by Tora Glory

A man so under developed, he’s not even blessed with a name. The Prince is almost an afterthought in the movie, appearing for a brief segment in the beginning of the film to sing “One Song” to a random girl sitting by a well belting in a fluttery soprano. Of course, it’s love at first sight! But the rest of the film is dedicated to Snow White’s interaction with seven short mining men, none of them her true love. In the end, who shows up just in time to save the day? The Prince, of course, who kisses Snow White out of her coma and whisks her off to his castle in the distance. Superfluous, forgettable, but a great singer. D

The Prince – Appearance 1 of 2

 

Prince Charming – Cinderella

Not far evolved from Snow White’s prince, but at least he has a name. It is rumored, that after a tense debate, that the Disney writers narrowed the list of prospective adjectives to Sexypants, Studly, and Charming. Guess which won? Prince Charming, other than having a soggy sweet name, is no upgrade from The Prince. He isn’t even allowed his own song, and doesn’t save Cinderella from her ghastly fate. Instead, he lets a bumbling footman with a monocle handle all the dirty work. In the end, after waving goodbye, you can see him as merely a chest in the carriage as Cinderella waves at her grain throwing mice. So in essence, completely and utterly lame. F

The Only Redeeming Thing About Prince Charming is This Song

 

Prince Philip – Sleeping Beauty

 Prince Philip was the first to be a beautiful singer, handsome to a fault, and kick some major ass. You see him first as a kid, making a funny not-so-impressed face at the wailing baby Aurora, but he is reintroduced when a much older and studlier Philip hears a very well developed nearly sixteen Briar Rose singing in the forest. He makes his dashing entrance, sweeping the girl off her delicate bare feet, singing one of the most well known Disney duets, “Once Upon a Dream.” He is thrown into the dungeon by Maleficent, who is one of the most awesomely wicked villians ever, and promptly saved by the Good Fairies so he in turn can save Aurora/Briar Rose, who really is quite useless to be perfectly frank. In the end, Prince Philip is really running the show, fighting off hobgoblins and sprites, and then facing Maleficent turned enormous evil dragon. After a battle of epic proportions, he destroys Maleficent, awakens Aurora with a kiss (another comatose princess, I’m sensing a theme) and they live happily evere after. Hats off, Phil. You, in a word, are awesome. A+

The Battle Between Philip and Maleficent = Epic

Prince Eric – The Little Mermaid

The first love story to span species, Prince Eric is the handsome, flute playing prince that the mermaid Ariel sets her sights upon. Ariel (a not so entirely useless princess) saves him from a shipwreck, and Eric opens his eyes to see the sillouhette of his savior singing to him. He falls in love instantly, as normal people are wont to do, and scours the kingdom in search of the mystery girl.  Eric is actually blessed with a personality, and a realistic one at that.  He’s kind and has a wicked sense of humor, but he also has doubts and sorrows.  Aww.  Anyway, Ursula, the scariest squid ever, spells Eric to believe she is the girl who saved him using Ariel’s voice, which is just plain mean. Eventually, Ariel reveals herself, and takes back her voice, Ursula grows to the size of the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man ala Ghostbusters, and Eric impales her with the stern of a ship. Kickass! And of course, Ariel get married and live happily ever after. This prince’s downside? Eric never sings. The upside: Bring on the sushi. A-/B+

The Beast/Prince Adam – Beauty and the Beast

Another interspecies romance. Sort of. The Beast, who I never realized actually had a name, is not given the golden shiny reputation at the outset of the film. In fact, as a human, he was selfish and unkind, according to the low voiced narrator. The Beast is no better, angry at his cursed state and making the lives of his servants, now delightfully animated objects, miserable. It’s only when he takes Belle, who’s not actually a princess, prisoner, that he begins to see the light. The Beast is the first dynamic prince character that Disney produces, learning from his mistakes and becoming compassionate and selfless. Upon realization that he loves her, the Beast lets Belle go to her father, though she promptly returns to warn him of the angry French mob. After a fatal blow from Gaston, leaving the Beast dying in Belle’s arms, Belle actually saves the prince this time by admitting her love for him and releasing him from his curse. Happily ever after ensues. Though the Beast is another prince who just barely sings, but he does rescue Belle from wolves and is a good dancer for having paws rather than feet. B

The One and Only Time the Beast Sings in the Movie

Aladdin/Prince Ali – Aladdin

I was really torn about whether I wanted to include Aladdin in this grouping. Aladdin is NOT a prince, which is the whole point of the movie. He has to lie about being a prince, which is helped by having a genie at his disposal, in order to win the hand of Princess Jasmine, who really couldn’t care less about his being a prince and cares more about being lied to than anything (typical woman.) However, Aladdin is one of the coolest heroes in Disney history. He’s a smooth talker, a great singer, roguish, brave, and clever to boot. Honesty may not be his strong suit, but hey, who’s perfect? In the end, he defeats Jafar using cunning rather than brawn, and wins Jasmine’s affections, as well as restoring the kingdom to the Sultan, who changes the prince law because really that’s the least he could do. The only real downside to Aladdin is he’s still not a prince. N/A

Thieves are Sexy

Prince Edward – Enchanted

Prince Edward is the sweet, not so bright prince of Disney’s Enchanted,and the only prince that doesn’t end up with his (originally intended) princess. He’s handsome and well dressed, risking everything to come to New York and save Giselle. On the other side, he has an overly developed ego, which he’s very sincere about, and isn’t particularly clever. However, this prince stereotype still manages to win our hearts and win the girl, though not the girl he was looking for. Oh, and did I mention the man can sing? Cause damn. With his dimpled cheeks, boyish charm, and reckless (if unecessary) heroics, Prince Edward is a Disney prince through and through. Animated or not. B

Beautiful Voice, Not So Smart

There you have it folks, my analysis on the princes of Disney. I hope you enjoyed the show and may you all enjoy your own happily ever afters. Hopefully they won’t be nearly so cheesy, and the wardrobe infinitely more comfortable. Cheers!

