Ancient Epic in Film and Television 9781474473767

Citation preview

Ancient Epic in Film and Television

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Screening Antiquity Series Editors: Monica S. Cyrino and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones Screening Antiquity is a cutting-­edge and provocative series of academic monographs and edited volumes focusing on new research on the reception of the ancient world in film and television. Screening Antiquity showcases the work of the best-­established and up-­and-­coming specialists in the field. It provides an important synergy of the latest international scholarly ideas about the conception of antiquity in popular culture and is the only series that focuses exclusively on screened representations of the ancient world. Editorial Advisory Board Antony Augoustakis, Alastair Blanshard, Robert Burgoyne, Lisa Maurice, Gideon Nisbet, Joanna Paul, Jon Solomon Titles available in the series Rome Season Two: Trial and Triumph Edited by Monica S. Cyrino Ben-­Hur: The Original Blockbuster Jon Solomon Cowboy Classics: The Roots of the American Western in the Epic Tradition Kirsten Day STARZ Spartacus: Reimagining an Icon on Screen Edited by Antony Augoustakis and Monica S. Cyrino Ancient Greece on British Television Edited by Fiona Hobden and Amanda Wrigley Epic Heroes on Screen Edited by Antony Augoustakis and Stacie Raucci Designs on the Past: How Hollywood Created the Ancient World Lloyd Llewellyn-­Jones Screening the Golden Ages of the Classical Tradition Edited by Meredith E. Safran Screening Divinity Lisa Maurice Ancient Epic in Film and Television Edited by Amanda Potter and Hunter Gardner Forthcoming Titles Pontius Pilate on Screen: Soldier, Sinner, Superstar Christopher M. McDonough Screening Antiquity in the War on Terror Alex McAuley Battlestar Galactica: An American Aeneid for the Twenty-First Century Meredith E. Safran Visit the series website at: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-­screening-­antiquity.html

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Ancient Epic in Film and Television

Edited by Amanda Potter and Hunter Gardner

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-­edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Amanda Potter and Hunter Gardner, 2022 © the chapters their several authors, 2022 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/​13 Sabon by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 7374 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 7376 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 7377 4 (epub) The right of Amanda Potter and Hunter Gardner to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Illustrations Series Editors’ Preface Introduction: The Past and Future of Ancient Epic Amanda Potter and Hunter Gardner Part I Surge and Splendour: Ancient Epic Conventions on the Silver Screen   1 A View with (a) Room: Spatial Projections in Ancient and Screen Epic Dan Curley

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  2 Allusions to Homeric Epic in Contemporary Films, 1984–201933 Jon Solomon   3 ‘Mighty Saga of the World’s Mightiest Man’: Is There Such a Thing as a Modern Hercules Epic? Emma J. Stafford

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  4 Vergilian Echoes of Fate in Snowpiercer (2013): Engine and Empire without End Jennifer A. Rea

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  5 A Roman Epic in Modern Japan: Screening Rome as Empire Nostalgia in Takeuchi Hideki’s Thermae Romae (2012)82 Monica S. Cyrino   6 Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Helen of Troy and the Trojan Horse Kirsten Day

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Contents

Part II From Gold to Platinum: Epic Conventions on the Small Screen   7 Revival of Mythic Epics or Epic Failure? On Gods and Heroes in the Television Shows Olympus (2015) and Troy: Fall of a City (2018) Sylvie Magerstädt   8 Travels with Odysseus and the Odyssey in Twenty-­First-­ Century Television Documentaries Fiona Hobden

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  9 Many (Un)Happy Returns in HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019)152 Hunter Gardner 10 The Performance of War: Battle as Spectacle in the Iliad and Into the Badlands (2015–2019)168 Jo Wynell-Mayow 11 Homeric Intimacy in NBC’s Hannibal (2013–2015) Lynn Kozak 12 The Gods in Epic Television: The Homeric Cosmos in Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009) Meredith E. Safran 13 Towards a Definition of Twenty-­First-­Century Epic: Audience Responses to Game of Thrones (2011–2019) and His Dark Materials (2019–) as Epic Television Amanda Potter

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Afterword233 Joanna Paul Filmography240 Bibliography248 Notes on Contributors 274 Index278

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2 Figure 2.1 Figure 3.1

Figure 3.2 Figure 4.1

Figure 4.2 Figure 5.1 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2

The cityscape of Troy, showing the urban built environment, during the triumphal entrance of Paris, Helen and Hector. Troy (2004). Warner Bros.23 The lower Mediterranean basin and Nile delta as seen from space in Agora (2009). Focus Features/Newmarket Films. 30 ‘ἠὼς ­ῥοδοδάκτυλος . . . ­We read Homer at the Point, in Greek.’ Nick Nolte in The Thin Red Line (1998). Fox 2000 Pictures. 38 Advertisement for the Levine-­promoted Hercules (Le fatiche di Ercole) (1958). Embassy Pictures/Galatea Film/Lux Film/Warner Brothers Pictures. 50 Hercules (Kellan Lutz) in the arena in Sicily. The Legend of Hercules (2014). Summit Entertainment/Millennium Films. 59 Wilford (Ed Harris) explains to Curtis (Chris Evans) that he and Gilliam have been planning all along for Curtis to take over as leader in Snowpiercer (2013). Opus Pictures/The Weinstein Company. 73 Yona (Go Ah-­sung) marvels at the aquarium in the front of the train in Snowpiercer (2013). Opus Pictures/The Weinstein Company. 78 Abe Hiroshi (Lucius Modestus) in Thermae Romae (2012). Fuji Television/Toho. 88 The Trojan Horse (left) and Helen (Rosanna Podestà, right) in Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy (1956). Warner Bros. 104 The Trojan Horse (top left) and Helen (Sienna

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List of Illustrations

Guillory, right) in John Kent Harrison’s Helen of Troy (2003). USA Network. At bottom left, Bucephalus detail from the Alexander Mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii (created c. 100 bce).108 Figure 8.1 CGI animation of Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops in Clash of the Gods, ‘Curse of the Sea’ (2009). HISTORY.  138 Figure 9.1 Daenerys (Emilia Clarke), atop her dragon, Drogon, hovers above King’s Landing, pausing to consider options before continuing her path of vengeance. Game of Thrones, ‘The Bells’ (8.5, 2019). HBO.153 Figure 10.1 The Widow (Emily Beacham) and Nathaniel Moon (Sherman Augustus) mid-­battle in Into the Badlands, ‘Enter the Phoenix’ (3.1, 2018). AMC.180 Figure 11.1 Blurring of Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). Hannibal, ‘Dolce’ (3.6, 2015). NBC. 193 Figure 12.1 A divine messenger impersonates Cylon Model Six (Tricia Helfer, left) to guide Gaius Baltar (James Callis, right) into enacting the Plan. Battlestar Galactica, ‘Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part 2’ (1.13, 2005). David Eick Television/R&D TV/NBC Universal/Universal Media Studios/ Universal Productions. 214

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Series Editors’ Preface

Screening Antiquity is a new series of cutting-­edge academic monographs and edited volumes that present exciting and original research on the reception of the ancient world in film and television. It provides an important synergy of the latest international scholarly ideas about the onscreen conception of antiquity in popular culture and is the only book series to focus exclusively on screened representations of the ancient world. The interactions between cinema, television, and historical representation is a growing field of scholarship and student engagement; many Classics and Ancient History departments in universities worldwide teach cinematic representations of the past as part of their programmes in Reception Studies. Scholars are now questioning how historical films and television series reflect the societies in which they were made, and speculate on how attitudes towards the past have been moulded in the popular imagination by their depiction in the movies. Screening Antiquity explores how these constructions came about and offers scope to analyse how and why the ancient past is filtered through onscreen representations in specific ways. The series highlights exciting and original publications that explore the representation of antiquity onscreen, and that employ modern theoretical and cultural perspectives to examine screened antiquity, including: stars and star text, directors and auteurs, cinematography, design and art direction, marketing, fans, and the online presence of the ancient world. The series aims to present original research focused exclusively on the reception of the ancient world in film and television. In itself this is an exciting and original approach. There is no other book series that engages head-­on with both big screen and small screen recreations of the past, yet their integral interactivity is clear to see: film popularity has a major impact on television productions and for its part, television regularly influences cinema (including film spin-­offs

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of popular television series). This is the first academic series to identify and encourage the holistic interactivity of these two major media institutions, and the first to promote interdisciplinary research in all the fields of Cinema Studies, Media Studies, Classics, and Ancient History. Screening Antiquity explores the various facets of onscreen creations of the past, exploring the theme from multiple angles. Some volumes will foreground a Classics ‘reading’ of the subject, analysing the nuances of film and television productions against a background of ancient literature, art, history, or culture; others will focus more on Media ‘readings’, by privileging the onscreen creation of the past or positioning the film or television representation within the context of modern popular culture. A third ‘reading’ will allow for a more fluid interaction between both the Classics and Media approaches. All three methods are valuable, since Reception Studies demands a flexible approach whereby individual scholars, or groups of researchers, foster a reading of an onscreen ‘text’ particular to their angle of viewing. Screening Antiquity represents a major turning point in that it signals a better appreciation and understanding of the rich and complex interaction between the past and contemporary culture, and also of the lasting significance of antiquity in today’s world. Monica S. Cyrino and Lloyd Llewellyn-­Jones Series Editors

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Introduction: The Past and Future of Ancient Epic Amanda Potter and Hunter Gardner

‘“Decadent popcorn entertainment, but hardly epic.” It’s chariots at the ready as Jack Huston steps into Charlton Heston’s sandals to re-­create one of the most beloved blockbusters of old.’ tag line for Stella Papamichael’s review of Ben-Hur (2016), Radio Times, 6 September 2016 ‘I love the epic scope of the series, the spectacular locations, the cast of thousands, great ensemble of actors’ and ‘[I am a] lover of grandiose epic, lavish on-­screen opulence.’ viewer response to Game of Thrones, surveyed in 2018

This essay collection addresses the often paradoxical relationship between television and the Hollywood historical epic and views that relationship as mediated in part through ancient epic poetry. How and why have we come to a point where screen productions such as Ben-Hur of 2016, ostensibly aligned with the splendour and scope of the mid-­twentieth-­century Hollywood production, are perceived as ‘hardly epic’, while a serial drama set in the fantastical realm of Westeros is described repeatedly and emphatically as ‘epic’? As Vivian Sobchack confirmed at the end of the twentieth century in her comments on the displacement of cinema by the television mini-­series as the primary medium through which we reconstruct the past, the latter medium operates to convey a different sense of time: The miniseries also transforms the Hollywood historical epic in a more profound way – formally altering its temporal field, and thus its construction of ­­history . . . ­the electronic medium’s new mode of episodic and fragmented exhibition has changed the sense and terms of the expansiveness, movement,

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Amanda Potter and Hunter Gardner and repetitiveness of epic – and historical – time. . . . In the electronic era of television and the VCR, temporality is transformed. Repetition means reruns, and one can literally manipulate time to construct various versions of ‘history’ (which no longer are weighty enough to bear a capital H).1

Television manipulates its viewers’ construction of time through its potential for reruns as well as narratives that are frequently episodic, fragmented and imagined from competing perspectives – potential that has only increased as an era of ‘must see TV’ yielded to an increasingly competitive market of premium, golden-­age television, to an era in which streaming capabilities now allow for instant access to virtually any show at any time of day. And yet, as one particular viewer’s comments above indicate, audiences still identify within such television series distinctly epic qualities, some of them the very ones foregrounded by Sobchack as contributing to the excesses of the Hollywood historical epic and its strategies of situating viewers in history as embodied subjects experiencing a kind of temporal transcendence, a position that allows us to observe from the balconies of the multiplex an unassailable account of what happened.2 Television may resist the authoritative visions that convey a single master narrative – history with a capital H – but epic qualities persist in the newer medium, and this volume works not only to identify reasons for such persistence, but to consider how those qualities continue to be manifested in contemporary onscreen productions. As Joanna Paul’s work on the ancient resonance of the term ‘epic’ in its applications to cinema has made abundantly clear,3 there is little agreement about what qualities consistently define the ‘epic film’ and perhaps even less consensus on the roots of those qualities in the Graeco-­Roman verse form of ‘epic’ poetry. Ancient qualifications for epic were formally based on metre – namely dactylic hexameter –, and less formally on subject – that is, the ‘kings and battles’, reges et proelia, that Vergil’s speaker famously resists in his sixth Eclogue (6.3). The historical screen epic is defined within even sketchier parameters,4 though spectacle, length and a focus on past events are often invoked as qualifications. Recent work (Paul’s in particular) on the epic film genre has revealed its continuity with ancient epic texts, and we should recognise that the screen epic and the ancient epic poem are both inherently popular media, attempting to inculcate in audiences a shared vision of the past and transmit shared ideals for the viewing present.5 Such scholarship, however, has also hinted that the focus of screen epic on the past may yield to a new set of temporal and geographic parameters,6 parameters not only drawn on smaller screens with vastly improved production values, but also situated

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well beyond the traditional realm of Graeco-­Roman antiquity: by identifying epic conventions on the large and small screen, as well as within a range of speculative fictions in fantastical and futuristic settings, contributors to this volume consider the function of such conventions within their twenty-­first-­century production contexts. As the range of visual texts under discussion indicates, this new orientation for epic conventions did not occur overnight (e.g., the early Hercules peplum films pave the way for redirecting epic’s emergence in fantasy on big and small screens).7 Still, it is largely the contemporary film and television landscape that this collection concerns, as contributors clarify distinctive features of the genre through analysis of their reception and demonstrate how adaptation and revision of ancient epic conventions facilitate the articulation of emerging ideals concerning gender, class, race and nationality. Moreover, the essays focus on relatively novel screen technologies, exploring how these technologies have facilitated the capacity of films and television to augment the spatiality, distance and ontological scope identified as crucial components of the epic genre. Our interest in the twenty-­first century, however, is balanced by a persistent concern with the Graeco-­Roman past: we examine not only the epic poems that antiquity bequeathed to (especially) the European tradition of visual and literary arts, but also the critical stances assumed in the ancient world, as philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato grappled with defining epic and accounting for its impact on the audience.8 For Plato, epic was a danger largely because it had such a profound impact on shaping the values and emotional responses of citizens. His Socrates attacks Homeric and Hesiodic poetry in particular in the Republic as a source of mistruths about the divine that has a distorting effect on the minds of the young.9 The affective potential of the genre, we argue, still persists but, as the product of collaborative work often performed across lines of race, nation and gender,10 epic film and television transmit ideals that have the potential to reflect the multiplicity of values that characterise the audience, rather than imposing monolithic narratives intended to justify the past as a glorious foundation for an incontestable status quo. Thus, and for example, a relationship between male protagonists in a contemporary series like Hannibal (2013–15) can draw out the understated homoerotic relationship of Achilles and Patroklos in the Iliad.11 Similarly, the moral ambiguity of Homer’s Odysseus is exploited rather than resolved for viewers of contemporary drama and documentary, who may find fault with the hero’s violent retribution in a way that perhaps ancient audiences did not.

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A dystopian vision of the future in a film like Snowpiercer (2013) can productively engage the ending of Vergil’s Aeneid not to affirm that the poem’s hero did the right thing, but to demonstrate that violence and empire are relentlessly intertwined. The essays in Ancient Epic in Film and Television look backward at a set of inherited epic conventions and forward to the ways in which those conventions continue to be manipulated. We demonstrate how confirmations of and challenges to the ancient epic genre – as well as to the ideals subtended through the genre’s formal elements – can be located not only in recent articulations of antiquity on screen, but also in ‘speculative fiction’ (= SF), the term we use to denote a range of fantastical and futuristic narratives frequently, but less precisely, termed ‘science fiction’ or ‘science fiction and fantasy’.12 More specifically, these contributions investigate qualities of heroism and meditations on imperialism, elements originating with ancient epic’s famous ‘kings and battles’, but recently emerging in screen genres beyond the traditional ‘swords and sandals’ epic production. This collection thus addresses the perceived decline of the epic film genre (cf. the poor critical and box office response to Pompeii (2014) and Ben-Hur (2016)) with more positive assessments of the genre’s return by suggesting that conventions of ancient epic persist, but do so most successfully outside the parameters of the historical epic film – in particular, the realms of SF and television serial dramas. The epic film’s return following the success of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) has been theorised by Elliot (2014), who addresses reasons for the genre’s relative obscurity in the late twentieth century as well as various catalysts for its re-­emergence, including the reduced production costs that accompanied developments in CGI (computer-­generated imagery). While arguing for the cyclical nature of epic filmmaking, Elliot also acknowledges the fact that the notoriously difficult-­ to-­ define ingredients of the screen epic survived throughout the twentieth century in other media, especially television.13 Thus, while Derek Jacobi’s most recognisable role from antiquity may be the titular character of the BBC’s small-­screen I, Claudius (1976), he significantly enhances the epic lustre of Scott’s big-­screen production, prompting consideration of what elements, beyond the ancient Roman setting, contribute to the easy transference of Jacobi’s star power from one medium to the next.14 As Wheatley observes (2016: 9), even if its spectacular qualities have only recently received scholarly attention, television has always competed with cinema to attract more than a glance. Essays in our collection identify various ‘televisual’ features of programming (e.g., battle narratives, extended

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geographic scope) that find kinship with both the historical epic film and its ancient poetic ancestor. In broad terms, we have organised the essays according to whether they examine cinematic or television productions, in the hope that such an arrangement will clarify how epic motifs on the big and small screen have intensified their mutually reciprocal relationship since the start of the twenty-­first century. We acknowledge the limits of that reciprocity as certain conventions of dramatic television series (e.g., extended character development, multiple sub-­plots) are unavailable to the two-­hour feature film. Budgetary considerations of television productions, moreover, have tended to limit the ‘surge and splendour’ (Sobchack 1990) characteristic of the Hollywood historical epic; though, as stressed in studies of home entertainment as it has developed in the new millennium,15 screen technologies and greater financial investment in television productions constantly challenge those limits. Within the big-­ screen/small-­ screen divisions we have organised material along generic lines (e.g., documentary, speculative fictions, historical drama), collocating the essays in ways that encourage reflection on how various productions confirm or subvert gender or racial norms associated with epic heroes, as well as how these heroes defend or frustrate the goals of the communities they represent. As such, contributors throughout the collection further investigations of and challenges to the nationalist agendas often assumed of the historical epic.16 While most screen texts analysed in the collection ostensibly align themselves with both the ancient and Hollywood historical epic, they also incorporate tropes of lament and elegy, as well as gender ideals at odds with configurations of the ancient epic hero, revealing what Dan Curley describes in his contribution as ‘the sheer magnitude of epic’. As noted, our volume foregrounds a number of screen productions whose narratives unfold in fantastical or futuristic settings and demonstrate kinship with SF. Contributors to the volume intensify their focus on classical epic as a discursive element within SF on screen and reveal how SF narratives heighten the plasticity of the epic genre, allowing its conventions to accommodate contemporary ideals. The relative gender equality that defines some SF series (e.g., Game of Thrones (2011–19), Battlestar Galactica (2003, 2004–9)) has allowed female characters to play roles usually assigned to male heroes of ancient Greek epic. Ancient epic discourses on empire, especially that of Vergil’s Aeneid, are also productively adapted to reflect on imperial ambitions (Thermae Romae (2012)), and to address

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the horrors of contemporary capitalism, especially evident in dystopian film and television (e.g., Snowpiercer, Into the Badlands). The gods of the Homeric pantheon offer a concept of divinity against which theologies of futuristic SF can evaluate and critique a Judaeo-­ Christian patriarchal god (Battlestar Galactica). By identifying epic topoi in screen productions outside the traditional parameters of the genre, these essays map in clearer detail the ‘networks of connections’ (Paul 2013: 306) that bind ancient and contemporary epic. The contributions reflect on the expansion of the genre, while also revealing how ostensibly esoteric productions use epic forms to assert and challenge the values purported to unite and define a community. Of course, the use of epic tropes to undermine the values they assert is as old as the genre itself. The straightforward path from epic production – especially oral and scribal – to the development of communal or national identity has been confirmed and complicated by debates within Classics, which has located in the very origins of ancient epic a devaluing of heroic deeds and kleos (‘glory, fame’) as well as constant tensions between provincial concerns and imperatives touted as universal.17 Our collection of essays, while addressing the problematic issue of defining the limits of the epic genre in the first place, productively extends such debates into the realm of screen texts. Moreover, we broaden the terms of a more familiar debate concerning cinema and nation to one also encompassing the relationship between television and nationality, a relationship complicated (as with recent film production) by the increasingly globalised operations of production. The complexities of such operations are addressed by Martin-­ Jones (2006), who uses Giles Deleuze’s binary of the ‘movement-­image’ as opposed to the ‘time-­image’ to explore how film frequently depicts events in accordance with a single, unified view of the past that corresponds to a (usually) triumphalist narrative of a national identity – that is, the ‘movement-­image’ associated with classical Hollywood (Martin-­Jones 2006: 8; Deleuze 1986; e.g., Saving Private Ryan (1998)). Deleuze refers to the early epics of D. W. Griffith as an illustration of how ‘the American cinema constantly shoots and reshoots a single fundamental film, which is the birth of a nation-­civilization’ (1986: 148). Alternatively, and as is particularly evident in European cinema after World War II, film can depict time as fragmented, labyrinthine, disrupted and structured by competing, irreconcilable narratives (that is, the ‘time-­image’; Deleuze 1989; e.g., Run Lola Run (1998)). While in practice cinema most often relies on a hybrid articulation that combines time-­image and movement-­

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image, the distinction reminds us that a predominance of one or the other can create the ‘illusion that there is one “correct” narrative of national identity’ (Martin-­Jones 2006: 4). Rather than invoking epic as an independent genre, Deleuze addresses ‘epic’ qualities of the Hollywood historical film;18 still, it is important to see the common ground between epic poetry as a long-­recognised source of cohesion for those who produce it and the ideological work performed by films, and increasingly television productions, with epic qualities. As one reviewer of the aforementioned remake of Ben-Hur (2016) comments, the film offers a muddled vision of how to deal with an insurgent movement in an ancient Judaea posing as an allegory for the challenges to US dominance in the Middle East: in evaluating a scene in which a local boy fires a single arrow at Pontius Pilate, narrowly missing him but resulting in the death of another soldier, James Romm (2016) notes, ‘[t]he episode clearly evokes modern insurgent tactics – the sniper fire and IED’s to which Western troop convoys are exposed, as they pass through the streets of Fallujah and Ramadi – leaving an American moviegoer somewhat puzzled as to which side in this ancient struggle he or she is on’. Judah’s ambiguous response to the attack is reflected in the film’s failure to offer a unified movement-­image – a story that reaffirms an incontestable narrative of what happened during the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the ramifications of those events for US world hegemony, which, in something of a mise en abyme, in turn is reflected in the status of Ben-Hur (2016) as ‘hardly’ epic.19 At the same time, we must grapple with the fact that television series touted as definitely ‘epic’ increasingly complicate the search for a single national narrative. As John Wilkinson (2015: 4) remarks in his introduction to a special volume of Critical Quarterly on Game of Thrones, the series makes exacting demands on its audience, exposing them to increasingly contentious views of history, lineage and birthright, summed up as ‘a prodigious multiplicity in the epic of Westeros’. This multiplicity is encouraged by the multiple viewpoints of characters in George R. R. Martin’s books. Wilkinson continues by addressing how the series sits uncomfortably alongside other visions of epic: Plainly such multiplicity, not to mention all the ignominious goings-­ on, offends against the authentic ‘totality’ of epic when deployed as a politically unifying force. Epics adapted to national mythology work to establish imposing ­­singularities . . . ­national epics can become rallying points for an embattled, subjected or exiled people: but they still serve to define a people in an imagined restored unity ­­and . . . ­can feed a discourse and practice of the most virulent, exclusive racism.20

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While the final episode of the HBO series may be read as a grasp at ‘restored unity’ in Westeros, that unity is explicitly segregated from patriarchal lineage in the figure of Bran, who cannot sire children of his own and functions as the repository of a collective rather than individual memory. We are then forced to ask the question of how such a fragmented account, which presents a ‘tangled skein rife with the outrageous offenses against filiation’ (4), lives up to the ‘epic’ status so often ascribed to it. It is our hope that the contributions here shed light on the appeal of epic in the contemporary world: they do so in part by locating various conventions of ancient epic that, even within their original Graeco-­Roman contexts, function to challenge as often as confirm a unified narrative. Before turning to an overview of this volume’s contributions, it is also important to locate the collection within the burgeoning field of reception studies in Classics. We concur generally with Martindale (1993) that all contemporary approaches to antiquity – whether scholarly analysis or filmic recreation – constitute acts of reception, interpretations conditioned by preceding interpretations. While we acknowledge the validity of critical responses to films set in antiquity that fail to ‘present a thoroughly imagined classical world’,21 we also defend the autonomy of film and television producers who adapt antiquity for contemporary agendas, even at the risk of compromising ‘authenticity’.22 While the epic constructions in the media discussed in our volume may not offer unproblematic access to the ancient world, they do powerfully and productively adapt and respond to certain values of ancient epic poetry, Vergilian and Homeric epic in particular. As the filmic and televisual texts we discuss often invoke conventions of ancient epic in order to challenge them, they participate in an intertextuality between two sources mapped often uncomfortably onto one another. As Lushkov observes of the productive, ‘animative’ potential of locating allusions to ancient topoi in modern media: ‘whether as a self-­reflexive commentary on the topos itself or as a startling invocation of a competing subtext or mood, intertextuality offers the potential to enlarge our understanding of a work by bringing texts together for productive comparison at the micro and macro levels’.23 Thus, our contributors locate in various twenty-­first-­ century receptions the very transhistorical valence, a dialogue across history, that Martindale and various scholars following his lead have described as operating within the field.24 The first half of the collection, devoted to feature-­length films, examines cinema’s frequent allusions to and interrogation of Graeco-­ Roman epic. Dan Curley’s chapter on spatial projections opens the

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collection with a discussion of the use of space in Troy (2004) and Agora (2009). Curley argues that epic film, like the ancient epic, requires sufficient space to cover not only the subject matter of kings, heroes and battles, but also intimate relationships, and the widescreen format of epic film can stand in for the long verse form of the dactylic hexameter used in epic poetry. This widescreen format also offers viewers the epic scale synonymous with the genre of the epic film, with its sweeping views of landscapes and cityscapes. However, just as important are the views of intimate spaces, where character development takes place: epic film offers us both the exterior view, where battles and journeys are staged, and the interior view, where our protagonists plot, debate and make love. In Chapter 2 Jon Solomon provides an analysis of Homeric allusions in films from 1984 to 2019. These allusions to the Iliad and the Odyssey shed light on a character’s motivations and movements throughout a variety of educational and military contexts. In this wide-­ranging overview, including films from multiple genres, Solomon concludes that these numerous intentional allusions made by filmmakers represent a significant contribution in the dissemination of the Classics by reaching a large number of viewers. Emma Stafford then narrows the focus onto a single hero, in a chapter examining whether films chronicling the exploits of Hercules can be considered as ‘epic’. Stafford discusses how the Greek hero Hercules was a subject of ancient epic poetry, despite the episodic nature of his exploits; however, films from the pepla of the 1950s and 1960s to the two Hercules films from 2014 do not follow the story of Hercules’ life and labours, but rather choose to place him in different stories; for example, expanding his role as an Argonaut in Hercules (Le fatiche di Ercole) (1958), or following the story of Hercules as the leader of a band of mercenaries from Steve Moore’s comic series Hercules: The Thracian Wars in Hercules (2014). Stafford concludes that, although Hercules films provide spectacle, and borrow from the settings of epic films set in ancient Rome, an epic Hercules film engaging with the epic sources has yet to be made. Jennifer Rea examines Vergil’s Aeneid as a companion text to the science fiction film Snowpiercer, arguing that both works expose the violent conflicts required for society to move forward. Rea observes how the action in both the film and the epic poem is driven to a conclusion by rumours and gossip, and that protagonists Aeneas and Curtis both face preordained roles. While Aeneas accepts his fate and Curtis rejects his, both texts end ambivalently; it is uncertain whether Aeneas’ violent actions will result in a better future for

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Rome; and it is equally uncertain whether humanity will survive following the bloodshed caused by Curtis’s rebellion in Snowpiercer. Monica Cyrino takes us from a horrific vision of the future in a film based on a French graphic novel to a comedic but insightful take on modern Japan through the eyes of a Roman time traveller, in Thermae Romae, based on the manga series of the same name. Cyrino discusses the film in relation to modern Japan’s reflections on its own twentieth-­century history, and the juxtaposition of Japan with the Roman empire in the film. Thermae Romae is therefore both part of the tradition of the epic film, depicting the splendour of ancient Rome while casting a critical eye over the power structures supporting it, and a comment on modern Japan’s uneasy relationship with its recent imperial past. Kirsten Day’s chapter bridges the gap between film and television, illustrating how visual links are made in portrayals of Helen and the Trojan Horse in cinema from the 1950s onwards and in television series from the 1990s and twenty-­first century. Day argues that Helen and the horse were closely associated in the ancient epic tradition and by ancient writers such as Euripides and Theocritus as the devices through which Troy was destroyed. The visual associations made in film and television are striking, from the parallel scenes in which they are introduced, to Helen’s hairstyles and jewellery replicated in the plaiting of horses’ mains and bridle decorations. Day also discusses Helen and the Trojan Horse in conjunction with Pandora and the box/jar, each pair fulfilling similar functions in causing death and destruction. In the second half of the collection we continue the turn away from the big screen and focus primarily on television series, most of them twenty-­first-­century productions. Sylvie Magerstädt uses Aristotle’s Poetics as a lens through which to interrogate the lack of success among audiences of two recent productions that aspire to the title of epic television: Olympus (2015) and Troy: Fall of a City (2018). Magerstädt finds that both series lack the essential elements of character development and coherent plot. Moreover, both productions failed in engaging the emotions of the audience, the ‘pity and fear’ that Aristotle finds so essential, which led to significant criticism and diminishing ratings. In her chapter covering four different television documentaries centred on the Odyssey broadcast from 2009 to 2018, Fiona Hobden describes how each of these programmes uses the theme of travel in a different way. Clash of the Gods (2009) presents Odysseus as an action hero and everyman, mixing historical evidence from

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experts with action sequences akin to those found in epic film. Sur les traces d’Ulysse (2017) uses the story of Odysseus as a lens through which to shed light on the heroic stories of real people living in the Mediterranean and facing political and economic challenges. Gods and Monsters: Homer’s Odyssey (2010) and Akala’s Odyssey (2018), presented by poet Simon Armitage and hip-­hop artist Akala respectively, prioritise the role of the poet over the hero (Armitage) and the role of the poem in inspiring subsequent creative projects (Akala). For Hunter Gardner’s chapter we maintain a focus on Homer’s Odyssey, in this case examining the poem as a companion piece (or ‘cultural companion’)25 to HBO’s phenomenally successful Game of Thrones. Gardner argues that the vengeance Daenerys Targaryen enacts on the people of King’s Landing makes more sense when we contrast this with Odysseus’ return to Ithaka and the excessive violence he perpetrates on the suitors. Gardner also compares the centrality of hospitality/xenia in the series and Homer’s epic, arguing that the violation of norms associated with hospitality in both operate to explain, if not fully justify, acts of violent retribution. Jo Wynell-­Mayow stays with the theme of Homeric violence, but in her chapter she uses graphic descriptions of battle in the Iliad as a means to interrogate the stylised visual scenes of violence in Into the Badlands. This series pays homage to Hong Kong action cinema, and to a lesser extent to the myths of ancient Greece, but its set-­piece action sequences where (almost) superpowered fighters clash provides us with a visual representation of the Homeric aristeia (series of heroic feats, usually on the battlefield). Lynn Kozac continues to probe the Iliad as a source text for contemporary television, but turns away from the battlefield and towards the often more intimate settings for the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos: she argues that the two Homeric heroes offer a template for the complex relationship between FBI profiler Will Graham and serial killer Hannibal Lecter in NBC’s Hannibal. At one point this comparison is explicitly made in the series, to shed light on a relationship that comprises elements of family, homoeroticism, love and friendship, as well as doubling and interchangeability between the two protagonists. Kozac persuasively argues that both texts illustrate the fluidity of intimate male relationships. From a series set in contemporary America, we move to a series set in a future where humans have colonised new planets. In her chapter on Battlestar Galactica, Meredith Safran interrogates the function of the gods in the critically acclaimed science fiction series in comparison with the gods in ancient epic. Safran discusses how the series

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makes connections between the Lords of Kobol, worshipped by the humans in Battlestar Galactica, and the Greek gods they are named after (including Zeus, Hera, Apollo and Athena). However, Safran argues that the Cylons – artificially intelligent robots and the series’ antagonists – share deeper similarities with the gods in Homer and Vergil. Like the Olympians, there are twelve Cylon models, they are immortal, they believe in their own superiority to humans, and they have a regulatory role in ensuring that fate, equivalent to a divine plan, is followed, although they can form close connections with individual humans. Following Safran’s analysis of a series described as ‘top quality drama’ and ‘one of the best sci-­fi series ever made’,26 we return to the paradigmatic quality television series of the twenty-­first century, Game of Thrones, but this time through the eyes of its viewers and fans. In the final chapter Amanda Potter looks away from the form and content of specific television episodes and redirects our focus onto the audience, in order to better understand what the nebulous term ‘epic’ means to contemporary viewers. By interrogating responses to audience surveys on two series described by series creators as ‘epic television’, based on fantasy novels also described as epic, namely Game of Thrones and the first season of His Dark Materials (2019), Potter finds that the term ‘epic’ continues to be a marker of quality, even though it may mean different things to different viewers. Importance is placed on scale, plot and character development, all required if a series is to be classed as epic in the minds of contemporary audiences. The collection starts with Curley’s discussion of the use of space in two twenty-­first-­century films, and ends with Potter’s analysis of viewer reactions to two twenty-­first-­century television series, where use of space is a key factor in categorising a media text as ‘epic’. Curley argues that epic is a ‘huge’ or ‘spacious’ genre, and, for viewers, Game of Thrones is epic because ‘[the creators] seemed to have so much space to tell the story and develop the characters’.27 The future of epic, then, may be in serial television, the most ‘spacious’ of media, whether its narratives unfold in an infinite ‘outerspace’ as a site for galactic travels or the painstakingly mapped, but equally fantastical, realm of Westeros. As Joanna Paul puts it in the afterword we’ve included to round out the collection, television, especially amidst the lockdowns necessitated by the Covid-­19 pandemic, has proven essential for transmitting cultural values, and remains a medium especially suited to accommodating Odyssean journeys – journeys lived, imagined and eagerly anticipated.

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NOTES   1 Sobchack (1990: 40).   2 The ‘balcony of history’ is a figure used by Barthes in his essay ‘On Cinemascope’; cf. Burgoyne (2011: 3).   3 See Paul (2013: esp. 1–23).   4 As observed by Elley (1984: 13).   5 See Elley (1984) for the entertainment and instructional value of both epic poetry and the epic film. Like Paul, Elley recognises the roots of epic cinema in ancient Graeco-­Roman epic, though his focus is broader (e.g., including medieval poetry) and offers more of a film critic’s (as opposed to a Classicist’s) perspective on the relationship.  6 See especially Paul (2013: 18–19) and Elley (1984: 24) for science fiction narratives as offering similar opportunities for epic distance.  7 We have made no attempt to impose a standard form on classical names throughout the book. Contributors have used their preferred form, often because they are specifically referencing the Greek or Latin version of a god, hero or character from myth.   8 Weiner (2017) identifies common ground between ancient epic, conceived of by Aristotle as a popular medium, and modern fantasy, also known for its widespread, popular (often denigrated) appeal.   9 Homer and Hesiod come under fire throughout the Republic; but see Book 2 (377a–383c) for especially pointed attacks. 10 For epic films as collaborative, global efforts, see Burgoyne’s intro­ duction to the collection of essays The Epic Film in World Culture (2011). 11 This is one of many examples in this collection where films and television programmes encourage us to ‘focus critical attention back towards the ancient source and sometimes frame new questions’, one of the key purposes of classical reception studies proposed by Lorna Hardwick (2003: 4). 12 For the utility of SF (= ‘speculative fiction’) to designate a wide range of literature set in imaginary worlds, see Rogers and Stevens (2105: 5). The editors use MF to designate ‘modern fantasy’ in their subsequent volume (2017). 13 Elliot (2014: 3); see also Barra (1989), e.g., on the perceived decline in popularity of epic films during the late twentieth century. 14 On the star power of the actor in epic films see Cyrino (2018), focusing on Russell Crowe. 15 See especially Creeber (2004) and Wheatley (2016). 16 On nationalism and the screen epic, cf. Elley (1984: 6, 10) and Burgoyne (2011: 3–6). 17 For such tensions within ancient epic, see especially Bessinger, Tylus and Wofford (1999). 18 Deleuze perhaps employs an overly broad estimation of Hollywood

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cinema to correlate to the movement-­image; cf. Martin-­Jones (2006: 7) on Deleuze’s binary as overly reductive. 19 West (2020) points to critical reception of Jack Huston’s 2016 portrayal of Judah Ben-­Hur as revealing: the intense focus on his masculinity (or lack thereof) ‘reveals a great deal about twenty-­first-­century expectations of their male epic heroes and the stars chosen to play them’ (216); the movie’s reception thus sheds light on the ‘status of the twenty-­first-­ century ancient world epic and its attendant investment in a particular form of masculinity’. 20 Wilkinson (2015: 4). 21 Martindale (2013: 176), specifically addressing Gladiator. 22 For authenticity as a criterion for films set in the ancient world, see Coleman (2004), who thoughtfully addresses the role of the academic historical consultant in creating filmic images of the past. 23 Lushkov (2017b: 311) draws on the work of Stephen Hinds (1998) for her understanding of the potential of intertextuality. 24 As successors to Martindale’s practice of reception studies in the field of Classics, see especially the recent collection of essays Deep Classics, in whose introduction Shane Butler uses the metaphor of archaeological strata as a figure for scholarly approaches to ‘antiquity’ as ‘Deep Time’ thinking. The very positing of ‘antiquity’ from a modern perspective is fraught with challenges (‘build a better ­­microscope . . . ­and it will finally reveal, not answers, but even deeper questions’) and emblematic of the more universal quest for knowledge: ‘the pose of a student of ­­antiquity . . . ­is here borrowed as paradigmatic of all human questioning about time and its works’ (2016: 14). 25 We borrow the concept of the modern text as ‘cultural companion’ to (rather than explicit adaptation of or allusion to) an ancient work from James (2009: 239). 26 See https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2020/battlestar-­gala ctica (accessed 31 August 2020). 27 Viewer response to His Dark Materials survey on why Game of Thrones was epic and His Dark Materials was not.

