Restless Pilgrim

One of my favourite YouTube channels is “HIstory Buffs”. However, I remember watching the episode on “Agora” and being more than a little suspicious about its representation of what happened in Alexandria:

I came across the following commentary on Reddit:

00:20 “Set during the last days of the Roman Empire”. The movie is set in 391 AD. The Western Roman Empire wouldn’t fall for another 85 years and the Eastern one not for another 1062 years. But who cares about details?

01:21 “Alexandria was founded by knowledge” Being close to the river delta of the Nile, one of the most important rivers of the Mediterranean Sea certainly didn’t hurt. To the maker’s credit, he later mentions this himself at 02:30. The statement is misleading nonetheless.

01:40 “Alexander’s open-minded approach to their [the Egyptians’] religion and custom”. They hailed him as a half-god and he didn’t stay long. Of course he liked them.

03:30 “His empire would be divided.” He makes it sound as though the fracture of Alexander’s short lived empire was some sort of amicable power-sharing and not decades of war.

3:44 “Science”. Science didn’t exist back then. Call it “proto-science” or “natural philosophy”, but not “Science!”.

04:05 The claim that everybody who entered the city was searched for books. If they had pulled that off, nobody would be willing to take his books to Alexandria because nobody would want to wait for weeks while some scribe went through the labor of copying every word of his book by hand. I am aware that some ancient sources claim they did, but blindly following sources is not proper study. The story is just too impracticable to be taken without salt. And it’s unnecessary to bring it up here! This plays no role in the movie.

04:20 “These books were eventually the only ones to survive the years [because they were constantly copied in the Library of Alexandria].” Yes, sure. Nobody else copied books. Everyone else was stupid. Athens? Stupid. Rome? Stupid. Constantinople? Stupid.

04:50 Come to see a movie review. Stay to listen to an infatuated teenager indulging in his Library of Alexandria fetish. Because there were no other centers of learning.

05:50 Here he blames much of the destruction of the LoA on Caesar’s conquest. This is a possible theory, but by no means the only one. Here it’s given as an unshakeable fact.

06:28 “The Serapeum was all that was left of the original library”. Here I will refer to Tim O’Neil’s review. His position is that not a single ancient source, even pagan ones who didn’t like Christianity, linked the destruction of the Serapeum to the loss of a library. There once was a library in the Serapeum, but not by the time of the movie. History Buffs seems curiously ignorant of this possibility, considering how this movie is all about keeping an open, questioning mind.

08:20 I know I promised not to talk about the actual movie. But this scene was chosen by History Buffs to highlight Hypatia’s intellect. The problem is that the answers her students give are not along the lines of Aristotelian natural philosophy. People had asked why objects fall before and “because it’s heavy” would not have sufficed. It would be more like “the cloth is earthly and that element tends to the center of the universe”. And one of the assembled adults would have given that answer.

08:55 Why did the movie give this Christian orator a horrible accent and bad teeth and the pagan one a posh accent and clean robes? Did anyone who made this movie ever stop to think about why people decided to become Christian? And why does History Buffs fail to point out this blatant black & white painting?

10:02 NO critical distance by History Buffs. They take this movie at its word. By the way, until some point I was still hoping that the speaker would suddenly burst out and say it was all a prank and that this movie was biased as hell. He didn’t.

10:50 So Neoplatonist were atheists then? Or what exactly are we to believe their religious motives were? The following explanation does not really answer this.

12:22 History Buffs fails to note that not a single Roman soldier wears the ridge helmet that was typical for the late Roman army.

14:00 “But the true loss came when Christians descended on the library – and tore it apart [dramatic music]”. Again, we have no firm evidence to suggest that there was a library of significance in the Serapeum. He tries to hedge by saying this library was smaller, but then backtracks and claims that its loss “cannot be understated”. Again, obvious LoA fetish.

14:40 “The last bastion of the ancient wisdom [The Serapeum , meaning the LoA] was gone”. Because there was not a single library elsewhere. Anywhere.

14:45 “All other pagans had either converted or fled Alexandria”. Actually, this makes sense. According to Wiki “Pagus” means country dweller, so pagans literally didn’t live in the city of Alexandria, but in the countryside. Ok, enough wordplay, let’s move on.

14:50 “The Empire had divided and the once mighty city of Rome had been sacked by barbarians only five years before”. The Empire had been divided for quite some time already. Theodosius briefly reunified it, but its recent re-division would not have shocked anyone. Also, given that Alexandria was in the Eastern Roman Empire and the Goths were hardly the ‘worst sackers ever’, I don’t think a strong, independent woman like Hypatia would get depressions over it.

15:20 “I have been unable to find any evidence for this.” Now you start caring about evidence?

18:35 “He declared Hypatia to be a witch” I don’t care whether the movie has a nice scene about it. Declaring somebody a witch 1000 years before the actual witch craze only panders to the common “Christians hate women and declare them witches” stereotype. There were isolated incidents before the witch craze, granted, but I have never, ever, heard of Hypatia being accused of being a witch. Again, not a single critical thought by History Buffs. He just retells the movie.

