300's Spartans liked to shout a lot, but Agora's heroine prefers a good book. Photograph: ITAR-TASS
Hollywood's obsession with the classical world - most recently evinced by Zak Snyder's pumped-up, shouty, leather-knickers-clad Spartans in last year's 300 - is to take yet another turn.
Filming is to start this week on Agora, Alejandro Amenábar's next English-language film after The Others. As a Classics spod, I never imagined in my wildest dreams that Hollywood would make a film set in the ancient library of Alexandria but, as Sophocles would say, polla ta deina (or, roughly translated, wonders never cease).
According to Amenábar, "It's amazing to think that [ancient Alexandria] should be condemned to oblivion, not least by filmmakers. Our entire team is devoted to bringing ancient Alexandria back to life by using a hyper-realist approach. We want the audience to see, feel and smell a remote civilization as if it were as real as the present day."
Agora stars our own Rachel Weisz as the fourth-century AD Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer and editor Hypatia. A famous scholar in a city of scholars, she was caught up in the violent religious tensions that prevailed, and blamed by the rising Christian movement for poor relations between the Alexandrian bishop and the imperial Roman prefect. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon described her death thus, "On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster shells and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames."
Cripes. Shame Gibbon wasn't on the script, really. Anyway, this is great material for a film (without too much biographical fact to inhibit invention) and the writers have, naturally, inserted a romantic subplot: Hypatia's slave, Davus, is, according to the makers, "torn between his secret love for her and the freedom he could attain by joining the rising tide of Christianity".
As rioters gather outside, Hypatia is to be trapped inside the library - the greatest repository of knowledge in the world, which might have contained half a million scrolls. Judging from the filmmakers' statement, it seems that Hypatia will be trying to save the library from going up in flames (which it did, though the real date of this cataclysm is disputed).
Frankly, I couldn't be more excited. Apart from anything, when was the last time a swords-and-sandals epic starred a woman? Oh all right, Elizabeth Taylor. But that was a long time ago...