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PA RT I

Surge and Splendour: Ancient Epic Conventions on the Silver Screen

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1  A View with (a) Room: Spatial Projections in Ancient and Screen Epic Dan Curley

My title nods to E. M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View (1908), and especially the Merchant-­Ivory film adaptation (1985). The film realises the novel’s play of space, in which sensuous landscapes disrupt the arid, private worlds of Edwardian travellers. Nowhere is the disruption more evident than in the meadow above Florence where Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) and George Emerson (Julian Sands) kiss for the first time, their passion underscored by a Puccini aria that seems wafted in on the Tuscan breeze – only to be discovered by Lucy’s cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith). Few would categorise A Room with a View (in any form) as an epic, vistas on the Italian countryside notwithstanding. Nevertheless, Forster’s work shares epic’s concerns with interior and exterior, the placement of its characters, and the act of viewing. These and other concerns are the subject of my essay, which examines epic space or, perhaps better, epic spatiality: the genre’s strategies for presenting and negotiating space. Drawing case studies from ancient epic poetry and modern screen epics set in the ancient world, I discuss five spatial manifestations – projections – emblematic of both genres. On the screen side, I examine two films named after specific locales: Troy (2004) and Agora (2009). The former presents, through its origins in Homeric poetry, a conventional exemplar of screen epic. The latter, a biopic on the Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), is less conventional, but no less instructive in its spatial remit. Such is the importance of spatiality. Whatever else epic is or aspires to be,

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whichever subjects or historical periods it encompasses, the play of space might well be the genre’s one stable criterion.1 P RO J E C T I O N 1 : E P I C A S S PAC I O U S G E N R E : B E Y O N D K I N G S A N D B AT T L E S Ancient epic was traditionally so enormous a genre that poets claimed themselves ill-­suited to its challenges. The locus classicus of this claim appears in the Aetia, an elegiac poem by Callimachus (third century bce), which explains the origins of customs and rituals throughout the Hellenistic world. In the prologue to the surviving edition, Callimachus highlights the sheer magnitude of epic by addressing his critics and rehearsing advice from Apollo, the god of poetry: They mutter against me, against my poetry ­­ . . . b ­ ecause I did not complete one single continuous song (on the glory of ?) ­­kings . . . i­n many thousands of lines or on ­­ . . . ­heroes. . . . For when I placed a writing tablet in my lap for the first time, Lycian Apollo told me, ‘Feed the sacrificial animal so that it becomes as fat as possible, but, my dear fellow, keep the Muse slender.’2

Although the Greek is fragmentary and therefore fraught with interpretations, Callimachus clearly recuses himself from writing traditional epic, which operates at the highest registers of genre. These registers include the traditional epic medium, a continuous song with very many verses – but note there was no required length for ancient epic poems. Equally important is subject matter, the exploits of kings or heroes. Modern readers will think of Homer’s Iliad (mid-­eighth century bce), though no one epic is referenced here. Nonetheless, Callimachus advocates for a ‘slender’ (leptaleos) muse – slender in both quantitative and qualitative terms – who will inspire poetry of ostensibly lesser registers, like the Aetia.3 The Latin poet Vergil (late first century bce) also characterises epic as grandiose. Early in his career, he justifies the pastorals of his first collection, the Eclogues, in distinctly Callimachean terms. In poem 6 Vergil’s narrator, Tityrus the shepherd, recalls an intervention by Apollo: ‘When I began to sing of kings and battles, Apollo tugged my ear and warned me, “It is fitting, Tityrus, for a shepherd to pasture fat flocks, but to sing a slender song.”’4 With a clear echo of Apollo’s intervention in the Aetia, the poet rejects both the grand scale of epic and its grand material, kings and battles, in favour of slender (deductus, lit. ‘fine-­spun’) song. Yet some twenty years later, at the end of his career, Vergil would produce the quintessential Roman epic, the Aeneid, in which he aspires to poetry of the first rank:

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Come now, Erato, I will relate what kings, what circumstances, what state of events there were in ancient Latium, when the Trojan expedition first put its fleet in to Ausonian shores, and I will recall the origins of the first conflict. You, goddess, you: remind the poet. I will tell of savage wars, of battle lines, of kings driven to death by bravery. . . . A greater sequence of events rises before me. I am setting in motion a grander work.5

At the beginning of Book 7, the hero, Aeneas, has made landfall near the site of Rome and ignited conflict among the native Latin peoples. Vergil invokes the muse to mark this new development, which requires the traditional kings and battles. Especially palpable is the sense of ‘ramping up’ at the midpoint of the poem, from the Odyssean wanderings of Books 1–6, in which Aeneas traverses the Mediterranean following Troy’s destruction, to the Iliadic warfare of Books 7–12. That is, however high the register of the epic’s first half, the second half activates a higher register due to its subject matter. Where such theoretical affectation leads, in the previous examples and elsewhere, is to the first of this essay’s five projections: a conception of Graeco-­Roman epic as a huge, or spacious, genre. Epic occupies space on the bookshelf because it requires room to address the enormous topics of kings and battles. This being said, even in antiquity it was known that epic amounted to more than just, as Stephen Hinds puts it, ‘all war, all male, all the time’ (2000: 226), with the erotic intrigues inspired by women (a typical outcome of their presence in the text) being essential to the genre. Roman poets feign surprise at women like Helen, Penelope, Dido and Lavinia taking part in epic poetry, but this reaction is also theoretical affectation.6 Ancient epic has space to accommodate kings and battles, yet it also has ample room for women and love and any number of seemingly incompatible topics. The corollary is that, while subject matter alone might not be sufficient to classify an ancient poem as epic, a diversity of subject matter – with a poem of appropriate length to house it all – might be. Modern screen epics tend to embrace diverse subjects and eschew theoretical posturing, although kings and battles remain a staple of the genre. Troy applies the formula more or less from beginning to end, while Agora also brings it to bear on the religious riots that transform Alexandria. Yet kings and battles have prevailed across a full century of cinematic epic. At one end is Cabiria (1914), Giovanni Pastrone’s saga of the Second Punic War, which over its two-­and-­ a-half-­hour run boasts spectacular sequences like Hannibal’s transit of the Alps, the Roman defeat at Syracuse and the eruption of Mount Etna. At the other end of the century is Ridley Scott’s biblical

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­extravaganza Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), the title of which, from an ancient perspective, could scarcely be more epic. The film, its run time matching that of Cabiria, actualises its grandiose premise with clashes between Egyptians and Hittites, sweeping cityscapes built by Hebrew slave labour, and (of course) the parting of the Red Sea. Nevertheless, the same century reveals what else screen epic has to offer. Cabiria is named not after Hannibal, but after a girl rendered homeless by the Etna disaster. True to the title, much of the plot involves Cabiria’s coming of age after being sold into slavery. Her perils occur in tandem with the Roman–Carthaginian conflict, which itself is rendered on a human scale through the adventures of the Roman spy Fulvius Axilla (Umberto Mozzato) and his servant Maciste (Bartolomeo Pagano). Although emphasised throughout, romance abounds in the final scene. Instead of, say, the Battle of Zama, the movie ends with the shipboard betrothal of Axilla and the now-­grown Cabiria (Lidia Quaranta), who watch in amazement as they are encircled by sea deities. Similarly, Exodus, although lacking the romantic triangle between Moses, Nefertari and Rameses from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), nonetheless gives its Moses (Christian Bale) a wife during his exile from Egypt: Zipporah (María Valverde), the daughter of Jethro, with whom he has a son. Although it is sometimes embedded,7 theoretical posturing akin to that of ancient poets is rare in epic films. The advertisements promoting the films, however, are another matter. Here, too, lies a conception of epic fuller than kings and battles. For instance, posters for the original Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), naturally feature the famous chariot race between Ben-­Hur (Ramon Novarro) and Messala (Francis X. Bushman); yet they also show Ben-­Hur with his wife, Esther (May McAvoy), and Messala with his mistress, Iras (Carmel Myers). Likewise, the various posters for Troy feature the Trojan Horse, as well as Achilles (Brad Pitt) and Hector (Eric Bana) duelling to the death; but they do not neglect Paris (Orlando Bloom) and Helen (Diane Kruger). Posters for Agora highlight the film’s protagonists, particularly the trio of Hypatia, her former slave Davus (Max Minghella) and the Roman prefect Orestes (Oscar Isaac). Nevertheless, dire tag lines, such as ‘A holy war becomes hell on earth’, suggest that the biopic will transcend character study and become larger than life. Advertisements like these show the totalising ambitions of ancient epic translated to the screen. Far from being ‘all war, all male, all the time’, the genre offers something for everyone, a

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synergy – not a tension – between kings and battles and romance and anything else the filmmakers care to add.8 P RO J E C T I O N 2 : S C R E E N S PAC E : W I D E S C R E E N A S P E C T R AT I O S My second projection is screen space, or the height and especially the width of the cinematic frame. Although early filmmakers experimented with widescreen processes (for example, Abel Gance’s 1927 epic Napoleon utilised triptychs), expanded frames became an industry standard only in the 1950s and 1960s, with the advent of Cinerama, Cinescope, Panavision and other proprietary methods.9 There followed a shift in audience expectations regarding the size of projected images and the corresponding immersiveness (for want of a better term10) of the moviegoing experience – particularly versus the experience of watching television.11 Furthermore, what today is considered the golden age of screen epic was comprised of widescreen-­era films, including The Robe (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), Cleopatra (1963) and even 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In our digital age, where the widescreen ratio of 16:9 is now standard on the screens of televisions, computers and smartphones, it can be difficult to appreciate how widescreen technologies revitalised the screen epic by opening the most expansive windows possible on the ancient world. Perhaps the closest ancient analogue to widescreen aspect ratio is the original metre of epic, the dactylic hexameter. Had Graeco-­ Roman poets seen fit to broaden the hexameter, on a par with widening the cinematic screen, they could have added more feet to the line, as English poets have sometimes done, to make verses of seven feet (heptameters), eight feet (octometers), twelve feet (dodecameters) and so on – longer lines to bear the weight of kings and battles and all the rest. But this was unnecessary. As Aristotle notes, the dactylic hexameter was considered the ‘steadiest and bulkiest’ (stasimotatos, onkodestatos) of metres in antiquity.12 At the same time, the hexameter could be constricted in order to make less-­than-­epic poetry. In Book 1 of Ovid’s Amores (late first century bce), the poet recuses himself from epic by recounting how Cupid transformed his work into elegy: I was preparing to sing of arms and violent wars in a serious metre, with my subject matching my rhythms. The second verse was equal to the one before – but Cupid reputedly laughed and snatched away a foot. . . . Let my work now surge forward in six feet, and let it retreat in five. Farewell, ironclad wars and your rhythms, too!13

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The classic kings-­and-­battles subject matter of epic, here represented by ‘arms and violent wars’, becomes untenable without the support of full hexameters, the suitably ‘serious metre’. Cupid’s theft of one dactyl forces Ovid to compose in the elegiac couplet, a line of hexameter followed by a line of pentameter, which confines him to elegiac themes and motifs. These include erotic desire and its expression in the sometimes playful, sometimes violent affair between poet and mistress, as well as lament and other expressions of loss inherited from the genre’s funerary origins. Hence dactylic hexameter seems to have been the poetic equivalent of widescreen aspect ratio, and to have remained the ‘industry standard’ for epic from its debut in Homeric poetry. P R O J E C T I O N 3 : L A R G E - ­S C A L E S P A C E : V I S TA S , C I T Y S C A P E S , C R OW D S My third projection dovetails with the second. The verbal and metrical medium of ancient epic is conducive to spectacle, as the early books of the Iliad demonstrate. Two notable examples are the extended catalogue of Greek and Trojan forces, and the teichoskopeia or wall-­watching scene, in which Helen and Priam gaze down upon the battlefield from the walls of Troy.14 The latter is especially germane here, since it not only encapsulates a vast horizontal and vertical space, but also thematises the viewing of that space. The wide aspect ratios of modern screen epics likewise encourage spectacle in the form of large-­scale settings and events enacted by entire crowds, which in turn justify the widescreen format. Of course, older films with narrower aspect ratios operate on a large scale: Cabiria is proof enough – and to the list of the movie’s spectacles in Projection 1 should be added the stunning Temple of Moloch sequence, with hundreds of actors and extras on a huge set featuring an enormous statue of the god. Furthermore, even golden age films were slow to embrace the possibilities of widescreen framing, and often kept crucial action centre screen, the better to accommodate television broadcasts in a 4:3 ratio. Nevertheless, framing techniques for exploiting widescreen, like long takes with panning or deep focus, gradually evolved into standard practices for epic cinema. Both Troy and Agora are fully invested in widescreen antiquity. Troy presents a city dense and layered, especially during the triumphant entry of Hector, Paris and Helen. The camera ranges over the Trojan built environment, from city walls and gates, which open to admit the returning embassy; to streets lined with temples, statuary

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Figure 1.1  The cityscape of Troy, showing the urban built environment, during the triumphal entrance of Paris, Helen and Hector. Troy (2004). Warner Bros.

and domiciles; to porticos and plazas at ground level or the massive palace of Priam on high (see Figure 1.1). Crowds throng these structures at every level: soldiers staring down from ramparts, and eager Trojans in ranks along the roads or clustered together on rooftops. Long shots invite poring over the vast cityscape. Close-­ups and medium shots, in turn, provide human detail, as when Helen notices women gossiping high above her, their judgemental expressions clear in the low-­angle point-­of-­view shot that mimics the progress of her chariot. The sequence is an ample introduction to the topography of Troy, which until this point has been mentioned but never seen. Although Troy depicts a city more or less unified in celebrating Helen’s arrival, Agora depicts an Alexandria deeply divided along religious lines. Early in the film, tensions between Christians and so-­called pagans escalate in the agora itself, as the zealot Ammonius (Ashraf Barhom) debates divine nature with a Roman patrician (Sam Cox). Just prior to their altercation, medium shots capture the daily bustle of the market, with vendors selling wares, masters and slaves shopping, travellers passing through and citizens discussing current events. These glimpses of the cityscape, from humble market stalls to the majestic public theatre, imply substantial urban infrastructure. Long shots place all of the foregoing commotion in perspective, showing not only the sheer expanse of the agora, but also its function as both commercial and religious space. The market’s cultic precinct is flanked by classical temples and adorned with looming statues of Graeco-­Roman and Egyptian deities, among them Apollo, Minerva and Serapis. A raised channel of blazing coals separates the Christians from the pagans during the ensuing debate, and soon provides a platform for testing the religious fervour of Ammonius and

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his interlocutor. Whereas the latter is horribly burnt by the flames, the former walks across without harm, demonstrating that his beliefs are righteous and reinscribing a site of pagan worship as one of Christian triumphalism.15 In both sequences widescreen composition encourages the depiction of ancient urban topography to the fullest extent. Extreme long shots of Troy and the agora show both vertical and lateral sprawl, while varying camera placement renders each cityscape in 360 degrees and further engrosses viewers within them. What encourage a sense of space above and beyond mere place, however, are the crowds within these locales, their presence and movements creating the impression of lived environments demarcated as much by social as by physical constructs. During Helen’s ceremonial entrance, for example, she grapples with abandoning her life in Sparta and being a stranger in in Troy, subject to rumour and suspicion. Her ascension to Priam’s citadel is an opportunity to reinvent herself. She corrects Paris, who calls her ‘Helen of Sparta’, by introducing herself as ‘Helen of Troy’, and successfully renegotiates her identity among the Trojan elite. The Alexandrian agora, meanwhile, is a space of religious transition, if not conversion. Following the altercation between Ammonius and the patrician, the Christians condemn the marketplace’s statues as false idols, hurling jeers along with stones and fruit. The pagans retaliate with armed force in an effort to reclaim the precinct, only to meet with overwhelming Christian resistance. Aerial shots track the violence and uproar, reducing pagans and Christians alike to the scale of ants as they riot amid the streets, temples and porticos of the agora. Screen width, in addition to capturing the myriad details of each cityscape, leverages those details towards contextualising the body politic. P RO J E C T I O N 4 : G L O B A L S PAC E : O N E WO R L D, M A N Y P L AC E S My fourth projection involves the sheer global reach of ancient and screen epic. Quite apart from aspect ratios and the scale of particular settings, epic has the capacity to access and display a multitude of exteriors and interiors across tracts of time and space. Jenny Strauss Clay aptly describes the similarities between the third-­person narrator of ancient epic and the omniscient camera of screen epic: The poet ­­ . . . ­takes the verbal component of his story and actually sees it playing like a movie in his mind’s eye and then is able to translate this vision into words that allow his audience to share in his vision.16

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The ancient epic that takes reach to extremes is arguably Ovid’s Metamorphoses (early first century ce). Through his universal history of transformation stories, Ovid meticulously constructs an entire mundus, or world, embarking on a broad survey of Greece before turning to Italy and Rome. Within this world are any number of loci, the landscapes and locales where metamorphoses occur: cities and towns, islands and plains, mountains and caves, rivers and pools, grottoes and clearings, palaces and humble homes, all ranging from the Underworld to the upper world to Mount Olympus. Ovid not only uses these loci as opportunities for mise en scène, creating stages or theatres for his narratives, but also depicts characters moving through space and shows the transformational effect of their movements.17 Even in ancient epics tied to specific locations, poets attend to the arrangement of space. Clay has demonstrated that the Troy of Homer’s Iliad is a theatre in multiple senses: a theatre of war, that is, a place of military engagement;18 a dramatic theatre, where characters debate, make love, live and die; and a visual theatre (in the radical sense of theatron, ‘viewing place’), where characters observe and take stock of the drama, as in the teichoskopeia of Priam and Helen. Underpinning all of these senses is a Troy rationally envisioned and topographically precise, with clear demarcations between sea and land, between the city proper and the enemy encampment and, within each of these, between various public and private venues.19 The poet’s easy transitions between these various locales, the result of working in a potentially limitless medium, is also a mark of the care with which he has constructed a diverse yet cohesive milieu. Although the Iliad is largely confined to the Troad, Troy begins in Thessaly and moves to Sparta and Phthia, before settling on the titular city for the remainder of the picture. On the one hand, these Greek cities and territories underscore the global threat to Troy following the abduction of Helen – a threat rendered in widescreen by a shot of countless ships, perhaps a thousand in all, sailing westward across the Aegean. On the other hand, a broader view of the Hellenic world compensates for what the film lacks, but the Iliad has in abundance: divine oversight, which lends the poem a cosmic dimension. Whereas Homer routinely ‘cuts away’ to Mount Olympus and the machinations of the gods, Troy cannot do the same because of its atheistic stance.20 Nevertheless, the film matches Homer’s topographic variety and precision with respect to Troy itself. The city culminates vertically in the parapets of the royal citadel, from where the Trojan elite observe the vicissitudes of the war. Majestic exteriors

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are supplemented with mundane interiors, such as the bedchamber of Hector and Andromache (Saffron Burrows), which foster the illusion of a living city through glimpses of Trojan domesticity. The environs of the cinematic Troy are also delineated according to clear spatial strategies, which orient viewers during the many battle sequences. These strategies are clear from the initial landing of the Greeks, when Achilles becomes the first to leap from his ship and attack (thereby succeeding where the legendary Protesilaus had failed21). As he fights his way from the shore to the nearby Temple of Apollo, tight continuity editing tracks his incursion into Trojan territory, especially in shots when he runs towards the camera with the ocean at his back. Achilles almost single-­handedly remaps the terrain along Greek and Trojan lines, with the Greeks now positioned to control the sea, the ships and the shore, and the Trojans confined to the city, its fortifications and the plain beneath them. These lines remain intact for much of the film, even during the skirmish that follows the abortive duel between Paris and Menelaus, or during Hector’s unsuccessful attempt to rally his troops and burn the enemy fleet. If Troy couches the mass conflict of Trojans versus Greeks in terms of exteriority, Agora takes the opposite tack. Although it features many exteriors, from the marketplace of the title, to the theatre precinct, to the open sea, the film deploys purposeful interiority when staging struggles between pagans and Christians over time. Perhaps most emblematic of these struggles, more than the actual agora, is the Serapaeum complex. During the movie’s first half, the complex houses the temple to Serapis, the second Library of Alexandria and the classroom of Hypatia. In the latter half, following the Christian riots, the Serapaeum (like many pagan spaces in antiquity) becomes repurposed. The Library is used as a livestock pen, while the temple itself becomes converted into a church, its original ankh augmented with a chi-­rho cross. Here Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria (Sami Samir), consolidates his political authority, denouncing Hypatia with a letter from Paul in praise of docile women and forcing the city council to kneel in deference to scripture. Widescreen composition makes the erasure of paganism a matter of space: Cyril crosses from the altar and its dais at left, codex in hand, and confronts the Alexandrian coalition at far right, all of its members except Orestes falling to their knees. Although Hypatia seeks to demystify a hierarchical view of the heavens, Cyril shores up that hierarchy and imposes it upon the ruling class by forcing them into an untenable, inferior position.

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P RO J E C T I O N 5 : G E N R E S PAC E : E P I C , E L E G Y A N D T R A G E DY The notion of demarcated space in epic narrative leads to my fifth and final spatial projection, which also recalls my first. This essay began by characterising both ancient and screen epic as spacious and totalising. Now I want to refine that characterisation by calling attention to how the diverse content of epic might be demarcated along the lines of genre. That is, instead of a miscellaneous ‘grab bag’ of kings, battles, men, women, mortals, gods and other motifs, epic can be theorised as a master genre that encapsulates other genres, such as elegy and tragedy. The result is generic compartmentalisation, palpable when characters within the epic transgress boundaries and thresholds that delineate not only physical spaces, but also literary kinds. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with its highly compartmentalised mundus, is a repository of genre space. The sprawling Medea narrative in Book 7, for example, bridges other genres as its heroine ventures from place to place. Her story begins in Colchis, on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, where the heroine helps Jason obtain the Golden Fleece; it culminates in the Greek city of Corinth, where she murders her own sons.22 Medea’s transformation from helper-­maiden to child-­killer also entails a shift in genres. Although the former identity has strong associations with epic, especially Book 3 of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica (third century bce), it resonates with elegy as well, since Medea’s desire for Jason is articulated at length. The latter identity, meanwhile, belongs to tragedy, not least the Medea of Euripides, whose depiction of the children’s murder became canonical. In the world of Ovid’s epic, Corinth and the tragedy that occurs there are the end point of Medea’s arc, an inevitable destination. Try as she might – and she does try, with a spectacular, almost cinematic chariot ride that takes her as far from Corinth as possible – the heroine cannot avoid the tragedy that crowns her myth, because the city is ever looming on the horizon.23 Under the totalising programme of the Metamorphoses, epic demarcates the respective urban spaces of Colchis and Corinth as zones for elegy and tragedy, genres long ago descended and sundered from epic, but now self-­consciously reincorporated into their genre of origin.24 As noted earlier, Troy presents an array of exterior and interior spaces. The exteriors are generally reserved for displays of martial prowess, while the interiors are for interpersonal matters such as strategising, debating and love-­making. Achilles himself best ­embodies

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this firm divide between outside and inside, public and private, epic and other. When not playing the ruthless killer on the battlefield, the hero is often to be found in his skene or tent, which receives roughly seventeen minutes (or almost 10 per cent) of screen time in the original theatrical release. By sealing himself within his own sovereign domain, where orders from Agamemnon have no purchase, Achilles segregates himself from the traditional ‘all-­war, all-­male, all-­the-­time’ exploits of epic. Rather, the tent becomes a space more appropriate for elegy, whether the hero bemoans his mistreatment by his allies, seduces the virginal Briseis (Rose Byrne) or mourns the premature death of his cousin Patroclus (Garrett Hedlund). The film’s most poignant representation of elegiac interiority comes when Priam visits Achilles to plead for the return of Hector’s body – a scene that departs from Iliad 24 in significant ways.25 The Homeric Priam, after circumventing the daunting fortifications around Achilles’ camp with the aid of Hermes, encounters the hero finishing dinner among his men. His onscreen counterpart (Peter O’Toole), in contrast, simply enters Achilles’ tent and finds him sitting alone in the dark, clutching Patroclus’ necklace. What was an episode of epic xenia (hospitality), in which Achilles offers the Trojan king food, drink and shelter, becomes an intimate exchange between two sworn enemies. Their proximity to one another increases as the conversation continues: Achilles lifts Priam from his suppliant position and seats him in a nearby chair, while Priam eventually rises and sits beside Achilles on his bed. Reverse close-­ups of both men, the camera gradually zooming in on each, suggest their burgeoning mutual respect and understanding. After asking Priam to meet him outside, Achilles weeps over the defiled corpse of Hector, telling him, ‘We’ll meet again soon, my brother.’ This powerful moment of grief, occurring just beyond the confines of the tent, is nothing like the movie’s public funerary spectacles, with flaming pyres and mourners. Nevertheless, this is the last we see of the brooding, elegiac Achilles. From this point forward, the hero is destined to fight and to die in the sack of Troy, never again to be shown inside the quietude of his tent. Predicated on interpersonal and intercultural exchanges, Agora capitalises on the proximity of its characters, particularly Davus and Hypatia. Davus, who nurses unrequited desire for Hypatia throughout his servitude, his manumission and his ascension in the Parabalani, a militant Christian sect, is routinely paired with her in the same frame. Their juxtaposition creates disconcerting elegiac spaces, where visual intimacy belies the decidedly unromantic reali-

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ties of their relationship. Some examples include Davus standing at the side of Hypatia, freshly emerged from her bath, and gazing at her with unabashed longing; pinning her to a column after the destruction of the Serapaeum and forcing himself upon her, before dissolving into tears of remorse; clasping her in a perversion of a lover’s embrace and suffocating her in an act of mercy killing, to spare her from being stoned to death by his fellow zealots.26 All three sequences occur indoors and feature close-­ups of Davus’ and Hypatia’s faces – sometimes mere inches apart, sometimes closer – their eyes reflecting the pathos and violence of each encounter. Together they exemplify how Agora collocates its protagonists and their bodies within a changing Alexandria and its shifting hierarchies. However commonplace elegiac interiority might be within the context of a biopic, Agora also creates epic space through its anachronistic use of the actual mundus. The earth is shown on five occasions from outer space in shots reminiscent of the Apollo 17 ‘Blue Marble’ photograph:27 (1) the film’s beginning, as the planet drifts right to left in a graceful arc during the opening text; (2) Orestes’ aulos recital in the theatre, the coastline of northern Africa peeking through the cloud cover; (3) the film’s midpoint, which opens with a long inward zoom from the southern Mediterranean basin onto the former Serapaeum; (4) the Parabalani’s massacre of the Jews, their cries audible as the camera reaches apogee; (5) the end of the film, a long outward zoom from the Serapaeum to the entire African continent, as the earth drifts upward and out of frame. These contemporary extraterrestrial sequences are striking in themselves as appearing in a movie set in ancient Egypt. They are equally poignant as spatial inversions of the scenes between Davus and Hypatia, who are situated as uncomfortably close to the viewer as to one another. In these calculated ‘god’s-­ eye’ shots, the entire city of Alexandria stands at the furthest possible removes. By granting the viewer a capability normally reserved for divinities – namely, to observe the earth from a distance – the movie achieves truly epic proportions (Figure 1.2). Elegy and ­­epic . . . ­and tragedy? Even as it explores the extremes of epic exteriority by evoking the ‘Blue Marble’, Agora also achieves new heights of tragic irony. First, the audience’s god’s-­eye view challenges the theistic beliefs of Alexandrian pagans, Jews and Christians. The void of space is cold and empty. If any deity is watching, they make no effort to intervene in human affairs. Second, the satellite images embedded in modern consciousness are proof of the truths Hypatia relentlessly pursues and discovers only before her death – that the earth orbits the sun along an elliptical path. Finally, placing

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Figure 1.2  The lower Mediterranean basin and Nile delta as seen from space in Agora (2009). Focus Features/Newmarket Films.

entire hemispheres on display suggests the worldwide consequences of a city’s conversion to Christianity. The closing text of Agora posits a planet thrust into an age of darkness lasting thirteen centuries, due to the brutal suppression of one woman’s very simple and very dangerous theory. This is a tragedy for all of humanity, and tragedy on such a scale is nothing less than epic. Although this essay has covered a lot of ground, it has endeavoured to illustrate how essential space and spatiality are to ancient and screen epic. That there is room for more than kings and battles ought to be clear. Furthermore, it is the making of room – sometimes knowingly, sometimes tacitly, but always effortlessly – that has kept epic a dynamic and vibrant genre in the long and complicated odyssey from page to screen. NOTES My thanks to the panel organisers of the 2016 Celtic Classics Conference (Amanda Potter) and the 2020 Society for Classical Studies (Hunter Gardner and Stacie Raucci) for the opportunity to present early versions of this essay. Thanks also to audiences at these venues for fruitful discussion and feedback. Special thanks to Denise Gavio, Assistant Librarian at the American Academy in Rome, for granting reader access to the library from October 2018 to January 2019.   1 Paul (2013: 1) defines cinematic epic in orders of spatial magnitude: ‘A film with a cast of thousands, a gigantic budget, lengthy running time, . . . a grandiosity of scale and a variety of spectacle’. Paul goes on to

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complicate these rather conventional notions with categories such as (Bakhtinian) ‘epic ­­distance . . . ­between the world of the heroes and that of the audience’ (17), and ‘tradition’ or ‘whether film epic behaves in a roughly similar way to the literary genre’ (23, emphasis mine). Like Paul I resist simplistic taxonomies and essentialist readings of epic. At the same time, the question of spatiality in epic deserves further consideration – not only in quantitative terms, but also in qualitative ones, which align with Paul’s theories of tradition.  2 Callimachus, Aetia fragment 1.1–5 and 21–4; adapted from the translation by Harder (2012).   3 See the commentary by Harder (2012) for a fuller discussion.  4 Vergil, Eclogues 6.3–5; translation mine. See further Clausen (1994).  5 Vergil, Aeneid 7.37–45; translation adapted from Horsfall (2000).   6 Feigning surprise: a central thesis of Hinds (2000). See section 1, ‘Arms and the (Wo)man’ (223–36) for examples from Augustan poets, especially Ovid.  7 Embedded epic theory: Brett Ratner’s Hercules (2014) opens with a prologue summarising the hero’s birth and labours – only to reveal them as fictional and beyond the scope of film that follows. See further Curley (2018: 186).   8 For a sampling of ‘totalising’ posters and advertisements for Hollywood screen epics, see Llewellyn-­Jones (2018), chapter 1, ‘SEE! SEE! SEE! Hollywood Sells the Past.’  9 Cook (2004: 389–406) offers a concise history of widescreen processes; see also (555–9) for an overview of widescreen technique. The exhaustive study is that of Belton (1992), while Llewellyn-­Jones (2018: 188–91) surveys the technique in films set in antiquity. 10 Immersiveness as problematic concept in contemporary media: Lukas (2016). 11 Early televisions had diminutive screens that (in the United States, at least) preserved the Academy standard 4:3 aspect ratio. 12 Aristotle, Poetics 1459b. 13 Ovid, Amores 1.1–4, 27–8; translation mine. 14 Homer, Iliad 2.484–877 and 3.161–244, respectively. 15 This paragraph owes much to conversations with Gregory Spinner. 16 Clay (2011: 29). 17 The Metamorphoses and mise en scène: Hinds (2002). The transformational effect of movement: Curley (2013), chapter 4, subtitled ‘Space, Time, and Spectacle’. 18 See ‘theatre/theater, n.’, 6.c, in OED Online (n.d.). 19 Clay (2011), especially chapter 3, ‘Homer’s Trojan Theater’ (diagram on 104). 20 Atheistic Troy: Winkler (2009: 218). 21 On Protesilaus (‘first of the people’ or ‘first leaper’), the first of the Greeks to disembark upon reaching the Troad and to be slain by

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Hector, see Apollodorus, Epitome 3.20. Achilles’ decisive action in Troy is intriguing, given that (as Apollodorus notes) Achilles’ mother, the goddess Thetis, had advised him not to be the first to go ashore. 22 Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.1–403. 23 Curley (2013: 121–32). 24 Compare Keith (2002: 269): ‘Generic exploration culminates in [Ovid’s] comprehensive summation of epos [epic] with the return of all literary streams to their generic origin’ (brackets mine). 25 Homer, Iliad 24.440–676. 26 Add to these the sequence of Davus surreptitiously reaching for Hypatia’s foot as she sleeps in the Serapaeum courtyard, his hand inching towards her toes in extreme close-­up. 27 ‘Blue Marble’: www.nasa.gov/content/blue-­marble-­image-­of-­the-­earth-­ from-­apollo-­17.

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2  Allusions to Homeric Epic in Contemporary Films, 1984–2019 Jon Solomon

Since the 1980s I have collected a database of over 1,700 classical allusions to Latin, Greek, and Graeco-­Roman history, art, architecture and literature in contemporary American films, although foreign-­ language films that penetrate the American market are also included. I enter only clear allusions into the database (‘Carpe diem’, ‘Caesar’, ‘Icarus’), which are often designed to establish general recognition among viewers. The over 150 allusions to Homeric epics are disproportionately numerous, too numerous to include in this chapter, which will offer methodological observations, organisational parallels and rudimentary analyses of the most typical or successful examples from four rubrics: ‘epic’, ‘Homer’, ‘Odyssey’ and ‘Iliad’, omitting hundreds of works explored in W. B. Stanford’s The Ulysses Theme and Edith Hall’s The Return of Ulysses, and updating them only to the extent that this was written at the close of 2019.1 Given that popular films are made not by academics but by artists, technicians and business interests to provide entertainment and profitability, these four rubrics have considerable overlap. EPIC Cinematic allusions to ‘epic’ usually refer to epic films, as in Dreamgirls (2006), in which Deena Jones (Beyoncé Knowles) will make her film debut in ‘the epic, untold story of Cleopatra’s early years’. But ancient epic has played a powerful thematic role in two recent, high-­profile films. Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s Birdman: Or (The

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Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), winning Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay Oscars, focuses on Riggan (Michael Keaton), who had achieved early film stardom playing the superhero Birdman but is now resurrecting his career directing a serious drama. In a press interview, Gabriel (Damian Young), a caricatured intellectual journalist, challenges him by paraphrasing Barthes: ‘The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry detergent and comic book characters.’ Riggan struggles to respond: ‘Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, like you said, that, uh, Barthes said, uh. See, Birdman, like Icarus – .’ He is interrupted by Clara (Natalie Gold), an interviewer more interested in gossip, who tries to substantiate a rumour about Riggan injecting himself with baby pig semen. The first interviewer attacks the interviewer’s ignorance, asserting: ‘Roland Barthes was a French philosopher.’ This brief scene parodies both types of interviewers, sophisticated and naive, but Iñarritu has successfully reinforced his critique of Barthes’s Mythologies, establishing that Birdman, like Icarus, is a continuation of the bygone era of ‘gods and epic sagas’. Allowing for Iñarritu’s loose terminology – I would prefer ‘ancient mythological characters and epics’ – he concludes the film nearly two hours later when Riggan, after an attempted suicide, leaps off the ledge of the hospital and disappears from view. The camera frames his daughter, looking towards the sky and smiling, presumably seeing Riggan flying, like Icarus, thereby refuting Barthes and transforming Birdman into a timeless ‘epic saga’ that maintains its relevance in the modern world. In Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), another Academy honoree, the epic concept again contributes historical and intellectual depth. When Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) promotes Queen’s new album at a business meeting, he tells the group’s manager (Mike Myers), ‘It’s a rock and roll record with the scale of opera, the pathos of Greek tragedy, the wit of Shakespeare, the unbridled joy of musical theatre.’ Queen’s lawyer (Tom Hollander) interjects that ‘Fortune favours the bold’, confirming the epic conception, and finally Mercury calls the album specifically ‘an epic poem’. The insertion of allusions to Greek tragedy and epic poetry, in addition to opera, Shakespeare and musical theatre, elevates the audience’s appreciation for what might otherwise be described as simply ‘a rock and roll record’. Traditional genres and historical/cultural periods are similarly blurred in the final narration of the Werner Herzog/Zak Penn mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness (2004):

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It was an adventure, it was an epic. Honestly, it was like something out of a Werner Herzog film. I don’t regret any of it. Was there a tragedy? Of course there was: I mean, people died. That’s always tragic. But, that is what happens in any great adventure. Think about stories from ancient Greece, or a movie, or Lord of the Rings or something. I mean, someone always dies. That’s the way it works.

This is a parodic attempt at assigning ancient genre labels to film, as is clear from comparing this to a Werner Herzog film, which, of course, it is. But it aptly applies to the odd mixture of events that have transpired earlier in the film and demonstrates to us how modern filmmakers can claim to reject the concept of an ancient epic. Forward-­looking twenty-­first-­century films like Birdman and Bohemian Rhapsody make sure to deliver the message that their cinematic products do not represent ancient genres that no longer apply. This line of thinking, especially when forcibly promulgated in critically recognised, commercially successful films, provides at least one reason for the relative absence of allusions to ancient epic in contemporary popular film. At best ancient genres are grouped together with their post-­ancient derivatives. For example, the DVD commentary to Eric R. Dickerson’s Never Die Alone (2004) describes the death of the drug dealer who may have been killed by his son, saying, ‘There is a Greek element, a very Shakespearean tragic element.’ Other films, such as Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq (2015), Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (1995) and Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), also demonstrate how fluid contemporary popular cinematic interpretations of ancient genres are, whether intended as comedies, dramas or epics. HOMER In a voiceover during the opening credits of Lasse Hallström’s The Cider House Rules (1999), Dr Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine) introduces the protagonist orphaned infant, Homer Wells. The camera follows prospective parents (Patrick Donnelly, Edie Schechter) to Larch’s office at St. Cloud’s Orphanage. Now in live action, Larch tells them, ‘I named him after the Greek writer. You know about Homer, of course . . . ’ – the couple’s expressions make it clear they do not – ‘and I made his name Wells because I could tell that he was, uh, very deep.’ Returning to the voiceover, Caine says that his head nurse actually named the infant: ‘Her father drilled wells, and she once owned a cat named Homer.’ Despite this disclaimer, Homer Wells is aptly named. The film, like John Irving’s 1985 novel, follows the orphaned Homer from

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childhood to adulthood, through romance and intrigue, until he ultimately becomes director at St. Cloud’s. The story is his life’s odyssey. This is implied, not stated as a clear allusion, and I hasten to add that every bildungsroman describing a life’s journey or a road trip is not necessarily a Homeric-­inspired odyssey.2 In this instance, there is even an additional disclaimer in Caine’s voiceover: ‘I had hoped to become a hero, but in St. Cloud’s there was no such position. In the lonely, sordid world of lost children, there are no heroes to be found.’ The Natural (1984) provides a parallel. Based on Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel, Barry Levinson’s film early on introduces Harriet Bird (Barbara Hershey). Having seen the protagonist baseball phenomenon Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) strike out ‘the Whammer’, she tells Hobbs, ‘It was just like watching Sir Lancelot jousting with Sir Turquin, or was it Maldemer?’ Like the aforementioned prospective parents, he has no answer. Bird then asks, ‘Have you ever read Homer?’ Answering, ‘The only Homer I know has four bases in it’, he laughs at his own joke. She does not. Instead she responds, ‘Homer lived ages ago and wrote about heroes and gods, and he would have had it in mind to write about baseball if he had seen you out there today.’ The brief identification of Homer recalls the condescending identification of Barthes in Birdman, immediately characterising its educated speaker while informing (or reminding) the audience of who Homer was. The second part of Bird’s statement gives Hobbs great praise, as if from Homer himself. Hobbs explains that he expects to be the greatest baseball player ever, and she leads him on, adding, ‘Isn’t there something more, more glorious?’ Her delivery emphasises the word ‘glorious’, making the allusion to Homeric kleos (‘glory, fame’) more enticing. Although neither the film nor novel makes additional clear allusions to Homer, they both unfold within the ‘mythic framework’ described by York.3 In an early episode, Hobbs’s signature bat is hewn from a tree struck by lightning, and two subsequent scenes connect his powerful home runs with lightning. But burned into the bat is the generic American name ‘Wonderboy’, not Zeus or Jupiter or even ‘Thunderbolt’. Shortly after the Homer discussion, Hobbs reconfirms his goal to be ‘the best there ever was’, and Bird immediately shoots him in the stomach, punishing his hybris by causing his disappearance from the game for fifteen years. In both scenes Bird is draped in black, and after shooting Hobbs she magically dissolves from view, Levinson employing the same camera technique Iñarritu employed in Birdman, that is, identifying a mythological creature by not showing it. Kevin Thomas Curtin identified Bird – we note the

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symbolic name – as Nemesis, adding as corroborating evidence that newspapers reported that ‘a mysterious woman’ had previously shot an Olympic athlete and a famous football player with silver bullets.4 Also, just a paragraph earlier in the novel, Malamud had described Bird as ‘certainly a snappy goddess’. And then there is her counterpart Iris (Glenn Close), dressed in white, who revives and inspires him to hit the championship-­winning home run, despite Wonderboy shattering and his old wound bleeding through his shirt. York identified Hobbs’s incurable wound as a mythological trait and his bat as a modern Excalibur, while Curtin attributes to Iris the embodiment of the powers of Athena, Demeter and Penelope ‘while she waits for Odysseus to find his way home’. The 2007 DVD featurette ‘Knights in Shining Armor’ presents a variety of interpretative perspectives from co-­writers Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry, Malamud’s daughter (Janna Malamud-­Smith), the senior curator of the Baseball Hall of Fame (Tom Shieber) and modern mythologist Phil Cousineau. They make it clear that the Homeric allusion is not the key to unlocking the mythological assemblage that includes the quest for the Holy Grail and the defeat of the ‘Kingfisher’ (Fisher King) of Arthurian lore, noting that the manager of Hobbs’s team, the Knights, is named Pop Fisher. Even Malamud’s paragraph preceding the Homer question mentions ‘David jawboning the Goliath-­Whammer’ along with ‘Sir Percy lancing Sir Maldemer’. Redford rightly summarises by saying that Malamud ‘loaded the story with every mythological character you could think about, every mythological plot’. In The Cider House Rules and The Natural, Homeric allusions lead the viewer into mythological substructures. These are not allegories filled with one-­for-­one pairings, nor do they follow a prescribed narrative path or necessarily even rise to the surface again. The path in The Cider House Rules remains as tantalisingly obscure as its initial presentation, where the prospective parents did not know who Homer was, and Larch, as narrator, says Homer was named after a cat. The Homeric allusion in The Natural from the outset is conflated with a variety of other mythological contexts. A dramaturgical desideratum in such examples is the ignorance of the character at whom the allusion is aimed. Neither the prospective parents nor Roy Hobbs know who Homer is (Malamud: ‘His head spun at her allusions’), the second interviewer in Birdman does not know who Barthes is, or Icarus, and Queen’s manager in Bohemian Rhapsody does not grasp what Freddie Mercury tells him about creating ‘an epic poem’. Delivering the allusions this way helps characterise the roles of the participants and engages audience

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Figure 2.1 ‘ἠὼς ­ῥοδοδάκτυλος . . . We read Homer at the Point, in Greek.’ Nick Nolte in The Thin Red Line (1998). Fox 2000 Pictures.

members, some requiring the explanation, others appreciating the literary-historical challenge, whether or not it leads them towards the symbolic substructure. In contrast, in Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1999) Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte), using a walkietalkie beneath a colourful dawn sky, establishes his credentials as an officer by saying ‘ἠὼς­ῥοδοδάκτυλος’,5 adding, ‘We read Homer at the Point’, that is, West Point, and then emphasising, ‘in Greek’ (Figure 2.1). This unique Homeric allusion engendered its own tradition. In The Good Thief (2002), Nick Nolte’s character, gambling at the end of a long night, utters the phrase ‘rosy-fingered dawn’. In the DVD commentary director Neil Jordan, who is also a novelist and studied English literature at University College, Dublin, reveals that he was conscious of Nolte’s previous Homeric utterance but was trying to avoid being ‘pretentious’.6 O DY S S E Y A number of films identify a clear Odyssey parallel with Homerically named characters and recognisable narrative elements in contemporary settings.7 In Meg Ryan’s Ithaca (2015), based on William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, Homer is the young protagonist in the fictional town of Ithaca, California, during World War II, and his brother is named Ulysses. In Kevin Bacon’s Loverboy (2005), six years after a sexual odyssey culminating in a one-night stand, Emily (Kyra Sedgwick) tells her son that his father is ‘our wanderer Odysseus, trapped, and sleeping, on some island so very far away from us, and he is trying to get back’, suggesting that she represents Calypso/Circe

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conceiving with him and Penelope waiting for his return.8 Describing the title of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick said, ‘It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation.’9 Other films of this type vary the Homeric prototype, turning the Ulysses character into a widower in Ulee’s Gold (1997), and focusing on the Penelope figure in Sommersby (1993) and Cold Mountain (2003).10 The best-­known example is O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Several scholarly analyses have pointed out that such elements as the Cyclops, Sirens and Teiresias episodes, and the katabasis (a journey to the Underworld) and nostos (‘homecoming, return’) are reinvented, conflated and redistributed over several scenes.11 The Sirens, for instance, are represented as three southern American women singing and washing clothes in watery shallows. Intoxicated, Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) disappears and seems to reappear as a toad, evoking the Circe episode, and that toad will turn up again in the Cyclops encounters. Subsequently, the initial Cyclops restaurant episode, which introduces the one-­eyed ‘Big Dan’ Teague (John Goodman), includes not only the toad but a classical bust of Homer and the character named Homer Stokes. O Brother begins with an invocation to the Muse. Other films establish their Odyssean credentials by other methods. In Gabriele Salvatores’ Oscar-­winning Mediterraneo (1991), Lieutenant Montini (Claudio Bigagli) announces that he has read the Iliad and Odyssey in Greek. A few minutes later, in a Lotus-­Eater scene, the Italian soldiers smoke hash on a very small and distant Greek island. In a conflation of the Lotus-­Eater and Cyclops episodes, one of the drugged Italian soldiers keeps repeating the phrase ‘non so’ (‘I don’t know’) and earns that as a nickname, a clear allusion to Homer’s ‘Outis’ (‘No One’). Near the beginning of The Spitfire Grill (1996), winner of that year’s Audience Award at Sundance, the protagonist Percy (Alison Elliott), a released prisoner trying to start life over, reads aloud the Book 12 introduction to the Circe episode: ‘And rosy fingered dawn came upon the sleeping sailors and they woke to resume their long journey’, an alternative to the Butler translation, ‘to the shore where we went to sleep and waited till day should break. Then, when the child of morning, rosy-­fingered Dawn, appeared, I sent some men to . . .’ Writer/director Lee Zlotoff explained in a 27 April 2006 email that he changed the translation to avoid copyright issues, otherwise requiring permission to read the printed version, if not payment, and/or possibly a costly delay in securing either or both, or even a

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legal complication. Homeric epic may be ancient, but for filmmakers Homeric translations are modern copyrighted property. I originally assumed the Odyssey reading alluded to Percy’s journey from prison to a new town. But Zlotoff adds that it was, not only [an allusion] to Percy’s search for a home, but perhaps more specifically to her relationship with Eli [John M. Jackson]. If you recall from the movie, Eli is in fact a soldier that is, in some way, also trying to return home but has obviously been too traumatized by his war experience to fully get there. That is until Percy proves to be the human (goddess?) connection that ultimately allows him to return.