From Horn Book Magazine, November 2011.

 

The wolves appear to have disappeared. But everything else is here – from the grisly off-cuts of various surgical operations to a feast of fag ends and a heartbreaking little portrait of the darling daughter who died at the age of seven.

Children were always banned from this near-mythical hideaway – and told that ferocious wolves prowled within. Yet, there was nothing anti-child about the occupant. This was  where a childlike genius produced some of  the most enduring children’s literature of the 20th century.

And today, 21 years after he stubbed out his last Marlboro and sharpened his last Dixon Ticonderoga pencil in here, Roald Dahl’s writing hut remains exactly as it was when he died in 1990.

No one has even emptied the bin. Among the assorted detritus inside it, I spot a scrumpled sheet of paper with a few scribbles about star signs (which he had planned to develop into a diary  for children).

This tiny brick outhouse, at the end of a lush avenue of interweaving lime trees, remains a shrine to the man who gave the world Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, The Big Friendly Giant and James And The Giant Peach. Neither his widow, Felicity – who still lives here at the family home in Great Missenden, Bucks – nor his four children or nine grandchildren have wanted to touch it, let alone give it a good clear-out. Until now.

With another winter approaching, the remnants of an extraordinary life – marked with great  tragedy and heroism as well as literary success – are starting to deteriorate.

The members of the Dahl clan have finally decided that the time has come to preserve the great man’s inner sanctum – or ‘little nest’ as he called it – for posterity. The plan is to remove the interior in its entirety and relocate it to the Roald Dahl Museum which they have founded just down the road.

But it is not going to be cheap. Indeed, at £500,000, the cost might seem as fantastic as the plotline to, well, Fantastic Mr Fox. Even here in this leafy, half-timbered corner of the Chilterns, surely property prices have not got so ludicrous that it costs half a million quid to shift a glorified potting shed?

Yesterday morning, there were gasps of incredulity within minutes of the launch of a public appeal, on the BBC, fronted by the author’s model/writer granddaughter, Sophie Dahl. Angry emails came pouring in. How could a hut cost so much? And why couldn’t the literary estate of an international bestselling author – published in 49 languages – stump up the funds?

By yesterday afternoon, the debate stretched from the web pages of the Los Angeles Times to Taiwan. So, what is all the fuss about? And does it really require so much money?

No sooner have I stepped through the door (well-guarded with hefty Banham locks and a security grille) than I sense a certain aura. And it’s not just because I am inside Britain’s costliest bothy. There is an inescap-able sense of entering the creative bolthole of a literary giant. And it is all engagingly barmy.

The hut, constructed by a local builder in the Fifties, is built of a single layer of bricks and lined with poly- styrene. A small ante-room contains the filing cabinets in which Dahl locked away all the drafts of his books and screenplays, and the remnants of various hobbies. In later life, he developed an obsession for picture-framing. Dozens of ornate frames hang on pegs, awaiting a picture.

An open doorway leads into the nerve centre. Commanding the ‘room’ – it is about the size of a modest ship’s cabin – is an ancient wing-backed armchair which belonged to Dahl’s mother.

An extra cushion was added by him to aid the bad back which was a lasting legacy of a crash-landing during a stint as an RAF fighter ace in World War II. When he later developed an abscess in his back, his response was not to get a new chair but to hack a hole in the back of it to accommodate the sore. The hole is still there.

Alongside it stands a table of mementos, some curious, some grotesque. There is the hip bone which Dahl retained after a hip replacement and a little jar of spinal shavings – another souvenir from that RAF crash. On the opposite wall is a filing cabinet with a bizarre lever wedged into a drawer handle to make it easier to open.

This charming artefact, it turns out, was his original hip replacement – itself replaced in a subsequent operation.

Hovering above the chair is a truly terrifying bit of DIY – a single-bar electric heater dangling from a  couple of wires on what look like a pair of coat hangers. Depending on the temperature, Dahl would pull the thing closer or push it away with a walking stick. Given all the polystyrene on the walls, the constant cigarettes and this red-hot contraption hovering overhead, it is a wonder he didn’t go up in smoke.

All over the walls are family photographs and miscellany. Children may have been banned, but their cards and letters were lovingly impaled on the polystyrene with twisted paperclips (for some reason, Dahl preferred these to drawing pins).

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the most obvious images are those of Olivia, Dahl’s eldest, who died from measles encephalitis in 1962 at the age  of seven.

