Alexandria — the third largest city in the Roman empire — was not a secular town by any means in the fourth century. Christians, once lion food in the Roman Empire, were allowed to practice in public. Intolerance was on the rise with ever-recurring battles between Jews, followers of Greek traditions, and Christians. The intolerance was facilitated by Roman Emperors who after conversion had discovered a new hobby which provided primal excitement – wiping out idolatry.
Theodosius I, for example, banned non-Christian rituals and his man in Alexandria, Pope Theophilus, facilitated the destruction of Serapeum — a temple dedicated to Hellenistic-Egyptian god Serapis. But in spite of religious fanaticism, Alexandria was the Takshashila of Egypt; students came from Syria, Cyrene and Constantinople to learn philosophy, math, astronomy and astrology. The city had temples and churches and schools for intellectual and cultural nourishment. It was here that Hypatia, the female astronomer/mathematician/philosopher lived, taught, and was murdered. The movie is the biography of this less known Egyptian.
When this visually stunning swords-and-sandals movie starts, Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) is already a well known teacher. She had learned from her father Theon, one of the members of the Museum of Alexandria, where some scrolls from the library of Alexandria were preserved. She also wrote commentaries, edited Ptolemy’s texts, and taught Neoplatonism, a monistic theology with similarities to Indic schools of thought (not mentioned in the movie).
She is seen wondering about the paths of planets; this was a time when Ptolemy’s geocentric model prevailed. The observations did not match Ptolemy’s model and she wondered if there was a simple explanation for the wanderers. She mentions Aristarchus, who had proposed a heliocentric model, but was not quite sure if that was the answer.
While she was worrying about the wanderers in the sky, the minds of some of her students were wandering around hers. This included an aristocrat Orestes, who eventually became the Prefect of Egypt. Hypatia rejected his public advances, devoted herself to science, and stayed a virgin till her death.
On the streets, Christians were mocking and aggressively converting followers of Greek traditions. This leads to the first major conflict between the scholars and Christians. Fed up with the constant mocking, the Christians are attacked by the locals. But the Christians gain an upper hand and lay a siege of the Serapenum. The news reaches the emperor who grants amnesty to the non-Christians, but allows the Christians to ransack the place and burn the scrolls.
The second set of disastrous events start following the death of Bishop Theophilus. He was succeeded by his nephew, Cyril, a self-aggrandizing control freak who continued his uncle’s overzealousness with vigor. Since the “pagans” were take care of, Cyril turned his attention to the Jews. The fact that Jews watched the theater during Sabbath turned to be the peace breaker. The violence between Christians and Jews exploded and the matter was bought to the Prefect, Orestes, who was a once student of Hypatia. But he could do nothing. Jews, who lived in Alexandria since the time of Alexander, were forced to leave.
Though a baptized Christian, Orestes does not approve of Cyril’s attempts to encroach over civil power, but he has to steer through the foggy borderlands between his religion and his friendship with his teacher. As the crisis gathers steam and boils over, Cyril notices Hypatia’s popularity and her friendship with Orestes. Cyril gives a public lecture in which he blames Hypatia for controlling Orestes and calls her a witch — an unpopular profession in 5th century Egypt and 21st century Delaware. He also quotes scripture which mentions the role of women and asks Orestes to accept the word of God; Orestes refuses.
To hurt the Prefect, the Parabalani monks — monks whose primary duty is to take care of the ill and homeless — decide to take action. They kidnap Hypatia, a humanist who thought all people were brothers, to a church and stone her to death. In the movie, one of her slaves, who was in love with her, chokes her before the stoning.
None of her works survived, but we know about her from the letters written by one of her students, who later became a Christian priest. In the movie he is portrayed as the one trying to reconcile Cyril and Orestes.
Though the movie is made on large scale with stunning sets which recreate the Alexandria of the 5th century, the script is loose on facts. In the movie Hypatia is seen as discovering the heliocentric model and elliptical orbit, much ahead of Kepler, but facts don’t support it. A millennia later, Galileo would be imprisoned by the Pope for suggesting a heliocentric model of the universe, but Hypatia was not murdered for her philosophy or science, but due to political reasons.
Alongside Hypatia’s death, the destruction of the traditions and beliefs and Gods of the classical antiquity too was happening. These traditions survived the blood thirsty Roman empire, which did not give a hoot as to which Gods you worshiped so long as the coffers were filled. But against the new nemesis — intolerant mutation of monotheism — traditions which survived centuries had no chance of survival. As Rachel Weisz mentioned in an interview with Charlie Rose, Europe slipped into the Dark Ages.
Additional Reading & Credits

1. Hypatia, Ancient Alexandria’s Great Female Scholar
2. The New York Times review of Agora
3. Movie Trailer in HD
4. Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Harvard University Press, 1996)
5. Image from Wikipedia.