Zlotoff here illustrates the multiplicity of readings that can be applied to a Homeric allusion, allowing even for a dual application. The text of his email suggests that, as in Loverboy, the allusion may include both suffering wanderer and mythical goddess. Moreover, as we observed in Birdman and The Cider House Rules, Zlotoff intentionally undercuts his allusion. After Percy reads those Odyssey lines, Joe (Kieran Mulroney) remarks, ‘I don’t think I know that one.’ Percy responds, ‘It’s a very old story.’ But even if brief and downplayed, and never mentioned again, it establishes the film’s narrative arc and character development. Two other examples of Homeric allusions motivate struggling dancers. In the world of underground breakdancing, Angel (Julie Urich), the struggling protagonist of B-Girl (2009), enters a Los Angeles City College classroom late. On the chalkboard is written ‘The Odyssey - wine-­dark seas - Cyclops, Ulysses, Ithica [sic], Troy’. The male instructor assumes she has not read the assignment, so he derisively challenges her to ‘interpret the central struggle of Ulysses: a parallel of each individual’s struggle for self in a directionless ocean of uncertainty? Or simply the story of a man who refuses to stop and ask for directions?’ Angel responds, What is an odyssey? It’s a journey, it’s a big long pointless voyage. Ulysses didn’t ask for an odyssey: he was just trying to get home. You know ‘home’, where there’s always milk and honey, and it’s quiet and safe and warm. But it’s the getting there that’s the problem. There’s no road signs, ‘HOME’, there’s no Thomas Guide saying, ‘You are here, home is there.’ Because when you’re out on the stormy seas and you’re fightin’ Sirens and Harpies and a crew full of pigs, home’s so far away it’s a fantasy. And even if you get there, you’re still going to have to fight – for your people, for your kingdom. I mean, the woman that you love, she doesn’t even know you. There’s never gonna be no milk and honey. Just be happy with your pizza and beer.

This Odyssey allusion occurs just before the final dance sequences, clearly intended as the psychological climax/author’s message,

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demonstrating the strength that Angel has exhibited in completing her odyssey. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004) employs a less complex formula. Protagonist Katey Miller (Romola Garai), a new student, walks into a class and is asked to read from the Odyssey. She explains that she read it the previous year, for which her fellow students mock her. She reads, ‘Now the suitors turned to dance and song, to the lovely beat and sway, waiting for dusk to come upon them there, and the dark night came upon them, lost in pleasure’, from the Fagles translation (1.480–3). Again there is a disclaimer, in this instance a fellow student interpreting the passage as ‘a bunch of drunk guys “doing” it’. But Katey soberly explains that ‘Athena wants the suitors to keep invading Odysseus’ house so that he’ll get angry enough to kill ­­them . . . t­o find his strength and courage’, and as the film proceeds she finds the strength and courage to ignore racial and parental pressures so she can dance with her chosen partner. Other classroom scenes involving the Odyssey are meant at least to confirm an educational environment. In the Mike Figgis remake of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1994), the first five lines of the Odyssey in Greek are written on the chalkboard, and in The Myth of the American Sleepover (2011) there are several allusions to a high-­school’s dramatic production of the Odyssey.12 In period dramas Odyssey allusions help establish periodicity. In Michael Winterbottom’s Thomas Hardy adaptation Jude (1996), the protagonist (Christopher Eccleston) memorises the beginning of the Odyssey in Greek and then English, and in Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009), Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) is engaged by Charles Brown in a discussion of the Odyssey, although she admits, ‘I have not yet read all of it.’ In Ridley Scott’s White Squall (1996), where the classroom is located in the hull of the brigantine Albatross, Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ is read aloud. Later, during a montage of the students running across hills on a deserted island, one student’s voiceover concludes, ‘Today I finally understand Homer: the journey’s the thing.’ This epitomises the film’s intellectual ebullience, which then disintegrates after a catastrophic storm. Even more so, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader (2008) advances over many decades until the protagonist Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) hangs herself by stepping upon a pile of books, one of which is the Odyssey. The passing of time and the romantic affair between her and Michael Berg (David Kross, Ralph Fiennes) is connected in six different Odyssey scenes.13 Again, the screenplay specifies, ‘Everyone believes Homer’s

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subject is homecoming. In fact, the Odyssey is a book about a journey. Home is a place you dream of.’ In her preface to Teaching Hope: Stories from the Freedom Writer Teachers and Erin Gruwell, Gruwell writes that she approached her mixed-­race, at-­risk students at Long Beach’s Woodrow Wilson High School with idealistic hopes of teaching the Odyssey and Shakespeare’s sonnets.14 She found instead that she had to engage the students with contemporary pedagogical exercises on gangs, drugs and racism. But in the first scene of Richard LaGravenese’s Freedom Writers (2007), Gruwell (Hilary Swank) does attempt to teach a lesson on Homer, which evokes a joke about Homer Simpson. In the extended scene on the DVD, she writes ‘Cyclops’ on the board, explaining that ‘an odyssey is a journey’ and that the Cyclops was ‘an obstacle’, inspiring one of the male students to joke that his ‘one-­eyed monster is not an obstacle’. In a subsequent scene, sentences with grammatical and spelling errors on the board include: 1) Odysseus didn’t have no since of direction? 2) He grow up ina bad naborhods. 3) Odisses want on a long jurnee.

Here, as often, the film inserts meaningful classical allusions absent in the original book.15 And yet, the extended Odyssey allusion was deleted from the release version of the film, suggesting that the filmmakers and/or test audiences found it objectionable because of the ‘one-­eyed monster’ joke. Another off-­colour comical scene is found in Get Hard (2015), where the protagonist James (Will Ferrell), a white businessman sentenced to prison, asks Darnell (Kevin Hart), a younger black man, to teach him how to cope with prison, assuming stereotypically that he has already spent time in prison. When James says, ‘You could be the Athena to my Odysseus’, Darnell responds, ‘I don’t know what the fuck that is, man!’ Viewers not familiar with the Odyssey reference will still laugh at Hart’s off-­colour delivery. Brevity suffices. In Kate Barker-­Froyland’s Song One (2014), just one sentence from the Fitzgerald translation describing Ulysses’ return to Ithaca, read by the comatose patient’s mother (Mary Steenburgen), conveys the hope that her son will revive consciousness. Filmmakers show just the cover of the Odyssey to instil the journey theme or characterise the actor’s role in Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993), Hal Hartley’s Amateur (1994), Maria Maggenti’s Puccini for Beginners (2006) and Joseph Castelo’s The Preppie Connection (2015), in which prep-­ school students snort cocaine off a paperback Odyssey translation’s cover. When Joe (Tom Hanks) in Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)

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decides to quit his job and prepare for a long, romantic journey, he shows his office mate that he is packing Robinson Crusoe, Romeo and Juliet and, with an emphatic gesture, the Odyssey. In popular culture several Odyssey episodes from Books 9–12 have their own traditions. Freedom Writers used the Cyclops episode, as did Cinema Paradiso (1988) and The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004). Other films employ a Cyclops as a being/creature/machine totally divorced from Homeric context. In Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008) it is a child with a birth defect, in Riddick (2013) a small machine, in Chi-Raq a character played by Wesley Stipes, and in X-Men (2000) a mutant with single-­vision eyewear, just to name several. The Sirens have a similar bifurcation in that Noise (2007) and Coraline (2009) allude to them in their Homeric context, while in Sirens (1994), Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003), Aquamarine (2006), Easy Virtue (2008), Scales: Mermaids Are Real (2017) and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) they are creatures unto themselves, a testimony to the proliferation of the Homeric tradition in popular arts. Aaron Sorkin in Molly’s Game (2017) uses a Circe allusion to account for his protagonist’s control over men. Most Odyssey episodes have their own secondary traditions as well. A class discussing Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-­Eaters’ in Smart People (2008) delivers the author’s message about loneliness, and the ship in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), a parody of an oceanographic expedition, is not named Calypso, as was Jacques Cousteau’s vessel, but Belafonte, employing the name of the famous calypso-­style music singer. ILIAD As with journey and bildungsroman films and the Odyssey, one can cast a wide net to connect a number of war films with the Iliad, including the aforementioned The Thin Red Line, Kubrik’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) and others discussed in Martin Winkler’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est pro Patria Mori? Classical Literature in the War Film’.16 But our focus is on clear allusions. Occasionally the Iliad and Odyssey are mentioned together. In Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, a classmate tells the studious Katey, ‘I’m sure even Homer took some time off between the Iliad and the Odyssey.’ Classroom and school sequences are again commonly associated with the Iliad. An Iliad translation exercise on a chalkboard in Tolkien (2019) presages the young protagonist’s linguistic expertise.

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In John Singleton’s Higher Learning (1995), one of the university student protagonists, Remy (Michael Rapaport), is reading by himself on the steps outside a campus building. We see a pair of boots mount the steps. They belong to Scott Moss (Cole Hauser), who asks Remy what he is reading. Remy looks at the cover; ‘Iliad’, he says. Scott replies, ‘That’s a good book. Lot a great battles in that book.’ Scott will soon recruit Remy into his neo-­Nazi movement, and Singleton will build this simple Iliadic allusion into the violent gun ‘battle’ at the end of the film. Other films connect the Iliad, education and war in various ways. The camera in The War at Home (1996) captures a poster advertising an Iliad college campus event. Because the film features a Vietnam veteran suffering from post-­traumatic stress disorder, the connection is clear, particularly in that he was a successful student before enlisting. Chris Hauty and Jeff Wadlow used Iliadic allusions to frame Never Back Down (2008). Where B-Girl has the underground breakdancing environment, this film focuses on an underground martial-­ arts fight club. That two of our films focus on underground sectors of popular culture suggests that they are intended to represent the polar opposite of classical culture. The film introduces the protagonist Jake Tyler (Sean Faris), a recent high-­school transfer, in a classroom where he reveals his familiarity with the Homeric epic, which he read at his former school. As in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, the protagonist is portrayed as knowledgeable only insofar as he comes from a different educational system, another method of de-­emphasising the importance of the Homeric allusion so the protagonist does not appear to be unattractively bookish. A third interesting aspect of this allusion is that the audience is challenged when the teacher asks, ‘What symbol or symbols might suggest a less vainglorious attitude toward warfare?’ Baja Miller (Amber Heard) fumbles for an answer and then responds, ‘I’m sorry. You lost me at “vainglorious”.’ Jake rescues her: ‘That’s the shield of Achilles. The scenes of normal life depicted on Achilles’ shield suggest an alternative to war – friends, or family, or what is at stake.’ Outside the classroom Baja calls to ‘Shield of Achilles’, thanks him for ‘the save’ and suggests that it was probably not wise for a new kid to ‘suck up in English class’, thereby undercutting the allusion again. This continues with the next interchange, in which she says his handwriting is ‘harder to read than the Iliad’. But the camera notices her much-­creased copy, causing him to say, ‘Oh, looks like you didn’t have any problem reading it. A book that beat up’s gotta be flipped through a couple-­a times.’ Again undercutting this additional claim to educational devotion, she

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says, ‘Maybe I bought it used.’ Not finished with the banter, he adds, ‘Maybe, but I doubt it.’ The mutual romantic attraction between the two leads is introduced via the Iliad, its classroom presence, interpretation, difficulty in reading and non-­war imagery. This is as complex an introduction as we have in any allusion to Homeric epic in a contemporary film, and it is intentional, demonstrably. Just before the final match of the film, Baja visits with Tyler, encouraging him: ‘I get it – why you’re fighting. It’s like the shield of Achilles. You’re fighting so you don’t have to fight again’, referring to the respect he needs to gain from his fellow students. In the DVD commentary the filmmakers divulge that they were consciously reminding the audience about the ‘shield of Achilles’ allusion. We find a different approach in Tully (2018), the fourth collaboration between Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman, in which Marlo (Charlize Theron) has just been told that she must find a different school for her ‘quirky’ son. She angrily tells the principal, Oh, my God, what is this ‘quirky’ thing everybody keeps saying? It’s so stupid. What does it even mean? Do I have a kid or a fucking ukulele? Just say what you mean. You think Jonah is ­­retarded . . . ­and he’s ruining it for everybody in his class who’s reading, like, the Iliad, or whatever the fuck they read!

Here the Iliad does not introduce a battle theme for the film, which will go in an entirely different direction to focus on Marlo’s relationship with Tully (Mackenzie Davis), the nanny she hires. More probably it symbolises the pointlessness and irrelevance of a traditional education for her ‘quirky’ son. ‘The Iliad’ is a potent phrase. ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘Mark Twain’, although also representing a traditional education, would not have signified the same uselessness. The Iliad even lacks the charming adventure elements the Odyssey often represents in popular arts. The allusion in Scent of a Woman (1992) is similarly anti-­educational in that a prep-­student, using a loudspeaker, includes it in a lampoon of the headmaster: Mr. Trask is our fearless leader, A man of learning, a voracious reader. He could recite the Iliad in ancient Greek While fishing for trout in a rippling creek. Endowed with wisdom of judgment sound, Nevertheless about him the questions abound.

Similar also is The Wife (2017), a film about a fictitious Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. Nathan Bone (Christian Slater), his would-­be biographer, says that his father was a teacher at Yale and used to

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make him recite the Iliad in Greek during dinner even though ‘he didn’t understand a word of it’, evoking the response, ‘That’s fucked up.’ In contrast, The Human Stain (2003), based on Philip Roth’s 2000 novel of the same name, contains a well-­integrated Iliad allusion of the classroom type. Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), a classics professor at the fictional Athena College, introduces his popular course on ‘Gods, Heroes, and Myth’ with words very similar to those in Roth’s novel: ‘Sing, O Gods, of the wrath of Achilles.’ . . . All of European literature springs from a fight, a barroom brawl, really. And what was Achilles so angry about? Well, he and King Agamemnon were quarreling over a woman, a young girl and her body and the delights of sexual rapacity. Achilles, the most hypersensitive fighting machine in the history of warfare. Achilles, who, because of his rage at having to give up the girl, isolates himself defiantly outside the very society whose protector he is and whose need of him is enormous. Achilles has to give up the girl. He has to give her back. And that is how the great imaginative literature of Europe begins.

After several complications, Roth’s story places Silk himself in a relationship with the younger Faunia (Nicole Kidman). Silk engages a lawyer, Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Senise), who advises him to take precautions against HIV and a paternity suit and verbalises these contemporary issues in an Iliadic context: ‘Give up the girl, ­­Achilles . . . ­Achilles on Viagra. How much sense does that make anyway?’ As we have seen, a single Homeric allusion is usually sufficient to establish an ancient–modern connection. Here the award-­winning writer and director, Nicholas Meyer and Robert Benton, inserted this second allusion several scenes subsequently, reflecting the novel’s multiple classical allusions and themes.17 In fact, in the novel it is not Zuckerman but Silk who says, ‘Thanks to Viagra I’ve come to understand Zeus’s amorous transformations. That’s what they should have called Viagra. They should have called it Zeus.’ Just as the cover of the Odyssey could convey a thematic message, so in Mary Shelley (2017, a physical copy of the Iliad symbolises the relationship between Mary (Elle Fanning) and her father (Stephen Dillane). His frustration with her drives him to sell it at a bookstall, saying, ‘There comes a time when we have to let go of the things we hold dear.’ Lastly, some filmmakers insert odd Iliadic allusions, perhaps because of their exotic sound but possibly still suggesting competition. In Robert Aldrich’s psychological duel between two sisters, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), a television plays an ad for Iliad-­brand dog food: ‘It’s a classic.’ In Free Enterprise

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(1999), the Iliad Bookshop in Hollywood sits right next to Odyssey Video. Many different perspectives can be applied to a film. But the implied reader of a commercial feature film is certainly not a trained classical scholar.18 Surely even films set in antiquity, like Troy and Immortals (2011), are not designed for the approval of, let alone analysis by, classical scholars any more than spy thrillers or courtroom dramas seek approval from CIA operatives or licensed barristers. But like a reading from a queer, feminist or political perspective, a classical reading can explore the implications of a clear allusion to ancient epic, despite immediate disclaimers, whether near the beginning of a film, at the psychological climax/author’s message or just before the action climax. Although a classical reading can be applied to many films, there is a sub-­group that have clear allusions that were in all likelihood intentional on the part of the filmmakers and therefore designed to reach the millions or tens of millions of expected general viewers. Considering this enormous impact, we can appreciate these allusions in popular cinema as one of the most powerful and expedient methods of disseminating the classical tradition in the modern era, which at present shows no signs of diminishing. NOTES   1 Stanford (1954); Hall (2008).   2 Troy, Kella and Wahlström (2014: 126–68). Similar is Racing with the Moon (1984), in which the protagonist’s dog is named Argus, and the plot’s odyssey follows how Henry ‘Hopper’ Nash (Sean Penn) and Nicky (Nicholas Gage) spend their last few weeks before joining the army during World War II.   3 York (2003: 26–37).   4 Curtin (1985: 225–41).   5 ‘Rosy-­fingered dawn’.   6 Billen (1996: 67).   7 For a broader scope, see Hall (2008) and Walter (2007: 129–51).  8 Older examples include Godard’s New Wave Le Mépris (1963) and Mervyn LeRoy’s Homecoming (1948).   9 Agel (1970: 25). Martin Winkler has also pointed out the Cyclopean aspects of the murderous, single-­eyed HAL 9000 computer. 10 Young (2014); Rabel (2003: 391–406); Chitwood (2004: 232–43); Vandiver (2004: 125–48). 11 E.g., Siegel (2007: 213–45); Pollio (2007: 23–7); Heckel (2005: 571–89); Danek (2002: 84–94). 12 The Odyssey is not mentioned in Rattigan’s play.

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13 The Odyssey scenes in the film are more numerous and more thoroughly integrated than in Bernhard Schlink’s novel. Cf. Niven (2003: 381–96). 14 The Freedom Writers with Erin Gruwell (1999: xvii–xviii). 15 Cf. The Man without a Face (1993) and Girl, Interrupted (1999). 16 Winkler (2000: 177–214). 17 Canales (2009: 111–28). 18 Cf. Kubowitz (2012: 201–28).

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3  ‘Mighty Saga of the World’s Mightiest Man’: Is There Such a Thing as a Modern Hercules Epic? Emma J. Stafford

The quotation in my title is from a magazine advert promoting Pietro Francisci’s Hercules (Le fatiche di Ercole) (1958) in the United States (Figure 3.1). The artist’s impression of Hercules (Steve Reeves) wielding a chain as the heroine Iole (Sylvia Koscina) clings to his muscular leg, surrounded by miniature scenes of battle, is reproduced on posters and other marketing, but notable here is the insistence on the injunction to ‘­­SEE . . . ­SEE . . . SEE. . . .’ This sort of presentation, promising spectacular action with a smattering of romance, is very much in the tradition of advertising for the classic Hollywood epic film – and yet the case for categorising any modern screen adaptation of Hercules’ story as ‘epic’, in any sense, is far from proven. In this chapter I shall consider a number of definitions of ‘epic’, and the extent to which they might be applied to existing Hercules films. I shall first review the limited evidence for the Herakles (using the Greek version of his name when discussing Greek material) of ancient epic poetry, and briefly compare this to other ancient story-­telling media, both literary and visual, which provide some precedent for the filmmaker’s challenge in framing a narrative around Hercules. I shall then consider the hero’s appearances on the twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century screen. There are of course a great many Hercules films which we might put to the test against any set of criteria for the qualification ‘epic’:1 I shall focus on just a few examples, first of the peplum or ‘sword and sandal’ genre of the late 1950s and 1960s, then of the revival or ‘rebooting’ of the genre in 2014.2 I shall consider how these Hercules-­themed

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Figure 3.1  Advertisement for the Levine-­promoted Hercules (Le fatiche di Ercole) (1958). Embassy Pictures/Galatea Film/Lux Film/Warner Brothers Pictures.

films might be said to engage with either the ancient poetic genre or the epic film of classical Hollywood, before concluding with some suggestions as to the form a modern Hercules epic might ideally take.

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T H E H E R A K L E S O F A N C I E N T S T O RY- T ­ ELLING Herakles may not immediately spring to mind as a hero of ancient epic. He is of an older generation than the Greeks who fight at Homer’s Troy for the return of Helen, so the few mentions he gets in the Iliad are allusive, not part of the main narrative – we hear of his birth, servitude to Eursytheus, slaying of the sea-­monster for Laomedon and shipwreck on Kos, fetching of Kerberos from the Underworld, and eventual death. In the Odyssey he features briefly in person, though dead, a soul encountered by Odysseus during his visit to the Underworld. Hesiod’s Theogony catalogues the genealogies of five of Herakles’ monstrous opponents and refers to his apotheosis; the fragmentary Hesiodic Catalogue of Women seems to have covered his birth, several exploits, death and apotheosis; and the Kypria, part of the Epic Cycle, included mention of his madness.3 Later, in Apollonius’ Argonautika he has a more substantial part as one of the Argonauts, but famously leaves the expedition when his beloved Hylas goes missing, and is seen no more after the end of Book 1. In Latin epic, Vergil’s Aeneid notably recounts Hercules’ encounter with Cacus and suggests that Augustus will surpass Hercules in his achievements, while Ovid’s Metamorphoses covers Hercules’ death and apotheosis, and victories over Achelous, Antaeus and Periclymenus. Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica follows Apollonius, with Hercules leaving the expedition at the end of his Book 3; and the Antaeus episode is related in the surprising context of Lucan’s Pharsalia, a rare epic poem on a historical subject.4 If Herakles-­Hercules is not a central figure in most of the ancient epic poems known today, he is the protagonist of one poem which is still extant: the 480-­line Shield, traditionally attributed to Hesiod but now generally assigned to an anonymous later-­archaic poet (c. 570 bce). The title is justified by the elaborate description of Herakles’ shield which takes up more than a third of the poem (ll. 139–319), but this is preceded by a substantial account of the hero’s birth (ll.1– 56) and interrupts the narrative of his battle with the fierce Kyknos, son of Ares, whom he encounters in a grove of Apollo at Pagasai in Thessaly (ll. 57–138 and 320–480). We also know of several poems in which Herakles must have played a leading role, but which have come down to us as no more than a handful of fragments – quotations of a line or two, and/or testimonia that may be as little as passing mention of the poem’s title.5 We know little beyond the existence of the Capture of Oichalia variously attributed to Homer or to the contemporary Kreophylos of Samos: the title s­ uggests it recounted one

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of Herakles’ less admirable exploits, in which he retaliated against King Eurytos’ refusal to give him his daughter Iole’s hand in marriage by razing his city to the ground and taking Iole by force. We know a little more about the Herakleia (‘Deeds of Herakles’) by Peisandros of Kameiros, Rhodes, who flourished in the 640s bce. One of the testimonia (Souda π1565) tells us that the poem was in two books and that Peisandros ‘was the first to equip Herakles with a club’, while the twelve fragments indicate that the narrative included many of the labours and other exploits we know of from later sources: wrestling the lion, the hydra, the golden-­horned hind, the birds; crossing Okeanos in the cup of Helios, Antaios, the first sack of Troy. It is likely that the poem would also have encompassed the elements of Herakles’ birth, death and apotheosis mentioned in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, while one fragment (fr. 7) which is actually quoted, rather than paraphrased, confirms that the poem was in the standard epic hexameter. Another Herakleia was composed by Panyassis of Halikarnassos c.  450 bce, rather later than the majority of Greek epics. The thirty fragments include mention of several of the labours (lion, hydra, the Hesperides apples), Herakles’ rescue of Theseus and Peirithoos from the Underworld, his injuring of Hades and Hera, his liason with Omphale, and the naming of his son Hyllos. There must have been narration of a good many more episodes besides, however, as one of the testimonia (Suda π 248) tells us that it ran to fourteen books and had a total of 9,000 lines – three-­quarters of the length of the Odyssey. In the fourth century, such epics attracted criticism from Aristotle (Poetics 1451a16–22, trans. Malcolm Heath): ‘It is clear that a mistake has been made by all those poets who have composed a Heracleid or a Theseid, or poems of that kind, on the assumption that, just because Herakles was one person, the plot too is bound to be unified.’ The passage raises a point which continues to be an issue for modern storytellers grappling with Herakles as a theme: how do you make a coherent whole out of the great mass of episodes attached to the hero? The idea of giving a systematic account of Herakles’ exploits nevertheless persisted in the prose genre of mythography. We know of a substantial Herakles work by the Athenian Pherekydes (c.  450 bce), of which we have nineteen fragments indicating that it covered episodes from Herakles’ childhood, several of the labours and other exploits, and some of the events leading up to his death. A similar work by Herodoros of Herakleia (c. 400 bce), of which we have twenty-­eight fragments, apparently ran to more than seventeen books, potentially making it even more detailed than Panyassis’ epic.6

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Two later mythographic works which have survived in fairly complete form allow us to fill in the gaps. Diodoros of Sicily’s Historical Library, a ‘universal history’ of Greece from mythological times to 60 bce, written c. 30 bce, includes an extensive account of Herakles’ life (4.9–39). Apollodorus’ Library, most likely written in the first or second century ce, provides a more straightforward – and shorter – narrative (2.5–7), from Herakles’ birth to death and apotheosis, via the twelve labours and other exploits. Given the length and untidiness of Herakles’ story, it is perhaps not surprising that by far the majority of ancient writers and artists decided to focus on individual episodes. From the sixth century bce, we know of lyric poems by Stesichoros each treating a single one of Herakles’ combats, a Geryoneis, a Kerberos and a Kyknos. From the fifth century, extant tragedies include Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and Philoktetes, Euripides’ Herakles, Alkestis and Children of Herakles. Less well known today, due to the accidents of survival, are the many satyr plays which presented burlesque versions of Heraklean stories, with titles like The Lion, Little Herakles, Kerberos, Herakles at Tainaron, Eurystheus, Bousiris and Omphale. The Herakles who makes cameo appearances in Aristophanes’ Birds and Frogs gives just a small taste of what was apparently a stock character in Old and Middle Comedy, presumably playing a leading role in lost plays with titles like Herakles Marrying, Herakles in Search of the Belt, Herakles with Pholos, Kerkopes, Auge, ManHerakles and Herakles the Producer. Even in the more everday world of New Comedy we hear of a Pseudo-Herakles by Menander, and Herakles’ birth story is central to Plautus’ Amphitryon. Likewise in the visual arts, it is individual episodes which predominate, from the vases of archaic Greece through to the wall-­paintings, mosaics and sculpture of the imperial Roman world. In just a handful of cases we see some attempt to tell the whole story, notably in the twelve metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia (c. 460 bce), which are often credited with having established the canon of labours, and on a number of Roman sarcophagi and mosaics.7 In short, the ancient Herakles was certainly a hero of epic, and at least two substantial epic poems were dedicated to telling the whole of his story. The sheer quantity of episodes attached to him make that story ‘epic’ in a looser sense, too, in terms of scale, as does the geographical scope of his travels, which took him from end to end of the known world and beyond. While that story is preserved in some detail in our later mythographic sources, however, no authorative epic text survives as a point of reference – no equivalent of the Iliad,

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Odyssey or Aeneid – and this has had a profound effect on Herakles’ reception. What survive from antiquity to inform modern reworkings of the hero’s story are myriad accounts of individual episodes from Herakles’-Hercules’ myth, in a wide variety of story-­telling media, both literary and visual. T H E M O D E R N H E RC U L E S S T O RY: EVOKING AND REJECTING EPIC The question of narrative scope is clearly applicable to representations of Hercules on the modern screen, too, but before we turn to specific examples we should look briefly at that other category of ‘epic’, the epic film. The slippery issue of definition is addressed elsewhere in this volume, but a few statements on the subject are worth citing here to establish some parameters for interrogating the Herculean material. In the 1984 volume Epic Film Elley lists what he sees as non-­essential characteristics before identifying the genre’s most significant feature: This book is not about spectacular films, inordinately long films, heroic films, war films or costume films per se – all of which, at one time or another, have been dubbed ‘epics’. Rather, it is about epic form in the cinema – specifically in those films dealing with periods up to the end of the Dark Ages, a time when correspondences with the literary epic are ­­greatest . . . S­pectacle is the genre’s most characteristic ­­trademark . . . ­The epic ­­film . . . h ­ as the same power as the literary epic to express universal concepts of morality. The form’s main aim, however, is to entertain.8

The idea of there being some commonality with ancient literary epic is of interest, but the emphasis on spectacle is especially striking. Ten years later, Lucanio puts the word in his subtitle – Italian Spectacles on American Screens – but makes a distinction between spectacle and epic, the latter being ‘defined not only by its visual opulence but by its extensive development of both narrative and character’.9 In a more recent (2011) Epic Film volume, Burgoyne fails to problematise his subject, but he does offer a definition in passing: The features that define the epic film – tactility and immersion, spectacle and eroticism, monumentality and sensuality – suggest that the sensory excitement of the medium itself played a role in their success ­­ . . . ­The first part [of the volume] focuses on spectacle – the signature trait of the epic genre.10

Spectacle recurs in Blanshard and Shahabudin’s identification of the genre’s most important features: An epic film is certainly a production on a large scale, in terms of budget, resources, locations and often casts (prestige as well as numbers). This dictates

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a presentation in which spectacle and grandeur are foregrounded, making the ancient world with its monumental architecture and extravagant emperors an ideal topic for epic film.11

Pace Elley, they go on to comment on the apparent paradox that ‘film epic was never particularly interested in ancient epic’, attributing this to ‘Classical Hollywood’s primary drive for realism’ which ‘could not easily accommodate the gods, heroes and monsters of ancient myth’ – an issue to which we will return. For now, the salient point is that Hollywood epic favours biblical or Roman historical subjects.12 Spectacle, then, is one quality on which all agree. On this criterion, the Hercules films of the late 1950s and early 1960s would seem to qualify as epic: the advertisement with which we started (Figure 3.1) places the emphasis firmly on the visual – ‘­­SEE . . . ­SEE . . . SEE . . .’ – and scale – ‘cast of thousands’. Indeed, the term ‘historical spectacle movies’ is adopted by Smith (in yet another Epic Films volume) for a listing of films which includes eighteen on Herculean themes.13 However, the Hercules films belong to a distinct, if related, genre most commonly referred to as the ‘sword and sandal’ film or ‘the peplum’, the latter term coined in the early 1960s by French scholars in derisive reference to the protagonists’ short tunics, but subsequently appropriated by fans.14 The style of costume immediately identifies the genre’s typical setting in classical antiquity, but, alongside the predominantly biblical and Roman historical topics of epic, other cultures often feature in the peplum, with Greek myth and monsters especially prevalent. The defining features of the peplum are the genre’s usually Italian production (some French and Spanish co-­productions can be found), often clumsy dubbing for the English-­ language version, low budget, and a focus on the muscle-­bound body of the strongman hero, often played by an American bodybuilder.15 Turning to specific examples, first, the founding film of the peplum genre: Pietro Francisci’s Le fatiche di Ercole, promoted in the United States as Hercules, starring Steve Reeves. As already noted, Joseph Levine’s extraordinary marketing campaign sought to align the film with the Hollywood epic in terms of the emphasis on spectacle and scale.16 In terms of narrative scope, the film ignores most of the traditional Hercules myth, the plot being very loosely based on the story of the Argonauts bringing back the Golden Fleece – indeed, the credits acknowledge ‘The Argonauts by Appollonius (sic) of Rhodes (Third Century bc)’. The reference seems to recognise value in associating the film with ancient literary tradition, and yet the film diverges significantly from Apollonius’ version of the story: Jason’s role as

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leader is subordinated to Hercules, who is clearly the romantic lead as well as the strongest of the party, morally as well as in terms of physical prowess. There is no question of a young male love-­interest distracting Hercules from the quest, but rather he accompanies it all the way to Colchis and back: indeed, without his determination, Jason and the rest would have been detained by the (firmly heterosexual) Amazons en route.17 There is, however, brief engagement with the labours to establish Hercules’ identity as invincible monster-­ slayer. Early on in the film news reaches Jolco of a terrible lion threatening the neighbourhood, the bodies of its bloodied victims dramatically displayed in the city square: although Hercules kills it with his bare hands, his failure to save princess Iole’s arrogant brother Iphitus from its jaws leads to his being sent away. Shortly thereafter Hercules also dispatches a not-­very-­imposing bull, but it is the lion-­slaying which would subsequently become a staple of Hercules films, acting as shorthand for all his labours. In terms of narrative, then, this Hercules has some contact with an ancient epic, but not one which traditionally features Hercules as leading man. The links with Hollywood epic are more obvious, for example in the film’s use of monumental architecture: the scene where the lion’s depredations are discovered reveals Jolco’s agora as looking rather like that of ancient Athens, with temple-­like structures of its own, including King Pelias’ palace, backed by an acropolis crowded with further columned buildings.18 Hercules’ Samsonesque pulling down of the palace, his torso’s musculature showcased in the famous ‘lateral spread’, is the memorable climax of the film.19 The sequel, Ercole e la regina di Lidia (1959), promoted in the United States as Hercules Unchained, again establishes the hero’s identity early on via a traditional combat, with the giant Anteus (heavyweight boxer Primo Carnera). In antiquity this encounter is a parergon (an ‘incidental deed’) rather than one of the twelve labours imposed by Eurystheus, but it was promoted to the canon of twelve during the Middle Ages and was one of the most popular Herculean themes for depiction by Renaissance artists.20 The film’s overall plot, however, is loosely based on a myth in which Hercules traditionally has no involvement at all: the Seven Against Thebes – though again the credits claim it is ‘based on the legends of Hercules and Omphale from the works of Sophocles, Aeschylus’. The substantial sub-­plot indicated by the Italian title, in which the hero is detained by queen Omphale, is certainly part of the ancient Herculean curriculum vitae,21 but Lydia’s apparent status as an island in the film is one of many elements likening Omphale to the Odyssey’s Circe,

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the reference being underlined by the role of a young Ulysses as Hercules’ sidekick. Once again, then, ancient epic is in evidence as an influence on the narrative, but it is largely the ‘wrong’ epic as far as Hercules’ story is concerned, while the stated influence of ancient literature must refer to Aeshylus’ Seven Against Thebes and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus rather than any Herakles-­themed tragedy. The link with Hollywood epic is again stronger, especially in the figure of the villainous Eteocles (Sergio Fantoni), who has usurped his brother Polyneices’ right to rule Thebes in alternate years. He is the epitome of the Evil Roman Emperor, in the mould of Peter Ustinov’s Nero in Quo Vadis (1951), especially as he languidly watches tigers in his private arena.22 An even more direct evocation of the Roman historical epic can be seen when Hercules himself is forced to fight the tigers, while the poor folk of Thebes look on through a grate from their prison below the arena, just like Christians waiting to be fed to the lions.23 In the avalanche of sword and sandal films which followed, these sorts of deliberate evocations of the Hollywood epic can frequently be spotted, but the narratives move ever further away from Greek myth. Even a vaguely ancient-­world setting is abandoned in such titles as Hercules and the Black Pirate, set in seventeenth-­century Spain (Sansone contro il Corsaro Nero, 1962), the Western Hercules of the Desert (La Valle dell’Eco Tonante, 1964) and Hercules Against the Moon Men (Maciste e la Regina di Samar, 1964). It is also worth noting how quickly the genre begins to subvert itself. Vittorio Cottafavi’s Hercules Conquers Atlantis (Ercole a la Conquista di Atlantide, aka Hercules and the Captive Women, 1961) stars the English bodybuilder Reg Parke as a strikingly lazy Hercules, who has to be tricked into action by his companions – despite posters for the film promising the standard epic ‘unprecedented spectacle with a cast of thousands’, and a protagonist ‘pounding the screen with the tremendous power of violent action!’24 Likewise reacting against the conventions of the peplum is Giorgio Capitani’s Samson and His Mighty Challenge (Ercole, Sansone, Maciste e Ursus gli invincibile, aka Combatei dei giganti and Le grand défi, 1964), starring Alan Steel (Sergio Ciani), one of very few Italians to play the role. As I have argued elsewhere, the film’s parodic intentions are announced in the opening scene, where Hercules explicitly rejects Zeus’ indication of the ‘path of virtue’ in favour of that of pleasure – a rare direct filmic reference to the Prodicean ‘Choice of Herakles’ story.25 The film pays tongue-­in-­cheek homage to Hollywood epic in its costumes, its props and the monumental architecture of the palace of Lydia (here a city):

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the wicked queen Nemea (comic actress Lia Zoppelli) hastily rejects Hercules’ offer to prove his identity by tearing down a column or two: ‘No, no, I’ve just had the palace redecorated!’ The peplum is overtaken by the ‘Spaghetti Western’ in Italian popular filmmaking from the mid-­1960s, but the genre is exploited for comic effect in Hercules in New York (1970), and briefly revived in the (Italian-­produced) Hercules (1983) and The Adventures of Hercules (Le avventure dell’incredibile Ercole, 1985), starring Lou ‘the Hulk’ Ferrigno; their setting partly in outer space gives them as much in common with science fiction as the traditional peplum. The 1990s see two important developments in the hero’s onscreen depiction, the Hercules: The Legendary Journeys franchise and Disney’s Hercules (1997), to which we will briefly return below, although both deserve fuller discussion than can be accommodated here.26 More directly indebted to the peplum tradition are the two major Hercules films of 2014, and their accompanying ‘mockbuster’, which also display the influence of Hollywood epic, mediated by the influential Gladiator (2000).27 Renny Harlin’s The Legend of Hercules, starring Kellan Lutz, and Brett Ratner’s Hercules, with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, have been thoroughly discussed elsewhere, especially in the 2018 Screening Antiquity volume Epic Heroes on Screen;28 Nick Lyon’s low-­budget, direct-­to-­video Hercules Reborn of the same year has received less scholarly attention, but has not been entirely overlooked.29 Of most relevance here, however, are observations on three aspects of the 2014 films. First, narratives: all three films have overarching storylines which are far removed from any precedent in ancient literature. The beginning of Ratner’s Hercules brilliantly invokes the labours only to undercut the audience’s belief in them, as the narrator turns out to be Hercules’ self-­appointed PR man Iolaus, and Hercules himself, despite his conspicuous wearing of the lion skin throughout the film, repeatedly fails to endorse his version of the story: asked ‘Did you really kill the lion?’ he replies enigmatically ‘So they say’ – not until the closing credits do we find out what really happened.30 Apart from this postmodern take on the peplum’s traditional use of one or more labours to establish the hero’s identity, the only element of the ancient myth to be included is Hercules’ murder of his family in a fit of madness, elaborated especially in Euripides’ Herakles and Seneca’s Hercules Furens tragedies – and even this receives a modern twist. Reborn reprises the madness theme, with the same twist, but makes no reference to the labours, the establishment of Hercules’ identity being achieved rather by a fight against regular soldiers and his own

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Figure 3.2  Hercules (Kellan Lutz) in the arena in Sicily. The Legend of Hercules (2014). Summit Entertainment/Millennium Films.

declaration ‘I am Hercules!’ The Legend’s tale of a romantic hero who has to win his way back from exile to rescue the girl he loves and bring peace to the kingdom of Tiryns bears some resemblance to Hercules (1958), but goes against the peplum’s convention of the hero who eschews settled political power when he stays to inherit the throne. Of ancient myth there is little trace: even a brief Nemean lion scene is undercut by Hercules’ crediting of Iphicles with his own barehanded victory, and Iphicles’ wearing of its pelt on their return to the palace. Second, Roman elements: the Hercules of The Legend spends a good deal of the film as a gladiator, in scenes endebted to Spartacus (1960) and Gladiator. Figure 3.2, for example, has Hercules contending with a net-­throwing retiarius as well as other gladiators. This provides an obvious link to the classic Hollywood epic, although, as noted above, arena scenes can be found in the notionally Greek world of the peplum too.31 Third, monumental architecture: the 2014 films’ most obvious continuity with Hollywood epic is in their use of spectacular architecture, facilitated by the twenty-­first-­century filmmakers’ access to CGI. Not so much is on show in the low-­budget Reborn, though external shots of the palace at Enos feature a monumental courtyard surrounded by

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Corinthian columns, with steps leading up to a monumental doorway flanked by Doric columns. Locations in The Legend draw on elements from a variety of periods – Minoan Knossos, Mycenae’s Lion Gate (the lions replaced by griffins), a classical Greek-­style theatre – as well as the Roman amphitheatre in which the hero performs in Sicily. The scene in Figure 3.2, with white-­tunic-­clad spectators shouting the action on, right fists raised, looks like evocations of the arena in nineteenth-­century painting, such as Jean-­Leon Gerôme’s Pollice Verso (Phoenix Art Museum, 1872) – just the sort of image on which the classic Hollywood epic itself frequently drew. Ratner’s Hercules has two contrasting monumentalised locations. Flashbacks to Hercules’ earlier life feature a magnificent reconstruction of the Athenian Acropolis as it might have looked after the Periclean building project of the fifth century bce, with Ionic temples and colonnades, and a colossal Athena Parthenos statue looking across the lower town and out to sea. Cotys’ Thracian court, by contrast, is replete with heavier Doric columns, more darkly lit, and dominated by the statue of Hercules’ traditional divine arch-­enemy Hera. The viewer’s attention is drawn to it by princess Ergenia’s comments – ‘it took five years and a thousand men’ to build – and its toppling by Hercules provides the climax of the final battle.32 R E A L I S M V E R S U S T H E F A N TA S T I C Finally, let us return to Blanshard and Shahabudin’s comment on classic Hollywood epic’s ‘drive for realism’ and difficulty accommodating ‘the gods, heroes and monsters of ancient myth’ (above). It is perhaps in deference to this tradition that the peplum, despite its Greek mythological subject matter, generally avoids direct representation of the gods: in Hercules (1958) the hero even renounces his own divinity, communicating with the gods via a visit to ‘the Sibyl’ in an anachronistically ruined Greek temple. In subsequent pepla, likewise, any communication with the divine is via a priest-­ intermediary: the direct intervention of Zeus in Capitani’s Samson and His Mighty Challenge, twice heard as a disembodied voice from above, is part of the film’s parody of the genre’s conventions. The obvious challenge to the pagan gods’ invisibility comes of course with Jason and Argonauts, and later Clash of the Titans (1981), the screenplays of both masterminded by Beverley Cross and Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen himself was struck by the absence of supernatural elements from previous films on Greek mythological subjects, and by their potential for stop-­motion animation:

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Most films in the genre, including the Italian sword-­and-­sandal epics of the ’50s and ’60s, had concentrated on the heroes, heroines and villains while more or less ignoring the creatures[33] and the machinations of the gods. So I asked myself: what if we make a film that featured the creatures and the gods and used the humans to link the story? That was how Jason and Argonauts was born.34

As Lewellyn-­Jones argues, the resulting films’ conception of the gods is very much in keeping with that of Homer, and this in turn affects the presentation of their mortal protagonists: ‘Jason and Perseus – heroes who never appear in Homeric epics per se – are given Homeric epic qualities on screen due to their direct involvement with the gods.’35 Subsequent Hercules films would have no hesitation in representing the divine. Hercules in New York begins on Olympus, whence the bored young hero (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is ejected by a lightning-­ bolt accident, and which is thronged with toga-­clad gods, several of whom try to retrieve him. The five films of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994) and the subsequent TV series (1995–9) likewise feature the gods quite prominently – notably Antony Quinn’s Zeus, but other Olympians and a host of minor deities too; Hera’s hostile presence is often indicated by the appearance in the sky of just a pair of eyes and a peacock feather, to a menacing musical motif. Disney’s Hercules (1997) also features scenes on Olympus, where Hercules is born the legitimate child of Zeus and Hera, although he, like his 1958 predecessor, eventually renounces his divinity in favour of human love. In the twenty-­first century, gods have become almost familiar figures on screen: Immortals (2011) pits evil King Hyperion and the Titans against Theseus and a whole army of Greek gods, including Hercules (Steve Byers); the two Percy Jackson films (2010 and 2013) feature an array of Olympians alongside their demigod offspring; meanwhile Marvel Cinematic Universe’s three Thor films (2011, 2013 and 2017) feature the Norse gods of Asgard, while Thor also appears in the superhero film The Avengers (2012) and its sequels. Against this background it is striking that the three 2014 Hercules films eschew direct representation of the divine, reverting to the peplum convention of indirect reference, for example via Cotys’ statue of Hera in Hercules. The Legend likewise has Alcmene praying to statues – a twice-­life-­size one in Hera’s temple early in the film and later a smaller one beside which Alcmene is murdered – while Zeus’ interventions are represented by lightning and thunder rather than by any anthropomorphic apparition. While the possibility of the hero’s divinity is raised, the emphasis in all three films is very much on Hercules the man.