Also on the wall is a tiny ‘WDT’ valve, used in the treatment of hydrocephalus (water on the brain). Dahl, who was interested in engineering, helped to develop this widget after his son, Theo, was hit by a New York taxi in 1960 and ended up in intensive care. As well as achieving literary immortality, Dahl acquired a medical renown of sorts. The ‘WDT’ valve is named after its three inventors. The ‘D’ stands for Dahl.

A psychoanalyst would have a field day in here. If Dahl hated his schooldays so much, as he claimed, why are old photographs of his alma mater, Repton, on the walls? And why did he reject a writing desk in favour of this green baize board shaped to fit around his waist?

It would sit on a roll of corrugated paper laid across his legs. His feet, meanwhile, would rest on this old travelling trunk full of logs and nailed to the floor.

The whole thing looks like a home-made replica of a long-distance  aeroplane seat. Does this show a subliminal hankering for his pilot days? ‘It certainly has the feel of a cockpit,’ observes Amelia Foster, the director of the Roald Dahl Museum.

She is thrilled that all this will be relocated to her award-winning museum. And she points out that it is a painstaking process.

‘We have to send everything to a  special museum freezer facility just to kill off any pests,’ she points out. ‘And then we have to rebuild an entire  gallery to accommodate this room exactly as it is.’

While the brick exterior will remain in the garden, the interior will  have to be extracted by experts to prevent the cracked, nicotine-stained polystyrene walls from falling apart. But what about the £500,000 cost?

‘It is a very expensive business. But no one has ever seen this place before, and we want to share it with future generations because that is how you inspire young people,’ explains Amelia, a child literacy expert.

As for criticism about the fundraising, she insists that neither the museum nor the family is holding out a begging bowl.

‘These are hard times. We aren’t asking hard-pressed people to dip into their pockets and we are not seeking public money, either. But if people want to make a contribution, then it would be very welcome and we are also approaching grant-giving foundations and trusts.’

The Dahl family, she points out, have already contributed around £250,000 of the money required, while it is the author’s literary estate which keeps the museum solvent and buzzing – and also funds Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity for seriously ill children.

This is certainly no ordinary shed. And every child – or former child – who has ever been touched or captivated by this curious man’s creative energy should be fascinated to see where it all happened. DIY enthusiasts, meanwhile, can come and  marvel at the price.

Jane Austen’s Advice for Writers

by Vic Sanborn, Oct 4, 2010

Jane Austen wrote about the art of writing in her letters to family, friends, and acquaintances, and followed her own advice.

In her letters to her sister, Cassandra, niece Anna Austen, and Rev. James Stanier Clarke, Jane Austen revealed her thoughts on writing. While she did not adhere to the strict rules of punctuation, her observations about character development and staying true to what you know are sound advice for all authors today.

Write Daily

Jane Austen wrote letters, plays, and stories ever since she was a young girl, whether she was motivated to write or not. At times she struggled. “How ill I have written. I begin to hate myself,” she shared with her sister, Cassandra, when she was 21. Even when Jane was unable to complete a novel during her peripatetic years in Bath, she wrote letters regularly. “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am,” she told Cassandra and confessed to her niece Anna in 1814 that she had “nothing very particular to say.” When Jane was not writing original work, she copied reams of her favorite music into large volumes and her youthful work into journals that were distributed among the family.

Jane’s most productive writing years were spent in Chawton Cottage, where she developed distinct writing habits. She wrote near a window on a small walnut table on a writing slope that her father had given to her. Whenever anyone entered the room, the door would creak, giving Jane ample time to secrete her work under a sheet of blotting paper. Her regular schedule allowed her to produce three of her six novels during the last eight years of her life, and to revise her earlier ones.

Write About Topics You Know Well

Jane Austen has been accused by critics of ignoring the larger world and historical events of the day in favor of every day occurrences in village life. Her reasons for these limitations were deliberate. To her way of thinking authors lost credibility if they wrote about topics that were out of their depth. “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on,” Jane wrote to her niece, Anna, a budding young author. In another letter she advised Anna to keep her characters in England as she knew nothing of the manners in Ireland. “You will be in danger of giving false representations. Stick to Bath and the Foresters. There you will be quite at home.”

Jane followed her own counsel. When James Stanier Clarke, the Prince Regent’s librarian, suggested new avenues for Jane to explore, she wrote “No – I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way; And though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.” (1816) She elaborated further in another letter to Mr. Clarke, “I could no more write a Romance than an Epic Poem.- could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter.”

Style and Punctuation

Jane Austen was not overly concerned about punctuation. After the release of Pride and Prejudice, she wrote to Cassandra, “There are a few Typical errors–& a ‘said he’ or a ‘said she’ would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear–but ‘I do not write for such dull Elves As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.’” In other words, a smart person would figure out what she meant to say. She was also prone to using exclamations, ampersands, and dashes, especially in her letters, but was unapologetic about the habit, saying “I am always wandering away into some exclamation or other.”

