The Serapeum was clearly not a library at all, yet the movie perpetuates that Gibbonian myth. Socrates Scholasticus describes the destruction of that shrine 24 years before Hypatia’s death and describes the destruction of its idols and cult objects. He makes no mention of any library. Rufinus Tyrannius does the same, with no mention of any books or library. And Eunapius – a pagan writer who was fiercely anti-Christian and who witnessed the sacking of the Serapeum itself – also makes no mention of any library or books, though he’d have a good incentive to do so.

Ammianus Marcellinus’ earlier description of the Serapeum, based on his visit to Alexandria some years before the sack, says it HAD contained a library once. The city had been devastated by sacks by Caracalla, Aurelian and Diocletian, with Aurelian burning the very quarter in which the Serapeum was situated. So the most likely culprits for destroying any library that had *once* been there were these Roman emperors and their troops, not any Christian mob.

And I’m sorry, but I don’t have a lot of time for movies that distort history to make a polemical point, especially when the makers fervently declare that their film *is* historical (as in this case). Any historian will tell you that they spend a lot of their time knocking erroneous ideas about important subjects in history out of their students’ heads because most people get their grasp of history from popular culture.

Finally, no I don’t agree that the historical events support the “theme” at all. Her murder was a bit of petty tit-for-tat political violence, so to harness it to some theme about “fundamentalism” is ridiculous. And I’m willing to bet the movie ends with some kind of coda about how Hypatia’s death happened at the beginning of the “Dark Ages”, implying that the “fundamentalists” caused that too. In fact, the academy at Alexandria remained a centre of science and philosophy for centuries to come and the “Dark Ages” were a purely western European affair that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the total collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

If I have an “argumentative tone” it’s because I’m sick of ignorant film-makers peddling myths and calling them history.

I’m aware that the Great Library didn’t exist as it once did in her time, but if the Serapeum was, in fact, the main library of Alexandria at that time, I can see how such a statement could be made. As I wrote, I was hopeful that the movie would treat Hypatia more as the actual woman she was than as a symbol, but I do understand the impulse toward such changes when using a historical event as the basis for an artistic work. One of my favorite movies, Amadeus, is one I know to be full of historical inaccuracies and mischaracterizations, yet I know that it would not be such a powerful artistic work if that artistic license had not been taken.

However, your recounting of the historical events still supports what seems to be the theme, which the director has spoken about in interviews (his line of thinking seems a bit different and more nuanced than what is conveyed in press releases, which, as I know from working in publishing, one should never take at face value), of fantaticism leading to horrific acts. I think it is possible to view the a group of zealous monks as separate from the mainstream Christianity of the time; but it is also cautionary in the sense that it shows how religious belief–or any kind of belief, for that matter–can be twisted into zealotry.