Now · Today: the Afterlives · 2009 CE

A story told by Alejandro Amenábar: the film Agora

Legend · Told story

Alejandro Amenábar's film Agora puts Hypatia at the sack of the Serapeum and its library.

What the evidence supports: No ancient account of 391/392 mentions books or Hypatia. She was perhaps in her thirties when the temple fell, more than twenty years before her death.

Who and what

People
Hypatia

Told stories

Legend: told story

Hypatia, the last librarian

Carl Sagan's Cosmos ends its account of the Library's destruction with Hypatia's death, and so joins the two; later tellers make her its last librarian. Cosmos is the latest date for the link; who first made it is still to be dated from Watts 2017.

Told by Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980, more than fifteen centuries after her death

What the evidence supports

No ancient source supports it. Hypatia taught mathematics and Platonism in Alexandria and was killed by a Christian mob in March 415; no ancient source connects her with the Library or with any library, and the Serapeum had fallen more than twenty years before.

Sources (3)
  • Socrates Scholasticus, Church History 7.13–15
  • E. J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)
  • M. Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)
The Hall of Told Stories
Legend: told story

The hall you may have pictured

Engravers of the 19th century drew the Library as a soaring hall with galleries of shelves and scholars in togas; Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1980) and the film Agora (2009) built it again.

Told by Engravers of the 19th century, then Cosmos and Agora, 19th century CE, more than two thousand years after the Library

What the evidence supports

No building of the Library has been found or described. Ancient book-rooms were rooms with cupboards along the walls, as at Pergamon and Ephesus, and rolls lay in pigeonholes.

Sources (3)
  • R. S. Bagnall, "Alexandria: Library of Dreams", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 146.4 (2002) 348–362
  • L. Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)
  • G. W. Houston, Inside Roman Libraries: Book Collections and Their Management in Antiquity (Chapel Hill, 2014)
The Hall of Told Stories

In the show

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Sources
  • E. J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)