She wrote her thoughts in a hurry, not always dividing long passages into paragraphs. Two original and unedited chapters from Persuasion demonstrate that she wrote long sentences, ignored commas, and used dashes to connect her sub-clauses. *

Jane decried the use of slang and used it only to delineate a character, such as John Thorpe, a seedy character in Northanger Abbey. When her niece, Anna, began to write her own novel, Jane cautioned: “Devereux Forester’s being ruined by his Vanity is extremely good; but I wish you would not let him plunge into a ‘vortex of Dissipation’… it is such thorough novel slang–and so old, that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.” (1814)

Characters and their Development

Jane Austen was quite critical of her own work, writing to Cassandra in 1799 about one of her characters, “Henry Mellish I am afraid will be too much in the common Novel style–a handsome, amiable, unexceptionable Young Man.” She was particular about love scenes and heroes. “I do not like a lover speaking in the 3rd person … I think it not natural,” she said to Anna, adding in a later letter that Anna’s hero must be given something interesting but realistic to do. “What can you do with Egerton to increase the interest for him? I wish you could contrive something, some family occurrence to bring out his good qualities more. Some distress among brothers and sisters to relieve by the sale of his curacy! … I would not seriously recommend anything improbable, but if you could invent something spirited for him it would have a good effect.” Actions also needed to make sense and the author should provide a character a compelling reason to do them. “We are not satisfied with Mrs. Forester settling herself as tenant and near neighbour to such a man as Sir Thomas, without having some other inducement to go there. She ought to have some friend living thereabouts to tempt her.”

Editing and Factual Accuracy

Jane Austen suggested that authors use words sparingly, write accurate descriptions, apply common sense, and consult the facts. “Here and there we have thought the sense could be expressed in fewer words, and I have scratched out Sir Thos. from walking with the others to the stables, &c. the very day after breaking his arm,” she wrote to Anna, adding, “Lyme will not do. Lyme is towards forty miles from Dawlish and would not be talked of there. I have put Starcross instead.”

Jane suggested revisions for a good purpose. As she wrote to Anna, “The scene with Mrs. Mellish I should condemn; it is prosy and nothing to the purpose” and “I have also scratched out the introduction between Lord Portman and his brother and Mr. Griffin. A country surgeon … would not be introduced to men of their rank.” One gets the sense from Jane’s critiques that she knew her geographic distances well, and that physical details mattered for the novel to be believable. “Russell Square is a very proper distance from Berkeley Square. … They must be two days going from Dawlish to Bath. They are nearly 100 miles apart.”

Today’s author would do well to follow Jane Austen’s advice in writing interesting characters who move about realistically in settings that the writer knows well.

Sources:

Letters of Jane Austen – Brabourne Edition, Republic of Pemberley.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen didn’t do punctuation – dash it, The Australian.

Jane Austen’s Writing Desk and Writing Table. Suite 101.

Leonard Cohen

Ernest Hemingway, 1939

William Faulkner, 1943

Agatha Christie, 1946

George Orwell

Alfred Hitchcock, 1939

Bob Dylan

Tennessee Williams, 1946

Dorothy Parker, 1937

Faulkner again. Just because.

‘Jane Eyre’ movie rekindles Austen vs. Bronte, the battle of the bonnets

By Monica Hesse, The Washington Post, March 17, 2011

An hour with Lotta Dempsey: a journalist and columnist who practiced her craft at a time when working for a newspaper was not considered a ‘ladylike’ profession.

Growing up among the “Famous Five,” she got her start at the Edmonton Journal in 1923 and went on to witness everything from JFK’s inauguration to Princess Anne’s wedding…

Listen to the CBC Rewind podcast

“At times of great emotion or great tragedy, the story wrote itself.”

WTF Jennifer Garner As Miss Marple?

By Sadie Stein, jezebel.com, March 29, 2011

‘Nihilo sanc­tum estne?’ Miss Cross asked, famously and semi-accurately, in Rushmore. And contemplating the conundrum that is this Miss Marple remake, we’re left wondering the same thing.

Marple devotees are akin to Dr. Who fanatics in their love of debate. Who was the best Marple to grace St. Mary Mead? The caustic Geraldine McEwan? The grandmotherly Julia McKenzie? The venerable Joan Hickson? Here’s an actress whom I’m guessing no one inadvertently left out of the conversation: Jennifer Garner.

I have no problem with Jennifer Garner; I speak as a woman who owns 13 Going on 30 and is an active follower of Violet Affleck’s lifestyle choices. She’s a personable actress, a beautiful woman, and seems to be a nice person. Know what she isn’t? Miss Marple.

Actually, she is. The initial reports were alarming enough:

Disney has made a deal to revive the Agatha Christie mystery series staple character Miss Marple, but with one big difference: instead of the elderly spinster who lives in the English village of St. Mary Mead and solves mysteries as a hobby, the new configuration is for Mark Frost to script a version where Marple is in her 30s or 40s.

And then came the horrifying confirmation.

Jennifer Garner will be the actress who puts a young spin on Miss Marple in Disney’s reboot of the Agatha Christie mystery series sleuth. The character had been portrayed by a long line of actresses who played Marple as an elderly spinster who cracked crimes in her spare time. Garner and her Vandalia Films partner Juliana Janes will produce a film that will be shaped as a star vehicle for Garner, the former Alias star who will next be seen in Arthur.

One word: why? Why take one of the few characters in literature who represents a woman of a certain age, who doesn’t make sexuality any part of her power, and who gives credit to a generally-overlooked segment of the population, and give it a sexy, youthful, utterly generic “spin?” Here’s the thing about Jean Marple: she’s a character who’s consistently underestimated. That’s her power, as an older woman in society, and the key to her ability to observe unobtrusively. She’s about confounding expectation.