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Emma J. Stafford CONCLUSION

The short answer to the question ‘is there such a thing as a modern Hercules epic?’, then, is ‘no’, or at least ‘not really’. All Hercules-­ themed films made to date fall short of the ancient poetic genre in one way or another: the majority suppress the gods who play such a vital role in ancient epic and they do not cover much, if any, of the ancient Herakles’ story – although they may borrow elements from other epic heroes’ stories. In terms of Hollywood epic, Hercules-­themed films come closer, especially in their emphasis on spectacle, achieved via their use of monumental architecture and the action set against it. It might be fair to say that these productions are not ‘epics’ in themselves, but rather that they interact with, and often deliberately evoke, both ancient epic poetry and Hollywood epic film. The failure of the film industry to exploit the wealth of ancient stories about Herakles-­ Hercules can be attributed to the lack of an authorative ancient text, although this very absence has also proved an attraction to some – as the directors of Disney’s Hercules, John Musker and Ron Clements, commented: ‘Hercules appealed to us because it didn’t seem as sacred a thing as something like the Odyssey.’36 For a future filmic Hercules epic to be successful, one would first have to reconstruct the storyline of Peisandros’ or Panyassis’ epic – a venture for which, as we have seen, plenty of material is available – and then consider the issue of format. One might review the relative merits of existing screen adaptations of the Homeric epics, the Iliad and Odyssey: Helen of Troy (1956, 1 hour 58 minutes) compared to Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004, 2 hours 43 minutes) and the eight-­part Troy: Fall of a City (2018, 56-­minute episodes); Ulysses (1 hour 34 minutes) compared to the two-­part TV mini-­series The Odyssey (1997, 2 hours 56 minutes). Clearly an eight-­hour series allows time for more detail to be included, more ‘development of narrative and character’ (Lucanio, above), than a film of an hour and a half. An episodic structure is also, arguably, suitable for a tale like that of Hercules, which is composed of so many parts. Then there is the issue of the gods. The two 1950s films here both omit the gods, as does Petersen’s Troy – as Llewellyn-­Jones comments: ‘The editing out of the gods of Troy shows an astonishing lack of imagination on Petersen’s ­­part . . . ­The gods are central not only to the arc of Homer’s glorious narrative, but to the symbolic heart of the Iliad.’37 Scholarly assessment of Troy: Fall of a City has only recently emerged in print, but the depiction of the gods in the series is certainly striking: not only are they visible to the viewer and their power clearly drives the

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action, but the casting of British-­Nigerian actor Hakeem Kazim as Zeus caused particular comment.38 Our Hercules epic, then, would be a multi-­part series, employing all the potential of modern CGI for representing monsters, gods and exotic locations. It would also not shirk the issue of Herakles’Hercules’ own divinity: the hero’s ultimate apotheosis was central to the myth in antiquity, and provides a happy ending to counterbalance the many tribulations of his life. The story this epic would tell is neatly summarised in one final example of ancient epic poetry, in just nine hexameter lines of the sixth-­century bce Homeric Hymn (no. 15) to Herakles the Lion-Hearted (my translation): I shall sing of Herakles, son of Zeus, by far the best of men on the earth, whom Alkmene bore in fair-­dancing Thebes, after she had lain with the dark-­clouded son of Kronos. Once he used to wander over the unmeasured land and the sea, sent by lord Eurystheus, and on his own account he both performed and endured many violent deeds. But now he lives happily in the fine seat of snowy Olympos, and has fair-­ankled Hebe as his wife. Hail, lord, son of Zeus: Grant me excellence and wealth!

NOTES I would like to thank the organisers of, and the other participants in, the Modern (Ancient) Epic panel at the Celtic Classical Conference at University College Dublin, June 2016, for their helpful comments and discussion. Thanks are also due to Amanda and Hunter as patient editors.   1 Estimates vary: cataloguing the Hercules films of the 1950s and 1960s is hampered by the fact that they are all continental European productions which were subsequently dubbed into English for a wider audience, the hero sometimes being named for the biblical ‘Samson’ or the Italian ‘Maciste’ (on whom see Reich 2015).   2 Solomon (2001: 103–31 and 307–23) provides a useful overview of Hercules on film 1909–98; see also Blanshard (2005) and Stafford (2012: 232–9); Solomon (2018) brings the survey up to date. On the concept of ‘rebooting’ in relation to the 2014 films, see Gordon (2020).   3 Greek epic: e.g., Iliad 5.640–51, 8.362–8, 14.249–56, 18.11–19, 19.95– 125, 20.144–8; Odyssey 11.266–70 and 601–26, 21.11–41; Hesiod, Theogony ll. 215–16, 289–94, 306–32, 950–5; Catalogue of Women frs 10a.1–19, 25, 26.29–33, 33a.12–17, 43a.65, 65, 195.8–63, 233 MW; Kypria, Argumentum ll. 28–9 PEG (Bernabé 1996); (West 2003: 70–1).   4 Latin epic: Vergil, Aeneid 8.184–305 and 6.801–3; Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.1–273 and 12.536–76; Lucan, Pharsalia 4.593–655.

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  5 The standard reference work for epic fragments is PEG, but they have been made much more accessible by the publication of the Loeb volume (West 2003), which includes Greek text, English translation and brief commentary. See West (2003) 172–7 (Kreophylos), 176–87 (Peisandros), 188–217 (Panyassis); translations here are my own, adapted from West’s.   6 These fragmentary mythographies are more accessible since the publication of Fowler’s text (2000) and commentary (2013), the latter including a substantial chapter on Herakles.   7 A multiplicity of Herakles scenes can also be seen on the Heraion I at Foce del Sele (c. 560–540 bce), the Athenian Treasury at Delphi (c. 490 bce) and the Temple of Hephaistos in the Athenian Agora (449/448 bce). For systematic discussion of the ancient sources mentioned in this section, see Galinsky (1972), Gantz (1993) and Stafford (2012).  8 Elley (1984: 1–2).   9 Lucanio (1994: 7 n.1). 10 Burgoyne (2011: 2–3). 11 Blanshard and Shahabudin (2011: 37–9). 12 On Greek history’s lack of appeal for Hollywood, cf. Elley (1984: 52) and Nisbet (2008: 7 and 9). 13 Smith (1991). 14 For discussion of the term, see Aziza (1998: 7–11) and (2009: 13–19). 15 Bondanella (2009: 159–79) equates the two genres in the unexamined title of his Chapter 6, ‘The Italian “Peplum”: The Sword and Sandal Epic’, which begs many questions. 16 McKenna (2008: 87–116) discusses the promotional campaign for Hercules (Le fatiche di Ercole) in the context of Levine’s career. 17 In Don Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts (1963), the nearly forty-­year-­ old Nigel Green very properly features as an older Hercules, driven to abandon the expedition by Hylas’ disappearance. 18 Garcia (2008: 24) notes the contribution of set designer Flavio Mogherini, who had previously worked on Mario Camerini’s Ulysses (1954). 19 For further discussion of Hercules (Le fatiche di Ercole), see Lucanio (1994: 12–56), Wyke (1997b), Rushing (2008), Blanshard and Shahabudin (2011: 58–76), Burke (2011: 26–33), Pomeroy (2013) and Stafford (2017: 150–5). On the peplum more broadly in its social context, see Dyer (1997: 165–83), Günsberg (2005: 97–132), Cornelius (2011), O’Brien (2014) and Rushing (2016). 20 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy IV poem 7.13–35. On the ancient canon, see Stafford (2012: 24–30); on Hercules in Renaissance art, see Bull (2005: 86–140). 21 On the ancient sources for the Omphale story, see Stafford (2012: 132–4). 22 On Quo Vadis, see Blanshard and Shahabudin (2011: 40–56).

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23 For further discussion of Hercules Unchained, see Clauss (2008) and Stafford (2017: 155–61). 24 The film’s parodic qualities are commented on by Burke (2011: 33 and 38–46) and Shahabudin (2009). See also Elley (1984: 58), Giordano (1998: 45–7), Winkler (2007b: 466–9 and 472–3), Pomeroy (2008: 52–3 fig. 4) and Bondanella (2009: 171). 25 The story is first attested in Xenophon’s Memorabilia 2.1.21–34: see Stafford (2005) on the ancient sources and Stafford (2017) on the theme’s significance in the peplum. Samson and His Mighty Challenge has other­wise only received passing mention in scholarly literature: Lucanio (1994: 270–2), Giordano (1998: 45), Blanshard and Shahabudin (2011: 174). The film is best known for its reuse in the Australian cult classic Hercules Returns (1993), on which see Dillon (2020). 26 On The Legendary Journeys, see Blondell (2005) and Solomon (2020). On Disney’s Hercules, see Thomas (1997: 164–219), Byrne and Macquilian (1999: 151–9), Prieto Arciniega (2010: 75–88), Blanshard and Shahabudin (2011: 194–215), Maurice (2020) and Summers (2020). Cf. Allan (2020) on the Translux series The Mighty Hercules (1963–6), and Safran (2015) on Hallmark’s 2005 mini-­series Hercules. 27 See Blanshard and Shahabudin (2011: 216–38) on ‘The return of the epic? Gladiator (2000)’; see also Winkler (2004). 28 See, e.g., Blanshard (2018), Cyrino (2020), and Jean Alvares[and Patricia Salzman-­ Mitchell (2020); cf. Katherine Lu Hsu (2020) and T.  H.  M.  Gellar-­Goad (2020) on the Steve Moore comics on which Hercules (2014) is based. 29 See Stafford (2018) and Gordon (2020). 30 See Chiu (2018) on the important role played by this Hercules’ companions, a departure from the ‘lone hero’ model of the peplum. 31 Cf. Blanshard and Shahabudin (2011: 221–2 and 224) on gladiatorial combat not being confined to films set in Rome. 32 On the CGI work on the film by Method Studios and Milk VFX, see Wilson (2014) with related links; also the DVD extra ‘The Effects of Hercules’. Cf. Garcia (2008) on the creation of ‘Greece’ in earlier films. Cf. Stafford (2018) on other aspects of the ‘look’ of the three 2014 films. 33 Harryhausen disliked the term ‘monsters’. 34 Harryhausen and Dalton (2005: 99). 35 Llewellyn-­Jones (2013: 18); see also Trzaskoma (2013). On Jason and the Argonauts more generally, see Blanshard and Shahabudin (2011: 125–45). 36 Thomas (1997: 166). 37 Llewellyn-­ Jones (2013: 17). On Troy more generally, see Winkler (2007a). 38 Cyrino and Augoustakis (2021): see especially chapters on episodic structure and representation of the gods.

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4  Vergilian Echoes of Fate in Snowpiercer (2013): Engine and Empire without End Jennifer A. Rea

This chapter examines how both the film Snowpiercer (2013) and the ancient epic the Aeneid utilise the idea that violent conflict is necessary in order to survive and have a viable future. As a basis for comparison of the two works, I borrow a concept from Paula James, whose approach to classical reception studies includes analysing what she calls mythical ‘types’ – such as the heroic figure – drawn from antiquity. These types, she argues, can inspire characters’ stories in modern popular media without being a direct retelling of a myth.1 Something similar, I believe, can be said about Snowpiercer and the Aeneid; the film is not based on the Aeneid, but there is a Roman idea, which Rhiannon Evans calls ‘Rome’s decline narrative’,2 that carries over into Snowpiercer. As Evans notes, warfare seems to be the Romans’ ‘natural state’, and the population endures a dystopian existence. Consequently, peace and order are dependent on conflict, violent force and laws.3 Likewise, Snowpiercer emphasises the need for revolution and violent rebellion as a way to maintain order. It is through a close reading of the similarities between the two works, I suggest, that we can better understand Snowpiercer’s ambiguous ending, which raises meaningful questions about the high costs of war for a population. Snowpiercer is a movie about a group of people attempting to escape the ruins of their frozen civilisation with a leader. The Aeneid is an epic about a group of people attempting to escape the burning ruins of their city with a leader. Both the film and Vergil’s ancient epic ask audiences to consider unsettling questions about their societies’

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futures: are strife and conflict necessary to achieve a peaceful society? How do rumours and fate contribute to the sense that there is no opting out of the future? Moreover, both works contain problematic endings: in each instance the audience has to consider, ‘What will life look like following war and destruction?’ In the Aeneid, the audience is viewing the events from the vantage point of knowing the future; in Snowpiercer, the audience does not know the outcome of events. V E R G I L’ S A E N E I D Publius Vergilius Maro composed his Roman epic, the Aeneid, between 29 and 19 bce. The poem tells the story of the Trojan exile Aeneas and how he sails with a group of refugees to the Italian shores, where he is destined to found a new city. The son of the mortal Anchises and the Roman goddess Venus, Aeneas flees from the devastated city of Troy following the Trojan War. During his adventures, Aeneas travels to Cumae in Italy, where he finds the Underworld’s entrance. While on his journey through the Underworld, Aeneas’ father, Anchises, explains the significance of Aeneas’ mission and informs him that Fate has already determined his future (Aen. 6.756–853; 888–92). The gods and Anchises inform Aeneas that he must fulfill his destiny of settling the Trojans in Italy and of creating a bloodline that will eventually establish and rule Rome. Aeneas is often hesitant about his mission, but the founding of the Roman empire will prove inevitable. Aeneas’ goal is to establish a peaceful settlement for himself and his fellow Trojans. Nevertheless, once he arrives in Italy, he has first to fight the local inhabitants for the right to settle in a foreign land. The bloody battle against the local Rutulian hero, Turnus, for the claim to rule in Latium ends with Aeneas and the Trojans as victors. His victory at the end of Vergil’s work, however, raises significant questions about whether or not violence can ever solve humanity’s problems and whether or not war is ever justified. Similarly, Snowpiercer’s protagonist Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) will hesitate sometimes, a father figure named Gilliam (John Hurt) will guide him, rumour will drive the film’s action, and the protagonist will be told that he is fated to lead his people. S N OW P I E R C E R Snowpiercer is an English-­language, South Korean, science fiction film based on a French graphic novel, Le Transperceneige. The film, directed by Bong Joon-­ho, portrays the geo-­engineering of earth gone

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wrong and its consequences for the population. Snowpiercer begins with news media discussing the events of 1 July 2014, when an attempt to cool the earth’s atmosphere and prevent global warming by shooting a chemical cooling substance, known as CW7, into the atmosphere worked too well; it ended up freezing the planet and setting off another ice age. The film’s audience is told that ‘life goes extinct’. Earth’s only survivors are riding on a train, known as the Snowpiercer, which circumnavigates the globe, and a mechanical, ‘never-­ending’ engine powers the train. The main action takes place aboard the train in 2031, by which time a diverse crowd of people is grouped within cars separated by a strict class division. The first-­class passengers live in splendour: they eat extravagant meals, dance in a disco car, and go to the spa and the sauna. They have every luxury imaginable at their disposal, while the poor experience a cattle-­car kind of existence where they subsist on protein bars made of insects. When necessary, the poor supply Wilford (Ed Harris), the train’s inventor, with children who can work the train’s engine; this is revealed near the end of the film to be a brutal form of child labour. Curtis Everett, the film’s main character, who is from the tail of the train (as the back is called), is one of the people who can remember what the squalid conditions were like for the poor when everyone first boarded and how long they have been eating protein bars made of insects. He starts a revolution to get to the front of the train so he can overthrow the class system. He is able to succeed in his mission with the help of a security expert, Nam (Song Kang-­ho), whom he rescues from the prison part of the train. Curtis bribes Nam with the promise of a drug in exchange for his help, and Nam insists on bringing his clairvoyant daughter, Yona (Go Ah-­sung), with him in exchange for helping Curtis. Snowpiercer’s characters learn that ‘if the engine ever stops, we’d all die’, and that the order of the class system is what keeps everyone alive. After Curtis begins the revolution, Snowpiercer’s second-­in-­ command, Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton), visits the characters that inhabit the train’s rear section to reinforce the idea that everyone has their place and must stay in it. Mason comes from the train’s front section to quell the rebellion following an incident where a man, Andrew (Ewan Bremmer), throws a shoe at Wilford’s assistant, Claude (Emma Levie), who has just hauled Andrew’s child away to help run the engine. Two of Wilford’s supporters immediately haul Andrew to a door on the train, and shove his arm outside until it freezes and can be broken off. Then Mason appears and reminds

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the passengers that they must not question the way in which the leaders run the train: ‘Order is the barrier that holds back the frozen death. We must all of us, on this train of life, remain in our allotted station. We must each of us occupy our preordained particular position.’ Curtis will challenge Mason’s idea that everyone’s positions are ‘preordained’. Her emphasis on maintaining a proper, sustainable balance between the existing population and the train’s resources foreshadows a later meeting Curtis has with Wilford, when he will find out the truth about how Wilford keeps the population in check. Control of the population and keeping everyone sectioned off in their appropriate train cars is the ultimate goal for those who are in charge. Curtis, like Aeneas during his journey, makes haste slowly during his quest to reach the front of the train. He questions his own leadership skills when he recalls that the early days of the train required the tail-­section passengers to resort to cannibalism before they were eventually given bug-­filled meal-­replacement bars. But, the darker side of Curtis shows that he is as much a part of the system as anyone else: he reveals to Nam that he was one of the men who killed and ate people to survive: You ever been to the tail section? Do you have any idea what went on back there? When we boarded? It was chaos. Yeah, we didn’t freeze to death, but we didn’t have time to be thankful. Wilford’s soldiers came and they took everything. A thousand people in an iron box ­­ . . . ­no food, no water. . . . After a month, we ate the weak. . . . You know what I hate about myself? I know what people taste like. I know that babies taste best.

Curtis also shows this darker side when he sacrifices his friend Edgar (Jamie Bell) to the mission and when he partakes in the killing to survive. When Curtis finally meets Wilford and finds out that the guards have taken children from the tail section to replace broken parts in the engine, he will have to decide whether the established system with the preordained places for the train’s passengers is worth perpetuating. F AT E A N D R U M O U R I N T H E A E N E I D Unlike Curtis, Aeneas will not have the choice to opt out of a preordained future. In this section I will look at some key examples of the way in which rumour, or gossip, fuels Aeneas’ inevitable journey towards building a future that includes Rome becoming a mighty empire. In particular, I will examine episodes that lead up to the final conflict between the Trojans and the local people in Italy that the

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Trojans have come to rule. The epic’s connection between rumour/ reputation, or fama, and fate or fata, will demonstrate the ways in which the future appears to have been predetermined for Aeneas and his descendants. As the epic progresses, Vergil’s audience sees the ways in which gossip influences how the characters, including Aeneas himself, react to news of the Trojans’ fate. Hardie notes that Vergil summarises the ways in which fama means ‘fame’, ‘rumour’ and ‘tradition’, and I will be focusing on fama as ‘rumour’ or ‘gossip’ here (4.173–97).4 Antonia Syson suggests that ‘fama has the power to make things happen in the world’ and points out that some of the Aeneid’s rumours are accurate, although the monstrous introduction to rumour in the Aeneid comes in the form of personified Fama, a hideous and frightening creature ‘who sings her gossip’.5 Thus, gossip can sometimes be an accurate report of what is happening, and sometimes be highly deceptive. Rumour/gossip manipulates the characters’ actions and their emotions; as Sarah Spence argues, the emotions which Fama can stir up are powerful.6 Yet Lee Fratantuono notes that Fama, or Rumour, ‘speaks the truth, even as she clings to the false and wicked (4.188)’.7 When the rumour of Aeneas’ relationship with Dido reaches a local king, Iarbas, he speaks to his father, Jupiter Ammon, about the situation. Vergil highlights the following for his audience: Iarbas sees Aeneas as a Paris-­like figure who poses a threat to an established order in Carthage (4.215–17). Iarbas’ disdain is evident in his stereotyping of the Trojans – he perceives Aeneas as an effeminate, perfumed foreigner who has come only to seize the land, create disorder and cause trouble. Despite Iarbas’ complaints, Jupiter indicates in his speech to Iarbas that Aeneas needs to go to Italy to rule there (4.224– 5). Fama also possesses the ability to outline ‘personal reputation’ in addition to the communication of ‘current affairs’.8 Thus, Fama has foreshadowed the conflict that will occur later in the epic between Aeneas, the foreigner with ‘effeminate’ ways, and his adversaries in Italy, and helped to set up the reason why he must leave Carthage to establish Roman rule in Italy.9 Fama will also announce Aeneas’ arrival at Latinus’ settlement (7.105) once he leaves Carthage. In this case, Fama foreshadows the downward spiral into the war of the Latins versus the Trojans. In part, the emotional reactions of characters like Iarbas to the rumours that spread about the Trojans help to establish the need for war. Syson defines the Aeneid’s Fama as an ‘unstable blend of imagination, information, and commemoration’, which conveys the gods’ will.10 Vergil establishes the ties between fama, emotion and power

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beginning in Book 4 with the rumours about Aeneas’ arrival, which indicate he is coming to rule. In the Aeneid’s second half, fama will continue driving the action towards the confrontation between Aeneas and his enemies. In Book 7, Aeneas and his men land at Ostia, and build a military encampment. The Trojans at this point have learned through rumour that they are finally in their destined place: ‘Here suddenly rumor is disseminated through the Trojans’ troops / that the day had come when they should found the walls’ (7.144–5). The Trojans send their representatives to the local king, Latinus, who allies himself with Aeneas, but Juno sends her own envoy, the Fury Allecto, to Latinus’ wife, Amata, who is hopeful that her daughter will marry Turnus. After Allecto stirs up Amata’s anger at a possible marriage between her daughter, Lavinia, and Aeneas, Allecto spurs Turnus into giving the orders to prepare for war against the Trojans (7.467–72): Therefore he points out the way to king Latinus, to the leaders of the youths, since peace was corrupted, and he orders preparations for war, to protect Italy, to drive out the enemy from its boundaries. . . . the Rutulians urged one another eagerly to arms.

In particular, phrases such as ‘peace was corrupted’ and the eager way in which the Rutulians encourage one another to go to war highlight the idea that this is supposed to be the time ‘when Troy can begin the process of merging with Italy to become Rome’.11 But all of the events that have led up to Aeneas and his men coming into conflict with the Rutulians, which included the gossip that the Trojans had reached their final destination, are fated because Jupiter is controlling the outcome. As Hershkowitz argues, the end is ‘Jupiter’s to dictate’ and as a result, Aeneas will win the duel with Turnus.12 Although false rumour and fate in the Aeneid fuel conflict and demonstrate Aeneas’ predetermined fate, Snowpiercer’s use of gossip and destiny will lead to a different end for Curtis, one where the audience gets to question whether or not he helps humanity at the film’s conclusion by opting out of his destined role on the train. F AT E A N D R U M O U R I N S N OW P I E R C E R Just as rumour drives the action in the Aeneid, it is also an essential part of Snowpiercer’s plot when it comes to keeping order on the train. Curtis and his fellow rebels will come to realise that the rumours are planted specifically to generate the rebellion in order to

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keep the train’s population ‘sustainable’. Thus, not all of the rumours on the train turn out to be true. In particular, the poor characters in the film believe erroneously that bullets, chickens and cigarettes have all become ‘extinct’. Right at the start of the rebellion, Curtis tells Gilliam, ‘Bullets are extinct’, but this will later prove to be false. Characters use the word ‘extinct’ throughout the film at key points to illustrate that the ‘facts’ which the tail class have come to believe are true are not in fact true. When Curtis first encounters Nam, Nam smokes a Marlboro Light that he pulls from his pocket, leading one character to remark, ‘I can’t believe it, cigarettes have been extinct for more than ten years now.’ Another character works a valve by hand to perform his job because a part has gone ‘extinct’, which hints at the fact that the audience and Curtis will eventually learn the truth behind how the ‘never-­ending’ engine works. This conversation will anticipate his eventual meeting with Wilford, who explains that another part ‘has gone extinct recently’ in his attempt to justify the child-­powered engine. Curtis suspects that the soldiers who maintain control on the train possess unloaded guns. His idea that the military is out of bullets is part of what makes him think the revolt can succeed. Minister Mason reinforces this idea in a scene where she tells an armed guard to put his ‘useless’ gun down. Curtis spreads the rumour that the guns are not actually loaded because he believes the armed guards used up all of the bullets four years ago in the last revolt, and this encourages other rebels to join his insurgency. The soldiers appear with guns but do not fire them in several fight scenes in the film, and this also reinforces the rumour. In particular, when Curtis first confronts an armed guard head-­on, the guard points the barrel of a gun at his head. But, when the guard pulls the trigger, no bullets come out. The other passengers in the tail section swarm the guards after seeing this, and the rebellion is under way. The fighting early on between the tail-­section passengers and the guards will be without guns fired. Later on, the extinct-­bullet rumour will be disproven in a classroom scene where armed guards fire loaded guns after the children watch a propaganda film about Wilford and the train’s ‘never-­ending’ engine. Curtis rejects the idea that he has to stay in a ‘preordained’ position at the train’s tail, yet his hesitancy to assume a leadership role contrasts with how others see his fate. He receives mysterious clues that Gilliam refers to as ‘red letters’, hidden in the protein bars, which reveal what he will need in order to rebel. The first clue tells him about Nam, the security expert, who can assist them in getting control of the train’s engine. Afterwards, he tells Gilliam, ‘I’m not who he

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Figure 4.1  Wilford (Ed Harris) explains to Curtis (Chris Evans) that he and Gilliam have been planning all along for Curtis to take over as leader in Snowpiercer (2013). Opus Pictures/The Weinstein Company.

[Edgar] thinks I am’, referring to Edgar looking up to him as a leader, to which Gilliam replies, ‘Few of us ever are.’ Gilliam warns Curtis: ‘Our fate depends on this man [Nam].’ Curtis notes, ‘We control the engine, we control the world. Without that we have nothing. All past revolutions have failed because they couldn’t take the engine.’ Curtis then reveals to Gilliam his plans to kill Wilford, and tells Gilliam he wants him to run the train. Edgar warns Curtis that Gilliam is old and will not be able to run the train for very long, at which point Curtis will need to take over. Curtis replies, ‘I’m not a leader.’ Curtis reminds Gilliam of his plan and Gilliam tells him, ‘Stop it, Curtis. Why are you doing that? You know very well that you’re already our leader. You have to accept that now.’ Curtis will soon learn that his reputation as a leader helps to shape his destiny (see Figure 4.1). The film’s central scene features the rebels watching young schoolchildren become indoctrinated with pro-­Wilford propaganda. The scene establishes that Wilford was an intelligent and inventive creator, but it also depicts him as a saviour figure whose dominance is required for survival. The propaganda makes an enemy out of Wilford for those who receive so little in the tail class of the train. The rumour that chickens and eggs have disappeared for good is disproven in the schoolroom scene, as Curtis receives an egg in which the word ‘blood’ appears written on a red letter contained within the egg. One of the rebels remarks, ‘Oh! I thought the chicken was extinct.’ Immediately afterwards, a worker who has been handing out eggs from a wheeled cart informs Curtis and the others, ‘There are actually many things on board that were rumored to be extinct’

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and then immediately pulls a gun out of the cart and begins firing. The teacher then joins him in shooting at Curtis and his followers. The classroom is equipped with a TV screen and Curtis then sees Gilliam, who remained behind with some of the other rebels, shot dead by an armed guard. Curtis stands looking at the screen in shock until another tail-­class passenger, Tanya (Octavia Spencer), slaps him across the face and says, ‘Curtis, you got to lead us.’ Curtis picks up a gun from the schoolroom floor and tells everyone ‘We go forward.’ The audience later finds out that there have been failed revolutions before this rebellion. Gilliam tells Curtis several times during the rebellion to get to the engine and talk to Wilford. When Gilliam warns him that he has to continue to be the leader of the revolution, Curtis hesitates, but finally agrees to go to the engine and see Wilford alone. Wilford then confesses that he and Gilliam have been grooming Curtis to take over as leader. Wilford: Curtis, everyone has their preordained position, and everyone is in their place except you. Curtis: That’s what people in the best place say to the people in the worst place.

Once again, the word ‘preordained’ is used to explain why things have always been the way they are on the train. All the revolutions that have taken place on the train, including this latest organised revolt, according to Wilford, were planned all along, and were necessary, in order to maintain the balance of the population: Wilford: Curtis, dear boy, the fact is that we are all stuck inside this blasted train. We are all prisoners in this hunk of metal ­­ . . . ­And this train is a closed ecosystem. We must always strive for balance. Air, food, water supply, population must always be kept in balance.

Curtis now realises that Wilford has carefully orchestrated events to lead up to this moment. Thus, as Ward argues, the characters’ illusion of free will – for example, Curtis receiving the red letters and deciding how to respond to each one – is deceptive: ‘everything matters, but nothing is as it seems’.13 Wilford explains to Curtis that sometimes there needs to be a way to reduce the population and they cannot wait for natural selection to occur. Wilford then confirms that achieving his desire for ‘optimal balance’ requires ‘radical’ solutions. It is at these times that Wilford has created conditions to incite revolutions. He refers to this rebellion as ‘the Great Curtis Revolution’ and tells him that Gilliam was in on the plan the whole time: Wilford: I believe it is easier for people to survive on this train if they have some level of insanity. I mean, as Gilliam well understood, we need to

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maintain a proper balance of anxiety and fear and chaos and horror in order to keep life going. If we don’t have that, we need to invent it. In that sense, the Great Curtis Revolution you invented was truly a masterpiece.

Wilford asks Curtis to take over his place as the engineer of the train: ‘And now you have the sacred responsibility to lead all of humanity. Without you, Curtis, humanity will cease to exist. Curtis ­­ . . . ­this is your destiny.’ Just as Syson establishes the connection between fama as both ‘rumour’ and ‘fame’ in the Aeneid,14 here Snowpiercer’s audience sees Wilford explaining the connection between the rumours, which are ‘invented’ for the purpose of inciting the rebellion, and how the rumours lead inevitably to the notoriety, or fame, that Curtis achieves as a result of ‘the Great Curtis Revolution’. THE ENDING OF THE AENEID Throughout the latter half of the Aeneid, the audience realises that war is approaching. As Evans notes, peace (pax) is a ‘post-­war state’: For Romans, the escape is provisional and conditional, found within the bounds of empire, and in Latin, pax has long been understood as a claim for Roman security – an end to civil war. . . . So, the overtly political use of pax is strongly connected to the maintenance of empire, rather than the end of all warfare.15

There is a cyclical model represented here where barbarians ‘without law are periodically subjected to the civilizing work of a saviour’, similar to the treatment of insurgents in Snowpiercer’s rebellions.16 Just as Wilford previously informed Curtis that he needed to fulfill his destiny, now Aeneas needs to fulfill his. The Aeneid, like Snowpiercer, challenges audiences to think about the consequences of using violence to maintain peace. Fama has stirred up violent emotions, creating the chaos and anger that led to this conflict. Yet the fight between Aeneas and Turnus culminates in the achievement of Jupiter’s plan. Fama has ‘furthered the plans of Jupiter’, which produces the ‘fama “fame” of Aeneas and his descendants’.17 Richard Thomas argues that when Aeneas pauses before killing Turnus, this hesitation leaves some room for the audience to feel unease about the epic’s ending: When, in other words, we turn back to the ending of Aeneid 12, no matter how comprehensible the vengeance is, we are left with a sense that it might not have happened and therefore might not needed to have happened (Aeneas’ hesitation shows the reality of that possibility).18

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The epic’s conclusion can make audiences feel Aeneas’ humanity.19 Aeneas knows Turnus killed Pallas, a youth whom Pallas’ father, Evander, entrusted to Aeneas before they went into battle. When Turnus enters the final battle wearing Pallas’ belt as a victory-­ token, Aeneas is enraged. Yet he does not decide to kill Turnus in haste: ‘Aeneas, hesitating, brandishes the deadly weapon against him’ (12.919–27). He stops for just a moment to reflect on using a telum fatale, or ‘deadly weapon’, against Turnus. Vergil describes the weapon as having a sound mightier than rocks from a tormentum or ‘war engine’. Thus, Turnus’ death hints at a cycle of violence and vengeance that will lead to Aeneas’ own demise.20 The Aeneid’s ending does not offer its audience closure or a solution to the violence of war, and there is no scholarly consensus on whether the epic looks towards the future with hope.21 In the final scene, Turnus begs Aeneas to spare him, or, if Aeneas will not agree to this, at least that his father may receive his corpse for burial (12.928–39). When Aeneas kills Turnus, he shows no mercy; rather, he demonstrates his independence when he decides to ignore Turnus’ pleas and to deviate from his father’s command to spare the submissive (6.851–3).22 The poem’s final lines describe Aeneas’ destructive accomplishment: he [Aeneas] concealed the sword within his [Turnus’] hostile chest; but his limbs grow slack with cold and his life fled indignant with a lamentation to the shades. (12.940–52)

The final lines offer a bleak message. Just as there is an established pattern of uprisings in Snowpiercer that sustain the never-­ending engine, Aeneas, through Turnus’ death, is setting in motion a series of violent conflicts that will lead to Rome’s founding. Will the empire be worth maintaining through future wars? Putnam has labelled Aeneas as both a civilisation founder and destroyer, arguing that his actions make the audience uncertain about the prospects for the future: ‘Death, not birth, or rebirth, is apparently in the offing.’23 This leaves Vergil’s audience wondering: does Aeneas see a future for himself in the new world he has helped to create?24 The ending remains unsettling. There is no funeral for Turnus, and no straightforward message that the proto-­Roman world is now a better place because of Aeneas’ rage: There is a relentless negativity to this conclusion that the poet leaves unresolved. . . . The poet offers us no relief from Aeneas’s all-­consuming fury, no transcendence into a different emotional or intellectual sphere. Neither

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through the words of his hero nor within the narration does Virgil come to the defense of his violent action. He gives us no sense that Aeneas kills either to secure his own heroic stature as his poem concludes or to rid the world of negative opposition to his immediate fate or to more distant Roman accomplishments.25

Consequently, the poem’s ending leaves the reader to consider the significance of Aeneas’ actions: Aeneas’ violent deed prefigures Rome’s future wars, which will consist of cyclical violent conquests to ensure peace. The audience can consider the question of whether Aeneas offers the Romans a better future or not. Curtis, on the other hand, will stop the cycle of rebellion and the ‘never-­ending’ engine. Nevertheless, questions also remain about how his actions will affect the future. S N OW P I E R C E R ’ S E N D I N G At the film’s end, Nam tells Curtis he does not want the future the train holds for him. He is convinced, based on the type of snow he has seen and the signs of thawing he has observed from the train’s windows, that the ice is melting. Therefore, he concludes that life can survive outside the train. Nam is opting out of a future that he feels he has no place in. He uses the drug to build an explosive to blow open an exterior door on the train. While he does not survive, his daughter Yona and a boy named Timmy do not succumb to the explosion’s blast and they step out into the snowy landscape. They escape the train’s burning carcass like Aeneas escaping from Troy’s burning ashes. They look around at the world and as the camera pans back, a polar bear appears in the distance, moving away from them. What does the film’s ending mean? Gerry Canavan writes of the hope of a non-­Caucasian, non-­Western future due to the destruction of the train along with the train’s capitalist system.26 Not everyone sees this as a possibility, however, and Aaron Bady contends the two survivors might face a doomed future: Everybody in this movie needs to die and they all do, thank God. That’s the real ending of the movie, and it’s pleasurable to watch, a relief. The movie fades to black before we see the polar bear eat these two kids, but let’s not fool ourselves, these two kids are not going to wander off into a new Eden and repopulate the earth. . . . Nature is about to eat the children that were just saved from being eaten by the train. A polar bear is not a sign of hope, because polar bears eat people, and anyway, how is a pair of children who have never been off the train, who have never even seen dirt, going to be able to live in what is basically Antarctica? Those kids are already dead, in days, if not hours, if not minutes.27

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Figure 4.2  Yona (Go Ah-­sung) marvels at the aquarium in the front of the train in Snowpiercer (2013). Opus Pictures/The Weinstein Company.

While the audience does not know what is going to happen to Timmy and Yona, it can recall the voiceover in the opening sequence that informs the audience, ‘life goes extinct’, and question whether or not the use of ‘extinct’ is accurate, when it was proven incorrect so many times in the film. The choice to end the established system might actually lead to a new beginning for humankind (see Figure 4.2). Bady argues that the train’s tail section’s purpose is to provide ‘psychological comfort’ to the rich, in addition to supplying children to replace the parts of the train that have worn out. They lack the comforts the first-­class passengers enjoy so the first class can be convinced that they have everything they want. He argues the tail passengers are required because revolutions are necessary. You need blood and violence to keep the system going – otherwise there is no change, and pleasure is derived from change, not from things always being the same. The purpose of the lowest level of society is ‘less and less to work and be exploited than to be excluded and to suffer’.28 Canavan points out that the film critiques ‘necrofuturist visions of the future’ where the capitalist system contains ‘unsustainable practices and immoral practices even as those practices become more and more destructive and self-­defeating’.29 This is similar to the Roman empire, where expansion of the empire’s borders through war in order to make the non-­Roman spaces into Roman space requires never-­ending resources of wealth and military. The empire becomes an unsustainable model, yet it continues until it is doomed to end. Snowpiercer challenges that unsustainable model, because characters like Curtis and Nam are looking to opt out of that future. Snowpiercer

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asks what the alternatives to an unsustainable and doomed model might be. CONCLUSION Both the Aeneid and Snowpiercer ask their audiences to consider the consequences of opting out of the future. Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of the system as we know it?30 Both Curtis and Aeneas have been told that their destiny awaits them. Curtis thinks that he is overthrowing a corrupt system only to learn he is the system’s new preordained leader. Just as Vergil’s Turnus can be seen as an enemy who is an impediment to a better world and is better off eliminated, Wilford will become that enemy in Snowpiercer. Curtis dies in the struggle to opt out of his destiny. His moral critique of his society, where he is leading a revolution because famine and poverty are not acceptable, creates his desire for a better way of life, although Wilford treats him as though he is naive to think that such utopia-­like conditions are possible. Like Aeneas, Curtis becomes both the civilisation destroyer and founder. Snowpiercer highlights for its audience that the future has to exist outside humanity’s current form of existence, of consumerism and an ecologically unsustainable lifestyle: The train had no future, but Yona and Timmy might. The utopian impulse driving the end of Snowpiercer is thus the lifting of the curse of necrofuturity: there do in fact exist alternative futures that are not Western, white, or ecologically unsustainable, or reliant on a vicious system of class difference.31

Snowpiercer’s global-­warming parable shows us anxiety about a dystopian world that may already be inevitable. Both Aeneas and Curtis struggle to come to terms with what they are told is their destiny as events are manipulated around them to encourage their acceptance of the established order. Aeneas’ fate suggests the never-­ending war machine will be Rome’s future, just as up until the film’s end, the future for humans offered in Snowpiercer is the ‘never-­ending’ engine. Both Aeneas’ decision to kill Turnus and the decision made by Curtis to stop the Snowpiercer train compel audiences to think about the consequences of perpetuating a system of violence and war in order to maintain order for a society.

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I would like to thank the editors, Hunter Gardner and Amanda Potter, for their editorial guidance and invitation to contribute to this volume. Avery D. Cahill and Velvet L. Yates volunteered to read drafts of this work and their critical insight has been invaluable.   1 James (2009: 238).   2 Evans (2008: 7).   3 Evans (2008: 68–9).   4 Hardie (2012: 78). In this chapter, I will use lower-­case ‘fama’ to mean ‘rumour’ or ‘gossip’ and upper-­case ‘Fama’ to mean Vergil’s goddess/ monster.   5 Syson (2013: 38).   6 Spence (1999: 92).   7 Fratantuono (2007: 108).   8 Syson (2013: 21).  9 As Fratantuono (2007: 112–13) points out, Aeneas tells Dido he is going to Italy against his own will (4.361) and suggests this is meant to show Aeneas’ ‘passivity’. 10 Syson (2013: 3). 11 Mack (1999: 131–2). All translations are my own. 12 Hershkowitz (1998: 107) notes the ‘intimate link between Jupiter’s speech acts and fated endings’, when he tells Juno that she cannot hope to change the outcome of the war between the Trojans and the Rutulians (10.626–7). Hardie (2012: 103) defines fatum as ‘the utterance or word that brings order into the world and directs events to a fixed goal’. See also Gransden (1984: 38–9) on Aeneas’ destiny. 13 Ward (2014: 59). 14 Syson (2013: 33). 15 Evans (2008: 162). 16 Evans (2008: 166). 17 Hardie (2012: 104). 18 Thomas (2001: 291). 19 Galinsky (1988: 341–2). See also Lowrie (2005: 947–50) for the relationship between Rome’s foundation and violence. 20 Aeneas’ death occurs in battle during his fourth year as king (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 64.3). 21 Thomas (2001: 290–296). See also Edgeworth and Stem (2005: 7–11) for an overview of various scholars’ readings of the ending. 22 James (2009: 253), although Galinsky (1988: 325) argues for Aeneas’ ‘humane hesitation’ before killing Turnus. 23 Putnam (2011: 76). 24 See Burnell (1987: 186–92). See also Fratantuono (2007: 386–99). 25 Putnam (2011: 103).