19:15 It is true that Hypatia had a very painful death, but “in the olden days” a lot of politically motivated killings were slow and painful. Sadly, hers was hardly special.

19:35 “Later he [Cyril, the bad guy] was declared a saint”. Maybe because in real-life he wasn’t the walking one-dimensional stereotype he is in this movie?

19:37 “If science ever had a martyr, it was Hypatia.” She was not a scientist. She was a natural philosopher. And she wasn’t a martyr for natural philosophy either, she just was collateral damage in a power struggle in Alexandria between two Christian factions. On the other hand: At least he didn’t mention Bruno or Galileo, so that’s cool.

20:30 “You [a Christian] do not question what you believe. You cannot. I must.” I find it ironic that History Buffs has this obvious infatuation for Hypatia, incorporates this scene into the review, showing the importance of critical thinking, and never ever questions whether the “Greeks = intelligent and good, Christians = bad and stupid” narrative might be ever so slightly wrong and that Christians could contribute to philosophy.

21:10 Here he admits that there is hardly any surviving information about the actual events and that’s why he doesn’t want to point out inaccuracies in this movie. I mused why he was so ready and willing to give an obviously biased movie (all Christians seem to wear black rags and are hairy) the benefit of the doubt. I was interrupted when he immediately blamed that loss of information on the Christians (“It’s because of stupid shit like this”), instead of a host of problems stifling the leisure to write chronicles, together with the centuries of time that seeped away the sources that were actually written, due to natural spoilage.

20:22 “We know Hypatia was probably in her fifties or sixties at the time of her death… But it’s not that big of a deal to me”. Having a thirty-something-year-old crack elliptical orbits 1000+ years before Kepler later in the movie is not a big deal??? That’s about as believable as Denise Richards as nuclear physicist Christmas Jones in “James Bond: The World Is Not Enough”. The casting obviously tries to appeal to baser human perception and judging by History Buffs, it seems to work. Edit: This was never brought up, but I looked it up anyway: Kepler came up with elliptical orbits in his thirties, so Hypatia, being another human, certainly had the same potential (ignoring all the giants on whose shoulders Kepler stood). I still maintain that Hypatia is way too young and elliptical orbits require a suspension of disbelief, but I agree that her age is reconcilable with artistic liscence, as protagonists are played by good-looking people in almost all movies ever made.

24:20 “When Agora came out, let’s just say it wasn’t that well received by Christians.” I wonder why. He eventually goes on that this movie isn’t about Christianity but about general religious fanaticism. Fair enough. Why did they have to bend the evidence then, to shoehorn in their obvious message? He then likens the destruction of the fictional library by fantasy Christians to ISIS.

25:25 The previous bit was annoying, but it was only the build-up. “And so classical Greek and Roman literature were rejected by choice.” No. In the Latin West Greek eventually became extinct. They had no choice about Greek works, they just couldn’t read them. It might come as a surprise to History Buffs, but one of the last ditch efforts to translate Greek works into Latin in Odoacer’s Italy was done by a Christian named Boethius. He devoted his precious time (among other works) on Aristotle’s work on logic. Because he obviously hated Greek classical learning and rational thought \i. Oh, and Boethius is revered as a Catholic saint.

25:36 Here comes a quote from Tertullian. And a pronunciation straight out of /r/atheism. History buffs calls him a “Christian apologist”. Sounds strange? Where did this specific word come from, it seems so out of context? On to the Wikipedia! And yes, Tertullian is listed as a “Christian apologist”. Curious. He was an important Christian figure, but died about 100 years before Hypatia was even born. Clearly there have been no changes in Christian doctrine for 100 years, nevermind Constantine or the Council of Nicaea. I have already produced Boethius as a counter-example, I will not bother with a second one. AND Tertullian is not a saint. My example of a Christian scholar is literally holier than History Buffs’.

26:20 “And after the Fall of the Roman Empire the Church would be the sole institution in the western world” Except for the Byzantine/”Roman” Emperor and the Frankish, Visigoth, Anglo-Saxon and Lombard kingdoms.

26:30 “This period in time [The next 800 years] would be called ‘The Dark Ages.’” Oh. My. God. THANK YOU! It has been so long since I met somebody who seriously called everything until the 13th century “The Dark Ages”. Never mind Charlemagne. Never mind the Renaissance of the High Middle Ages. They were all unwashed savages!

26:36 “Step backwards in human development”. Presentism.

But it gets better 🙂

26:40 “With so much lost it’s impossible to say. Many historians speculate our civilization would be far more advanced than it is today”. We have a chartist! Who would have guessed they were still alive and well? Granted, he never outright shows it, but nonetheless: All hail The Chart of Scientific Advancement!!! Because nobody in China is able to do, what Greek Scientists can do! (deliberate capital letter on “scientists” by the way )

And it gets better still!

26:50 He speculates that if “The Dark Ages” hadn’t happened the Greek civ would have unlocked steam engines much sooner than it did. I would go even further. They would also have had access to much better tech and units than the other players and would easily have won the space race victory.

27:15 “What if science wasn’t seen as heresy”. The good old Conflict Theory, backed up by fiction, lies and ignorance.

27:20 Watch this scene. If The Chart was a movie, this would be it.