Now, I hope I’m wrong. The Sherlock reboot, after all, was fun TV. Maybe Marple is younger, yes, but still a spinster in the classic sense who has decided to build a life without men in it. Maybe she’s consistently overlooked by those around her, and slyly undermines conventional ideals. Maybe. But I’m not holding my breath.

“Agora” and Hypatia – Hollywood Strikes Again

by Tim O’Neill, Armarium Magnum, May 20, 2009

Normally I’d be delighted that someone was making a film set in the Fifth Century (at least, one that wasn’t another fantasy about “King Arthur” anyway). After all, it’s not like there’s a shortage of remarkable stories to tell from that turbulent and interesting time. And normally I’d be even more delighted that they are actually bothering to make it look like the Fifth Century, rather than assuming because it’s set in the Roman Empire everyone needs to be wearing togas, forward combed haircuts and lorica segmentata [segmented armour]. And I would be especially delighted that they are not only doing both these things but also casting the delightful Rachel Weisz in the lead role, since she’s an excellent actress and, let’s face it, pretty cute. And as an amateur historian of science I’m more than happy with the idea of a film that gets across the idea that, yes, there was a tradition of scientific thinking before Newton and Galileo.

So why am I not delighted? Because [Chilean director Alejandro] Amenabar has chosen to write and direct a film about the philosopher Hypatia and perpetuate some hoary Enlightenment myths by turning it into a morality tale about science vs fundamentalism.

Hypatia has long been pressed into service as a martyr for science by those with agendas that have nothing to do with the accurate presentation of history. As Maria Dzielska has detailed in her study of Hypatia in history and myth, Hypatia of Alexandria, virtually every age since her death that has heard her story has appropriated it and forced it to serve some polemical purpose.

Ask who Hypatia was and you will probably be told “She was that beautiful young pagan philosopher who was torn to pieces by monks (or, more generally, by Christians) in Alexandria in 415″. This pat answer would be based not on ancient sources, but on a mass of belletristic and historical literature …. Most of these works represent Hypatia as an innocent victim of the fanaticism of nascent Christianity, and her murder as marking the banishment of freedom of inquiry along with the Greek gods.
(Dzielska, p. 1)

If you had asked me at the age of 15 that’s certainly what I would have told you, since I had heard of Hypatia largely thanks to astronomer Carl Sagan’s TV series and book Cosmos. I still have a soft spot both for Sagan and Cosmos, since – as with a lot of young people of the time – it awakened my love not only of science, but a humanist tradition of science and a historical perspective on the subject that made it far more accessible to me than dry formulae. But popularisations of any subject can create erroneous impressions even when the writer is very sure of his material. And while Sagan was usually on very solid ground with his science, his history could be distinctly shaky. Especially when he had a barrow or two to push.

The final chapter of the book of Cosmos is the one where Sagan pushes a few barrows. Generally, his aims are admirable – he notes the fragility of life and of civilisation, makes some calm and quietly sober condemnations of nuclear proliferation – highly relevant and sensible in the depths of Cold War 1980 – and makes a rational and humanistic plea for the maintenance of a long term view on the Earth, the environment and our intellectual heritage. In the process he tells the story of Hypatia as a cautionary parable; a tale that illustrates how fragile civilisation is and how easily it can fall to the powers of ignorance and irrationality.

After describing the glories of the Great Library of Alexandria, he introduces Hypatia as its “last scientist”. He then notes that the Roman Empire was in crisis in her time and that “slavery had sapped ancient civilisation of its vitality”; which is an odd comment since the ancient world had always been based on slavery, making it hard to see why this institution would suddenly begin to “sap” it of “vitality” in the Fifth Century. He then he gets to the crux of his story:

Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril’s parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.
(Sagan, p. 366)

I gather I was not the only impressionable reader who found this parable made a great impression. One reader of Dzielska’s study, which debunks the version Sagan propagates, wrote a breathless review on Amazon.com that declared:

Hypatia was first brought to my attention by Carl Sagan in his television series Cosmos. She has often been represented as a pillar of wisdom in an age of growing dogma. Unlike with Socrates we know much less about her life and teachings. She is remembered precisely as a martyr who was sacrificed rather than executed by a literalist Christian mob inspired by “St” Cyril, apparently as she was regarded as a threat to Christendom and theology by certain regio-political figures.

That actually makes you wonder if they had read Dzielska’s book at all.

While Sagan is the best known propagator of the idea that Hypatia was a martyr for science, he was simply following a venerable polemical tradition that has its origin in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

A rumor was spread among the Christians, that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the prefect and the archbishop; and that obstacle was speedily removed. 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.

Like Gibbon, Sagan links the story of the murder of Hypatia with the idea that the Great Library of Alexandria was torched by another Christian mob. In fact, Sagan presents the two events as though they were subsequent, stating “[the Library's] last remnants were destroyed soon after Hypatia’s death” (p. 366) and that “when the mob came …. to burn the Library down there was nobody to stop them.” (p. 365)

In the hands of Sagan and others both the story of Hypatia’s murder and the Library’s destruction are a cautionary tale of what can happen if we let down our guards and allow mobs of fanatics to destroy the champions and repositories of reason.

