Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture

This book explores the changing fortunes of the heroes of Greek myth and history in the melting pot of popular culture. Using little-known examples, classicist and film fan Gideon Nisbet charts the hidden history of Greece in the twentieth-century imagination, from film to science fiction and comics. As the twenty-first century began, no less than seven production companies were declaring their intention to turn Alexander the Great into a wide-screen hero. The rivalry was intense, the resulting media circus unprecedented. How could a long-dead warlord generate so much movie-industry gossip in the present day? And why, in a century of film-making, had so few versions of his story – or that of Troy’s fall – made it to the big screen? When did we last see Classical Athens or Sparta in a movie? In the aftermath of Gladiator (2000), with Hollywood studios rushing to revisit the ancient world with Troy and Alexander (both 2004), these questions take on renewed significance. Nisbet here unpacks the ideas that continue to make Greece hot property in Hollywood. His lively exploration, which assumes no prior expertise in classical or film studies, will appeal to anyone with an interest in ‘reception’: the present day’s continual re-use and re-invention of the past.