Hypatia, again

Agora, the Gift that Keeps on GivingCatching up on tabs. 

[image error] A schlock movie A scholarly source,
albeit secondaryOver at Armarium Magnum, an atheist blogger yclept Tim O'Neill, who often takes his fellow atheists to task for being, well, stupid and ignorant about history, returns to the movie Agora. 

Agora was a movie that purported to tell the life and death of Hypatia of Alexandria, and which hit all the expected tropes.  As Marie Dzielka pointed out in her seminal book (entitled, appropriately enough, Hypatia of Alexandria), the poor Neoplatonic philosopher has been roped in as a Symbol for whichever hobby horse the current age was riding.  To Gibbon's generation, she symbolized Classicism and the fine old Greco-Roman civilization.  To 19th centurians like Draper and White, she symbolized Science (vs. Religion).  More recently, she has symbolized Woman (hear her roar).  In each mythos, Hypatia was killed because she was a pagan, because she was a "scientist" [sic], or because she was a woman.  Better yet, because she was a scientific pagan woman! Read more »