The Great Library and its Myths

This is certainly a powerful parable. Unfortunately, it doesn’t correspond very closely with actual history. To begin with, the Great Library of Alexandria no longer existed in Hypatia’s time. Precisely when and how it had been destroyed is unclear, though a fire in Alexandria caused by Julius Caesar’s troops in 48 BC is the most likely main culprit. More likely this and/or other fires were part of a long process of decline and degradation of the collection. Strangely, given that we know so little about it, the Great Library has long been a focus of some highly imaginative fantasies. The idea that it contained 500,000 o0r even 700,000 books is often repeated uncritically by many modern writers, even though comparison with the size other ancient libraries and estimates of the size of the building needed to house such a collection makes this highly unlikely. It is rather more probable that it was around less than a tenth of these numbers, though that would still make it the largest library in the ancient world by a wide margin.

The idea that the Great Library was still in existence in Hypatia’s time and that it was, like her, destroyed by a Christian mob has been popularised by Gibbon, who never let history get in the way of a good swipe at Christianity. But what Gibbon was talking about was the temple known as the Serapeum, which was not the Great Library at all. It seems the Serapeum had contained a library at some point and this was a “daughter library” of the former Great Library. But the problem with Gibbon’s version is that no account of the destruction of the Serapeum by the Bishop Theophilus in AD 391 makes any mention of a library or any books, only the destruction of pagan idols and cult objects:

At the solicitation of Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, the Emperor issued an order at this time for the demolition of the heathen temples in that city; commanding also that it should be put in execution under the direction of Theophilus. Seizing this opportunity, Theophilus exerted himself to the utmost to expose the pagan mysteries to contempt. And to begin with, he caused the Mithreum to be cleaned out, and exhibited to public view the tokens of its bloody mysteries. Then he destroyed the Serapeum, and the bloody rites of the Mithreum he publicly caricatured; the Serapeum also he showed full of extravagant superstitions, and he had the phalli of Priapus carried through the midst of the forum. Thus this disturbance having been terminated, the governor of Alexandria, and the commander-in-chief of the troops in Egypt, assisted Theophilus in demolishing the heathen temples.
(Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica, Bk V)

Even hostile, anti-Christian accounts of this event, like that of Eunapius of Sardis (who witnessed the demolition), do not mention any library or books being destroyed. And Ammianus Marcellinus, who seems to have visited Alexandria before 391, describes the Serapeum and mentions that it had once housed a library, indicating that by the time of its destruction it no longer did so.  The fact is that, with no less than five independent accounts detailing this event, the destruction of the Serapeum is one of the best attested events in the whole of ancient history.  Yet nothing in the evidence indicates the destruction of any library along with the temple complex.

Still, the myth of a Christian mob destroying the “Great Library of Alexandria” is too juicy for some to resist, so this myth remains a mainstay for arguments that “Christianity caused the Dark Ages” despite the fact it is completely without foundation. Amenabar couldn’t resist it – [his] movie features an anxious Hypatia scrambling to rescue precious scrolls before a screaming mob bearing crosses bursts through a barred door to destroy what he’s dubbed “the second library of Alexandria” (presumably he means the Serapeum). Sagan, on the other hand, put the destruction of the Library after her murder. In fact, it seems no such destruction happened either in her lifetime or after it and the idea it did is simply part of the mythic parable.

The Hypatia of History

The real Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, who was famous for his edition of Euclid’s Elements and his commentaries on Ptolemy, Euclid and Aratus. Her birth year is often given as AD 370, but Maria Dzielska argues this is 15-20 years too late and suggests AD 350 would be more accurate. That would make her 65 when she was killed and therefore someone who should perhaps be played by Helen Mirren rather than Rachel Weisz. But that would make the movie much harder to sell at the box office.

She grew up to become a renowned scholar in her own right. She seems to have assisted her father in his edition of Euclid and an edition of Ptolemy’s Almagest, as well writing commentaries on the Arithmetica of Diophantus and the Conics of Apollonius. Like most natural philosophers of her time, she embraced the neo-Platonic ideas of Plotinus and so her teaching and ideas appealed to a broad range of people – pagans, Christians and Jews. Amenabar’s film depicts her as an atheist, or at least as wholly irreligious, which is highly unlikely. Neo-Platonism embraced the idea of a perfect, ultimate source called “the One” or “the Good”, which was, by Hypatia’s time, fully identified with a monotheistic God in most respects.

She was admired by many and at least one of her most ardent students was the Bishop Synesius, who addressed several letters to her, calling her “mother, sister, teacher, and withal benefactress, and whatsoever is honoured in name and deed”, saying she is “my most revered teacher” and describing her as she “who legitimately presides over the mysteries of philosophy” (R. H. Charles, The Letters of Synesius of Cyrene). The Christian chronicler quoted above, Socrates Scholasticus, also wrote of her admiringly:

There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in coming to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.
(Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, VII.15)

So if she was admired so widely and admired and respected by learned Christians, how did she come to die at the hands of a Christian mob? And, more importantly, did it have anything to do with her learning or love of science?

