that leads to the destruction of the Alexandrian library comes from the worshippers of the old gods. Almost certainly neither Hypatia nor her father were involved in the attack on the library of Alexandria but having them there was certainly in character and having the Christians assault this storehouse of knowledge gives Amenabar a powerful symbol of bigotry. Believers in the old religion are provoked; they respond by attacking the Christians, which results in a disproportionate counter-attack during which the library is destroyed. Here the director draws on an old legend that Hypatia worked in the library of Alexandria, only he takes it further. Theon is the head of the library and Hypatia teaches philosophy there. It may not be historically accurate but it works dramatically, even though the story that a Christian mob destroyed the great repository of knowledge only emerged with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.

Another invention by Amenabar and his co-writer Mateo Gil is closer to the truth. Synesius (Rupert Evans) and Orestes (Oscar Isaac) are both portrayed as being taught philosophy by Hypatia. Again it is an effective device and grounded in the surviving records. Orestes just might have been taught philosophy by Hypatia in Athens although it is more likely they first met when he came to Alexandria as prefect. Synesius was a disciple of Hypatia, as in the film, and became a bishop. Clearly he could not have been an ally of Orestes against Cyril and would never have insisted on the “Book” as the undisputed word of God as he does in Agora. In spite of his bishopric Synesius remained a neo-Platonist and did not believe in the resurrection. Still Agora’s fiction emphasises the fact that there was diversity in the early church; more in fact than is shown in the film.

With Rachel Weisz’s Hypatia the film-makers get the historical character just about right. Hypatia, according to the surviving records, was beautiful (no problem for Ms Weisz), chaste—the scene where she rejects Orestes’s advances by handing him a handkerchief stained with the blood of her cycle is based on an authentic anecdote—and was a charismatic teacher, philosopher and mathematician. She probably did believe the study of philosophy made all her disciples brothers, as in one of Agora’s best scenes. Of course there is no evidence she had discovered the path of the earth around the sun just before she was murdered but Amenabar’s portrayal of her inquiry is one of Agora’s triumphs. It is a pity he could not find time to explore the neo-Platonism that was reportedly at the heart of her philosophical teaching. Still this search for the truth about the solar system and emphasis on the simple beauty of shapes and geometry provides a powerful contrast to the dark narrative of bigotry and violence that comes to dominate the film. Agora too has to be one of first epics to portray in depth the ancient world’s life of the mind. (Christopher Plummer’s delightful impersonation of Aristotle in Oliver Stone’s Alexander was a good start but Amenabar goes much further.)

A rare pleasure these days is that the director has limited the use of digital effects and built the sets representing fourth-century Alexandria in full, including, of course, the agora where much of the action takes place. When you think you can see the texture of the stone of the pillars you know you are in good hands. It is sumptuously shot by cinematographer Xavi Gimenez. With some of the compositions echoing the style of Victorian paintings of classical subjects and exploiting the full width of the Panavision frame for the confrontation scenes, Amenabar recreates something of the pictorial richness of the great epic films of the last century. Some of these, particularly those directed by Cecil B. De Mille, had their share of awkward dialogue—The Ten Commandments for example—while others such as Spartacus and The Fall of the Roman Empire were very well written. Ben Hur began with a serviceable script that was polished to great effect by British playwright Christopher Fry. (This was kept secret until revealed by Charlton Heston when he accepted his Oscar.)

The ideas and structure of Agora are an enrichment of the epic genre, but it is a Spanish film shot in English with the script, I suspect, written in Spanish and translated before being submitted to the actors. The result is that while there are some superb lines the dialogue has nothing like the richness of Spartacus or The Fall of the Roman Empire and is at times awkward. There is a speech given to Synesius included in the deleted scenes on the DVD that clearly had to be removed because the dialogue wasn’t good enough. (The actor was fine.) Classical Greek is, I am assured, “all style”, and the exchanges between Hypatia and her students would have been couched in quite beautiful language. Where was some latter-day Christopher Fry to create a distinguished English equivalent to the classical Greek they were supposedly speaking?

This is only a minor caveat; Agora may simplify the period but as with all the great epic films it transports its viewers into another world—a world that is disturbingly relevant to our own. Hypatia’s creed that she must question her beliefs lies at the heart of all good teaching, then and now. Christians no longer stone people to death and most do not insist on exact conformity to the word of God as revealed in the Bible. Extremist Muslims, however, when confronted with a problem ask what is in the Koran, not what is the evidence; and Iran and the Taliban stone women to death.

Hypatia’s story could easily have become a chamber of horrors. The mob violence is bad enough, but it seems Orestes ordered his would-be assassin tortured to death and of course Hypatia’s murder was horrendous. Amenabar cuts the torture and plays down the mob violence. For the philosopher’s assassination he devises a charming fiction that has her spared the worst horrors. It works so well that I won’t spoil the climax by relating it here. Good as it is, I do have a slight reservation. The artist, like Hypatia’s philosopher in the film, has to look at the world straight on and must at least register the moral and physical horror of crimes like Hypatia’s murder. Amenabar gets the moral horror about right. A civilised man, he withdraws from the full barbaric physical reality.

Still Agora is, I believe, going to be recognised as one of the great epics. It embodies themes and a story no other film-maker has dared even to contemplate before. Amenabar has revitalised the epic, taking the form beyond spectacle into the realm of philosophy and ideas.

Agora has been a great success in Spain, but less so in Britain and the USA, and there seem to be no plans for an Australian theatrical release.