Recently historians started getting obscene amounts of money for writing historical fiction. Thus when such a historian sets out to write a work of fiction, what sort of issues does he face? Saul David, whose new novel Hart of Empire is set during the second Anglo-Afghan War of 1879, writes

I, on the other hand, wanted to give history an undue prominence in my fiction until I was advised by my editor to “let go of the past”. Not an easy task for someone who’d spent the last fifteen years writing history, you might think? And you’d be right. Historical facts are the vital framework around which non-fiction writers construct their narratives; they are, quite simply, indispensable. Yet now I was being told that if I wanted to write decent historical fiction I had to avoid being constrained by events as they actually happened.
Eventually I saw the sense of this. I wasn’t being asked to sacrifice historical accuracy per se. Just to accept that a historical novel, or any novel for that matter, stands or falls on plot and characterisation; period detail is important, but only in so far as it gives a sense of authenticity. It must remain in the background and never be allowed to dominate the story
Historical fiction, as a result, often takes liberties with the ‘truth’: it compresses time, invents conversations and motives that real people never had, and generally tampers with the historical record for the purposes of plot.[Tall tales from history: Are historians best placed to write historical fiction?]

The year before the invasion of Iraq, the news was all about WMD: the chemical weapons, biological weapons and the mushroom cloud. Newspapers quoted “senior administration officials”; Colin Powell made a presentation; curveball made damning revelations. The smoking gun was never found, and the WMD scare just faded away as the goal post shifted.
In this action movie, based on Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the search for WMD comes back in Jason Bourne style. Matt Damon plays an Army Officer tasked to find the non-existent WMD. As he follows one false lead after another, he uncovers the truth: the administration knew very well that they did not exist.
Now that combat troops have been renamed in Iraq, it is important to  remember how the pre-emptive war originally started because another shift in goal posts is happening in Afghanistan. There is an attempt to explain that American troops are required because who else would save the women? 
This angle appeared in two media outlets in a span of weeks. First TIME had a cover story titled “What happens if we leave Afghanistan” which was accompanied by the image of a girl whose face was scarred by acid. Katie Couric made the same point in her broadcast from Afghanistan. 

VIDEO — KATIE COURIC’s “Final Thoughts” from Afghanistan: “There are many searing images from Afghanistan: the faces — so young! — of the soldiers receiving their bronze stars for valor in combat. ,,, But these are the faces and the eyes that I will always remember: the girls and women who have escaped to this shelter, their lives put indefinitely on hold. … Protecting human rights alone may not justify a massive military commitment. But whether you support this war or not, REMEMBER THESE FACES. As the Afghan government, with the tacit approval of the United States, extends a hand to the Taliban, will we turn our backs on the future of this country? Will the nations of the world allow the newfound rights of girls and women to become a casualty of a brokered peace?” http://bit.ly/9nH9bC [From POLITCO Playbook via email]

After this, are the Americans going to save the women in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan?

David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,  a historical novel set in Japan at the turn into the 19th century is getting good reviews. See reviews here and here. GoodReads has an interview in which he talks about the craft of writing historical fiction

With historical fiction, the spectrum is right through to wrong, it’s historically correct to historically incorrect. If it’s too much in the incorrect direction, then it’s not going to work. The onboard proofreader in your reader’s mind will say, “Hang on! They didn’t have electric lights at this point! This is a book, this is fiction, it isn’t real!” And—puff!—the whole thing disappears in a cloud of smoke, and the reader quite rightly throws the book across the room, end of story.

To get it right, you need to research and research and research. And then you need to hide all your research, otherwise something else happens. You get sentences like, “Milord, would you like me to light the sperm whale oil lantern or would you prefer the cheaper but smokier pig tallow candle?” You burst into laughter and—puff!—the illusion is gone. So you have to get it right, then you have to hide it.

Historical fiction isn’t easy; it’s not just another genre. How are they going to speak? If you get that too right, it sounds like a pastiche comedy—people are saying “thou” and “prithee” and “gadzooks,” which they did say, but to an early 21st-century audience, it’s laughable, even though it’s accurate. So you have to design a kind of “bygone-ese”—it’s modern enough for readers not to stumble over it, but it’s not so modern that the reader kind of thinks this could be out of House or Friends or something made for TV—puff! Again, the illusion is gone. It’s very easy to be wrong; it’s very easy for the book to fail. [David Mitchell]