Agoraphobic
[Dave Birch] So I watched the movie Agora on a plane, and it really annoyed me. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's set in 4th century Alexandria and it's about Hypatia, She was a famous philosopher, murdered by a Christian mob. In the movie she is a pagan, although no-one knows whether this is true or not and she may even have been Christian herself.
The Christian monks stripped her naked and dragged her through the streets to the newly Christianised Caesareum church, where she was brutally killed. Some reports suggest she was flayed with ostraca (pot shards) and set ablaze while still alive, though other accounts suggest those actions happened after her death:
Whew! Those Christians, huh? Anyway, I was curious about the story, and a cursory google reveals that it contains numerous errors (such as the fact that one of the key characters, a bishop, actually died two years before the events depicted). One comment on a movie site I saw pointed out that Hypatia was an older woman when these events took place and that she should have been played by Hellen Mirren instead of Rachel Weiss.
I suppose the movie did at least get me to go and find out more about her and the central battle between the religious (Bishop Cyril) and secular (Prefect Orestes) with, as usual, the Jews caught in the middle (although to be fair, the Bishop appeared to hate other Christians as much as he hated the Jews).
Orestes and Cyril soon came into conflict over Cyril's hard-line actions against smaller Christian factions like the Novatians and his violence against Alexandria's large Jewish community.
[From Agora, a Film on the Life of Philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria | Heritage Key]
This bit appear to be true: Psycho Cyril really did start a pogrom against the Jews, driving them out of Alexandria in 415 (Jews were an eighth of the population of Egypt at the time and Alexandria had the largest community) and he also killed Orestes.
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