The answer lies in the politics of early Fifth Century Alexandria and the way that the power of Christian bishops was beginning to encroach on that of civil authorities in this period. The Patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril, had been a protégé of his uncle Theophilus and succeeded him to the bishopric in AD 412. Theophilus had already made the position of Bishop of Alexandria a powerful one and Cyril continued his policy of expanding the influence of the office, increasingly encroaching on the powers and privilages of the Prefect of the City. The Prefect at the time was another Christian, Orestes, who had taken up his post not long before Cyril became bishop.

Orestes and Cyril soon came into conflict over Cyril’s hard-line actions against smaller Christian factions like the Novatians and his violence against Alexandria’s large Jewish community. After an attack by the Jews on a Christian congregation and a retaliatory pogrom against Jewish synagogues led by Cyril, Orestes complained to the Emperor but was over-ruled. Tensions between the supporters of the Bishop and those of the Prefect then began to run high in a city that was known for mob rule and vicious political street violence.

Hypatia, whether by chance or choice, found herself in the middle of this power struggle between two Christian factions. She was well-known to Orestes (and probably to Cyril as well) as a prominent participant in the civic life of the city and was perceived by Cyril’s faction to be not only a political ally of Orestes but an obstacle to any reconciliation between the two men. The tensions spilled over when a group of monks from the remote monasteries of the desert – men known for their fanatical zeal and not renowned for their political sophistication – came into the city in force to support Cyril and began a riot that resulted in Orestes’ entourage being pelted with rocks, with one stone hitting the Prefect in the head. Not one to stand for such insults, Orestes had the monk in question arrested and tortured, which led to the man’s death.

Cyril tried to exploit the torture and death of the monk, making out that it was effectively a martyrdom by Orestes. This time, however, his appeals to the Imperial authorities were rejected. Angered, Cyril’s followers (with or without his knowledge) took revenge by seizing Hypatia, as a political follower of Orestes, in the street and torturing her to death in vengeance.

The incident was generally regarded with horror and disgust by Christians, with Socrates Scholasticus making his feelings about it quite clear:

[Hypatia] fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles [oyster shells]. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them. This affair brought not the least opprobrium, not only upon Cyril, but also upon the whole Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort.
(Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, VII.15)

What is notable in all this is that nowhere in any of this is her science or learning mentioned, expect as the basis for the respect which she was accorded by pagans and Christians alike. Socrates Scholasticus finishes describing her achievements and the esteem with which she was held and then goes on to say “Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed”. In other words, despite her learning and position, she fell victim to politics. There is no evidence at all that her murder had anything to do with her learning. The idea that she was some kind of martyr to science is totally absurd.

History vs the Myths. And Movies.

Unfortunately for those who cling to the discredited “conflict thesis” of science and religion perpetually at odds, the history of science actually has very few genuine martyrs at the hands of religious bigots. The fact that a mystic and kook like Giordano Bruno gets dressed up as a free-thinking scientist shows how thin on the ground such martyrs are, though usually those who like to invoke these martyrs can fall back on citing “scientists burned by the Medieval Inquistion”, despite the fact this never actually happened. Most people know nothing about the Middle Ages, so this kind of vague hand-waving is usually pretty safe.

Unlike Giordano Bruno, Hypatia was a genuine scientist and, as a woman, was certainly remarkable for her time (though the fact that another female and pagan scientist, Aedisia, practised science in Alexandria unmolested and with high renown a generation  later shows she was far from unique). But Hypatia was no martyr for science and science had absolutely zero to do with her murder.

See also: Hypatia and “Agora” Redux

by Katha Pollitt, slate.com, November 18, 2010

Who is the most famous woman of the Greco-Roman world? No contest: Cleopatra. In fact, you may have to think a bit to come up with someone for second and third place (Sappho? Pericles’ mistress Aspasia?). Queen of an ancient, exotic, immensely wealthy land, twice married to her much younger brothers, mistress of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, flamboyant flinger-about of royal treasure, international power player, glamorous suicide, Cleopatra has been poeticized, dramatized, painted, and prosed about countless times.

And yet, as Stacy Schiff shows in Cleopatra, a lushly written, highly entertaining biography, almost everything people think they know about her is wrong. She wasn’t Egyptian, she was Greek—the last ruler in the dynasty established by Alexander the Great’s general Ptolemy in 305 B.C.—and she lived in Alexandria, a Greek city. She may not have been especially beautiful. A coin with her face shows a beaky-nosed, sharp-chinned woman with a rather cranky expression; if she took after her ancestors, she may even have been—wait for it—fat. A sexpot? She slept with only two men in her life. It is most unlikely that she killed herself with the bite of an asp hidden in a basket of figs. Did I mention that she had four children? No wonder she was worshipped as a goddess.

In separating the woman from the myth, Schiff has her work cut out for her. The historical record is remarkably thin: Not a lot of documentary evidence has survived from the Egypt of her day. Of her own writing only one word remains: the Greek for “let it be done,” appended to a tax-related decree. We know her mostly through Roman or Roman-influenced sources: Plutarch, Dio, Sallust, Suetonius, and others. All these men wrote many years after her death and were eager to burnish the greatness and glory of Rome in general and that of her enemy and conqueror Octavian, later Augustus, in particular. They were also huge misogynists, for whom the combination of women and power meant everything wicked and unnatural. In a trope Edward Said would find sadly familiar, Cleopatra represented the exotic, erotic, effeminate East ensnaring moral, manly Rome. Womanizing was one thing—both Caesar and Antony were prodigious adulterers—but that the two greatest warriors of the day were so captivated by a woman and a foreigner was deeply unsettling. It must have been through magic or drugs—Egyptian specialties both.

