While the film was lauded by its recreations of architecture and politics, it is heavily influenced by the Enlightening's views of the period and Carl Sagan's throughts on it, leading to a series of deviations in mindsets, personalities and minor facts.
Culture
- Alexandria's portrayal in the film is an incredible work of recreation, but its architecture and decoration are deeply Ancient Egyptian despite the time setting being the Late Roman Empire and the city being founded by Macedonian Greeks in the first place. Some of this was because Real Life Writes the Plot, though: director Aménabar had originally conceived a more accurate setting but production went over budget and he was forced to use an already built Egyptian design. The Roman soldiers also use equipment from the first century AD rather than the fifth for the same reason.
- The real Serapeum was certainly considered the spiritual sucessor to the burned Great Library, and it is possible, if not probable, that it carried scrolls rescued from the latter at some point, with chroniclers like Orosius confirming it had books that the Christians sacked. However contemporary sources
suggest the building's library was nothing impressive at the time of its destruction, possibly implying many of the books had been moved to other places over the years, so the resultant loss of knowledge was likely not as extreme and tragic as portrayed in the film. - In the film, set on 5th century, Hypatia is a Neoplatonist teacher that draws heavily from an empiricist mindset in order to conduct her experiments. However, while proto-empiricism was already around at the time in association to schools like Pyrrhonism and Stoicism, Neoplatonism was completely opposed to it. Hypatia and her colleagues were staunch rationalists that believed they could uncover the mysteries of the universe by reasoning alone. Historically, moreover, scientifical empiricism came around 11th century by Avicenna's hand, and its usage in astronomy was not applied until Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler did it in the 16th century of all times. Had the historical Hypatia performed the same experiment of dropping a grain sack on a moving boat, she would have been more likely to attribute this to the action of the Neoplatonist divinity than to the possibility that it meant the Earth was moving around the Sun.
- The film makes it look like the Alexandrian Christians formed a single, cohesive community that only suffered an inner struggle with the clash between Orestes and Cyril. This could not be farther from reality, as at the time there was a variety of opposing Christian sects, including Nicenes, Novatians, Arians and Gnostics, and some of them had their own enmities with Cyril.
Characters
- In real life, Hypatia was a believer of Neoplatonism, a school of thought of a kind we would call religious today, that considered philosophy as just a way to connect with the divine. In the film, she is still officially such, as she teaches in a Platonic school, but her self-declared beliefs sound much more like scientifical atheism, a change presumably done so the faith vs. science controversy that composes the film's theme will be clearer. This, as mentioned above, allows her to use empirical reasoning, which in real life was contrary to her school of thinking.
- The real Hypatia was apparently married (presumably in a Neoplatonist, celibate way) to another philosopher named Isidorus. This character is Adapted Out of the film, whose version of Hypatia claims to have never loved romantically.
- In real life, Hypatia's rejection of a suitor via menstrual rags was even nastier than portrayed in Agora: she did not use it to merely dispel his idealization of her, but to condemn his sexuality altogether. The Hypatia from the film doesn't seem to condemn sex by itself, given the mentioned modification, and even has a scene lamenting she has never known the topic of love. Also, the film interprets the suitor was no other than Orestes, but it's highly unlikely this would not have been mentioned in the chronicles due to the notoriety of the incident.
- Towards the end of the film, Synesius makes a Face–Heel Turn and presses Hypatia into converting, betraying her when she refuses. This would have been impossible in real life, not only because he actually died a year before Hypatia, but also because he was completely the opposite of how he is portrayed here: while he did try to get Hypatia to become a Christian, he respected her no and remained her close friend until the end of his life (calling her "mother, sister, teacher, and withal benefactress, and whatsoever is honoured in name and deed"), defended her and her theories in several circles, and was surprisingly tolerant of Neoplatonism in general.
Events
- In the film, the battle between Pagans and Christians that ended with the destruction of the Serapeum is caused by some Parabalani forcing a Pagan priest to burn alive. In real life, this kind of incidents happened with some frequency, but the cause of the battle was another, and a more spectacular one: it started when some Christian workers found Pagan paraphernalia in an unused temple and started parading mockingly through the city with it, infuriating all the Pagan citizens who witnessed the joke. Some chronicles also feature details that might or might not be propaganda, as Christian writers claimed the philosophers were torturing Christian prisoners inside the besieged Serapeum, while Pagan writers claim the Christians started the hostilities yet later tried to make all the battle's corpses pass as murdered Christians.
- Chronicles do exalt Hypatia as having made "such attainments in literature and science as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time," but there's no evidence that she studied specifically the system of Aristarchus (she could have been reasonably familiar with it, but that's it) nor made the astronomical advances portrayed in the film, which would have been difficult for her due to the philosophical reasons given above.
- In real life, the Christians completely demolished the Serapeum to the ground and built a monastery over it. In the film, the building itself is left mostly intact years after the incident, having been only vandalized and sacked.
- The film gives the impression that the Christian takeover cornered Hypatia politically, leaving her as a barely tolerated erudite known only among her former disciples and her Christian enemies. In real life, Hypatia was very popular and respected among both Christians and non-Christians alike until the end of her life, and was never publicly condemned by other than Cyril and his inner faction. The news of her murder horrified most people in the city, to the point chronicles from the time point to her murder as an example of how nasty political fighting was becoming.
- In the film, the enmity between Orestes and Cyril starts due to Hypatia's growing unpopularity among the Christians, which drives Cyril to attack her and Orestes to protect her in turn. In real life, their clash had nothing to do with Hypatia at first, as it came actually from their different stances towards the Jews: Orestes was friendly to them, even ordering the execution of a Christian named Hierax who had been causing trouble against their community, while Cyril was hostile, constanty preaching against the Jews and accusing them of attacks on Christians. It was later when Cyril and his allies started targeting Hypatia, among rumors that she was the brain behind Orestes' actions.
- The scene of the Jews ambushing Christians did happen, but its context and reasons were different. The film has the Jews acting in response to a similar attack by the Parabalani, while in real life the ambush was unprovoked: the Jews did it because they were tired of Cyril's critiques and Orestes was unable to appease them.
- While Hypatia's murderers were Christians and almost certainly operated in league with Cyril and the Parabalani, most evidences suggest that she was killed by political reasons rather than religious disputes, namely her allegiance to Orestes and the rumor that she was manipulating him into opposing Cyril. Obviously, the fact that she was a Pagan and a woman didn't help precisely to endear her to Christian militants (later Christians even accused her of being a witch and using spells to control Cyril's enemies), but unlike as portrayed in the film, this would have been a secondary motivation at the best.
- Hypatia's murder was a bit more spectacular in real life, as she was dragged out of her chariot, not caught while walking around, and was much more violent than simply being somethered and then having her body brutalized
