¶Agora is fun! Fairly early in the film I started wondering where it was headed regarding planetary motion, and sure enough, Hypatia came up with Kepler's theory that the orbits were elliptical with the sun at a focus. (Of course, a circle is just a degenerate ellipse in which the two foci coincide and become the center, so circular orbits were a reasonable first approximation.)
¶The Christians certainly were an unsavory lot, for the most part. Understandably the Pagans thought they were scum. In
Agora they looked as if they really had the "holy smell." (According to one of my professors, the "holy smell" could be attributed to Christians being averse to using the public bathing facilities. John Wesley, who proclaimed that cleanliness is next to godliness, came along much later.
)
¶By the way, it is now known that Ptolemy's theory of cycles, epicyles, epi-epicycles, etc., has a degree of legitimacy, since any smooth curve can be described by a Fourier series. The individual terms of a Fourier series represent cycles, so the series itself represents an infinite superposition of cycles, which are precisely cycles, epicycles, etc. Ptolemy used only the first few terms of the series, but his astronomical predictions were remarkably accurate.
¶As was noted by Einstein, in describing a physical system, any point can be taken as the origin of a coordinate system. In the geocentric theory, the Earth is taken as the origin, and the resulting equations for planetary motion are valid but very complicated (except for the earth, which just sits there at the origin). By taking the sun as origin, the equations for planetary motion become simple ellipses. In the mathematical derivation of Kepler's laws from Newton's laws of motion and gravitation, it is truly wondrous how the equations simplify when one converts them to polar coordinates with the sun at the pole (origin)!