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26 27 28 29 30

Canavan (2014: 61). Bady (2014). Bady (2014). Canavan (2014: 41). Canavan (2014: 42) argues that critiques of Snowpiercer emphasise the choice between the world’s end and capitalism’s demise. 31 Canavan (2014: 61).

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5  A Roman Epic in Modern Japan: Screening Rome as Empire Nostalgia in Takeuchi Hideki’s Thermae Romae (2012) Monica S. Cyrino This chapter introduces Takeuchi Hideki’s feature film Thermae Romae (2012), and examines how this recent Japanese production uses the cinematic site of ancient Rome to project, confront and skilfully satirise what I call its ‘empire nostalgia’. The key point of my argument in this inquiry is that the film Thermae Romae screens Roman antiquity in an entirely novel way in order to interrogate and reflect upon Japan’s current relationship, both proud and painful, with its memories of empire. F I L M , H I S T O RY, E M P I R E Scholars and critics who work in the field of classical reception studies have considered in detail how ancient Rome on screen functions as a lens through which filmmakers of different nationalities – and different ideological nationalisms – might negotiate, challenge or promote their relationships with the idea of power and ‘empire’.1 From its very beginning the cinema, and especially the screening of ancient Rome, influenced the way various nations projected their own identities, aspirations and histories, and how audiences consumed them. As Maria Wyke noted in her formative work on screening Roman antiquity: ‘Historical films set in ancient Rome became a privileged means for the production and consumption of an imperial romanità.’2 The Italian Fascist government, for example, financed the production of the spectacular historical film Scipione l’Africano (1937), directed by Carmine Gallone, in which the titular hero leads a

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unified Rome to military victory in Carthage, expressly to service Italy’s renewed aspirations in the 1930s to a colonial empire in the Mediterranean: the screening of the ancient Roman general and his martial success in Africa served as a direct analogy for il duce Benito Mussolini and a justification for his recent North African campaigns (1935–6).3 So invested was the government in the film that the War Ministry even supplied infantry and cavalry troops as extras for the shooting of battle sequences. Thus, the new regime established both historical legitimacy and popular support for its nascent imperial project by making explicit its association with and promotion of cinematic ancient Rome. A couple of decades later, in films such as Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis (1951) and William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959), the Hollywood epic film tradition of the 1950s and early 1960s also exploited the concept of Roman imperial power as a trope for the American political situation during the Cold War.4 In these mid-­century films, the image of an omnipotent but corrupt Roman state offers a more ambiguous identification, suggesting the tyrannical regimes of Old Europe – Nazi, Fascist and Communist – while they also offered provocative analogies for the repressions exercised within the United States during the era of McCarthyism, the blacklist and the surveillance state. Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) presented a signal moment in this real-­time cinematic history of screening ancient Rome to serve as an analogy for the United States as a politically repressive regime.5 As star Kirk Douglas often boasted, the film Spartacus ‘broke the Hollywood blacklist’6 by crediting for the first time in a decade the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the original Hollywood Ten.7 Such is the popularity, familiarity and staying power of the Roman epic cinematic model for probing the politics of authoritarian regimes that director Ridley Scott could successfully create a double image to suggest the parallels between the violence and splendour of ancient Rome, as portrayed in the blockbuster Gladiator (2000), and the benefits and excesses of American global hegemony at the turn of the millennium.8 In this film, the hero Maximus is (unhistorically) tasked by the dying Marcus Aurelius to do away with the ‘bad’ imperial Rome, personified by the evil Emperor Commodus, and to restore the ‘good Rome’ of the Republic.9 We shall see how this dual-­image ‘Gladiator formula’ is applied later to support the narrative of the film Thermae Romae. More recently, the premium cable television series STARZ Spartacus (2010–13), a fresh reimagining of the historical and cinematic slave

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rebellion, produced and shot entirely in the lush landscapes of New Zealand, explored in four compelling seasons both the rewards and costs of principled armed resistance to the military, political and industrial authority of ancient Rome.10 As a provocative analogy for the duty to confront authoritarian currents now surging through the halls of power in many parts of the world, the series could not be more timely or relevant. In Japan from the very earliest days of cinema there was an acute interest in ancient-­ Roman-­ themed productions, as indicated by screenings of important foreign films such as Enrico Guazzoni’s silent masterpiece Marcantonio e Cleopatra (1913), which was screened at the famous Denkikan cinema in Asakusa’s Rokku district, the entertainment district in central Tokyo.11 But soon Japan initiated and developed its own major film industry, as film scholar Daisuke Miyao notes in the introduction to his comprehensive volume: ‘Japanese cinema has historically and theoretically been one of the world’s important national cinemas.’12 Starting in the mid-­1920s, Japanese-­ made films gained in popularity, especially the jidaigeki or ‘period drama’ style, historical films set in the Edo Period (1603–1868) or even earlier, featuring samurai warriors, mercenary ronin and highly stylised sword fights.13 In the 1930s and 1940s, with Japan rapidly expanding its colonial empire and establishing itself as a world power, the government intensified its involvement in the cinema, producing propaganda films in the realist style and promoting documentaries that depicted patriotic or militaristic themes to glorify the empire of Japan (Dai Nippon Teikoku).14 These early Japanese-­made films obviously did not employ the trope of ancient Rome; however, the popularity of historical dramas that glamorised war and conquest in this period, as well as the government’s enthusiastic control of the film industry to support the aims of the imperial regime, both suggest clear parallels with the purposeful screening of ancient Rome in other nationalist cinemas. In the aftermath of World War II – with the empire surrendering to the Allies in 1945, and the enactment of the modern constitution of Japan as a liberal democracy in 1947 – there followed the period of Allied occupation and reconstruction, when Japan was once again exposed to international art and cinema that had been banned during the war. The 1950s saw the Japanese film industry blossom into what film scholars today call the ‘Golden Age of Japanese Cinema’: such hugely influential classics as Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon (1950) and his epic Seven Samurai (1954) marked the entrance of Japanese film onto the world stage.15 The 1960s were peak years in terms of

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cinema audiences and the number of films produced, as the decade began with Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) and later also produced the innovative Japanese New Wave.16 Then, after a steady decline in cinema audiences during the 1970s and 1980s due to the rise of television, the film industry bounced back in the 1990s and 2000s with the immense popularity of anime both within Japan and overseas, with such essential animated features as Miyazaki Hayao’s Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2001).17 Today Japan has one of the largest and busiest film industries in the world, producing the fourth highest number of feature films annually and competing at several international awards festivals.18 Yet alongside the shifting fortunes of the Japanese film industry, the modern nation state of Japan has found itself enmeshed in a protracted period of negotiation, introspection and interrogation of its imperial and militaristic past that still continues to this present day. Film scholar Adam Bingham calls Japanese cinema ‘an unstable institution’, and goes on to describe it as ‘a truly national film industry in that both its fate and its individual products and the characteristics that have defined them have remained closely tied to the socio-­political flux of the country in which they were made’.19 Although my lack of expertise as a modern historian should preclude an extended digression about the post-­war history of Japan, a few points can be made about contemporary Japanese national self-­ conception that are pertinent to an examination of the film Thermae Romae. In economic terms, the decades after the war saw Japan achieve rapid growth that made it the second largest economy in the world, until the mid-­1990s when Japan suffered a major recession.20 While gradual economic growth and the appearance of prosperity at the beginning of the twenty-­first century can be attributed to government-­ sponsored ‘stagflation’, Japan remains justifiably nervous about its fragile economy and also concerned about the increasing assertion of Chinese hegemony, as both an economic and military power, in the Pacific. Political scientist Ian Bremmer warns that politically motivated trade fights in the region are rattling the global economy: ‘In Japan, business confidence has turned negative for the first time since 2013.’21 And while Japanese creative ingenuity and technological expertise remain a source of pride for the country, recent discussions of Japanese technology have focused on major failures, such as Toyota’s massive recall of deadly Takata airbags, and the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, triggered by the March 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake, one of the worst disasters in the history of nuclear

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power. Thus, there exists a clear crisis of confidence about Japanese economic prospects going forward. In societal terms, Japan has also been engaged in an internal debate about how to come to terms with the legacy of Japanese imperialist aggression and militarism in the period leading up to World War II. While all nations embroider their own history to some extent, the Japanese government for many years played down or ignored imperial involvement in wartime atrocities, such as the Nanjing Massacre (December 1937 to January 1938) or the Bataan Death March (April 1942), a stance that Japan’s current allies and many of its citizens found problematic.22 In an article published on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Time Magazine examined how Japan had long declined to acknowledge its past: In recent decades Japanese officials, abetted by political and business conservatives, have subtly but systematically diluted the facts about Japanese aggression in Asia from 1931 to 1945. The tampering is reflected in school textbooks and popular literature, films and television, and has rendered some of the war’s tragedies almost benign.23

Now, however, it seems Japan realises it is too wealthy and too pivotal a global power to indulge in such historical amnesia, as increasingly its Asian neighbours and Pacific allies demand that Japan deal more forthrightly with past events.24 As a measure of this new perspective, we may note the December 2016 meeting of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe with President Barack Obama in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and his visit to the USS Arizona Memorial ‘to offer condolences’ following the seventy-­fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor.25 Although there has been the predictable right-­wing backlash at home and criticism abroad, especially from China, about the tone and tenor of such reconciliation, many Japanese artists, scholars and social critics have lauded the move towards a new national self-­ awareness and candour. Makoto Ooka, a prominent poet, has said: ‘Without a deep understanding of the many facets of the war, the Japanese people cannot regain their sense of dignity in the world.’26 Within the very fragile – and perhaps temporary – context of this tendency towards openness in dealing with their history comes the film Thermae Romae, the first Japanese-­made film to employ the trope of Roman antiquity as a narrative backdrop for exploring Japanese self-­ conception. Film critic Donald Richie once broadly claimed that ‘the divergence between traditional and non-­traditional is much less marked’ in the contemporary cinema of Japan.27 What I argue is that the film Thermae Romae is breaking new ground in

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that it deploys the cinematic site of ancient Rome in both generically conventional but also utterly modern ways to renegotiate Japan’s tricky relationship with the idea of ‘empire’ long past. Moreover, the film does this at a crucial moment when the nation of Japan is asking itself how to exist on the global stage as a political and military power – while it strives to maintain its presence as an economic one – and when issues of Japanese national identity, military engagement and imperial history are all being reinterrogated. With a more expansive approach to exploring the idea of ‘empire’, by taking the longer view on the historical past, and by using dark comedy and science fiction tropes to blur the edges of traditional cinematic epic, Thermae Romae invents a new kind of narrative and thematic mode that I call ‘empire nostalgia’. T H E R M A E R O M A E A N D E M P I R E N O S TA L G I A Thermae Romae (Terumae Romae) is the successful film adaptation of Yamazaki Mari’s bestselling six-­volume manga series of the same title (original run: 2008–13); the manga also appeared as a flash anime television series on Fuji TV in January 2012, directed by Tani Azuma.28 The live action film, also produced by Fuji TV, is a time-­ travelling comic sci-­fi fantasy set in the year 128 ce in the time of Emperor Hadrian. The film’s story introduces us to Lucius Modestus, played by famously handsome Japanese model-­ turned-­ actor Abe Hiroshi: Lucius is a prominent Roman bathhouse architect/engineer who is disheartened by his lack of new ideas. Under pressure to satisfy the emperor’s hunger for innovation, Lucius tries to relax away his troubles in the Roman thermae (baths), when he is sucked through a water drain/time tunnel and emerges into a present-­day Japanese public bathhouse: as entertainment critic Jordan Mintzer cheekily noted, the film’s premise is ‘Hot Tub Time Machine meets The Fall of the Roman Empire’.29 The film Thermae Romae premiered in April 2012 in Japan, and was the second highest-­grossing domestic film at the Japanese box office that year; so far it has grossed a total of ¥6 billion domestically (about $60 million US). Thermae Romae had its North American premiere in September 2012 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and has a very respectable total worldwide box office gross of $74 million (Figure 5.1).30 The opening sequence of the film conspicuously demonstrates how the epic cinematic conventions of screening the ancient Roman empire play with the genre of modern sci-­fi fantasy, with a bit of black comedy thrown in for good measure. Viewers of the film

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Figure 5.1  Abe Hiroshi (Lucius Modestus) in Thermae Romae (2012). Fuji Television/Toho.

f­amiliar with the HBO-­BBC Rome series (2005–7) will immediately recognise the massive Roman Forum set located on the Cinecittà Studios backlot in Rome where Thermae Romae was shot.31 In the film’s opening scenes, we meet the stern-­faced, conservative Lucius, who is shown to be very resistant to the concept of innovation, which he sees as a kind of self-­indulgence and a dissipation of morals. Lucius is presented as someone obsessed with the idea of empire as well as imperial authority, social control and national superiority; to Lucius, the baths are above all emblematic of a thriving, healthy, morally good civilisation, indeed a physical manifestation of cultural pre-­eminence. This serious, almost humourless attitude is comically contrasted with what he finds when he is miraculously transported by means of his unexpected water-­drain time travel to the bathhouse in modern-­day Japan. Before we can break down the film, we must ask this question: how should we talk about the parallels between Japan and ancient Rome? Over the years, scholars have compared ancient East Asian, and in particular Chinese, history and culture to ancient Graeco-­Roman history and culture within a broad theoretical paradigm.32 But only recently has modern scholarship begun to engage specifically in cross-­ cultural ‘deep comparison’ between the literary cultures of Rome

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and Japan. In her 2014 book, Wiebke Denecke compares the literary cultures of Rome and Japan, and articulates how each of these ‘latecomer’ cultures, as she designates them, developed and defined itself against the backdrop of a highly sophisticated and earlier ‘reference culture’, Greece and China, respectively.33 Denecke notes in her introduction that her book ‘tries to make a seductive case for dialogue’, as she invites Classicists, especially those in reception studies, to broaden our traditional geographical and linguistic boundaries, and consider ‘what attractions young fields like East Asian Studies in the West might hold for more mature ones like Classics’.34 Denecke’s book illuminates striking similarities in how the younger literary cultures of Rome and Japan sought to establish their own distinctive identities:35 they did so, for example, by reconstructing origins for their later literary traditions to compete with those of the older cultures; by presenting accounts of their predecessors’ ‘decline’ in contrast with their own progressive ‘simplicity’; and by formulating narratives of state formation with heroic founding myths and evocations of the imperial capitals, Rome and Kyoto, as important cultural spaces. But while this scholarly juxtaposition of Rome and Japan may make for fruitful academic discovery, the comparison can perhaps be made more immediate through the lens of modern popular culture, where contemporary Japan engages directly with ancient Rome. Here are two cultures of extraordinary global influence, both defined by the beauty and power of their intellectual and cultural achievements; both celebrated and reviled for their imperial ambitions and actions; both firmly structured around social and military hierarchies; both fixated on the mysteries of death and meticulously observant of its ceremonies; and both passionately obsessed with bathing, in all its rituals and accoutrements, or as one online comment describes it: ‘The two cultures in the world that have loved baths the most: the Japanese and the Romans.’36 With these particular comparisons in mind, we may more fruitfully consider the relationship between ancient Rome and modern Japan as presented in Thermae Romae, and specifically how and why the film creates and negotiates this new thematic mode of ‘empire nostalgia’. Right from the beginning, there were several pre-­production decisions that contributed to the heightened prominence of the theme of empire in the film’s narrative, and to its aesthetic commitment to recreating the time-­honoured look and feel of epic cinema about the ancient Roman world. In the first place, the near-­concurrent adaptation from the hip native genre of Japanese graphic manga, as well as the innovative

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anime television show, to the conservative Hollywood epic cinematic style effects an essential shift in overall tone, in that the epic film genre inevitably compels a greater focus on the traditional narrative of power and empire. Moreover, the epic film adaptation plays with narrative sequence and thematic emphasis as it develops a storyline quite distinct from both the original manga and television anime, with a much greater focus on the ‘real’ historical events of Hadrian’s imperial court and on the implications of Roman authoritarian power. In addition, the filming location at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, built by Mussolini in the 1930s for his colossal propaganda films and later revived in the 1950s for all those famous mid-­century Technicolor epics, promotes a perceptible link between the new Japanese film and the golden age of ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ productions and their overt nationalist strategies. In a more current connection, the use of the same monumental sets recently built for the production of the critically acclaimed HBO-­BBC series Rome puts Thermae Romae squarely on the visual tradition trajectory for the screening of Roman antiquity, while at the same time the use of these well-­appointed and historically accurate sets suggests a more modern approach to the screening of ‘ancient Rome’. Finally, the casting of the statuesque (6 ft 3 in.) Abe and the other Roman roles with well-­established Japanese actors with strikingly attractive physical features,37 who speak both Japanese and sometimes even a bit of Latin (with effusive Italian pronunciation), encourages the visual and aural identification of the two cultures. In the clever mixing of media, it is notable that the character of Lucius in the manga was already playfully drawn to resemble the famous actor Abe: the other characters in the manga even describe him as someone ‘who looks like a Greek sculpture’.38 The flash anime also teases the connection between the actor Abe and the ancient Roman figure, when another character in the modern-­day bathhouse tells the time-­traveller: ‘Hey you look kinda like Hiroshi Abe.’ In terms of its narrative, Thermae Romae presents two distinct movements or strands. The first half of the film offers the audience numerous comical sight-­gags that capitalise upon the familiar ‘fish out of water’ screen trope crossed with the figure of the foreigner who is stupendously impressed by Japanese ingenuity, a ubiquitous stock character in local Japanese tourist videos.39 The chrononaut Lucius – he is always in the water! – is both amazed and inspired by Japanese aquatic marvels, although as an elite and rather arrogant ancient Roman character he assumes the old men he encounters in the bathhouse to be ‘flat-­faced slaves’: the insulting physical descrip-

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tor seems to be an example of Japanese self-­deprecating humour.40 Note however, in the scene where Lucius first emerges in the modern bathhouse, there is a shade of even darker satire: while the Roman imperial bath is overflowing with raucous, fleshy men in their prime, the Japanese bathhouse has only a handful of very thin, older men whose voices barely register above a squeak. According to recent estimates, Japan today has the most aged population proportionally in the developed world: nearly 30 per cent of Japanese citizens are aged sixty-­five or older.41 The Japanese government is trying to respond to the stresses placed on the economy and social services by the ageing demographic with policies intended to increase the birth rate and keep the elderly more active; but the scene in the film seems to gesture comically but also somewhat bleakly towards this problem of the greying of Japan as an image that may parallel their loss of national vigour and vitality. On his first three forays forward in time to modern Japan, Lucius surfaces first at a public bathhouse, next inside a private domestic bathroom, and then at the expansive showroom of a luxe urban bath fixtures store. Lucius’ chaotic trips through the time tunnel/ water drain are always accompanied by background Italian opera music and sometimes also quick cuts to scenes of a man in a tuxedo dramatically belting out Italian arias on a green hillside, perhaps to reinforce the European associations between Italy and ancient Rome, perhaps just to heighten the emotions of the comical transition between temporal worlds.42 Each time he appears, the handsome and well-­muscled Abe is shown naked or nearly so, due to his conveniently Aphrodite-­of-­Knidos-­like proximity to bathwater. As media scholar Sung-­Ae Lee notes: ‘The wide appeal of the film lies – apart from much rear-­view and otherwise discreet nudity – in the humor stemming from cross-­cultural encounters and the similar but different practices of bath-­house cultures separated by vast distances of time and space.’43 Guiding him as his Beatrice and potential love-­interest through this wonderland of hydraulic technology is Mami Yamakoshi (Aya Ueto), an aspiring but as yet unsuccessful manga artist. While this leitmotif offers a subtle and appealing intertextual twist with the story’s graphic novel origins,44 Mami’s role in the film also underscores the importance of the visual artist as a mediator in popular screen receptions of Roman antiquity. Lucius’ unknowing contribution to the future is to provide an amazing story and a striking set of physical images to Mami, who finally finds in him ‘a hero with impact’ (in the words of her ill-­tempered editor’s orders), as she is

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inspired to create a popular manga about ancient Rome. Lucius, however, is more interested in the high-­tech toilets at the showroom where Mami works, as she finds herself trying to corral Lucius in an early scene in the film that takes place at the bath-­fixtures shop. The scene amusingly shows how Lucius is literally brought to tears by the technological supremacy of modern Japan in terms of bathroom conveniences: anyone who has ever been to Japan and enjoyed the sensational choices on the sidebar menu of even the most modest public toilet knows exactly how Lucius feels. Yet again, however, a sardonic element circles around the scene, as it suggests the peak of Japanese technological dominance is on the inside of a bubbling toilet bowl. As he travels back and forth from Rome to Japan, picking up new bath-­related ideas, Lucius remains stubbornly fixated on the idea of imperial Rome’s cultural superiority: as he notes with somewhat guilty justification, Rome has the right to absorb the culture of the provinces and tribes it dominates, does it not? Lucius transfers these purloined ideas and inventions first to a community thermae back in Rome, where he carves the Greek phrase Ariston Men Hydor (‘water is best’) outside its walls.45 Next Lucius appropriates Japanese technology to outfit a domestic outdoor bath for a private Roman citizen; and then finally, on an invited and prestigious imperial commission, Lucius applies the pilfered techniques to the magnificent baths at Hadrian’s Villa outside Rome, which is fully equipped with servant-­ powered jacuzzi and fancy bidet. But his new-­found success back in Rome does not cheer Lucius up; in fact, quite the opposite. The more bathhouse design innovations and nifty bathing contraptions Lucius steals from the ‘flat-­faced tribe’, the more depressed he becomes at his own seeming lack of imagination and originality, and his inability to invent or come up with ideas on his own. All throughout the film, Lucius constantly laments his inadequacy as an inventor and engineer: this persistent mode of grim self-­doubt and his shamefaced sense of personal insufficiency may also be playing into the dark mocking humour of the film as an analogy for Japan’s own questioning self-­conception. So, as the film moves towards its second act, Lucius requires something that will lift him out of his weary sense of defeat and give him a sense of purpose, and it is Mami who becomes pivotal in helping him to refocus his energies. The second half of the film delves deeply into imperial court intrigue. In this part of the film, the patriotic Lucius attempts to support the regime of the noble Emperor Hadrian (Ichimura Masachika), who

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is aided by a capable and caring assistant, Antoninus (Shishido Kai), but whose authority and position are threatened by a dissolute and cruel aristocrat, Ceionius (Kitamura Kazuki). By setting its action during the Hadrianic reign, Thermae Romae permits the use of the ‘Gladiator formula’, that is, the onscreen interrogation of the ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ imperial models described earlier:46 Ceionius is played just like the evil Commodus in the earlier film, while Hadrian, much like Aurelius in Gladiator, is shown to be a competent and dynamic leader; and the character of Antoninus Pius lives up to his name as a man of virtue and decency. The film emphasises Hadrian’s interest in building and architectural design as a way to highlight his role as the skilled and influential emperor who wished to construct an empire that was both beautiful and eternal.47 Just like Lucius, Hadrian sees the profound connection between the Roman baths and the empire’s cultural ascendancy. In the scene of Lucius’ initial audience with Hadrian, where Hadrian first invites Lucius to build him an imperial bath, Thermae Romae offers a distinct echo – the kind of narrative and visual homage typical in the epic film genre – of the scene where Maximus and Marcus Aurelius talk about empire early in the film Gladiator. Both scenes emphasise the integrity and righteousness of the Roman imperial project, even while the interlocutors might weigh its merits differently. However, an element of danger literally hangs over the Hadrianic scene: the Mount Fuji mural that Lucius first observed in the modern Japanese bathhouse is now transposed into a shimmering, mobile image of Mount Vesuvius in the Roman bath. This prominent visual motif recurs throughout the film, and many viewers would recognise that the majestic volcano Vesuvius represents a stark emblem of destruction, dark and foreboding. As a symbol of natural disaster, there is probably no more powerful image than Vesuvius:48 perhaps this is the way the film subtly alludes to Japan’s vulnerability to natural disasters, and even obliquely to the tragedy at Fukushima, too recent and too terrible for any more overt reference. Later in the film, when the course of history is upset and it appears that the evil Ceionius might inherit the throne, Lucius intervenes to build a marvellous mineral springs spa on the Danube front to heal the exhausted soldiers wounded in Hadrian’s wars, and he dedicates the new venue in the name of Antoninus, thereby righting the historical line of succession. With ideas he appropriated from a visit to the onsen or mineral hot springs near Mami’s home in rural Japan, Lucius’ new battlefield spa complex is a huge success in reinvigorating the Roman army. Thus, these new rustic-­style thermae

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lead directly to Roman military victory and the continuation of the Roman empire. On the morning following the final battle, Lucius and Mami watch as the sun rises over the defeated enemies of the victorious Roman army. In the Japanese Shinto religion, the deity of the New Year arrives at dawn with the first ray of the solar star, and so watching the sunrise is a culturally pervasive symbol of happiness. But the image of the rising sun is also a powerful political symbol that has a long and often complicated association with Japanese imperialism and militarism; and here at the end of the film, the image is directly juxtaposed with the idea of enduring Roman power. In this scene after the last battle, Lucius and Mami are sitting in their rustic tent in the murky pre-­dawn hours, both of them dressed in rough Roman tunics and looking rather grimier than they have appeared elsewhere in the film. There is a brief glimpse of the rising sun, but it is not quite the full brilliant sun that was the symbol of Japanese empire in the early twentieth century. This early morning sun is just emerging and still hazy, fading even as it struggles to become visible from behind the mountains. With this view of the pale half-­sun, perhaps the film is making one last comment on the difficulty and impermanence of empire; the faint, distant image may suggest, from today’s modern Japanese perspective, a nostalgia for two lost empires, not only that of ancient Rome, but also that of the powerhouse that once was Japan, at first militarily before World War II and then economically in the decades afterwards. By the end of the film, through his loyalty and near-­worship of the emperor, Lucius manages to protect the legacy of Hadrian and preserve the Roman empire. Thus, in one sense, we can assert that the film Thermae Romae is about the process of adaptation. At first Lucius is depressed and defeated by the idea of copying ideas from the ‘flat-­faced tribe’ and then passing them off as his own in his derivative Roman bath structures. Yet later he connects that crucial practice to the saving of the Roman empire when he freely gives Antoninus credit for his idea of building a hot-­springs healing spa to invigorate the wounded soldiers of Rome. The notion that both adaptation and innovation can bolster and eventually revitalise the imperial project suggests the film’s optimistic critique of the cinematic site of ancient Rome as a useful paradigm for a successful, powerful modern Japan, flourishing both socially and economically.49 Indeed, to embrace and replicate the Roman model of the ‘good’ empire is the supreme creative adaptation. But Thermae Romae also seems to acknowledge and indulge in the mode of ‘empire nostalgia’, a sometimes painful and ever com-

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plicated process of looking back at empire long gone, both that of ancient Rome and, more importantly, that of Japan, in the country’s military glory before the Pacific War and the economic glory of the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the film’s negotiation of the theme of ‘empire nostalgia’ comes at a particularly challenging time when Japan is pondering its role on the global stage as a military and political power, as well as an economic one, even though the film clearly puts a positive and playful spin on Japanese technological ingenuity and its celebrated spirit of collaborative work. As such, my exploration of Thermae Romae contributes to the discussion about the reception of ancient Rome on screen by demonstrating how it is always a valuable and provocative site for the projection of modern anxieties, attitudes and aspirations, as it is in this contemporary Japanese comic sci-­fi film. NOTES A version of this chapter was delivered as the keynote lecture for the 2017 annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies held at Victoria University, in Wellington, New Zealand.   1 See for example Wyke (1997a); Solomon (2001); Joshel, Malamud and McGuire (2001); Cyrino (2005b).   2 Wyke (1997a: 20).   3 See Caprotti (2009) on how the film posits clear parallels between the Roman empire and the Italian Fascist regime.   4 For more political interpretations of these mid-­century films, see Cyrino (2005b).   5 See Winkler (2007a) for a thorough examination of the film.   6 The boast even made it into the title of Douglas’s (2012) memoir: I Am Spartacus! Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist.  7 The Hollywood Ten were motion-­ picture producers, directors and screenwriters who appeared before the House Un-­American Activities Committee, also known as the McCarthy Hearings, in October 1947 and refused to ‘name names’ or answer questions regarding their possible Communist affiliations. Many of them, including Trumbo, spent time in prison for contempt of Congress, and then were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios. See Cyrino (2005b: 103).   8 See Winkler (2004) for a thorough exploration of the film.   9 On the dual depiction of ancient Rome, see Cyrino (2005b: 239). 10 See Augoustakis and Cyrino (2017) for a detailed examination of the series. 11 An unsourced black-­ and-­ white photograph of the film’s Tokyo premiere can be found on Wikipedia: ‘Outside of Denkikan on the opening

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day of Antony and Cleopatra in 1914’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Denkikan). 12 Miyao (2014: 1). 13 On the continuing popularity of jidaigeki films, see Yamamoto (2014: 306–7); Bingham (2015: 14–38). 14 Examples of the era’s martial-­themed films include Five Scouts (1938), 47 Ronin (1941) and Kato Flying Squadron (1944). 15 Other golden-­ age classics include Tokyo Story (1953) and Godzilla (1954). 16 Important films of the decade include award-­winners Bushido (1963) and Woman in the Dunes (1964), and the New Wave film Insect Woman (1963). 17 On the significance of the year 1997 as a decisive turning point in Japanese cinema, see Bingham (2015: 1–12). 18 In the 2010s, Japanese films have been selected to compete at the Cannes Film Festival, the Venice International Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival. 19 Bingham (2015: 1). 20 See Katz (1998) for an excellent overview of this long and complicated socio-­economic process. 21 Bremmer (2019: 31). 22 The bibliography on how these events are remembered is vast: for example, on Japanese debates about their role in the Nanjing Massacre, see Yoshida (2000). 23 Hillenbrand and Walsh (1991: 70–1). 24 On the escalating conflict between Japan and its Asian neighbours, see Bremmer (2019: 31). 25 The meeting between Obama and Abe took place on 27–8 December 2016; see Rothman (2016). 26 Quoted in Hillenbrand and Walsh (1991: 70–1). 27 Richie (2001: 217). 28 On the ‘media mix’ strategy in Japanese culture and entertainment that disperses content as a transmedia franchise across multiple representations, see Zahlten (2014). 29 Mintzer (2012). 30 Financial figures are from https://www.boxofficemojo.com. 31 On the HBO-­BBC series Rome, see the two volumes edited by Cyrino (2008b and 2015). 32 On China and ancient Greece, see for example Lloyd (2002); Shankman and Durrant (2002). On China and ancient Rome, see Scheidel (2009 and 2015). 33 Denecke (2014: 20) encourages deep comparison in temporal terms: ‘Both Japanese and Roman literatures were self-­conscious “latecomers”, with a strong sense both of themselves and of their belatedness vis-­à-vis their reference cultures.’

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34 Denecke (2014: 15). 35 Denecke (2014: 1–19). 36 The quote is from https://myanimelist.net/animae/ThermaeRomae. 37 Other well-­known Japanese actors in the film with matinee-­idol good looks include Kitamura Kazuki as Ceionius and Shishido Kai as Antoninus. 38 On the physical characteristics of Lucius in the manga, see Lee (2014: 147). 39 As noted by Schilling (2012) in his review. 40 For ‘quello humor nipponico marcato’ (‘that sharp Japanese humour’), see Abate (2014). 41 Demographic figures are from https://www.indexmundi.com/japan/age structure. 42 The numerous opera quotations in the film are all from Italian works. One is the famous tenor aria ‘Nessun dorma’ from Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, a story set in Asia; the aria, with its signature ending vincerò! (‘I will win!’), was made globally famous after it was performed by Luciano Pavarotti at the 1990 World Cup in Italy, and is used often in film and television musical scores. I thank Jon Solomon for the reference. 43 Lee (2014: 147). 44 The callback to the original manga seems reinforced in that the name of the character Mami Yamakoshi sounds very similar to the name of the manga artist Mari Yamazaki. I thank Amanda Potter for noting this connection. 45 The quote is from the ancient Greek poet Pindar Olympian I.1, and is also inscribed on the pediment outside the Pump Room at Bath in England. 46 On the dual image of Rome in Gladiator, see note 9 above. 47 The manga on which the film is based also pictorially emphasises Hadrian’s skill as an architect. 48 In cinematic terms, the image of Vesuvius may be a prophetic warning about the box office disaster of the movie Pompeii (2014), just two years later. 49 The paradigm proved useful enough to inspire a successful sequel, Thermae Romae II (2014).

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6  Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Helen of Troy and the Trojan Horse Kirsten Day

From the earliest days of cinema, filmmakers have shown an interest in drawing on narratives, both mythological and historical, from classical antiquity. The tale of the Trojan War has been one of the most popular, with treatments ranging from blockbuster spectacles to beer commercials.1 These recreations often play fast and loose with details, with even the most earnest filmic representations taking liberties with the ancient source material that make many classical scholars bristle. Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 Troy, for instance, omits the gods in service to realism, has Menelaus die at Hector’s hands to further its romantic agenda, and makes clear the heteronormative masculinity of Brad Pitt’s Achilles by making Patroclus (Garrett Hedlund) his cousin. But in antiquity too, myths existed in multiple forms, and these were sometimes further altered to serve a particular artistic agenda, as often happened in Greek drama. At the same time, certain narrative elements were so fundamental that in the ancient sources, they remain constant. Helen’s role in motivating the Trojan War and the horse’s role in ending it were two of those elements. Most filmmakers who have taken on the Trojan War story as a serious project also seem to take these two points as immutable.2 And, although classical mythology is nowhere near as familiar to the general public as it once was, even those who know little else recognise Helen as ‘the face that launch’d a thousand ships’, as Christopher Marlowe put it,3 and the Trojan Horse as the ruse which succeeded in bringing down Troy after ten years of war despite its unbreachable walls. In this chapter, I will examine these two figures more

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closely, first looking at the close relationship that ancient sources imply between Helen and the horse, and then demonstrating that a similar connection often manifests itself in filmic depictions of the Trojan War, the implications of which demonstrate the remarkable persistence of misogynistic notions about women’s nature even into our supposedly more enlightened era. A N C I E N T A S S O C I AT I O N S Although the horse is not explicitly paralleled with Helen in the ancient texts, the original audience would undoubtedly have seen a closer relationship between the two than is apparent to us at first glance. To begin with, women in antiquity were often associated with animals in general and with horses in particular. The seventh-­century bce archaic-­period poet Semonides, for instance, wrote a vicious invective against the female race where he compared the different types of women to various creatures or elements. One female ‘type’ is descended from the mare: A horse, dainty, with long-­flowing mane, begat another [type, The sort] who scorns servile work and toil. She would not touch a millstone, nor take up A sieve, nor throw dung out of the house, Nor sit down by the oven, disdaining the soot. Only by compulsion does she make a man her lover. She washes herself twice a day, some days Three times, and anoints herself with perfumes; And combing out her flowing hair, She wears it wreathed with flowers. For others, such a woman is a beautiful sight, But for the one having her she is an evil Unless he is some tyrant or a sceptre-­bearing king, Who delights his heart with such things.4

While most of Semonides’ female ‘types’ are repulsive – ugly, stupid, fat, dirty or loud – his description of the mare-­type as a woman of beauty who relishes wealth and luxury is consistent with Helen, who, in addition to her famous looks, enjoyed a royal and privileged position first as queen of Sparta and later as a princess of Troy. Writing a century or so later, the poet Anacreon drew on an analogy still familiar in English today in his framing of the object of his desire as a ‘filly’: Thracian filly, why do you callously flee me, Looking askance with your eyes, thinking me a fool? You can be sure that I could bridle you deftly,

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And gripping the reins, ride you around the goalpost; But now, you graze and frolic, leaping lightly, For you have no clever, horse-­tried horseman.5

This comparison taps into the view of young girls as wild and highlights their nature as ‘needing to be tamed’. In the third century bce, the poet Theocritus applies a similar metaphor to Helen herself when describing her beauty as a young maiden: Just as a great cypress rises up as an adornment of a fertile field Or a garden, or as a Thessalian horse [adorns] a chariot, Just so is rose-­complexioned Helen an ornament of Sparta.6

While women in general and Helen herself, then, would have been associated with horses, the Trojan horse was regularly gendered female. In the Odyssey, the earliest literary reference to the Trojan Horse, Homer repeatedly refers to the horse as a λόχος.7 Translators frequently render λόχος as ‘ambush’ in English,8 but it can also mean both ‘an armed band’, appropriately, since that’s what it contains, or ‘childbirth’, a meaning intensified by its pairing with the word κοῖλος, meaning ‘hollow’.9 The tragedian Euripides makes this more explicit in his Trojan Women when he has Poseidon describe the horse as ἐγκύμον’ . . . τευχέων – ‘pregnant with arms’.10 And Vergil, too, later taps into this meaning in his Aeneid when he repeatedly uses the word uterus,11 which can mean belly, but also ‘womb’, as indeed, it is often translated.12 And of course, the fact that the horse’s uterus contains a litter of Greek warriors reinforces this reproductive notion. In addition to these associations between women and horses, women in general and Helen most intently would have been connected to this particular horse in the minds of the ancient audience through the tricky, deceptive nature they share. This connection is suggested by Homer in the Odyssey, when Menelaus relates how Helen, accompanied by her third husband Deiphobus, had approached the horse and called out to the Greek commanders within, imitating the voices of their wives in an attempt to get them to betray themselves to the Trojans.13 By juxtaposing Helen’s deviousness with the trick of the horse, Menelaus implies a parallel between the two figures. The relationship between Helen’s deceptive nature and that of the horse is further illustrated through a look at Pandora. In classical antiquity, the ‘race’ of women originates with Pandora. This woman was created as a punishment for man in response to the Titan Prometheus’ theft of fire, but she came disguised as a gift from the gods. Her story is most famously recounted by the eighth-­century bce

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poet Hesiod, who deems the tale so formative that he tells it twice, once in his Theogony and again in Works and Days,14 where Zeus explains, ‘I will give to [men] in exchange for fire an evil, in which all will delight in their hearts as they embrace their own ruin.’15 While all women are descended from this first woman, Ruby Blondell notes a tradition that connects Helen with Pandora more intimately by making Helen, like Pandora, a ‘purposeful product of a vengeful Zeus’: in the Cypria, when Zeus wanted to reduce the population of humans, a character named Momos (‘blame’) counsels him to effect this through war rather than with lightning bolts or flooding. To this end, he suggests both that Zeus sire a beautiful daughter and that the sea nymph Thetis be married to a mortal, a union that would produce the fierce warrior Achilles. These two causes then led to the Trojan War, a destructive conflict that killed many.16 Helen is also linked to Pandora through her famous ‘box’, more properly translated as ‘jar’ or ‘vessel’. Not just Pandora but women in antiquity more generally are analogised to pots, jars, ovens and other containers,17 as is Helen in particular: Apollodorus, for instance, relates that she was born from an egg, which her mother Leda kept in a chest before it hatched.18 An Apulian mixing bowl dating to around 375 bce, similarly, depicts a seated Helen opening a box while Paris looks on.19 Furthermore, both women are the causes of great destruction. When Pandora opens her jar, she releases into the world all the miseries that had previously been contained, including toil, disease, sickness, old age and death,20 while Helen triggers a deadly war with her infidelity (which indeed, the scene on the mixing bowl mentioned above might be taken to suggest). Their destructive potential, moreover, is hinted at in their names. ‘Pandora’, as Hesiod points out, means ‘all gifts’:21 since these ‘gifts’, as it turns out, include all the world’s miseries, Pandora’s name replicates her deceptive nature. And the name ‘Helen’ easily lends itself to associations with destruction: in Aeschylus’ fifth-­century bce tragedy Agamemnon, for instance, the chorus plays on Helen’s name using ἑλ-, the unaugmented aorist form of the verb αἵρεω (‘destroy’), to echo the first syllable of her name when describing her as ἑλένας, ἕλανδρος, ἑλέπτολις – ‘ship-­destroyer, man-­destroyer, city-­destroyer’,22 often rendered in English as ‘hell’ for ships, for men and for cities.23 That the association between the two women as ‘brides bringing death’ would have been apparent to ancient audiences is also suggested in this play, as Aeschylus ‘uses the Hesiodic Pandora to frame and influence his portrayal of the famous Helen of Troy’.24

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And as the ancient audience would have recognised, the destruction each woman brings on is cataclysmic: ‘Just as Pandora brings about the end of the Golden Age, Helen precipitates the end of the Age of Heroes.’25 But Helen is aided in this destruction by the horse, as together they serve as ‘bookends’ of the fatal dispute: Helen brings on the war when Paris brings her to Troy, and the horse brings it to an end when the Trojans welcome it inside their walls. And the horse, too, has strong connections to Pandora: just as Pandora was framed as a gift from the gods to man, the Trojan Horse was ostensibly built as an offering from the Greeks to the gods. In Vergil, this is made explicit through the lies of the double agent Sinon, but both Hyginus and Apollodorus state that a dedication to Athena was inscribed on the side of the horse itself.26 And like Pandora, whom Hesiod describes as a καλὸν κακὸν27 – a ‘beautiful evil’, lovely on the outside, but with a destructive nature – the horse too is deceptive in appearance: on the outside, a sacred offering, but hiding within, a deadly band of armed men. And as with Pandora’s box, when the horse is opened, destructive forces are unleashed. Indeed, both terms have come into English with related meanings as something which outwardly seems a boon, but which is destructive when opened; as a result, calling something a Pandora’s box or advising someone to ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’, as Vergil’s Laocoön warned the Trojans as they debated what to do with the horse,28 still serve as dire warnings today. Thus, while the character of all women is implicated in the story of their primal forebear, for an ancient audience Helen in particular would have tracked as a Pandora figure: each woman is created by Zeus and given for destructive purposes to man, who is taken in by her beauty and later brought to ruin. With its feminine gendering and deceptive, dangerous nature, the horse too recalls both Pandora and her box. This mutual association, along with the related roles they play in initiating the war and concluding it, would have worked in antiquity to make the horse a clear analogue of Helen herself. C I N E M AT I C C O N N E C T I O N S When we turn to cinematic representations, we find that the ancient association of Helen and the horse persists, even if this parallel is not consciously inserted. As in antiquity, the horse in film is represented as feminine, but this gendering is signalled visually rather than linguistically: in the majority of filmic depictions the soldiers

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exit the horse via a rope lowered from a trapdoor on the underside of the horse’s belly. Clear examples are found in big-­screen productions like Mario Camerini’s Ulysses and Marc Allégret’s Loves of Three Queens, both from 1954, Robert Wise’s 1956 Helen of Troy, and Giorgio Ferroni’s 1961 The Trojan Horse; in animated versions such as a 1960 Mel-­O-Toons short and The Simpsons’ 2002 ‘Tales from the Public Domain’; and in television mini-­series like Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1997 The Odyssey and the USA Network’s 2003 Helen of Troy. While this seems a bit at odds with Apollodorus, who has the men lowering themselves with a rope from an opening εἰς τὰς πλευρὰς – at the ribs29 – the positioning of the exit in these films, paired with the umbilical-­cord-­like rope, makes for an effective visual connection with childbirth.30 Often, these filmic depictions hint at connections between the horse and Helen more specifically. In Loves of Three Queens, starring Hedy Lamarr as Helen, the horse is white and delicately sculpted in long, elegant lines, qualities reminiscent of Lamarr’s long neck, sculpted brows and white skin, traits which are further accentuated through cosmetics. The horse’s elaborate mane also visually echoes Lamarr’s intricate hairstyles, which often feature a mane-­like crest of curls spilling down the back of her head. And the decorative trappings on the horse replicate Lamarr’s costuming – not only her dresses, with their crossed bands and straps, but more strikingly her jewellery: the horse’s bridle echoes the accessories ornamenting her hair, the horse’s harness recalls a necklace she wears in Sparta, and most notably the horse’s belt, white with a repeating dark pattern through the centre, evokes an armband which is also white and studded with dark stones. David Cairns notes that this film was a Hedy Lamarr production into which she sank much of her fortune, and he characterises the film as the ultimate vanity project, citing lines that gush in praise of her unearthly beauty – lines which as producer she would have had to approve, if she did not insert them herself. In Cairns’s view, Lamarr’s advice for looking beautiful on screen – ‘Stand still and look stupid’ – positions her as an ‘ideal art object’.31 Of course, Helen and the horse offer the best opportunities for spectacle in Trojan War films and, not surprisingly, both are framed as objects of display in this production, as seen in two reverse shots: first Helen, glowing in a pure-­white gown and framed in an embrasure, watches from the walls the duel between Paris (Massimo Serato) and Menelaus (Robert Beatty) taking place below; as if in response, the horse on the beach is later viewed from the ramparts by a crowd of spectators, who look down upon it as if viewing a stage from the balcony. Thus,

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Figure 6.1  The Trojan Horse (left) and Helen (Rosanna Podestà, right) in Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy (1956). Warner Bros.

whether intentionally or not, the film suggests a kinship between Helen and the horse as the instigating and culminating forces that lead to the city’s destruction. While most readers will not have seen Allégret’s film,32 many will be familiar with Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy, starring Rossana Podestà.33 Here too, the horse’s design connects it visually with Podestà’s Helen: the blond wood of the horse is consonant with the colour of Podestà’s hair, which was dyed blonde for the film,34 and the horse’s long, straight tail finds a parallel in the ponytail Podestà regularly sports, often protruding from a bun, which further visually connects with the round shield fixed at the horse’s side (see Figure 6.1). I might add that as a symbol, Helen’s worth is located in her great beauty, and in the film, this dynamic is replicated by the fact that Podestà seems to have been cast primarily for her looks. She did not speak English and her lines, along with those of her co-­star Jacques Sernas, were dubbed; as a contemporary review in Variety notes, ‘Visually they both meet the demands of their roles.’35 And while Wise goes to great lengths in this film to ennoble both Helen and Sernas’s Paris in service to framing his story as one of a great love, nevertheless, the Trojan Aeneas (Ronald Lewis) suggests the dangerous Pandora-­esque nature of women even before Helen’s first appearance: like Hesiod, who acknowledges with dismay that women may be an evil, but their child-­bearing capacities make them a necessary one,36 Aeneas comments to Paris, ‘To think deeply, Paris, one must think of women. They bring all life into the world, and much death. They sway the destinies of men.’