Schiff’s Cleopatra is tough, daring, and smart. She was a great conversationalist and well-educated. According to Plutarch, she spoke at least eight languages (really? I suspect a bit of royal image-making here), including Egyptian, which, remarkably, she was the first Ptolemy in almost 300 years to bother to learn. She ruled Egypt well, despite the fact that a staggering 50 percent of its GDP went as taxes into her own personal account; she had her relatives murdered (a family tradition) only when necessary.

Above all, she was a survivor. When a palace coup by her first brother/husband triggered a Roman invasion and sent her packing to the Syrian desert, she had herself smuggled back into the palace, now occupied by Caesar, in a sack (not a carpet, as legend had it). Whether their affair was driven by politics or passion (or both), she was soon paying a long visit to Rome. There Caesar installed her in a villa across town from the one in which he lived with his wife and put up a life-size golden statue of her in the temple of Venus. Cleopatra had a baby son, whom she daringly named Caesarion, or little Caesar, and whom Caesar acknowledged as his own. To the Romans, who allowed little independence to women, this was all very shocking and thrilling. Roman ladies eagerly copied her pretty “melon” hairdo of tiny braids gathered into a loose bun.

Cleopatra’s liaison with Mark Antony, whatever it may have done for Shakespeare, was her big mistake. A wise ruler should have striven to stay out of Rome’s ferocious civil wars, not jumped in with both feet as Cleopatra did, and in any case I will never understand the appeal of this drunken, boastful character, always going on about his descent from Hercules. Besotted, Antony divorced his wife, Octavian’s virtuous and beautiful older sister, Octavia, abandoned his children by her, and, in an ostentatious public ceremony known as the Donations of Alexandria, publicly promised Roman provinces and client states as kingdoms to the three small children he had fathered with Cleopatra. Their downward spiral had an undeniably campy quality, with much confusing military maneuvering, all-night revelry, and hysteria. As Octavian closed in after winning the Battle of Actium, Antony botched his suicide and ended up being ignobly hauled up half-dead into Cleopatra’s chamber by a jerrybuilt contraption of ropes. Cleopatra made a more dignified exit, having prepared for immortality by testing poisons on prisoners.

It’s little things like this that make it hard to relate to the ancients “as people.” One minute they seem just like us—Antony is a middle-aged fratboy, Cleopatra is a multi-tasking diva. The next they’re murdering some poor devil while a slave peels them a grape. It’s easier to get a handle on Cleopatra’s world than on the woman herself, and Schiff evokes her Alexandria in all of its gorgeous, multicultural splendor:

During the day Alexandria echoed with the sounds of horses’ hooves, the cries of porridge sellers or chickpea vendors, street performers, soothsayers, moneylenders. Its spice stands released exotic aromas, carried through the streets by a thick, salty sea breeze. Long-legged white and black ibises assembled at every intersection, foraging for crumbs. … Altogether it was a mood-altering city of extreme sensuality and high intellectualism, the Paris of the ancient world: superior in its ways, splendid in its luxuries, the place to go to spend your fortune, write your poetry, find (or forget) a romance, restore your health, reinvent yourself, or regroup after having conquered vast swaths of Italy, Spain, and Greece over the course of a Herculean decade.

How important was Cleopatra in history? Not very, according to the classical historian Adrian Goldsworthy, whose new book, Antony and Cleopatra, resists proto-feminist revisionism and argues for Antony as the more important figure. (Rather unfairly, Goldsworthy’s book has been overshadowed by Schiff’s, but it’s quite fascinating, and I enjoyed its clear and straightforward narration of often murky political and military doings.) Cleopatra may have been the last independent ruler of Egypt until modern times, but Hellenistic Egypt was already a kingdom—and a civilization—in decline and a Roman client state in all but name. It was a Roman army, after all, that restored her father to the throne after he’d been ousted in a rebellion. Much of her political strategy was aimed at keeping Rome from simply annexing Egypt outright, and in that she failed, although for a few years she controlled an enormous swath of the Mediterranean. If she had sided with Octavian, we might be celebrating her as the miraculous preserver of Hellenistic culture. As it is, it’s hard to say what kind of lasting mark Cleopatra made on her world.

Myth and legend, however, are something else again. There, Cleopatra has reigned supreme as dangerous queen and love goddess for 2,000 years. Hard as Schiff works to clear away myths (romantic, misogynist, or both), what lies beneath them—the dense web of disturbing feelings evoked by powerful women—is too strong to be banished by a different interpretation of the same patchy historical record. Schiff doesn’t so much dismantle the archetype as add another layer. Asp or no asp, carpet or no carpet, her Cleopatra is still a sexy Oriental temptress—only now she also has brains, courage, and a fine grasp of the Egyptian tax code. Some myths are indestructible, and the proof is that Sony will be turning Schiff’s book into a biopic starring Angelina Jolie. I doubt she’ll be wearing a beaky nose or a sharp chin.