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Bella Vivante also observes that Helen’s dangerous nature is signalled through her association with imagery evoking Medusa, the snaky-­ haired female whose glance was literally petrifying. Throughout the lengthy overture that prefaces the film, a strange snaky statue in the Spartan palace is focal, and as the music draws to a close, the title – Helen’s name, with not ‘Sparta’ but ‘Troy’ appended – is laid over this image. Later we see the Gorgoneion, an apotropaic image of Medusa’s head that often appears on the aegis and shield of the war-­goddess Athena, emblazoned on the doors of the Spartan palace, including those of Helen’s private chambers. As Vivante notes, when her husband Menelaus (Niall MacGinnis) almost strangles her, jealous over her interest in Paris, Helen’s head is situated directly over this image, suggesting an identification with the deadly beauty.37 In addition, the Greek standards in this film feature a horse on which the wooden horse later seems to be modelled. Since images emblazoned on military standards function as symbols of identity, power and honour – the very areas in which Menelaus and the Greeks felt slighted when they lost Helen to the Trojans – this display again subtly connects Helen, who initiated the war, to the horse that will end it. Another film that demonstrates this dynamic is Giorgio Ferroni’s The Trojan Horse, starring Steve Reeves as Aeneas, who is here the focal hero. The film’s trailer introduces Hedy Vessel’s Helen as ‘the beautiful adulteress’, pointing to her as the casus belli, before naming the horse as the ‘deadly deception that destroyed an empire!’38 – effectively implying that when paired, they work together to bring down the city of sympathetic Trojans. In the film itself, moreover, John Drew Barrymore’s Ulysses proposes the trick of the horse to the Greek leaders using as an analogy an ornate golden urn that contains a nest of vipers. While the snakes themselves are another example of Medusa imagery, this vessel, with its deadly contents concealed by an attractive and irresistible exterior, also recalls the beautiful but treacherous nature of Pandora, who is best embodied in this narrative by Helen. And while it is surely a coincidence, Helen’s place in this analogy is here driven home by the surname of the actress who plays her.39 Although the horse in this film is almost entirely unadorned, there are echoes of the sharp, angular beauty of Hedy Vessel’s face in the mien of the horse. And in this rare filmic version where Helen is depicted as wholly unsympathetic, when the virtuous Creusa (Juliette Mayniel) sees ‘something horrible in the visage of that horse’, her

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observation would apply equally well to Helen, a cold, calculating femme fatale with no concern for anyone but herself. After the 1960s, big-­screen epic productions slowed, with interest in ancient narratives mainly shifting to television.40 The mid-­ 1990s saw a resurgence in the popularity of stories based on classical material on the small screen with Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994–9) and its spin-­ off Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), along with Konchalovksy’s 1997 mini-­series The Odyssey. In its first season, Xena included a Trojan War episode that played especially fast and loose with the details from antiquity, going so far as to omit Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon and Priam. And in contrast to the usual ‘third cheerleader from the left’ casting Ruby Blondell has elsewhere discussed,41 Helen here is played by Galyn Görg, whose father is German American and her mother African American, Choctaw, Blackfoot and Irish. While personally I was pleased to see a brown-­skinned Helen, the absence of negative commentary about this casting choice seems surprising in consideration of the virulent racist backlash prompted by the casting of David Gyasi as Achilles in Troy: Fall of a City (2018) more than twenty years later.42 In other ways too this episode is progressive, turning the ending on its head to have Helen break free of the proscriptions of patriarchy and forge her own path. But while there is no obvious visual relationship between Helen and horse here, in light of the clear pattern of connections we’ve seen between the two figures, the makeshift bamboo construction of the horse and its evocation of primitive tribal huts and lean-­tos create a troubling parallel with a brown-­ skinned Helen, replicating a long-­ standing association of dark-­skinned women with wildness and exoticism. While Hercules and Xena may have played a role, the enormous success of Ridley Scott’s 2000 Gladiator certainly intensified interest in ancient narratives on screens both big and small. In 2003, the Helen of Troy mini-­series appeared on the USA network, and here again, the thematic and visual connections between Helen and the horse persist. In this mini-­series, director John Kent Harrison takes pains to associate the young Helen, played by Sienna Guillory, with horses from the very beginning. This Helen has long, lanky, colt-­like limbs, and her free-­spirited nature is suggested by a slow-­motion scene where a beaming Helen rides her horse through a meadow. Her father Tyndareus (Richard Durden) refers to her in disgust as ‘untamed’, calling to mind Anacreon’s ‘filly’, though with more negative associations. And the series includes a lesser-­known episode from Helen’s childhood where she is kidnapped by the Athenian king

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Theseus (Stellan Skarsgård) and his buddy Pirithous (Jim Carter).43 In Harrison’s film, after their escape, the two cast lots, with the loser Pirithous conceding: ‘Well done, my friend. So you get the girl, and I get the horse.’ And despite the sympathetic depiction of this Helen, pains are again taken to suggest her beautiful-­ outside/dangerous-­ inside Pandora nature. Her beauty is emphasised by all: Aphrodite (Emily Kosloski) identifies Helen by name when she offers Matthew Marsden’s Paris ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ as a reward for naming her the fairest of goddesses, and Theseus echoes this when exhorting Pirithous to follow through on their kidnapping scheme. Her brother Pollux (Craig Kelly) warns Helen that her beauty ‘makes men weak’, and Theseus, after revealing that Zeus is her father, explains: ‘That is why your beauty will never be matched. That’s why no man will ever resist it.’ And after losing Helen to Theseus, Pirithous laments that he’ll have to find another ‘stunningly beautiful princess’, suggesting that the goddess Persephone might make an acceptable consolation prize. But the danger associated with this beauty is made clear when, at the very moment of his betrothal to her sister, Helen attracts the eye of Agamemnon (Rufus Sewell), whose lust is clearly characterised as threatening. And the bridal contest which awards her to James Callis’s Menelaus, significantly, is enacted by tossing the suitors’ seal rings into the air over a jar. Menelaus’ lands inside the vessel, analogising their union to the woes contained within Pandora’s box. Helen is also pointedly associated with death and destruction: she was conceived when her mother Leda was raped ‘because of her beauty’, according to Theseus, a violation which led her to suicide. Theseus kills four guards in order to make off with Helen, and when Pollux later comes to her rescue, the two men die at each other’s hands. Tyndareus not only holds her responsible for Pollux’s death, but even uses the funeral as an opportunity to announce her availability for marriage, asking the Greek heroes in attendance: ‘Is there any among you who will take this cursed woman? Is there any among you who wishes their home devastated, his country brought to ruin, his heart broken beyond repair?’44 Odysseus (Nigel Whitmey) agrees: ‘The path to her bed is strewn with ash and death.’ Yet they compete for her anyway, and at the contest’s conclusion, an ominous shot of Helen seen through the flames of Pollux’s pyre foreshadows the burning of Troy, implying her culpability. And consonant with ancient notions, this ‘untamed’ Helen is symbolically tamed through marriage. A conversation between Menelaus

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Figure 6.2  The Trojan Horse (top left) and Helen (Sienna Guillory, right) in John Kent Harrison’s Helen of Troy (2003). USA Network. At bottom left, Bucephalus detail from the Alexander Mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii (created c. 100 BCE).

and Paris in Sparta makes clear the Trojans’ superiority in horse-­ taming, effectively implying Paris’ role as Helen’s ‘true’ husband. Paris’ success in transforming her from a ‘wild’ maiden to a proper wife is further symbolised, much as it would have been in antiquity, through the treatment of her hair.45 When she arrives in Troy, her hair, previously worn loose and untended, is now regularly worn up and braided, covered, or adorned with an elaborate headdress that recalls a similar item from the so-­called ‘Treasure of Priam’; at the same time, this headgear evokes ceremonial horse tack – such as an Etruscan bridle dating from 700–650 bce, or that seen on Bucephalus from the Alexander Mosaic from Pompeii (c. 100 bce)46 – and anticipates the metal embellishments later seen on the wooden horse’s head (see Figure 6.2). The ending of this mini-­series drives these themes home. With Paris dead, Agamemnon rapes Helen on what seems to be an altar,47 a brutal scene that includes a long shot from Menelaus’ perspective, where a sculpted horsehead is visible in the foreground,48 suggesting that if the Greeks can’t tame Helen through love, they can break her

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through violence. Indeed, Helen, once a wild and untamed ‘filly’, is now fully broken and domesticated: in the end, she offers her neck to Menelaus, and when he declines to kill her and instead asks what she will do, she tentatively delivers her last line of the series: ‘I will follow?’ Menelaus ‘accepts’, and she walks off after him – a few steps behind to make her subservience clear. We now come to the filmic version of the Trojan war story most familiar to contemporary audiences: Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 Troy. At first glance, it is hard to see a clear connection between Diane Kruger’s bland, blonde beauty as Helen49 and the horse, which, though visually impressive, is composed of rough-­hewn wood planks cobbled together with rope and crude metal embellishments. This dissonance is not just visual: while Helen is stripped of power in this film in service to ‘romantic sympathy’, as Ruby Blondell has argued,50 this horse in contrast is impressively powerful and intimidating. But in her examination of Petersen’s film, Monica Cyrino notes that Helen’s entry into Troy, which is characterised as a joy-­filled celebration, is ‘echoed later in the film by the fateful entry of the Trojan Horse, also accompanied by a celebration of the unwitting townspeople’.51 She goes on to observe that Petersen uses an overhead tracking shot to follow the entry of first Helen and then the horse into the city, suggesting ‘a symbolic equation of the two events: the arrival of Helen in Troy marks the beginning of the city’s downfall, just as the entry of the horse signals its final destruction’.52 I would add that the tracking shots work in reverse: for Helen’s entrance, the camera enters the gates with the procession and then swings around to view Helen and Paris (Orlando Bloom) from the front; but with the horse, the camera starts with a frontal view and then swings around to show us the horse from behind, as seen from the standpoint of the city gates. This ring composition emphasises the mirrored roles Helen and the horse play in initiating the war and in bringing it to a close. A second look at the depiction of Helen herself reveals a closer connection to the horse in appearance as well: in more private contexts, Helen wears a relatively crude brown dress that evokes to some extent the rough texture and colour of the horse’s wooden construction. And here again, Helen’s attractive-­outside/dangerous-­ inside Pandora nature emerges when ominous imagery surrounds Helen as events unfold. For instance, as Hector (Eric Bana) goes to fight Achilles, Helen stands watching ‘in perfect stillness’, as Cyrino puts it, ‘veiled in ethereal white like a ghost. She lowers her eyes in sadness, as if to acknowledge her culpability for his imminent death.’ Cyrino thus reads Helen as ‘a harbinger of destruction, a sinister

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spirit of death’.53 Similarly, the horse here is one of the most menacing: its rough-­hewn wood is assembled like armour and iron anvils decorate the mane. Moreover, the Greek soldiers’ exit, which seems to follow Quintus Smyrnaeus’ description of the soldiers streaming down the sides of the horse like angry wasps,54 is a particularly unnerving preface to the destruction to come. And finally, in the most recent reworking of the Troy story, the 2018 BBC1/Netflix mini-­series Troy: Fall of a City, we again see these connections develop. At the series’ outset, women in general are assimilated to horses, and Paris (Louis Hunter) himself is characterised as preferring wild ‘fillies’, in a scene where he chases his girlfriend Oenone (Lise Slabber) through a meadow as a preface to love-­making. In response to his surrogate father’s shouts summoning him back to duty, Paris comments lustily, ‘His horses can wait. I’ve got a beast of my own to take care of.’ The series makes this analogy more specific to Helen, played here by Bella55 Dayne, by repeatedly associating her with horses. In episode 2, she makes her entry into Troy not via the usual grand procession, but on horseback. Then in episode 4, the sacrifice of a horse as a ‘holy vessel’ to ensure that Andromache’s father Eetion (Grant Swanby) finds peace in the afterlife leaves Helen rattled: the implication is that she sympathises and identifies with the animal, given by Eetion to Paris, who later surrenders it for this purpose, as a symbol passed between men and used for their own ends. This association extends to the Trojan Horse more specifically. First, the argument over what to do with Helen when she first enters the city is replicated by the argument over what to do with the horse when it appears on the beach: in both cases, Andromache (Chloe Pirrie) is a staunch leader of the opposition arguing against welcoming the newcomer, while in both instances, King Priam (David Threlfall) disregards these arguments, blinded by his own pride. Then, as we’ve seen elsewhere, Fall of a City also suggests this connection visually, as there are clear echoes of Dayne’s ornate costumes in the elaborate decorative scheme of the horse. The conjoined circles of a necklace Helen wears in the ‘Hall of Silks’ scene in episode 1 are recalled by the overlapping shields on the horse’s body in the series finale, while the shells and feathers that often embellish her wardrobe echo in material the animal skins covering the horse’s neck and in form its spiky mane of spears and the mosaic ‘skin’ of its head. The three beads dangling at her forehead in Helen’s most frequently worn headdress, moreover, find a parallel in the three-­pronged trident emerging from the horse’s forehead.

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In addition, the ancient connection between women and vessels is reiterated not only in the function of the sacrificial horse as a ‘holy vessel’, but also in the repeated association of Helen with containers throughout the series. At the end of the first episode, Helen smuggles herself out of Sparta in a chest that resembles the Hagia Triada sarcophagus; in episode 3, she distributes grain from a large basket to the Trojan people, who are all holding their own receptacles, and then produces a jug of wine when entertaining Andromache in her rooms; and in episode 4, she produces a bauble from her jewellery box to use as a bribe, later hiding it in an incense burner in episode 5. The contents of these containers, moreover, invariably change the trajectory of the narrative when they are brought out, hinting at Helen’s dangerous Pandora qualities, and anticipating the horse with its fatal contents concealed within. In a move perhaps intended to signal this association, not only is this horse a container for the Greek soldiers who will infiltrate the city, but it is also filled with grain: Thersites (Waldemar Schultz) as a Sinon figure explains that the horse is an offering to Poseidon for fair winds and that it contains the last of the Greeks’ supplies, including both grain and wine – items the long-­besieged Trojans badly need. This unexpected windfall recalls the scenes in episode 3, mentioned above, where Helen first endears herself to the hungry Trojans by giving out her own palace share of grain and then tries to curry favour with Andromache by offering ‘fortified wine’ to help with her infertility. Thus, the grain and wine within each of these containers serve to ingratiate first Helen, and then the horse, with the Trojan people. And finally, the creators encourage their audience to make the connection between Helen and the horse with an additional visual clue that is heavy with implication. Helen in the end is collaborating with the Greeks in the hope that her cooperation will save Paris and the other Trojans. Thus, like the horse, she is hiding a treacherous secret within. As it is brought through the city gates, Helen locks eyes with the horse in knowing recognition, nudging the viewer to make an identification between the two.56 Thus, as with the other cinematic depictions examined here, Troy: Fall of a City creates a significant connection between Helen and the horse by drawing clear, even if unintentional, parallels between the two that can be traced all the way back to their ancient counterparts.

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As Ruby Blondell has noted, Homer famously avoids specificity in his descriptions of Helen’s beauty: ‘Her impact is conveyed not through detailed description of her body but through the reactions of the internal audience.’57 This vagueness is crucial, in that it allows listeners (or readers) to construct in their minds an image of idealised beauty according to their own individual notions of what that might be. But filmic versions of this narrative don’t have this luxury: an actress must be cast, and she will presumably look like what the creators feel is a pinnacle of beauty, even if their ideas do not line up with yours or mine. Similarly, while some ancient sources add an odd detail here and there, in most – and certainly in the most canonical – the horse is simply huge, wooden and hollow, with the particulars left to the imagination. But here too, filmmakers have to make choices: the horse has to look like something. It cannot be a blank slate for the audience to flesh out in their mind’s eye. And the choices they make are often quite varied, ranging from very basic wooden models to versions with quite a bit more bling. Given the enormous latitude the ancient accounts provide filmmakers with in casting and costuming their Helens and constructing their horses, it is interesting, and significant, that so often, the choices they make visually replicate the parallels between Helen and the horse that are manifest somewhat differently in ancient literary works, and that these visual ties find support in other connections as well. The majority of the Helens in these films are positioned sympathetically, some as victims of patriarchal abuse and male greed, some as champions of women’s autonomy, and most as women who leave a man they were forced to marry for one they love. Overwhelmingly, these filmic versions show a clear preference for a very modern privileging of love, particularly in relation to marriage, and in most cases, they offer Helen a good deal of power and autonomy. While these moves are seemingly designed to appeal to modern audiences who do not want to see female characters who are merely disempowered and commodified, the persistent visual and narrative strategies which connect Helen to the Trojan Horse betray underlying misogynistic notions about the treacherous, even animalistic nature of women. While the vast majority of these connections are almost certainly not consciously inserted, despite attempts to appeal to modern audiences with more progressive ideas about women’s worth, the remarkable resilience of this analogy is indicative of the

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persistence of deeply embedded ideas about women’s deceptive, dangerous nature, the roots of which reach all the way back to antiquity. NOTES Thanks to Hunter Gardner, Amanda Potter, Ruby Blondell and Monica Cyrino for their input on this chapter. I am also grateful to attendees at the October 2019 Illinois Classical Conference, the November 2019 Film & History conference, and the February 2020 ‘Dangerous Women from Antiquity to Pop Culture’ lecture panel at the Getty Villa, and to students in my January 2020 ‘Classics in Film’ course for their comments.  1 Bud Light’s 2019 Superbowl LIII ad ‘When the Trojan Horse Goes Wrong’ (https://www.nfl.com/videos/bud-­light-­when-­the-­trojan-­horse-­ goes-­wrong-­403551).   2 With their focus on Odysseus’ story, however, Camerini’s 1954 Ulysses and Konchalovsky’s 1997 The Odyssey both feature the horse but leave Helen unmentioned.   3 Marlowe (2009: l. 163).   4 7.56–69. Translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise noted.   5 Fr. 417.  6 Idyll 18.29–31.   7 4.277, 8.515 and 11.525.   8 E.g., Powell (Homer 2014) and Murray (Homer 1919) do so consistently.   9 At 4.277 and 8.515. 10 L. 11. 11 2.20, 38, 52, 243 and 258. 12 Fagles, for instance, uses ‘womb’ throughout Book 2. 13 Odyssey 4.265–89. 14 Theogony 570–613; Works and Days 53–105. 15 Ll. 57–8. 16 Fr. 1. See Blondell (2013a: 27). 17 See Carson (1990: 155), duBois (1991: esp. 39–85, 110–29) and Powell (2009: 120–2). 18 Library 3.10.7. Walt Disney’s 1934 short The Hot Choc-late Soldiers, while not a retelling of the Trojan War story per se, includes a Trojan Horse trick with an interesting connection to Helen: here the wooden creature is a painted dove, which cracks open like an egg, revealing the soldiers within – a striking evocation of the egg from which Helen was born (thanks to Robert White for directing me to this short). 19 Image available at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A2ris#. 20 Works and Days 90–105. 21 Works and Days 80–2. 22 Ll. 689–90: noted in Christensen and Robinson (2018).

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23 As in Aeschylus, trans. Smyth and Sommerstein (1926 and 2009), for instance. 24 Doyle (2009: 11, 21–3). 25 Doyle (2009: 17). 26 Virgil, Aeneid 2.183–84; Hyginus, Fabulae 108.1.4–5; Apollodorus, Epitome 5.15. 27 Theogony 585. 28 Aeneid 2.49. 29 Apollodorus, Epitome 5.14 and 5.20. 30 The childbirth theme is also evoked in the egg-­like opening of the dove in The Hot Choc-late Soldiers noted above. 31 See Cairns’s comment on his post, also dated 2016. 32 The film’s history is confused (see Shearer 2010), and it survives in numerous cuts with widely varied run times, under several different titles (Cairns 2016), and with at least three different framing stories (the Wikipedia and IMDb summaries both offer versions different from that seen on the DVD I managed to obtain), but is not widely available. 33 Shearer (2010) notes that according to Italian film scholar Giovanni Secchi, Warner Bros bought the rights to the full version of Loves of Three Queens in order to prevent its release in the United States so that it would not undercut the success of Wise’s film. 34 Vivante (2013: 25). 35 Variety Staff (1954). Cyrino (2005a: 11) says that Podestà learned her lines by rote. 36 Theogony 602–12. 37 Vivante (2013: 31–3). 38 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJTBfH2Sf9k. 39 Her first name, Hedy, means ‘Battle War’, providing an additional, if coincidental, connection with the destructive nature of Helen both here and in Allégret’s film. 40 For more on this, see the Introduction to this volume. 41 Blondell (2013b). 42 In focus groups organised by Amanda Potter in 2007, participants did indicate that the casting of Görg worked against their expectations of Helen as white and blonde-­haired (see Potter 2010: 101). 43 Apollodorus, Epitome 1.23. 44 Winkler notes that Tyndareus’ words here ‘reinforce the traditional understanding of Helen that the film intends to change with its supposedly real story’ (2009: 235). 45 See Carson (1990: 152 and 160–4) and Levine (1995: 95–9 and 103). 46 Images available in Wikipedia’s entry on ‘Frentera’ (https://en.wiki pedia.org/wiki/Frentera). 47 An adaptation, perhaps, of Ajax the Lesser’s rape of Cassandra on the altar in the ancient sources (see Apollodorus, Epitome 5.22). 48 Thanks to Ruby Blondell for bringing this to my attention.

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49 Before turning to acting, Kruger was a model and ballet dancer – careers that entail being a ‘silent object depending for self-­expression on the body alone’, which Blondell sees as significant indications of Kruger’s ‘to be looked-­at-­ness’ (2013b: 64). 50 Blondell (2013b: 58–9). 51 Cyrino (2007: 137). 52 Cyrino (2007: 146. 53 Cyrino (2007: 145). Cyrino also notes that at Hector’s funeral Helen is dressed in black and holds Hector and Andromache’s son Astyanax, who is fated to be thrown from the walls after Troy’s fall. In this film, however, Astyanax seems to survive, as he is last seen escaping through the tunnels with his mother. 54 13.54–7. This may not be mere coincidence, as Jeffrey Richards notes that Petersen had a classical education in Hamburg, where he studied both Greek and Latin (2008: 179). 55 Another interesting casting coincidence, as ‘bella’ is both the feminine form of ‘beautiful’ and the plural of ‘war’ in Latin. 56 For more on the character of Helen in this series, see chapters by Day and Safran in Cyrino and Augoustakis (2021). 57 Blondell (2013b: 53).

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PA RT I I

From Gold to Platinum: Epic Conventions on the Small Screen

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7  Revival of Mythic Epics or Epic Failure? On Gods and Heroes in the Television Shows Olympus (2015) and Troy: Fall of a City (2018) Sylvie Magerstädt For decades, serious television dramas set in antiquity focused largely on the pseudo-­historical settings of the Roman empire (and more recently the late Republic), delegating ancient Greece to the fantastical, entertainment-­driven end of the television spectrum, as represented by shows like Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001) and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–9). Yet, after the revival of antiquity in television in the previous decade with the success of shows like HBO-­BBC’s Rome (2005–7) and STARZ Spartacus (2010–13), it seemed that television producers were starting to look at the ancient world more widely for subjects suitable to be turned into the revived epic television format. For example, the recent Sky/ Amazon co-­production Britannia (2017–) explores the Roman occupation of Britain, but with a strong fantasy element offering a creative twist. In cinema, Greek mythology was already a popular subject, especially over the previous two decades, with popular fantasy-­action films like Clash of the Titans (2010), Wrath of the Titans (2012) and Hercules (2014) as well as mytho-­historical1 works such as Troy (2004), 300 (2006) and 300: Rise of an Empire (2014). As Jacob Stolworthy notes in his review of Troy: Fall of a City: ‘This is certainly an epic that wouldn’t have existed on TV two decades ago, its lavish set design, production values and sci-­fi ­­soundtrack . . . a­ n emblem of what the small screen now has to offer.’2 Yet, despite the fact that contemporary television now has the aesthetic to rival cinema, Greek mythology still poses challenges for small-­screen adaptations as its

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focus on fate, heroism and the supernatural seems to be far more suited to cinema with its preference for (at least in its mainstream iteration) action, spectacle and narrative closure. As I will explore in this chapter, here ancient Greek story-­telling might be at odds with the televisual form and its preference for character, personal relationships and more open-­ended, episodic story-­telling. Nevertheless, two recent shows have adapted Greek myths for television, drawing on the one hand on an eclectic mix of Greek tragedies and on the other on Homer’s Iliad (with other additions from mythology). While the Canadian/British production Olympus (2015) was a low-­key affair, airing on a range of minor cable channels before appearing briefly on Netflix, the BBC1/Netflix co-­production Troy: Fall of a City (2018), with its budget of £2 million per episode, was meant to follow the success of Rome. As we will see, both Olympus and Fall of a City failed to capture audiences despite their laudable attempt to bring ancient Greece back onto television screens. Drawing on Aristotle’s theories of epic and tragic poetry, outlined in his Poetics, as well as on contemporary television scholarship, I will discuss some of the possible reasons for the shows’ failure. Here, I will suggest that these shows disappointed at least in part due to inherent problems in translating the epic and tragic formats of the classical myths onto television screens. The focus will be on issues relating to narrative structure and characterisation, which, at times, come into conflict with contemporary television drama and its preference for what we might call an ‘un-­epic’ mode of story-­telling that puts a greater emphasis on introspection, non-­linear narration and mundane aspects of life. There are, of course, some obvious challenges in applying Aristotle’s analysis of ancient poetry to twenty-­first-­century television, not least the fact that his interpretation of ancient works is by no means uncontentious.3 Moreover, as others have argued in this book, the term ‘epic’ is now applied in a much broader context than the strict sense of ‘epic poetry’ used by Aristotle. For Aristotle, the key difference between epic and tragic forms of story-­telling is their different narrative format: tragedy is dramatised to be performed on stage, while epics are written in rhythmic metres and meant to be read. Yet he also emphasises that the key elements of story, such as plot, emotional response and characterisation, are the same in both formats. The problem with adapting an ancient epic like the Iliad for television is that in the process of adaptation the epic is dramatised, and thus ceases to be an epic in Aristotle’s sense. Therefore, when analysing contemporary television productions based on ancient myths, be they tragic or epic, it no longer makes sense to consider

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them as being different formats. Tragedies in television format – as we will see in Olympus – no longer adhere to the strict time frames of stage performances defined by Aristotle, and epics, as already noted, become dramatised performances, thus taking on the characteristics of a tragedy. I will therefore refer to the shows under consideration as ‘epic tragedies’ unless a distinction is necessary and relevant. As my aim is not to provide detailed literary criticism of contemporary adaptations, but rather to highlight some of the challenges in bringing ancient works onto screens from the perspective of contemporary television scholarship, I hope that scholars of Aristotle will forgive me these liberties. E P I C FA I L U R E ( S ) When Olympus was announced as a new Syfy Channel production, Chris Regina, senior vice president of programing, touted it as a ‘fantastic blend of action, intense thrills, creatures and great story telling [featuring] characters from mythology in a way never before imagined’, while executive producer Robert Halmi Sr. noted that they were ‘confident that this will be another epic adventure for television’.4 Sadly, the show did not live up to expectations, as it was dismissed by critics and cancelled after the first season. One reviewer criticises the show especially for not fulfilling the ‘epic’ aspirations of its producers, suggesting that ‘[p]enny-­pinching is nothing new when it comes to Syfy productions, but when you’re trying to create an entire fantasy world from scratch, the limitations are painfully apparent’.5 Even more starkly, The Hollywood Reporter described it as ‘300 as shot for $300’.6 All the sets were digitally created, but it was not just the quality of the virtual worlds that prompted the show’s failure. Poor acting was also to blame, as ‘digital backdrops act as static counterpoint to the actors’ Dynasty-level emoting’.7 As I will discuss in more detail below, the lack of strong characterisation more generally was a major factor in the poor performance of the show. Although one could argue that the reference to soap-­opera-­style acting made it particularly suited for television, the show had neither the self-­ironic humour of mythic television shows like Hercules: The Legendary Journeys nor the production values of shows like Rome. As Von Doviak points out, ‘Olympus evokes the unreality of a high school play, but it isn’t going for campy laughs like other movies or shows.’8 One of the reasons for this lack of humour is maybe that the show’s creator Nick Willing claims that he was more inspired by Greek tragedies than some of the more fantastic Greek myths.

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In an interview for Slice of SciFi, Willing suggests he wanted to do a ‘very tough, hard hitting, beautiful and incredibly fast-­paced – as those Greek Tragedies were – series, that is as modern today as it was 2500 years ago’.9 Unfortunately, he also demonstrates a great deal of ignorance of the subject matter when claiming that no one has ever dramatised Greek tragedies for television.10 This lack of understanding of the televisual precedents for his work might be one of the faults of Olympus, given that contemporary drama now often includes a certain self-­ironic distancing and playfulness. As Trisha Dunleavy argues, quality drama ‘has often identified itself as such through the use of “generic mixing” and “self-­reflexivity”’, and she further suggests that in contemporary television, ‘intertextuality entails references by shows to other screen or literary texts, to their medium and/or their place in popular culture, as well as the acknowledgement through these references, that they too are works of fiction’.11 Yet Olympus, in its attempt to be novel in adapting Greek tragedy and mixing it with fantasy elements, lacks these aspects. Unlike Olympus, the 2018 BBC/Netflix co-­production Troy: Fall of a City generally fared well with critics but proved unpopular with audiences. The Critics Consensus on the Rotten Tomatoes site suggests that ‘Troy: Fall of a City never tries to reinvent the bronze wheel but succeeds in engaging audiences with both royal and divine intrigue, making for a highly enjoyable romp in the lost kingdom.’12 Audiences clearly disagreed as an already disappointing initial viewing figure of 3.3 million had dropped dramatically to 1.6 million by episode 4, when the story proper as featured in the Iliad starts, indicating neither enjoyment nor sustained interest.13 In contrast to Olympus, the BBC show offered more of the elements of quality television drama, not least ‘its very high per-­episode cost’ as well as ‘selected exterior locations, elaborate sets and cinematography’, which according to Dunleavy are key features of the distinctive ‘look’ of a contemporary quality drama.14 One of the aspects that critics disagreed about was the question of ‘faithfulness’ to the original story, which is problematic for various reasons. For example, The Guardian complimented the show for its ‘intriguing, relatively faithful version of the Iliad’,15 and similarly The Sydney Morning Herald noted that ‘Troy sticks close to Homer’s original, including the squabbling between the gods’.16 To complicate matters, Steve Greene also considers the show as sticking to the myth, but sees this as a weakness, suggesting that anyone ‘acquainted with a Classics 101 course knows how the [the show] plays out’.17 Andrea Tallarita, on the other hand, blames the audience’s ignorance of classical literature for the show’s failure,

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even though that should hardly be a requirement for watching a mainstream television drama.18 Moreover, as Aristotle pointed out, even in ancient Greece, ‘well-­known tales are well known only to a few, and nevertheless they give pleasure to all’.19 The BBC must have had a similar thought, asking journalists writing about Troy: Fall of a City ‘to avoid spoilers; apparently, we must think of those coming to these myths “for the first time”’.20 What Aristotle acknowledges here more broadly is that it is not the accuracy of minor details that makes stories fail or succeed with their audience, the things that scholars might get frustrated with, but rather the story’s lack of cohesion and sense for the universal, as I discuss in more depth shortly. Tallarita also submits that there can be no such thing as a retelling of the story in its original, ur-­form: if we want to be true to the text, the Iliad is practically impossible to convert to film. We’d stumble as early as in Book II, when attempting to render the (in) famous Catalogue of Ships.21

It seems Aristotle had a similar thought when he cautioned us: not to construct a tragedy on the plan of an epic poem (by epic I mean, having a multiplicity of stories) – as if, for example, someone were to dramatize the story of the Iliad in its ­­entirety . . . O ­ ne has only to note that those who have dramatized The Sack of Troy ­­entire . . . i­nvariably . . . have their plays hissed off.22

Television producers seem to have fared little better. The greater length and episodic character of television drama do, however, facilitate the retelling of a ‘multiplicity of stories’, and here one might think that television and ancient epics should be natural allies. Aristotle argued that in contrast to tragedy, epic poetry has a very distinct advantage . . . [because its] narrative form makes it possible to describe many parts as completed within the same time, and through ­­these . . . ­the bulk of the poem is ­­enlarged . . . ­making for grandeur and the diversion of the hearer through the introduction of episodes of dissimilar character.23

This notion of expansion and dissimilar episodes resonates in Vivian Sobchack’s description of the transformation of epics from cinema to television. Here she argues that the ‘­­miniseries . . . ­transforms the Hollywood historical epic . . . [by] formally altering its temporal field, and thus its construction of History’, and further suggests that the very term mini-series indicates ‘that the electronic medium’s new mode of episodic and fragmented exhibition has changed the sense and terms of the expansiveness, movement, and repetitiousness of epic – and historical – time’.24

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Yet merely offering more time for transforming an epic poem onto screen or mashing up a series of tragedies into a longer television drama does not per se make a good television adaptation if other aspects of the production fail to deliver. Contemporary stories also need to be able to create a sense of complexity – without confusing their audiences. ‘To call something complex [in television drama] is to highlight its sophistication and nuance, suggesting that it presents a vision of the world that avoids being reductive’.25 Troy expands the Iliad by drawing on other myths in order to explore the ‘backstories’ of its characters. Such background is important in contemporary story-­telling, with television dramas often centred on ‘conflict-­riven and usually transgressive primary characters ­­ . . . t­he moral and psychological complexity of these characters has been important to the allure of complex serials’.26 As I will explore further in the next section, television here extends well beyond the boundaries of ancient drama, posing challenges to anyone adapting these stories for the screen. One of the failures of Troy might be that it did not go far enough in expanding the plot beyond Homer’s ancient poem, lacking the psychological tension needed for contemporary television drama. ‘From the opening flashback, Troy: Fall of a City hammers home the fact that we know how this is going to end; by the end credits, it remains uncertain whether the series needs eight episodes to show it’,27 as Stolworthy notes. Similarly, Greene proposes that ‘[w]ithout much ­­reinvention . . . ­it’s not so much an adaptation of the story for current times, but an adaptation just for TV’s sake’.28 It lacks the inclusion of more innovative storylines and characters that could have provided added interest to the well-­known myth. Troy certainly offers a distinct visual style and puts a strong emphasis on locations, settings and costume, which is, according to Robin Nelson, an important aspect of contemporary television drama and its ‘widespread emphasis upon the primacy of the visual, which Caldwell [1995] dubbed “televisuality”’.29 The notion of psychologically complex characters also reveals something about the tension between ancient myths and contemporary television. For example, while one reviewer hopes that Troy will provide a ‘fresh, psychologically knotty take on one of the greatest tales of them all’,30 others complain that the ‘dialogue is so richly silted with self-­help banalities, we might as well be watching a Meghan and Harry biopic’.31 A closer look at character development in both Troy and Olympus might tell us more about the sources of these tensions.

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CA R D B OA R D C H A R AC T E RS Despite their differences, both Troy and Olympus portray a universal conflict between mortals and gods, where human characters become pawns in a play for power. Yet the problem both shows face when trying to make this relevant to audiences in the twenty-­first century is that turning ancient heroes and heroines into modern-­day people is not straightforward. ‘Having characters in robes and carrying swords amid gods, goddesses and mythic scenery, yet talking like normal folks waiting for a bus or down the supermarket, leaves the action feeling starved of dramatic wattage’, as Sweeting notes with regard to Troy.32 Both shows have the contradictory task of wanting to portray the imposing protagonists of mythic epics, but also make them relatable. It is not surprising, then, that character development is a key point of contention in the reviews of the show. For example, Greene argues that because the individuals in the story, whether in palace discussions or strategies of war, are so larger than life, there’s a real challenge to finding bits of character development within the saga that aren’t just means to get from one plot point to another.33

Characterisation in Olympus is even more problematic. This starts with the protagonist Hero (Tom York), who remains nameless throughout the show. As Von Doviak remarks, creating ‘identification with a lead character is crucial, and hard enough to pull off without adding to the degree of difficulty by not giving him a name’.34 Shows like Rome were primarily successful not because of their stunning sets and grand narrative, but because of their characters, which enabled the audience to follow the rise and fall not just of the Roman Republic but of the colourful and ruthless Atia, the passionate yet naive Antony or the loyal yet hot-­tempered Vorenus. In contrast, Troy keeps its characters at a distance and their interactions are often banal, lacking both the cynicism and the occasional humour found in the aforementioned Rome. Helen (Bella Dayne) remains aloof and unsympathetic and Paris (Louis Hunter) is flaky and keeps changing his attitude to Helen and his family in nearly every episode, so that you are never quite sure where you stand with him. Hector (Tom Weston-­Jones) is the upright good guy, but also a bit dull, and, despite mutual affection, there is little passion between him and his wife Andromache (Chloe Pirrie), who spends most of her time complaining about Helen. Interestingly, critics once again seem to disagree on this point. Some bemoan that the show ‘introduces Paris

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as a whiny playboy, but wants him to be both noble romantic hero and the poster child for failing upward within Troy’s inner circle’,35 while others argue that seeing ‘Paris – or Prince Alexander – struggle with the turmoil of being whisked from a rural to a regal life helped flesh out a character too often condemned merely as a spoilt troublemaker’.36 Moreover, Hawksley argues that Troy has succeeded in its attempt to ‘focus on character, rather than spectacle’.37 Even if we were to agree with Hawksley on this point, and I am not sure I do, this nevertheless creates tension between television and Aristotle’s view that the primary focus should always be on action, as it ‘is in action that happiness and unhappiness are found, and the end we aim at is a kind of activity, not a quality’.38 In its attempt to focus on character, the series loses the impact of the tragic-­epic story, but by not being successful enough in its characterisation, it also fails as television. Similarly, the lead characters in Olympus are colourless and at times outright dislikeable, and the lack of dramatic tension, the confusing plotline and the poor-­quality CGI make things worse. Scenes like this one highlighted by Von Doviak are symptomatic: In one scene, the Oracle and Theo fool Hero by making a circle of footprints to conceal their true destination; in the next scene, with no explanation, he’s found them in the forest. It’s as if Olympus can’t be bothered with the most rudimentary attempt at crafting suspense or even basic storytelling.39

For Aristotle, the action of the wider drama is key to the success of a story for ‘it is in their actions that men universally meet with success or failure’.40 While characterisation has some value, Aristotle emphasises that ‘it is not for the purpose of presenting their characters that the agents engage in action, but rather it is for the sake of their actions that they take on the characters they have’.41 When it comes to cinematic epics, one might indeed suggest that the action, especially in large-­scale battles and the like, combined with the intensity of the screen visuals, may take primacy over character development. Yet the opposite is true of contemporary television drama. By focusing on action and leaving out a lot of details, cinematic adaptations of the Iliad, for example, such as Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), focused on broader ideas such as the ethics of warfare and the nature of heroism. While the film was criticised for the one-­dimensionality of some of its characters, one could argue that the lack of complexity in characterisation was outweighed by its focus on action. After all, Aristotle claims that ‘without action there could not be tragedy, but there could be without characterisation’.42 Yet I would hold against

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this that without characterisation there could not be a television drama. As television explores narratives over a much longer period and in much greater detail, a sole focus on action is not enough to sustain the story, and some reviewers have rightly criticised a certain repetitiveness in the story, among them Greene, who suggests that the continuous, unresolved question of duty and obligation in the face of the dangers of war sets a cycle of repetition that swallows the ­­ . . . ­characters [of this] complex ­­saga . . . ­that, even halfway through the series has begun to redo itself.43

Although, as we discussed earlier, television might be in a unique position to adapt complex, multi-­story epics, it cannot do so merely by stretching out the story and dramatising all the minor details of the ancient poem. In addition to the problems noted above, Greene states that the ‘Troy-­Sparta story is such a dense web that it doesn’t leave much room for quiet conversation.’44 This is probably not a concern that would have troubled Aristotle, but it indicates some of the priorities of contemporary television viewers. For Aristotle, ‘“character” is whatever reveals a person’s habit of moral choice – whatever he tends to choose or reject when the choice is not obvious – and this element is, therefore, absent from speeches in which there is absolutely no choosing or rejecting of anything by the speaker’.45 Yet contemporary television drama is very much embedded in a culture in which people reveal their inner feelings and thoughts - their character – not just in actions but indeed in ‘speeches’, such as conversations and ‘therapy’ sessions. This is evident in Helen’s ruminations about her unhappy marriage or Achilles’ constant deliberating. Hero in Olympus does not talk much, but there is a constant challenge from the Oracle (Sonya Cassidy) and other characters about what motivates him to act. We might think that this is more in line with television drama, but it creates a somewhat jarring connection to the ‘men (and women) of action’ of ancient myth from which they are drawn. Especially in the case of Achilles (David Gyasi), it becomes difficult to see how a man that spends so much time reflecting and self-­assessing can suddenly turn to impulsive rage. Greene claims that all ‘Gyasi needs to instill fear in the hearts of his opponents are a simple chuckle and a controlled, menacing stare.’46 Yet this seems starkly at odds with the legendary wrath of the mythical hero. By reimagining Achilles as quiet and reflective, the show makes his subsequent actions seem ‘out of character’ to contemporary audiences. Much of this also depends on the universal themes underpinning the story. Aristotle contrasts the Iliad, which he describes as ‘simple

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in plot and a poem of passion’, with the Odyssey, which is ‘­­complex . . . a­ nd a poem of character’.47 This might explain why the 1997 television adaptation of the Odyssey was significantly more successful than BBC’s Troy.48 What Aristotle seems to imply here is that the focus of the Iliad is more strongly on universal ideas and concepts, such as wrath, jealousy, greed, warfare etc., whereas the Odyssey explores human character and its flaws, focusing on a morally ambiguous hero with a problematic track record. We can see why the latter seems more in line with contemporary television. It is thus not surprising that at the end of her week-­by-­week reviews for The Guardian, Sarah Hughes singles out Odysseus as the most tragic character of the show: It took only eight episodes, but as a numb Odysseus set sail for home, Andromache’s curse clearly still ringing in his head, Troy: Fall of a City had finally given us both a love story and a tragedy worthy of the name.49

Moreover, she also notes that ‘Odysseus has always understood that it is not enough to rant about the unfairness of the gods or the injustices done to you: you have to take responsibility for your actions’.50 For all his preference of action over character, we must not forget that for Aristotle character or virtues formed a central part of his Ethics. Even in the Poetics he acknowledges that ‘since tragedy is the imitation of an action and is enacted by men in action, these persons must necessarily possess certain qualities of Character and Thought’.51 He also criticises many of the tragedies of his time for ‘lacking in the ethical element’,52 which is linked to characterisation. One of the key elements of the more successful television shows set in the ancient world is their exploration of ethical issues, such as friendship, loyalty, trust and perseverance, which were central to shows like Hercules: The Legendary Journeys or STARZ Spartacus. Of course, we could argue that shows like Rome focused more on vices than virtues. Yet it was also the friendship and critical commentary of sometimes morally ambiguous characters like Vorenus and Pullo that gave the show its moral backbone. Greene argues with regard to Troy that some of the vicious and brutal choices made by some central figures, changing them from decent, compromised men to full-­blown monsters, ring false when they’re so tied to the burden of having to shepherd the story along as it’s been told so many times before’.53

In order to engage with the characters, we need to follow their development over time, but they need to be interesting enough to hold our attention. In order to be worthy of epic tragedy, a story ‘must

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have length and such length as to be easily held in the memory’.54 One of the issues with both Troy and Olympus is that they, like many contemporary television dramas, have indeed length, but the lack of audience engagement and the inconsistencies in plotlines (particularly in Olympus) make it difficult to remember the details from week to week or care enough about the characters to make the effort. Especially in Olympus, characters act in ways not necessarily consistent with their character. Hero’s actions, for example, are anything but heroic. When he starts his quest and frees the Oracle, his sole interest is to find out information about his past. He shows neither sympathy nor pity nor even a bit of care for her destiny as Oracle and the brutal treatment she receives in the temple, where she is tied up and forced to expose herself to the poisonous fumes that give her visions. In episode 11, Hero kills King Minos without any real need, and in the final episode, he chokes to death his apparent friend Daedalus, one of the more interesting characters of the show. Aristotle insists that ‘it is evident that good men ought not to be shown passing from prosperity to misfortune, for this does not inspire either pity or fear, but only revulsion, nor evil men rising from ill fortune to prosperity’,55 yet this is arguably what happens here. Granted, Hero is not meant to be evil at this stage, but neither could we really describe him as good. Also, the murders lack the tragic element arousing pity or fear, ‘pity for the man suffering undeservedly, fear for the man like ourselves’.56 We might feel pity with characters like Daedalus or even Minos, but the show clearly wants us to be on the side of Hero, who is neither like ourselves nor suffering undeservedly, so it is difficult to sympathise. Moreover, his flawed actions do not seem to result from conflicting moral choices (as when Odysseus has to choose between sparing Andromache’s son and loyalty to his king in Troy), nor do they spring from some unfortunate mistake or error of judgement. In the footnotes to his translation of the Poetics, James Hutton clarifies that in the Ethics Aristotle notes that ‘such mistaken acts are said to be due not to vice or depravity, but to ignorance of some relevant fact or circumstance. . . . Yet, since they are done intentionally, they are not mere accidents’.57 Moreover, for ‘the sake of probability, they should also be the sort of thing a certain kind of person is likely to do in the circumstances’.58 Yet, Hero’s actions as described above are not done due to some missing fact nor seem to be likely for the person to do in the circumstances. Instead, they feel random and impulsive, which is again ‘out of character’ for a protagonist that has shown little emotion up to that point.

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Aristotle notes further that it is not only an action complete in itself that tragedy represents; it also represents incidents involving pity and fear, and such incidents are most effective when they come unexpectedly and yet occur in a causal sequence in which one thing leads to another. 59

The balance between surprise and causality is a problem in both shows discussed here. Whereas in Troy, very little happens unexpectedly, Olympus is lacking a logical structure in which events and actions follow in some plausible order. The material added to Troy, such as the backstories of characters, as well as the various myths and tragedies found in Olympus, mean that both lack dramatic unity. Aristotle acknowledges that in real life many ‘things, indeed an endless number of things, happen to any one man some of which do not go together to form a unity’.60 However, he argues that for things to work as a story, we need to focus on those actions that do form a unity. Here again he might be at odds with contemporary television, which has a penchant for the inclusion of mundane and apparently banal elements in their stories. Nevertheless, the need for overall unity still applies. For example, while Rome successfully incorporated ordinary life and apparently random, mundane occurrences into its narrative, these inclusions actually helped to underscore the wider political tragedies that were afoot, even if that was not always explicit initially.61 In addition to an ability to evoke fear and pity, key elements of the tragic plot for Aristotle are reversal, recognition and suffering .62 Although we find plenty of suffering in Troy, we have few instances of reversal and recognition, beyond the discovery of Paris’ noble birth at the beginning of the show. Olympus offers plenty of reversals, although they mostly lack tragic gravitas and often seem entirely unmotivated. For instance, in episode 7 Hero and Oracle suddenly declare their love for each other, but this is presented as a statement of fact, with no motivation or spark, so is unconvincing. They then continue with their constant bickering; not even a kiss follows the ‘romantic declaration’. In episode 9, Hero suddenly falls in love with Ariadne (Sophia Lauchlin Hirt), a character that he despised up to that point. After Ariadne dies in the following episode, Hero once again realises he is in love with Oracle in the climactic scenes of the final episodes. Olympus creator Nick Willing seems to have again misunderstood Greek tragedy when arguing that its characters ‘are very unusual, they are not like everyday TV characters. They go through the most extraordinary turnarounds – they have the most

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extreme arcs of any kind of character’– and later adds that he needed ‘to find actors that could turn on a dime’.63 What he does not seem to realise is that, as noted by Aristotle, although those characters do indeed undergo dramatic changes over the course of the story, these are rarely ‘turns on a dime’ but rather steady developments that result directly from their actions and character flaws. The exception here might be cases of divine intervention. Yet, even within an ancient Greek context, Aristotle criticises playwrights for using the gods as an easy excuse for bad plotting and notes that a deus ex machina is only ‘to be used for matters lying outside the ­­drama . . . o ­ r things subsequent to the action that have to be prophesied and announced’, and that ‘within the events of the plot itself ­­ . . . ­there should be nothing unreasonable, or if there is, it should be kept outside the play proper’.64 It is not clear to me how the inclusion of the gods, despite being an attempt at faithfulness to the source material, helps us to better understand the characters and plot of Troy, especially if so much effort is also made to show Agamemnon as an obsessive monster who drives the whole war. And the ­haphazard way in which the plot of Olympus is driven forward by random prophecies, without any real motivation on behalf of the characters, would surely have displeased Aristotle. Although he concedes that epics have a little more scope than tragedies for what he calls the ‘irrational’, dramatising these epics for television and thus turning them into ‘epic tragedies’, as I argued above, creates a tension between the text and the visual display. According to Aristotle: The marvellous is an element that should of course be embodied in tragedies, but that which is a prime source of the marvellous – namely, the irrational – can be more freely introduced in epic poetry where we do not have the performer of the act directly before our eyes; for the Pursuit of Hector would seem ridiculous if it took place on the stage – the army just standing by and taking no part in the chase and Achilles shaking his head at them – but in the poem the absurdity goes unnoticed.65

Displaying the story on television, in a setting otherwise aiming at visual realism, only intensifies the absurdity of those elements rather than making them feel more natural. Although a more fantasy-­ oriented show like Olympus may have more scope for the ‘marvellous’, it also ignored an important suggestion from Aristotle, namely that what ‘is impossible yet probable should be preferred to that which is possible but incredible; plots should never be constructed out of irrational parts’.66 As already indicated, it is not the array of mythical creatures and deities that makes the storyline of Olympus

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irrational or implausible, but its construction of plotlines out of irrational actions. CONCLUSION As we have seen, both Olympus and Troy tried in different ways to adapt ancient Greek stories to the very modern demands of contemporary serial television. Yet, as the discussion of Aristotle’s Poetics has aimed to highlight, by adapting ancient epics and tragedies for television, we are also profoundly altering the elements that made them successful in their original form. Tensions between ancient story-­telling with its emphasis on actions and television’s primacy of character need to be addressed creatively when turning epic tragedies into contemporary drama series. Unfortunately, both shows failed to find the right balance between faithfulness and creativity when adapting their stories for modern audiences. Troy might have been overall the more successful, drawing on a more coherent mythic epic with a clear arc rather than the eclectic array of myths and tragedies that are loosely woven together in Olympus. Yet adding ‘psychological depth’ to the pre-­modern characters of these stories has proven challenging, as has balancing the universal, grand storylines with television’s interest in the mundane and the familiar. Including the gods in its narrative may have demonstrated Troy’s faithfulness to the Homeric tradition, but it did not make it a more convincing television drama, and Olympus’ unexpected dismissal of the Greek pantheon in favour of Christian iconography at the end of the show seemed out of place. It remains to be seen if the failure of these shows has put television producers off the ancient Greek world for the time being, or if we can hope for more imaginary retellings of those fascinating stories in the not too distant future. NOTES   1 For a discussion on the terms ‘mytho-­history’ and ‘mytho-­fantasy’ see Lucanio (1994).   2 Stolworthy (2018).   3 For an interesting outline of the Poetics’ chequered reception history, see for example Lazarus (2016).   4 Kimball (2014).   5 Von Doviak (2015).   6 Uhlich (2015).  7 Ibid.

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  8 Von Doviak (2015).   9 Brooks (2015). 10 For detailed discussions of Greek tragedies on screen, see for example Solomon (2001) as well as my recent work on the topic (Magerstädt 2019). 11 Dunleavy (2017: 60), drawing on Thompson (1996: 15). 12 ‘Critics Consensus’ in Rotten Tomatoes (n.d.-b). 13 Kalafatis (2018). 14 Dunleavy (2017: 4). 15 Ferguson (2018). 16 Elliott (2018). 17 Greene (2018). 18 Tallarita (2018). 19 Aristotle (1982: 1451b). 20 Cooke (2018). 21 Tallarita (2018). 22 Aristotle (1982: 1456a). 23 Aristotle (1982: 1459b). 24 Sobchack (1990: 42). 25 Mittell (2013) as cited in Dunleavy (2017: 2–3). 26 Dunleavy (2017: 5). 27 Stolworthy (2018). 28 Greene (2018). 29 Nelson (2007: 48). 30 Hawksley (2018). 31 Cooke (2018). 32 Sweeting (2018). 33 Greene (2018). 34 Von Doviak (2015). 35 Greene (2018). 36 Hawksley (2018). 37 Ibid. 38 Aristotle (1982: 1450a). 39 Von Doviak (2015). 40 Aristotle (1982: 1450a). 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Greene (2018). 44 Ibid. 45 Aristotle (1982: 1450b). 46 Greene (2018). 47 Aristotle (1982: 1459b). 48 The Odyssey was nominated for two Golden Globes in 1998 (including best mini-­series) and for various other television awards and won two Emmys in 1997. Troy: Fall of a City won a BAFTA for its special

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effects but had no other nominations. The Odyssey has an audience approval rating of 60 per cent compared to Troy’s 23 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes (n.d.-a; n.d.-b); and the shows rate 7/10 and 3.8/10 stars on IMDb (n.d.-a; n.d.-b) respectively. 49 Hughes (2018). 50 Ibid. 51 Aristotle (1982: 1449b–1450a). 52 Aristotle (1982: 1450a). 53 Greene (2018). 54 Aristotle (1982: 1451a). 55 Aristotle (1982: 1452b). 56 Aristotle (1982: 1453a). 57 Aristotle (1982: 1453a, n4). 58 Ibid. 59 Aristotle (1982: 1452a). 60 Aristotle (1982: 1451a). 61 For insightful discussions on this topic, see for example Brice (2008) and Cyrino (2008a). 62 Aristotle (1982: 1452a–1452b, chapter 11). 63 Brooks (2015). 64 Aristotle (1982: 1454b). 65 Aristotle (1982: 1460a). 66 Ibid.

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8  Travels with Odysseus and the Odyssey in Twenty-First-Century Television Documentaries Fiona Hobden

Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways who wandered far and wide after sacking the sacred citadel of Troy. He saw the cities and knew the minds of many men. Many pains he suffered at sea and in his spirit, striving to secure his life and the return of his companions. (Homer, Odyssey 1.1–5)

In the petition for divine inspiration that opens the Odyssey, travel is already a core element in Odysseus’ experience and identity. Within the present of the poem, the hero is on the move for only a limited time, departing from Calypso’s island to arrive at the palace of Alcinous on Phaeacia and from there sailing home to Ithaca (Books 5–8, 13). However, Odysseus’ unknown whereabouts drive his son Telemachus to set out on his own journey in search of information (Books 1–4). Odysseus’ return is then a resolution of that uncertainty and an end to his travels, although it remains for him to reclaim his position at the heart of the family and the community by killing the suitors for his wife, Penelope, reuniting with his father and coming to a resolution with the suitors’ families (Books 14–24). Before this, however, Odysseus regales the Phaeacians with a captivating account of his prior misadventures, featuring encounters with cannibalistic giants, seductive women, dangerous monsters, angry gods and the dead on land, at sea and in the Underworld (Books 9–12).1 This tale establishes Odysseus’ heroic credentials, albeit not unproblematically, and persuades the Phaeacians to aid his return home. Travelling, as the proem promises, is a source of knowledge and of the suffering encoded in its protagonist’s name.2 Given this priority, it may seem unremarkable that television

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­ ocumentaries dedicated to the Odyssey take up the travel theme.3 d Clash of the Gods (2009), Gods and Monsters: Homer’s Odyssey (2010), and Sur les traces d’Ulysse (2017) all structure their investigations around Odysseus’ journey from Troy to Ithaca, while Akala’s Odyssey (2018) takes advantage of the derived usage of ‘odyssey’ to mean ‘a long series of wanderings; a long adventurous journey’ to orient the hip-­hop artist’s engagement with the poem.4 The role of the journey in each series or programme, however, is distinct. While drawing from a pool of shared audiovisual and narrative strategies familiar to the documentary genre, they pursue fundamentally different interpretations of Odysseus and the Odyssey. As such, they provide an excellent set of case studies for exploring modern responses to the ancient epic. For all a poetic creation and its fictional hero may seem an odd subject for documentaries, which deal in facts and promise insights into ‘the real’,5 there are underlying equivalences. Not least, relying on oral delivery to large audiences, both epic poetry and television documentaries communicate with a community of viewer-listeners in contemporary language about the world and themselves, to follow Fiske and Hartley’s concept of ‘bardic television’.6 By tracing the travel theme in each programme or series, this chapter examines how and why television documentaries repurpose the Odyssey and reimagine Odysseus for the twenty-­first century, and considers what viewers learn when we invite television to ‘tell us’ about the ‘man of many ways’. PULP EPIC AND HISTORICAL TRUTHS Voiceover narrator: The Odyssey. It is the ultimate adventure story. A warrior king in a desperate race to get home before he loses the woman he loves and the nation he rules. In his way are savage beasts, hurricane winds, giant cannibals, and he’ll have to outsmart them all. Modern research is revealing some surprising truths behind the epic myth. This is the real story of Odysseus.

‘Curse of the Sea’ and ‘Warrior’s Revenge’ are two episodes dedicated to Odysseus in the 2009 ten-­part series Clash of the Gods from the American subscription channel HISTORY. The prologue to the former, which resembles a movie trailer with its deep-­voiced narrator and fast-­flowing images, captures the tone and contents. In keeping with the ‘adventure story’ frame, the episode progresses through action-­ packed moments, picking up Odysseus at Troy, where he orchestrates the sack of the city, and carrying him onwards through the lands of the Lotus-­Eaters and Laestrygonians, before depositing

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him on Circe’s island, from where he continues home via Hades to Ithaca in the next episode. At each stage, Odysseus faces obstacles and overcomes impediments, taking him closer to his destiny: a ­restoration of self and nation that is fundamental to the protagonist in Hollywood’s epic films.7 At the same time, the programme undertakes an analysis of Odysseus’ encounters that historicises the myth and authorises its own account, so that the bearded man in leather costume who resolves onscreen at the end of the prologue becomes Odysseus. In keeping with a series title that evokes the classic Greek myth film, Clash of the Titans (1981, remade 2010), Clash of the Gods draws upon the aesthetics and narrative structures of popular film, while making a documentary claim on reality. The result is a linear, pared-­down and segmented version of Odysseus’ journey, formatted to meet the documentary imperative to entertain and educate. This dual approach is reflected within a multi-­vocal and multi-­ layered narrative that combines a voice-­of-­god narrator, talking-­head statements, drama reconstruction and CGI. An early sequence in ‘Curse of the Sea’ (on which the remainder of this discussion focuses) detailing Odysseus’ participation in the sack of Troy, for example, balances the narrator’s unfolding account of how the Greeks’ stratagem of hiding inside a wooden horse resulted in the city’s annihilation with interventions from experts. So, Barry Strauss (introduced as author of The Trojan War: A New History) explains the economic and symbolic importance of horses to the Trojans; Peter Struck (University of Pennsylvania) describes the celebration of the Trojans, who invite the horse inside their walls, mistakenly believing that the war has ended; and Kristina Milnor (Barnard College) invokes the image of Trojans sleeping while the Greeks sneak into their city. Adding historical information and narrative detail, their contributions pack out and confirm the top-­line tale. At the same time, their cumulative efforts are reinforced by dramatised exposition. This starts with a close-­up of Odysseus peering out between the slats from inside the wooden horse (looking remarkably like its counterpart in the film Troy, 2004), and ends with shots of Greeks making their way through streets and up stairwells, carrying weapons and flaming torches. Like the culminating CGI of a flat-­roofed city on fire, the drama reconstruction realises and enhances the verbal narrative, adding visual excitement.8 The effect is strengthened in the Cyclops episode, excerpts from which offer tantalising flash-­ forwards from the very beginning. Integrating live action drama and cut-­out stills, the confrontation between Odysseus and his men and the Cyclops, Polyphemus, is

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Figure 8.1 CGI animation of Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops in Clash of the Gods, ‘Curse of the Sea’ (2009). HISTORY.

replete with extreme close-ups and point-of-view shots that show what each side sees. Together these emphasise the sailors’ fear, when the half-naked giant – ‘a ravenous beast with the strength of twenty men and one massive eye in the middle of his forehead’ (says the narrator) – finds them in his cave. In the attack, moving stills of two men spiralling upwards, splitting in half and bursting with blood, segue to close-ups on the mouth of an actor, made up in a grotesque latex mask and body suit, chewing lustily on snapping sinews. Viscera drop gloopily on the floor (Figure 8.1). The gruesome fate of Odysseus’ men is brought to life for the consumption – disgust and relish – of the television viewer. The onscreen enactment of Odysseus’ adventures thus upgrades the tendency in epic poetry towards vividness and visuality.9 Where the Odyssey relies upon a concatenation of participles and verbs to double up the action, deploys animal similes to emphasise the brutality of the hungry Cyclops, draws attention to the victims’ dismembered bodies and describes the despair of the onlookers at ‘this

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abominable deed’ (9.288–95), Clash of the Gods shows it through hyper-­realistic animation. In this respect, it is closer in aesthetics to ‘pulp epic’, as Martin describes the derivative and much-­ derided archaic poem Shield of Heracles, which over-­orchestrates scenes to produce ‘a bigger, more detailed, often gorier, usually livelier poem’.10 Akin, then, to pulp fiction, from which Martin derives the concept, the documentary version is characterised by excess: utilising the tools of dramatisation familiar to epic film in a highly stylised way to generate audiovisual hyperbole. This in turn mimics the language of narration across the episode, which incorporates cliché (‘It seems like a dream come true, but it’s about to become hell on earth’), flippancy (‘it’s dinner time!’), alliteration (‘ten terrified sailors are trapped’) and shocking revelation (‘a real scourge of ancient Greece: drug abuse’). Proceeding in a distinctly tabloid register, every element is pitched towards sensationalism. This even extends to segments dedicated to uncovering the reality behind Odysseus’ journey. Findings to support the existence of Odysseus’ fleet, for example, are ‘stunning’, and the conclusions are ‘an exciting revelation’. At issue is the dating of planks from a shipwreck dredged near Sicily. With tree rings supplying a date of 500 bce, however, the affirmation can only remain in the conditional. As the narrator puts it, ‘This could be exactly the type of ship Homer imagined for Odysseus’; or as expert witness Charles Barker from the Rose Mary (sic) Trust in Portsmouth says, ‘Odysseus’ journey could well have taken place’, and the excavated ship ‘could well have been comparable to the ships that he would have been on’ (my emphases). Correctly, given that the description of Odysseus’ fleet is poetic invention, none of these statements permits any conclusion about historical reality. The investigation validates the series’ documentary credentials, yet the flimsiness of the results highlights the difficulty in crafting ‘true’ stories out of epic poetry. This difficulty may explain the focus on Odysseus’s personal qualities, a move that obscures the character’s fictionality. Through comments interspersed between the story of his travels, the talking heads emphasise Odysseus’ mental agility, alongside his tenacity and rashness. In a straightforward way, this is the hero of the Odyssey, the ‘man of many ways’ introduced in the proem. However, their Odysseus is also an everyman. Regarding the lure of the lotus flower with its promise of oblivion (~ Od. 9.82–104), for example: ‘Everybody knows that experience. Everybody’s tired. Everybody’s been through too much. What could be more attractive?’, asks the author Scott Huller. Phrased in this way, the experience of Odysseus

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and his men merges with that of general humanity. The ‘timeless tale’ of the Odyssey, as the narrator describes it, is also universal. Again for Scott Huller, with its parallels to European folklore and Judaeo-­ Christian literature (Jack and the Beanstock/David and Goliath), the Cyclops encounter is a ‘fundamental story that is absolutely core to humanity’. A comparison by Peter Struck of Odysseus to the titular secret agent in the American television series MacGuyver (1985–92) completes the transformation. Such parallels potentially make the ancient epic and its hero more comprehensible to a contemporary audience, but they also convert Odysseus into a generic cipher for human struggle and survival, albeit, like myriad Hollywood action heroes, an exceptional one. POETIC PERFORMANCE AND M E N TA L   M A P P I N G Simon Armitage: I’m in the Mediterranean on the trail of a legend. A warrior from Greece who triumphed at Troy. His name is Odysseus, and he’s the hero of a two-­and-­a-half-­thousand-­year-­old poem called the Odyssey . . . But who was Odysseus? . . . I’ve come to Greece not just to follow his trail and tell his story, but to try and get inside his mind and to try and work out once and for all whether I really like him.

The principle that Odysseus can be understood through his journey is also central to Gods and Monsters: Homer’s Odyssey.11 However, presented by the English poet Simon Armitage and broadcast on the ‘arts, music and culture’ channel, BBC4, during its ‘The Glory of Greece’ season in 2010, this standalone programme differs significantly from Clash of the Gods in its approach. With Armitage embodying the charismatic presenter, whose enthusiastic exposition illuminates the past, and the questing presenter, who travels in search of knowledge,12 Gods and Monsters sets out to illuminate Odysseus by restaging his travels: as detailed in the prologue, delivered appropriately by the presenter from a boat sailing on a glistening blue sea. Embarking upon his own journey of narration and revelation, Armitage promises a new version of Odysseus’ tale, plus his personal reflections on a complicated hero.13 Aside from the towns of Corfu (~ Phaeacia) and Ithaca, which represent a return to civilisation for both the presenter and his subject, this performance and analysis take place in natural spaces. A damp, dark cave in a lush, green forest, for example, offers a parallel location to where Odysseus and his men get trapped with the Cyclops, who is evoked by a rock formation resembling a crude face. Crouching

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inside, Armitage switches between his own playful account of events and relevant excerpts from the Odyssey (9.105–566). Woven into this two-­ pronged narration is a critique of Odysseus’ character. Introduced as ‘a mistake of his own’ and a result of the fact ‘Odysseus can’t help himself’, the venture into the Cyclops’ cave in pursuit of ‘tasty-­looking sheep’ further demonstrates three separate traits.14 Naivety underlies Odysseus’ demand for a gift (in reply the Cyclops ‘eats two of his men as an appetiser and puts the rest in his larder for later’), cunning enables him to blind Polyphemus (‘heating up a shaft of olive wood in the fire and jabbing it into the Cyclops’ eye’) and boastfulness leads him to reveal his identity (‘goading the Cyclops as he sails away’). Poor judgement, a crafty mind and showing off are Odysseus’ defining qualities: insights which recall the presenter’s initial uncertainty over the hero’s likeability. This rather ambivalent portrait is mitigated to some degree by a psychologically oriented critique. This is primarily achieved through low-­key re-­enactments that focalise Odysseus’ experiences through on-­the-­spot reportage that blurs the identity of the presenter and his subject. Long shots of Armitage perched on top of a rock, looking out on an eventful sea as waves lap relentlessly at the shore, for example, simulate the described barrenness of Odysseus’ grief-­filled life, trapped on Ogygia with the nymph Calypso (~ Od. 5.149–59). This poetic sequence evokes pity on Odysseus’s behalf. Amidst the archaeological ruins at Acheron, by contrast, the light-­hearted humour that accompanies a spot of night-­time ‘cooking’ – pouring out and mixing ingredients foraged from the local supermarket onto a cleared spot of land – shifts towards something darker. As the results of this imitation necromantic ritual manifest themselves in flashing lights, negative exposures, swirling mist, thunderclaps and a high-­pitched vibrato, Armitage intones in voiceover, ‘Out of the swirling mist come the ­­dead . . . ­It is a terrifying occasion’ (~ Od. 11.23–44). However, the real horror lies in the emotional intensity of Odysseus’ encounters, which Armitage now narrates, wrapped in the shadows of the sanctuary’s underground chambers. The mother who killed herself out of grief and the dead warrior who despairs: the former ‘shakes Odysseus to the core’, while the latter provokes an existential crisis. ‘Is this how heroes are rewarded by the gods?’, Armitage inquires, speaking in perplexity for Odysseus, who leaves the Underworld ‘changed’. Acting as a stand-­in for Odysseus and a conduit for his mental anguish, the presenter exposes Odysseus’ emotional and psychological distress. A sympathetic reading of the hero is also fostered by an expert-­ witness conversation with two retired Greek sailors, Dimitris and

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Andreas. Quizzed by Armitage about Odysseus’ sexual relationship with Circe (~ Od. 10.274–474), one declares womanising to be Odysseus’ ‘big failing’. The other maps this behaviour directly onto his own life at sea, before concluding ‘It’s a very, very human story.’ Although Odysseus is a flawed individual, his experiences are universal: as the sailors are pushed to affirm, his story is ‘real’ and ‘every man has his Odysseus inside, in his mind’. The texture of their lives encourages both men to find Odysseus in themselves and to project him into others. However, this effective confirmation that ‘boys will be boys’, as Armitage earlier put it, does not resolve the previous question of whether Odysseus’ sojourn with Circe is an act of infidelity, of restoration or of self-­destructive overindulgence. Balancing his different qualities against each other only increases Odysseus’ opacity in Armitage’s ultimate assessment. Indeed, this is the point: Odysseus remains a puzzle, and this is where the ‘mystery’ and ‘excitement’ of the Odyssey lie. In the end, however, a solution is lacking. Any attempt to fathom Odysseus is futile because, despite his travails, still ‘he doesn’t really understand himself’. In the final evaluation, Odysseus stands on the fault line between everyman and enigma. Gods and Monsters thus thwarts an easy reading of Odysseus. To some degree, his unknowability is close to the Odyssey’s ‘man of many wiles’ (polymētis), who conceals himself behind far-­fetched stories, outright lies and physical disguise to aid his return; but here unknowability is a fundamental state of being. Moreover, for all Odysseus retains his heroic trajectory by ‘getting the girl and the glory’, that accomplishment is somewhat lessened by a tongue-­in-­ cheek re-­enactment of the bow-­stringing competition, during which the presenter, on location at the palace on Ithaca (in fact the so-­called School of Homer), fails repeatedly to hit an archery boss with his bow and arrows. As soon as the accompanying narration moves from the suitors’ inability to pull the bow to Odysseus’ success, the novice archer strikes home. Nonetheless, with soulful music accompanying the description of the subsequent slaughter, there is no adulation of Odysseus here (cf. Od. 21.1–22.501). One result of Armitage’s journey ‘on the trail of a legend’ is thus to destabilise the epic tradition by subordinating the description of heroic action to a character analysis and psychological critique. Another is to undermine the documentary form, which favours narratives about great men and typically solves its own conundrums. Instead, dismissing the original question of Odysseus’ likeability as ‘futile’, the programme concludes the ‘real hero of this story’ is Homer.

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Although elements of the poet’s artifice were passingly described – the parallel realms of gods and men, and the use of drama, irony and vivid comparisons – this praise still comes as a surprise. However, it is a fitting accolade from England’s future Poet Laureate (2019– 29), who to some degree has been acting as a replacement Homer throughout. Indeed, tasked with reading aloud from his dramatisation of the Odyssey to the local poetry society at a banquet on Corfu, Armitage stands somewhere between Odysseus regaling the court of Alcinous with a first-­person account of his travels – ‘We sailed ­­ . . . ­we ­­plundered . . . ­I ordered the retreat ­­ . . . ­But my army were boggle-­ eyed’ (~ Od. 9.39–66) – and Homer, as the poet of a new Odyssey.15 B E Y O N D O DY S S E U S : T H E H E RO I S M O F H U M A N I T Y Nina Mavis Brunner: We are following in the footsteps of Odysseus, meeting everyday heroes who share their personal stories. Stories that speak of homeland, liberty, happiness, love, and death. All the great themes of humanity that the poet Homer already wrote about in his epic, the Odyssey.

By accompanying the Swiss journalist Nina Mavis Brunner as she visits modern-­day locations around the Mediterranean associated with Odysseus’ journey over six episodes, Sur les traces d’Ulysse elevates the method and concept of ‘following in the footsteps of Odysseus’ to a central conceit.16 By contrast to Gods and Monsters, where Odysseus and the Odyssey are under interrogation, however, Sur les traces operates as an investigative travelogue. With the Odyssey established upfront as a poem that embraces ‘all the great themes of humanity’, the series pursues tales of heroism amongst inhabitants of Turkey, Tunisia, Malta, Italy and Greece in a time of political upheaval. While short animation sequences portraying episodes from Odysseus’ journey mark Brunner’s arrival in and departure from key locations, the series is dominated by slow-­paced conversations between the presenter and locals. Odysseus’ adventures are access points to real people’s lives. In this narrative economy, the relationship between the parallel journeys of the epic hero and the presenter is thematic. In episode 2, ‘From Tunisia to Malta’, for example, Odysseus and Brunner are both hosted by troglodytes: the Cyclops in his cave, and Fatma and Mohamed Ben Naceur in their subterranean home in the Tunisian desert village of Matmata. However, the outcomes are very different. In the cartoon, attractively designed in silhouette to mimic Athenian black-­figure pottery, the action is captured in a sequence of stills

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overlain with voiceover narration that progress from the relaxed feasting of Odysseus and his men on sheep and feta cheese they have ‘seized’, via the sudden appearance of Polyphemus, whose magnitude is conveyed by a sweep up his enormous body towards a bulging single eye and gruesome maw, and on to the Cyclops’ consumption of Odysseus’ men, dropped down into a gaping throat. Odysseus and his men of course escape, holding onto the underbellies of the sheep as they leave the cave. On the surface, this rendition provides a straightforwardly heroic story of dangers overcome. However, read backwards, it signifies the reverse of the welcome offered to Brunner, who is greeted with a warm smile as Fatma leads her into her home and is given a delicious meal of homemade bread, honey and oil. A turn to the Odyssey might illuminate this further. When Odysseus alights upon the new-­found land, he wonders about the men he might meet. Where the Cyclops’ abysmal hospitality proves the inhabitants of the new-­found land to be ‘arrogant, savage, and lacking in justice’, coversely, in the programme, Fatma and Mohamed are ‘hospitable to strangers and of a god-­fearing mind’ (Od. 9.173–6).17 The friendly faces that greet Brunner everywhere reinforce this disjunction between the experiences of the epic and real-­world travellers. Each arrival begins with a montage of residents. At Matmata, this includes the Ben Naceurs, with Fatma in headscarf and woven garment, plus a wrinkly-­faced man in a wide-­brimmed wicker hat, holding a hose at an old-­style petrol pump, and a younger moustachioed man wearing a baseball cap who stands with a cleaning brush in front of a Star Wars sign and poster (scenes from the 1977 sci-­fi classic were filmed here in the Hotel Sidi Driss). On the one hand, there is an element of ethnographical voyeurism here, as the viewer’s gaze falls upon the encountered ‘other’, whose clothes, dark skin tones and faces mark them apart from the lightly tanned and neatly dressed European presenter. On the other, the contemplative length of the shot and the subjects’ willing return of the gaze suggest a two-­ way exchange. The direction of this exchange represents a further departure between the epic hero and the documentary presenter. In the Odyssey, the new arrival is repeatedly invited by a curious host to identify himself and his origins (Alcinous, 7.238–9; Polyphemus, 9.252–5; Circe, 10.325). Instead, Brunner interrogates the trials and tribulations of her hosts, as they go about their daily lives. For Fatma and Mohamed, these include the financial impacts of declining tourism, a topic that not only resonates with their warm reception of Brunner, but also picks up an earlier comment, in voiceover during the drive to Matmata, on the effects of targeted Islamist

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terrorist attacks in spring 2015. This occurs within a wider demonstration of the couple’s ability to live comfortably in their simple surroundings, fetching water from a rock cistern, and aided by solar panels and a television aerial. Witnessing their evident contentment, a recently repulsed government initiative to resettle cave dwellers into ‘normal’ housing seems misguided. The political undertones here are extended by conversations with a Tunisian journalist, Ridha Maamri, that bracket Brunner’s visit. In the car and then over dinner, Maamri describes his observation of and participation in the revolution in Tunisia in 2010/11 – moments of ‘danger’ that the young man embraced as an ‘adventure’ – and his continuing hopes for democracy and freedom, despite those recent terrorist attacks. This is the wider context, then, for Fatma and Mohamed’s straitened circumstances. Between them, with their perseverance, resistance and optimism, all the Tunisians exemplify the ‘everyday heroism’ promised in the series’ opening sequence: a phrase that is accompanied by a shot of Fatma welcoming Brunner with a gentle smile and a handshake. Odysseus’ alleged stop-­off in the region may be the prompt for Brunner’s visit.18 However, the conversations initiated by Brunner reveal a more profound motive: to illuminate the minutiae of human lives within the wider sweep of political events. In every exchange, the driving force is empathy. By giving people an opportunity to voice their experiences in their own language (out of French, German, Italian, English and Arabic, Brunner requires a translator only for the last) and by sympathising with their struggles, Sur les traces displays a commitment to depicting individual lives with dignity and respect, attention to goodness and a driving sense of equality. This is further evident in the series’ treatment of migration on Malta. The personal story of the Somalian refugee and transgender student Farah Abdi, who braved a hazardous Mediterranean crossing to escape imprisonment and build a new future (also in episode 2); (and in episode 3, ‘Malta to Sicily’) the illegal rescue of stranded immigrants by fisherman Ray Bugeja; the preoccupations of the host of an internet radio station for refugees; and the outward migration of residents from the small island of Gozo cumulatively argue for a sympathetic approach to an inevitable behaviour. The animated Homeric analogue is Odysseus’ arrival at and departure from Aeolus’ court, and his forced return and subsequent expulsion, after his men squander the king’s gift of a bag of wind to blow them home (~ Od. 10.1–75). If Aeolus’ differing receptions of Odysseus symbolise the poles of immigrant experience, an open welcome and practical aid are preferable.

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In short, like its epic inspiration, Sur les traces services the audience’s ethnographical imagination by illuminating the outside world.19 On the matter of hospitality to strangers, it also co-­opts the Odyssey’s ethical frame. However, by grounding heroism in the life experiences of ordinary inhabitants of the Mediterranean in politicised contexts it also develops a journalistic perspective. This resonates with democratic ideologies and humanistic principles of the sort aimed for during the so-­called Arab Spring, but that are also undermined in Western countries, including Switzerland, by arguments against immigration and multiculturalism, often made in relation to the supposed Mediterranean ‘migrant crisis’.20 By celebrating humanity in all its diversity, Sur les traces sides with the values of freedom, tolerance and understanding. B E Y O N D T H E O DY S S E Y : A H I P - ­H O P R E S P O N S E Akala: The ancients believed that the Odyssey was a true story and that its main character, Odysseus, really existed. But what do we actually know about this ground-­breaking text and its mysterious author? In this film, I’m following in the footsteps of the Odyssey, across the Mediterranean, as part of my quest to compose my response to Homer’s epic call.

The subordination of Odysseus to the living is further refined in Akala’s Odyssey, a 2018 documentary presented by the British hip-­ hop artist Akala on BBC4 that meets the channel’s ambition for programmes that are ‘artist-­led’ and tell ‘their story’.21 In format, the programme conforms to the premise that travel generates knowledge. Moving from London to Greece and Italy, Akala meets experts who shape his understanding of the Odyssey’s historical contexts, performance settings and compositional techniques. However, in an extended prologue, delivered at an archaeological site and from a ferry sailing on a deep-­blue sea, the presenter gives a distinctive purpose to his ‘in the footsteps’ journey. Setting out on a ‘quest’ or (as per the title) ‘odyssey’ that incorporates live moments of composition and performance, Akala creates his own hip-­hop ‘response’ to the Odyssey: ‘The Blind Bard’s Vision’. In the process, he inserts himself into a creative tradition that runs back to Homer.22 Set within a conversation that admits uncertainty and a plurality of opinions, the Odyssey is an artefact for scrutiny, contextualisation and inspiration, rather than re-­narration. From the first, understanding of the Odyssey builds in tandem with the illumination of hip-­hop performance culture. The London stage of Akala’s journey is crucial both for grounding the presenter within

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his home turf – the damp streets of Tufnell Park, where he finds copies of Homeric poetry on the shelves of the Hellenic bookshop – and for establishing a mutual relationship between the forms. The venue is the Rich Mix arts centre in Shoreditch, where Neha Nini and Remi Graves perform spoken-­word poetry to audience applause. Following upon the revelation that Homeric poetry was originally performed orally, the concord established here between ancient and modern practices is deepened through a conversation with the poet Antony Anaxagorou. Distinguishing hip-­hop from other forms of spoken poetry by its ‘style of poetics and nuance and references’ and its preference for punning, Anaxagorou then tackles the incongruity between the high and low regard in which critics respectively hold the Odyssey and hip-­hop, when both are oral forms of popular culture. A declaration that poetry generally ‘reactivate[s] language and give[s] it back to people in a more exciting way’ further closes the divide. While the visual analogy of the modern performance venue clarifies the experience of ancient audiences, Anaxagorou advances a programmatic claim for equivalence that legitimises the modern art form and, by implication, Akala’s venture. In the developing synergy between hip-­hop and Homeric poetry, Akala’s professional perspective is key. His demonstration of how the rhythm structures of iambic pentameter operate within hip-­hop, for example, transforms the conversation with Dr Katherine Earnshaw (University of Exeter) on Homeric hexameter into a two-­way lesson, with Earnshaw shaping her description of the stress and sound patterns of epic verse in response to these parallel insights. The combination of practical and academic expertise effects a comparison through which epic is illuminated by hip-­hop, and vice versa. By contrast, when Akala takes a pause from talking to himself on the roadside at Delphi to show how, by following the rhythm and building lines in his head that solidify through repetition, he produces his work, no direct association is drawn. However, the continuing depiction of Akala nodding to his earphones in the car, swaying to the rhythm on a ferry and eventually performing a full version of his new track – shifting between a rocky beach and a recording studio – elevates his working process into the dominant lesson on writing-­ free poetic composition. Implicitly, hip-­hop is a productive frame for understanding the Odyssey.23 Within this balanced economy, it is striking that although the excellence and importance of the Odyssey are repeatedly acknowledged, a grand narrative for Homer is consistently eschewed. From the prologue onwards, when an evocative image of the ‘blind bard’

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stepping forward to deliver his ‘masterpiece’ is dismissed, to the uncertainty asserted by three separate expert witnesses regarding whether Homer ever existed, the idea of a unique genius is disputed. Instead, the Odyssey is of importance as a source of inspiration. Furthermore, that importance has been defused through millennia of artistic reimagination. As mentioned twice, Akala’s route to the ancient epic was initially Invisible Man. Written in 1953 by the African American novelist Ralph Ellison, this is a pessimistic restaging of the Odyssey in which the unnamed black protagonist suffers indignity, exploitation and violence in 1930s New York.24 Indeed, as Akala observes, when setting down to write up his notes, even the Homeric poet was working within an extant tradition. This strategy, which allows for the Odyssey to be ‘reborn each time a new work is created in response to it’, decentres the Odyssey, written by persons unknown, from its own tradition. This approach is complemented by the reframing of the Odyssey as a product of world culture: deploying story motifs already found in the epic of Gilgamesh from Babylon (‘present-­day Iraq’) and benefitting from the invention of writing by the Phoenicians (in ‘today’s Lebanon’). In an inversion of the standard idea that the Odyssey is part of the Greek heritage that defines so-­called ‘Western civilisation’25 – a model that is emphatically dismissed by the Greek Australian music artist Luka Lesson, who discusses his own sound and image response, ODYSSEUS26 – the Homeric poem owes a debt to the Near and Middle East. This reorientation is accompanied by a rereading of Odysseus’ adventures as metaphors for universal human experience. Most significantly, the Cyclops tale is an analogy for colonialism: ‘with Odysseus representing the greedy invader, plundering another’s land and disrespecting the customs of the place’. Thus, while the Odyssey is repositioned as one link in a long chain of multicultural accomplishment that extends to the writing and music of contemporary black artists – alongside Ellison, the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott and American pop superstar Prince are namechecked – all the way to Akala, its hero is recast as a malign invader, reflecting a deeper trend that imagines the Cyclops as ‘colonised’ and reclaims him as ‘other’.27 Chiming with Akala’s broader ambitions for an expanded canon that includes non-­Western literature and for ‘a much more revolutionary, inclusive, people-­centred global teaching of history for the world we live in’,28 the poem’s significance and its ethics are re-­evaluated from a postcolonial perspective. These trends in the assessment of the Odyssey as a cultural artefact come together in ‘The Blind Bard’s Vision’. Answering its own

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refrain, ‘Why is the story told? What is the teller’s mission?’, the hip-­hop song reframes knowledge gathered over the course of the programme into an analysis of the shape and purpose of the Odyssey that more generally explores the power of poetry and the role of the poet. At root, ‘the poet speaks to the building blocks of our existence’. For the Odyssey, this is grounded in a triangle of human relationships: ‘A son in search of a father that he has lost / A father trying to get back to his family at any cost / A woman that’s besieged by men with bad intentions’. But more generally ‘the word’ transforms the mundane into myth, creating knowledge to be passed down the generations: ‘not a lie, it’s a disguise from the truth / so the wise can recite to the youth’. From their vantage point, immortal poets create transportative visions, but they also provide a challenge: ‘So what you gonna do? You gonna search? Or gonnna stand on the side and rehearse?’ Thus, at the very point Akala’s odyssey ends, the listener is readied for their own life’s journey. Filled with engaging insights into epic and hip-­hop and closing with instructional verse, Akala’s Odyssey thus fulfils the ‘edutainment’ purposes not only of television documentary but also of contemporary British hip-­hop, which fosters positive expressions of black culture and personal development as a form of cultural activism.29 CONCLUSION When television documentaries approach the Odyssey through the prism of travel, they are far from alone.30 However, their representational strategies and narrative agendas generate distinctive and diverse responses. Above all, the need to tell a story about ‘the real’ leads to interpretative engagements with the poem, as a route to discussing its protagonist and as a topic of examination in its own right. Consideration of Odysseus tends towards his heroism, as exemplified during his travels. However, variation is demonstrated within Cyclops episodes, with CGI realisations supporting more positivistic presentations, versus nuanced appraisals of Odysseus’ motivations, character and accomplishments from thoughtful poet-­presenters. A contrast can also be drawn regarding claims about Odysseus and the Odyssey encoding human experience. The most sensationalist of the programmes also offers the most simplistic drawing of Odysseus as an ‘everyman’, as required by its action-­ adventure framing. Elsewhere, as presenters follow in Odysseus’ footsteps, the notion that his s­ pecific experiences are shared more widely is raised but not endorsed, subordinated to an illustration of the diversity of actual

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human experience or generalised into a mythic pattern. Onscreen conversation, reflection and interpretation facilitate more complex positions. As a final point of divergence, attention to the Odyssey as poetry may be token, or lead to either the elevation and praise of ‘Homer’ in place of Odysseus or to the Odyssey’s replacement by an alternative poetic performance. Beyond the shared drive to educate and entertain, commercial, journalistic and artistic imperatives enable quite different documentary responses. If television is the ‘bard’ of today, it speaks to us through the Odyssey of the past and the present, the values we might subscribe to or abhor and the world beyond our doors. However, there is no monolithic expression of ideology here. Rather, reflecting the disparateness of the television audience in an age of selective viewing, audiences receive different messages. A paying audience used to consuming its history through Hollywood cinema has its basic understanding of heroic action as ‘struggle, survival and vengeance’ in the defence of family and nation affirmed. A viewer in Switzerland re-­ encounters recent news stories that confirm political instability and challenges around the Mediterranean whilst fostering a humanitarian response. Meanwhile, when two British poets insinuate themselves and their art forms into the Homeric tradition, the prestige position of the Odyssey within the ‘Glory of Greece’ is confirmed and countered, the latter from an anti-­racialist perspective. In short, television documentaries realise the Odyssey and its hero in ways that appear conservative, progressive and radical, reflecting not just diversity in their contexts, shape and agendas, but fundamental tensions at the heart of modern global society. NOTES   1 On the structure and contents of this section, which is central to most documentary responses, see Said (2011: 150–83).   2 See Clay (1997: esp. 59–60), who captures the twofold meaning of the name given by Autolycus to his grandson to reflect his own reputation as odyssamenos – ‘angry’ and ‘incurring anger’ – with the adjective ‘cursed’ (see Od. 19.405–9).   3 For a twentieth-­century precursor, see Unterwegs mit Odysseus (ARD 1979), a German children’s series that combines animation narrative and modern travelogue: see Lindner (2017: 523–55). Unfortunately, there is not room here to discuss the Odysseus episode of the 2018 German ZDF series Terra-X: Superhelden-Odysseus.   4 See ‘odyssey’ in OED Online (n.d.) (accessed 31 May 2020).   5 See Hobden (2013a: 3–4); Makrinos (2013: 367).

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  6 Fiske and Hartley (2003: 64–77).   7 See Burgoyne (2008: 39).   8 Cf. Hobden (2017: 503–11).   9 See Lovatt and Vout (2013). 10 Martin (2005: 169). 11 I have benefitted from reading work in progress on this programme by Antony Makrinos. 12 For presenter styles, see Bell and Gray (2007). 13 A perspective on the hero that is shared by Armitage’s modern adaptation (2016). Prior to the radio broadcast this was a live stage play, touring in autumn 2015 (first outing at the Everyman in Liverpool, 25 September to 13 October 2016: https://www.everymanplayhouse.com/ whats-­on/the-­odyssey, accessed 31 May 2020). 14 Cf. Roisman (2008) on the Cyclops episode establishing Odysseus’ characteristics in the Odyssey and film. 15 Armitage (2006: 68–9). 16 Originally made for the German-­language Swiss broadcaster SRF in 2015, the programme was translated into French for RTS in 2017. The French-­language version is followed here. Translations into English are my own. 17 See Hobden (2013b: 69). 18 For this location, see Freely (2014: 151–2). 19 See Dougherty (2001). 20 See Lutz (2017) (Swiss context); ‘The Mediterranean Migrant Crisis’ (2015). 21 https://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/tv/articles/arts (accessed 31 May 2020). 22 Also noted by Macintosh (2021: 11). 23 Cf. Bakker (2005: 38–55), on the spoken units (formulae) out of which Homeric poetry was built. 24 See Rancine (2006). 25 See Hanink (2017). More normally documentaries are complicit in endorsing the ‘Greek heritage’: see Hobden (2018). 26 http://www.odysseus.live (accessed 31 May 2020). 27 See Hall (2012 [2008]: 93–8). 28 Akala (2018: 282; 2015). 29 See Turner (2017). 30 See Boitani (2009).

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9  Many (Un)Happy Returns in HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019) Hunter H. Gardner

Consider an especially disturbing scene in a series known for its power to shock audiences throughout the entirety of eight seasons: Daenerys, or Dany, ‘Storm-­born’ Targaryen is on the verge of reclaiming her birthright, the Iron Throne of King’s Landing, after suffering the humiliations of exile, rape, treachery and the call of disingenuous suitors from all quarters. She hovers above the city on her dragon and hears the bells of surrender toll. In the first closeup shot of the Queen since she began her attack, we observe her recognising the bells and (maybe?) considering the possibility of granting the mercy she had exercised so tactfully in the past. But the sound only appears to cause her further distress: she resumes her path of destruction, heading for her enemy Cersei in the Red Keep, and along the way scorches King’s Landing root and branch, leaving thousands of innocent citizens dead in the wake of the blast issued by her last remaining dragon, Drogon (Figure 9.1). This scene, I argue, draws heavily on Odysseus’ triumphant, but also lethal homecoming to Ithaka in Book 22 of the Odyssey. Scholarly responses to George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, as well as the HBO series born from it, have identified ancient epic as a consistent source for the heroism, politics and character arcs that determine the narrative’s battle against the White Walkers and the fight for the Iron Throne.1 This chapter demonstrates that the ancient concept of nostos (‘homecoming’ or ‘return’) and its corresponding acts of vengeance, as articulated through Homer’s Odyssey, allow us to understand better the returns of various characters in

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Figure 9.1  Daenerys (Emilia Clarke), atop her dragon, Drogon, hovers above King’s Landing, pausing to consider options before continuing her path of vengeance. Game of Thrones, ‘The Bells’ (8.5, 2019). HBO.

the HBO series, but especially that of Daenerys, whose return to King’s Landing, which aired as episode 5 of the final season (‘The Bells’), immediately struck viewers as problematic and an illustration of the writers’ failure to depict convincing female characters.2 Harper’s Bazaar and Radio Times, for instance, surveyed responses to the episode on Twitter and highlighted a range of disappointed reactions, reflections on how the woman on screen was ‘a far cry from the Breaker of Chains we’ve known for seven seasons’: fans tweeted that the writers and showrunners, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, were ‘the real villains of season 8’, and ‘ruin[ed] everything [Dany] stood for in one season’; ‘I couldn’t help but wonder if the writers sought to burn her entire character arc as well’; in reference to Dany’s continued assault on innocent civilians, one viewer asked in a tweet, ‘why wouldn’t she go straight to the Red Keep [Cersei’s location] instead of zig zagging destruction through the city?’ While some fans noted that the Mother of Dragons had behaved erratically on occasion in the past, the popular consensus appears to be that her ‘crazed state [in episode 8.5] seemed like a reach’; viewers concluded that, ‘the “mad queen” plot twist wasn’t earned at all’ and ‘the one I saw tonight was not my Dany’.3 Even Emilia Clarke, the actor who plays Dany, expressed dismay through an Instagram post over the transformation of her character, formerly heralded as ‘a paragon of how women should be written for television’.4 By understanding Daenerys’s vengeance in terms of ancient epic, and as the necessary (if still problematic) correlative to reclaiming

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one’s home, we can view her behaviour, rather than as an affront to the notion of women responsibly wielding power, as the response of a character whose story, like that of Odysseus, has taken her from humiliation and wandering to pride and a homeland recovered. After a brief review of scholarship that has examined representations of women in the series, and Daenerys’s portrayal in particular, I will identify epic, Odyssean elements within HBO’s eight-­ season production: namely, its concern with proper ‘hospitality’ (cf. the Greek xenia); its interest in how reputation, promulgated through song and legend, is often in conflict with the optimal functioning of the social order; and the homecomings of various characters throughout the series. I will suggest that these elements operate in conjunction to encourage a reading of Daenerys’s story as a nostos, a homecoming that paradoxically emphasises her foreign rather than native status and foregrounds her failure to make a proper distinction between justice and vengeance. Receptions of Homer’s poem in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries have drawn attention to the violence enacted by the hero as the unfortunately predictable reaction of a soldier having experienced the traumas of the battlefield.5 While Daenerys has fought as a combat soldier only in a limited sense, the traumas noted above, many of them associated with war in the Homeric poems, guide her effort to retake the throne at King’s Landing. We may not uphold the Storm-­born Targaryen queen as a role model, a function of song and stories frequently acknowledged in the series,6 as ballads of knights and battles frequently articulate behavioural ideals for men and women. We will, however, find an inner logic to Dany’s portrayal that makes for a convincing end to her story, one that acknowledges human inconsistencies and failings, and expands the epic dimensions so often recognised in Game of Thrones. F E M I N I S T I D E A L S I N W E S T E RO S A N D   B E YO N D ? In their analysis of ‘women warriors’ in Game of Thrones Tasker and Steenberg argue that the series offers exceptional portrayals of women who commit violence, with characters like Arya Stark, Brienne of Tarth and Yara Greyjoy who ‘fit uncomfortably within quality television frameworks, which stress women’s eroticized manipulation, or hidden illicit operations of power . . . [they] are out of step with postfeminist action heroines, who are framed by an insistent emphasis on sexualized physicality’ (2016: 174). Daenerys, unlike her more gender-­ambiguous counterparts in the show, is often

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erotically spectacularised: from her initial presentation just prior to a bath before her leering brother Viserys (Harry Lloyd; episode 1.1, ‘Winter is Coming’) to a point within the series where her legend has grown to the extent that prostitutes throughout Essos dress like her to attract clients (5.3, ‘High Sparrow’). At the same time, Dany does not conform to the common template for many postfeminist action heroines (e.g., Lara Croft of the Tomb Raider films; Sarah Connor of the Terminator series), since she doesn’t commit much of the violence herself, but enacts it through (male) agents or her (also male) dragons. On the one hand, by using male agents to enact violence she distinguishes herself from bloodthirsty warriors in the series who enjoy getting their hands dirty (e.g., Ser Gregor ‘the Mountain’ Clegane). On the other hand, Dany’s distance from the fray, by the end of the series, will also widen the gap between ruler and her subjects, transforming her into a less sympathetic character. It should be observed, however, that, like most men and women in the series, Dany does not resist the lure of vengeance and (also like other characters) frequently conflates or confuses vengeance with what is just: she demonstrates her penchant for vengeance early in the series by having Mirri Maz (Mia Soteriou), the witch responsible for the death of her husband, Kal Drogo (Jason Momoa), burned alive (1.10, ‘Fire and Blood’); she also has one of her handmaids, formerly a close confidant who is tempted into the bed of one of Dany’s treacherous suitors, executed at Qarth (2.10, ‘Valar Morghulis’). What is unusual about her vengeance in season 8 is the scale of it and the idea that it is driven by a mandate: after her rebirth from the ashes of Drogo’s funeral pyre and subsequent cobbling together of a fiercely loyal army – many of whom she liberated in cities along Slaver’s Bay – she is depicted as a ‘messiah’ queen, in a way that has struck some viewers as problematically ‘orientalist’.7 Such a depiction, however problematic, contributes to her status as a ‘revolutionary’, as she is described by other characters in the series (7.3, ‘The Queen’s Justice’; cf. 7.6, ‘Beyond the Wall’), a figure not known for stability and level-­headed governance. Rikke Schubart also stresses that Dany’s status as a ‘new kind of fantasy heroine’ is grounded partly in the lessons she learns as her character develops: in particular, she learns ‘authentic’ pride, born from one’s accomplishments, as opposed to ‘hubristic’ pride, which emerges from accidental, if inherent qualities, like high birth or good skin (2016: 210–12).8 Her character arc takes her from being the pawn of her brother and victim of spousal rape, to being a leader of nations unencumbered by obligations to male family members,

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a condition that distinguishes her from other strong women in the show, such as Sansa (Sophie Turner) and Cersei (Lena Heady), who must constantly defer to male kin in order to wield power. Dany’s link with dragons and identity as the Mother of Dragons is also new: ‘[W]hile dragons have, for the most part, been seen as an expression of male ambitions and powers, in [Game of Thrones], Dany is a woman . . . [but she] is the reverse of a dragonslayer: she is a dragon maker’ (2016: 120). The show upholds more traditional models of maternity (e.g., Katelyn Stark and Cersei) as foils for Dany’s radical revision of motherhood, one not dependent on or defended through claims of paternal lineage. Schubart frames her analysis as a qualified postfeminist critique, and views Dany’s character as a ‘point of interrogation’ (2016: 123) for various attempts to define feminism in the twenty-­first century. But what is the precise nature of the questions that Dany’s portrayal forces us to ask? As the outpouring of Twitter responses suggests, for many viewers, as ‘Mad Queen’ she problematised the circumstances of women in positions of leadership and reflected doubts about the ability of women to wield power with justice and temperance. But judging Daenerys solely within the framework of current debates about women in power does not do the series or her character’s arc justice. When we view her story through the lens of ancient epic, Odyssean epic in particular, we can better understand Dany’s response to reclaiming the Iron Throne at King’s Landing. Moreover, if Game of Thrones consistently demonstrates a ‘refusal of the hopeful mythologies of high epic fantasies’ (Tasker and Steenberg 2016: 189), we should not expect the series to allow Dany to become an exceptional instance where hopes of mercy and good governance are fulfilled. Jon Snow (Kit Harington) alone wields power justly as ‘King’ of the North, but only for a brief time, and at the end of the series he suffers exile among the Freefolk north of the wall. For Dany to behave and govern with temperance consistently would not only be out of keeping with ancient ideals of coming home and enacting retribution, but also inconsistent with the relatively cynical portraits of human nature painted throughout the series. EPIC QUALITIES OF GAME OF THRONES Ayelet Haimson Lushkov, in her study of elements of Graeco-­Roman antiquity that have shaped Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire and, to a lesser extent, the HBO series, has emphasised the distinctly epic qualities of the fight for the Iron Throne in Westeros and the threat

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of the White Walkers. The scale of these conflicts allows viewers to connect with events depicted as both temporally and spatially transcendent – part of the human condition – while also allowing individuals to take comfort in a narrative that somehow reflects on their personal experience.9 Of course, Game of Thrones’ characters, like Homeric heroes (as Aristotle recognised),10 are not just like you and me: their stories often emerge from questions about who is ‘the best’ (Lushkov 2017a: 60) and must address the problem of how a society can accommodate exceptional individuals (2017a: 118). Epic heroes, then, are as problematic as they are unique, and Dany is no exception. Her revolutionary fervour may not be born from Homeric epic, but her unwavering belief in her cause and her desire and ability to exact vengeance against those who have abused her are. Lushkov also stresses ancient tropes of hospitality in the series, which invite parallels with the Odyssey’s intricate exposure of the relationship between guests and hosts through its articulations of xenia, the Greek term describing the code of conduct that binds participants in acts of hospitality.11 Martin’s representations of Westeros frequently revolve around feasting; and crucial acts of vengeance are staged at banquets, moments in the series where the laws of hospitality are perverted, in particular, the notorious Red and Purple weddings: the former provided an opportunity for an ambush of the Stark family, and the latter provided the spectacular scene of Joffrey Baratheon’s poisoning.12 Dialogue in both the television series and books makes explicit the taboo associated with killing a guest beneath one’s roof, something the gods cannot forgive. The story of the Rat Cook, a tale told by Bran in which a cook is transformed into a rat after he kills the king’s son and then feeds the son to his father under his own roof (3.10, ‘Mysa’),13 makes explicit that abusing a guest in one’s home is a serious offence against the social order. The tale also alerts viewers to be aware of how banquets, as a site for crucial reciprocities between host and guest – relative strangers acting on good faith – replay certain tensions in a given community. Bran’s story, in fact, is told in the episode immediately following the notorious Red Wedding (3.9, ‘The Rains of Castamere’), in which Walder Frey (David Bradley) kills members of the Stark family who have betrayed him, at a wedding banquet during which musicians play the ‘Rains of Castamere’, a ballad glorifying the successful retribution of the Lannister family against House Reyne of Castamere. Frey’s retribution for having been denied a marriage between his daughter and Robb Stark (Richard Madden) occurs during an alternative wedding meant to reconcile the two families and is perhaps the most egregious

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example of transgressing the sanctity of the relationship between guest and host. As Stanton observes, xenia, which so often fails to ensure civil conduct in Game of Thrones, offers ‘sites where ­­ . . . ­differing ideals clash. . . . [A] model of “hospitable” contact underwritten by social decorum’ often conflicts with ‘a culture of song, story and legend that valorizes and promotes both personal and group victory’ (2015: 52). Thus, what Stanton describes as ‘thymotic drives’, drives underwritten by a culture in which one’s reputation (like the Homeric kleos, ‘repute, fame, glory’) is critical to personal identity, consistently upset the communal stability affirmed by xenia. Walder Frey is compelled by his thumos, the ‘impulsive center of the proud self’, to avenge the slight done to him by the Starks;14 the anticipated social cohesion of a wedding banquet provides a dramatic stage upon which the lord of House Frey and guardian of the strategically crucial Crossing over the River Trident can reclaim the loss to his honour. Stanton also observes the fact that the Red Wedding’s musicians playing from the balcony dispense with their instruments and pick up crossbows when the carnage begins, ‘turning the mechanics of hospitable pleasure against the guests’ (2015: 57). I would add that the scene alludes to the famous Homeric simile comparing Odysseus to a musician just before he turns his own bow on the suitors in his home. The titular hero, having suffered torrents of abuse from the suitors, is likened to a musician as he strings the famous bow: Like a musician, like a harper, when With quiet hand upon his instrument He draws between his thumb and forefinger A sweet new string upon a peg: so effortlessly Odysseus in one motion strung the bow. (21.406–9; Homer 1990: 404)

References in Game of Thrones to a problematic relationship that embeds a culture of songs glorifying violence within a culture that values the sacrosanct nature of hospitality (e.g., the ‘Rains of Castamere’ played at the Red Wedding) puts us squarely in the ethical economy of the Odyssey. The hero’s dependence on the laws of xenia and the threat posed to him in their absence heighten the suspense surrounding his return and anagnorisis (or ‘recognition’), as occurs here in the tense moments during which he strings his bow. Socrates in Plato’s Ion cites this scene as one of the most gripping of the epic, with the power to ‘thrill spectators most deeply’ (Ion 535 b). The Odyssey reminds us repeatedly (like Bran rehearsing the tale of the Rat King) of the fraught nature of hospitality in the

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context of homecoming, as various characters in the epic recall the fate of Agamemnon, who is offered as a foil to Odysseus throughout the poem and whose wife Clytemnestra conspires with her lover Aegisthus to slaughter him at a banquet, upon the moment of his own return from the war.15 At the same time, the dynamics of xenia played out to more ambiguous conclusions can also highlight estrangement or dissatisfaction within the social order, foreboding a change in the dynamics of power. As viewers of the Red and Purple Weddings staged in Game of Thrones, we may observe with some anticipation a banquet at the Stark home in Winterfell in the series’ final season (8.4, ‘The Last of the Starks’) following the funerals of those slain in the battle against the White Walkers. Dany has brought her armies and dragons north and helped secure a victory, but she sits as an uncomfortable guest in a home not her own. The uncertainty of her position in the very kingdom she should be claiming as queen is dramatised through her seat at the most prominent table in the banquet hall, where she is relatively isolated and physically distant from members of the Stark family. She attempts to affirm her status through a toast and proclamation that Gendry (Joe Dempsie), son of Robert Baratheon, should be named lord of Storm’s End, but the move does not inspire gratitude so much as suspicion among her advisors. After Tormund (Kristofer Hivju) in return makes a toast to ‘The Dragon Queen’, goodwill is soon fractured by jealousy as Tormund turns his attentions to Jon Snow as the recipient of praise. Viewers get a closeup of Dany’s expression of discomfort; then the camera shifts to focus on Lord Varys (Conleth Hill), seated a few places down, who watches the Queen carefully as his doubts about her stability have increased. Dining, here at Winterfell and throughout the series, offers a stage upon which guests perform their status, but its sanctity also encourages a vulnerability among participants. For Dany, the banquet is not nearly as tumultuous as it is for the Starks or Joffrey Baratheon, or as the Homeric banquets are for Agamemnon or Odysseus’ suitors. Instead of offering an opportunity for vengeance, the setting and the social cohesion it should ensure accentuate the extent to which Dany’s pride is at stake in her desire to be revered by a people whom she claims are hers to rule, but who view her as an outsider. She observes immediately after the banquet in a conversation with Jon Snow, ‘I saw the way they looked at ­­you . . . ­so many people have looked at me that way, but never here.’ Dany’s outsider status will be reinscribed upon her dramatic return to King’s Landing in the following episode, and again it is helpful to consider

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Odysseus’ orchestration of revenge in Odyssey 22. For the Homeric hero has also been considered an outsider in his own home, disguised as an old beggar up until the climactic moment of his revelation and recognition, when he strings the bow, casts off his disguise, and initiates a bloodbath of retribution that ‘either appalls or pleases’, one that ‘must be condemned ­­ . . . ­or honestly enjoyed’ (Hall 2008: 176). In the Odyssey, audience satisfaction in the vengeance is mitigated by the presence of certain suitors who have proven less than rapacious and even tempered the threat posed to Telemachus by other suitors. Commentators observe that the poet’s narrative of the brutal deaths of young men does not spare details that elicit sympathy for Odysseus’ victims, even the worst of them (‘a touch of pity and tenderness even for a villain’16). In particular, the behaviour of Leodes (Od. 21.144–62, 310–29) and Amphinomus is marked as superior to that of other suitors, with the latter described as Penelope’s favourite and actively discouraging both a plot against Telemachus (16.393– 405) and abuse of the disguised Odysseus (18.412–21). The brutal deaths of these men at the hands of Odysseus and Telemachus, as well as the later execution of twelve serving women thought to have conspired with them, has prompted starkly divergent reactions, and relatively recent screen adaptations of Odysseus’ homecoming tend to minimise the violence.17 At the same time, the slaying of the suitors has fuelled countless plots of vengeance in American cinema (from The Godfather (1972) to Unforgiven (1992) to Django Unchained (2012)), remarkable largely because they amplify rather than diminish the level of bloodshed.18 By describing Odysseus after the slaughter as a lion steeped in gore (22.402–5), the Homeric poet forces audiences to question the justification for the violence, while also allowing that audience to enjoy gratification, ‘a momentary compensation for every slight or rejection we have ever suffered’.19 The vengeance enacted by ancient epic heroes, from Achilles’ barbaric defilement of Hector’s body in the Iliad to Aeneas’ killing of Turnus at the end of Vergil’s Aeneid, is characteristically excessive; it provokes more questions than answers about the justice of it all, while also allowing audiences to revel in retribution.20 This ambivalence, I would argue, also characterises our response to vengeance enacted throughout Game of Thrones, and especially Daenerys’s destruction of King’s Landing. But just as scholars have examined Odysseus’ background as a soldier to explain why he resorts to such wholesale violence, we should consider to what extent Daenerys’s experiences determine the choice she makes in the show’s penultimate episode. Her life spent as an exile from birth makes her

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in some ways an ill fit for the Odyssean paradigm: she can’t be recognised in the way that the Homeric hero can. On this point we are reminded of how the divergences from as well as the correspondences between source text and adaptation can be instructive in the interpretative process,21 in this case allowing us to observe more clearly the relationship between vengeance (cf. the Greek tisis), justice (Greek dike) and return that pervade both the epic poem and the twenty-­ first-­century television series. The distinction between vengeance and justice is one that characters in the Song of Ice and Fire frequently observe,22 a distinction articulated and often confused in the HBO series through conversations between wronged parties about how to respond to those who have injured them. Season 4 is especially rife with comments about what justice is, as Dany attempts to govern with justice, rather than vengeance, the rebellious citizens of Junkai and Meereen; at the same time, Ser Oberyn ‘the Viper’ (Pedro Pascal) single-­mindedly seeks vengeance against Ser Gregor ‘the Mountain’ Clegane (Hafbór Júliús Björnsson) for the rape and murder of his sister Ilia; Arya too has begun in earnest her quest for vengeance against the individuals named on her list, those who have killed her family and loved ones. In season 6, two conversations, one between Yara and Theon Greyjoy (Gemma Whelan and Alfie Allen; 6.7, ‘The Broken Man’) and the other between Lady Tyrell and Oberyn’s lover (Diana Rigg and Indira Varma; 6.10, ‘The Winds of Winter’), uphold ‘justice’ as a goal while also admitting that ‘vengeance’ is what the actors are really seeking. By having Dany cross the line from retribution against Cersei, who unjustly occupies the Iron Throne and has executed Dany’s beloved confidante Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel), to a vengeance that outdoes even Odysseus’, by killing thousands of innocent Westerosi citizens, the series makes a final distinction between justice and vengeance and reflects on how each impacts personal identity. It is no accident that, within the same penultimate episode, Arya gives up on her quest to kill Cersei after Sandor ‘the Hound’ Clegane (Rory McCann) reminds her that if she continues to be driven by vengeance alone, she will become another version of himself, bound to die in his own mission to kill his monstrous brother, Ser Gregor. DA N Y ’ S N O S T O S Homecoming occurs as an insistent motif throughout Game of Thrones, and as with ancient iterations of nostos, the series uses it as a reflection on transformation and identity, for there is often a

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marked incongruence between a character’s idea of home and the place to which she returns. While Odysseus marvels at some details of the palace at Ithaka that have stood the test of time (e.g., the ashwood threshold, Od. 17.339–41), he finds the island initially so unlike his memory of it that he wakes upon it after his return denying that he has returned home (Od. 13.187–216). Such incongruity between recollection of home and the experience of return is especially pronounced in Game of Thrones: the Stark children are all forced to leave Winterfell and return to it under questionable circumstances in which the castle has been invaded by outsiders (the Boltons) or, in the case of Arya’s return in season 7, is de facto governed by a transformed older sister, who is initially far from welcoming; Bran’s return, also in season 7, marks his transformation into the ‘Three Eyed Raven’ and challenges his former identity as a child in the Stark household. Theon Greyjoy, after growing up a hostage and ward of the Stark family, returns to the Iron Islands failing to recognise his older sister Yara and being dismissed as a soft foreigner by his father. Samwell Tarley (John Bradley) experiences a brief and disastrous homecoming on his way to becoming a maester, the opportunity for an awkward family reunion that ultimately confirms how estranged Sam will remain from his father and brother. The closing montage of the final episode (8.6, ‘Iron Throne’) paradoxically reiterates the importance that returning home plays in the articulation of identity: the scenes weave together images of Jon Snow departing from Winterfell and Arya leaving Westeros – for she has already told the Hound that she will not return home – while Sansa Stark is depicted first at home in her dressing room and then attending to the business of being Queen of the North. In a return to the first image of the first episode of season 1, the final frame captures the gate of the North Wall beyond which Jon and his Wildling (or ‘Freefolk’) comrades now embark for new homes.23 Daenerys’s experience of nostos diverges from those of other characters in the series in so far as she has little to no memory of her home, details that emerge in season 7 after she finally returns to her birthplace on Dragon Stone, though she (like Odysseus first awaking on Ithaka) hardly recognises the place: ‘I wish I could remember it. I always thought this would be a homecoming; it doesn’t feel like home’ (7.2, ‘Stormborn’). All the same, audiences are given the impression that Dany is Westerosi – distinguished by clothing and appearance from the people who initially surround her in exile – and that she has some fond feelings for the land of her birth. In our first image of her at Pentos she faces away from the camera, gazing out

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at sea with longing (1.1, ‘Winter is Coming’), perhaps reminiscent of Odysseus’ pining for Ithaka on the shores of Ogygia. And yet where Odysseus’ subsequent tact and skilful persuasion of his captor Calypso mark him as polytropos (‘of many turns’ or ‘versatile’) and a man of the world, Dany is initially presented as an object to be manipulated, first by her brother, who dresses her, orders her not to slouch and reminds her of the need to be ‘perfect’. Once a marriage agreement is brokered between Viserys and the Dothraki, she at last voices her own wishes in words that suggestively detach her destiny as queen from her nostos. After being presented to the Dothraki leader, Khal Drogo, she protests, ‘I don’t want to be his queen, I want to go home’ (1.1, ‘Winter is Coming’), to which her brother responds: So do ­­I . . . ­I want us both to go home. But how do we go home? They took it from ­­us . . . ­We go home with an army, with Khal Drogo’s army. I would let his whole tribe fuck you if that’s what it took.

Thus, from her initial moments on screen Dany’s identity is marked as an exile and her power to correct that status, to achieve homecoming, is fraught with the potential of her own violation. She is by the end of the episode violated by her husband, Khal Drogo, whom Dany will eventually (and problematically for some viewers) grow to love;24 his initial failure to communicate with her on the night of their wedding, coupled with her tears and prostrate position during intercourse, distinctly signal rape. Dany’s initially humble presentation (she is literally beneath the men who control her) is gradually transformed into elevation, of character as she learns the value of self-­worth, and of status as she becomes a ruler of three cities on Slaver’s Bay and is disencumbered of male relatives;25 such a transformation is eventually mirrored through her literal, physical elevation by her dragons, which are fully grown, and quite dangerous, by season 4. The drama of her elevation is also echoed by her confrontations with death: like Odysseus, she must descend into death (which she does both through surviving Drogo’s funeral pyre in 1.10, ‘Fire and Blood’, and at Qarth, where she reunites with a vision of Drogo in the house of the undying; 2.10, ‘Valar Morghulis’) and have a full appreciation of death, before she can be reborn and fully elevated to the Iron Throne. If, as Schubart observes,26 pride is the paramount lesson that Dany learns in her journey from Pentos back home to Dragonstone and finally the Iron Throne in Westeros, it is in keeping with her portrayal that her thymotic drives – what Stanton suggests are precisely at stake for many characters in the series – propel her somewhat

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forcefully upon her return to King’s Landing. If her vengeance was anything less than excessive, she wouldn’t belong in the world of Game of Thrones. If, as we observed above with her behaviour at the banquet, she is poised on a tipping point of uncertainty about what is due to her not only as her birthright but in return for her services in defeating the army of the dead, her experience at the end of the same episode pushes her beyond that tipping point and beyond where she can distinguish justice from vengeance. After killing one of Dany’s dragons and destroying her fleet, Cersei takes Missandei as hostage and brutally executes her at the gates of King’s Landing. The murder of a beloved companion, as with Pallas’ death at the hands of Turnus in the Aeneid and Patroclus’ death at the hands of Hector in the Iliad, sparks the personal vendetta that will drive her decisions in the remaining episodes. As noted, the dynamics of Dany’s return to claim the throne and the widespread carnage that ensues in King’s Landing from that return evoke an even more compelling parallel with Odysseus’ wholesale slaughter of the suitors. Both heroes extend their paths of retribution beyond what is undoubtedly ‘just’ and force audiences to question the fate of relatively innocent bystanders. On the one hand, Dany’s vengeance (like that of Achilles and Aeneas) is more justified than Odysseus’ since her enemy Cersei has killed her beloved companion and ‘child’ dragon, rather than (as in the Ithakan’s case) simply abused the hospitality of a man thought to be dead. On the other hand, the innocence of some victims is even more pronounced in Game of Thrones than is the sympathetic nature of some of Odysseus’ victims: throughout episode 8.5 (‘The Bells’) we follow the point of view of a nameless mother and child who try to escape the destruction but are in the end casualties of Drogon’s fire, their bodies moulded together in ash. Moreover, at times their point of view intersects with that of Arya, who has explicitly abandoned her own quest for vengeance against Cersei and makes a futile attempt to save them. The visual possibilities actualised in the spectacle of the city’s destruction, characteristic of epic cinema, though not available to ancient epic poetry (at least not on the scale imagined in Game of Thrones), ultimately reveal the story of Dany’s victims in a way that the Homeric poem cannot. The aftermath of Dany’s reclaiming of King’s Landing provokes further comparison with Odysseus’ nostos, while also distancing her behaviour from that of the Homeric hero. In the Odyssey, restored order in the household depends in part on the fact that Odysseus remains committed (or at least appears to remain committed) to his

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role as a supporter of and sympathiser with the servants and lower classes, in opposition to the high-­born suitors whom he has eradicated: he promises to reward his loyal swineherd Eumaeus and the cowherd Philoetius with marriage, property and elevated social status (Od. 21.207–16).27 Dany, in stark contrast, will continue to espouse a rhetoric of breaking the wheel, freeing slaves and crushing tyrants. But the final episodes demonstrate a visible hierarchy that elevates her initially on Drogon’s back above the citizens of King’s Landing (8.5, ‘The Bells’) and in the final episode at the top of a grand staircase overlooking a plaza in the Red Keep (8.6, ‘Iron Throne’), high above the assembled Dothraki and Unsullied armies. Where we can perhaps forgive Odysseus’ excess because his experience as a beggar has taught him the virtue of humility as well as pride, Dany’s pride in the end only serves to distinguish her from the people she hopes to govern, perhaps a likely outcome of her dogged determination to rise to the challenge of her birthright, but one that makes her ill-­suited to rule in a Westeros where vengeance in retribution for personal slight has repeatedly proven an unstable ground for staking a claim in the rule of the Seven Kingdoms. Thus, it is not so much Dany’s gender that determines her failings as a leader as it is her sense of self-­worth, authentic pride in the best light and thymotic impulse in the worst, which throughout her eight-­season arc proves both her salvation and her ruin. Survivors (such as Arya) learn how the quest for vengeance impacts identity, and, like Odysseus, can explore identities other than that of their birth, moving up and down the social scale in ways that look forward to the kind of world Westeros hopes to become rather than the one it has been for so long. It is, then, with some irony that Dany’s own vision of the future articulated in season 6 will by the series’ conclusion no longer accommodate her (6.9, ‘Battle of the Bastards’): her acts of excessive vengeance elide her character with those she once decried, binding her to ‘our fathers ­­ . . . ­evil men’, and (as the ashes of King’s Landing attest) marking an unsettling failure to ‘leave the world a better place than we found it’. NOTES   1 See especially Lushkov (2017a and 2017b) and Weiner (2017), both discussed further below.   2 Guha (2019) for the view that ‘the Mad Queen trope was absolutely unnecessary’.   3 Gonzales (2019); Allen (2019).

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  4 For Emilia Clarke’s reaction, see Kosin (2019); cf. Frankel, who notes of Daenerys (as of season 3) that, because she experiences the full arc of a heroine without rejecting femininity, ‘most of the feminism of the show must be attributed to her’ (2014: 148). See also Spector (2012: 170) for the exceptional nature of Dany’s power in Westeros.   5 See, e.g., Shay (2002), Hall (2008) and Gardner and Murnaghan (2014); Cole (2012) analyses how characters in Song of Ice and Fire struggle with PTSD, though he does not use an Odyssean lens.   6 See Lushkov (2017a: 69–73).   7 Cf. Frankel (2014: 26–7) on the problem of casting Dany as a ‘white savior’ and her adventures as a ‘metaphor for colonialism’. See also Tasker and Steenberg (2016: 188).   8 Schubart borrows the distinction from the work of Tracy and Robins (2007).   9 See Lushkov (2017a: 69). 10 Cf. Poetics 1448a. For Aristotelian qualities of modern fantasy (MF), and the Song of Ice and Fire in particular, see Weiner (2017), for whom MF is ‘epic’ in the Aristotelian sense in so far as it privileges plot and character over style, metre and formal experimentation. 11 Lushkov (2017a: 36). 12 Lushkov (2017a: 32, 52–7). 13 Cf. Lushkov (2017a: 48) and Stanton (2015: 50). 14 Stanton (2015: 51) draws upon Sloterdijk’s (2010) concept of thymotic drives, a term derived from the Greek thumos. 15 Od.1.29–43, 4.519–47, 11.404–34. 16 Stanford’s commentary on Homer (1962: 372). 17 For a sensitive literary response to Odysseus’ violence, that against the serving maids in particular, see Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (2005). 18 Hall (2008: 177). 19 See Hall (2008: 178), who cites Gould (1991). 20 Cf. Lushkov (2017b: 322), who observes that, as in Game of Thrones, vengeance is a big driver of the plot in the Iliad and the Aeneid. 21 For the reciprocal light that a source text and its modern variation can shine on each other, with specific regard to the Odyssey, see especially Rogers (2015: 225) who, drawing on Paula James (2009), examines Alien Resurrection as a cultural companion to the Odyssey. 22 Cf. dialogue in Martin’s novel A Game of Thrones (2011: 470): Ned Stark to Ser Loras, ‘We are about justice here, and what you seek is vengeance.’ 23 See Blu-­ray featurette, ‘Duty is the Death of Love’. 24 Frankel (2014: 177–82) compiles a useful selection of responses to Dany’s story, her rape in particular, from magazines and blogs, many of which criticise the series from a feminist perspective. Politics aside, having Dany initially more humiliated makes the drama of her recovery more affective; cf. Emilia Clarke’s comment: ‘we wanted to track the real

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growth of the relationship’ (cited in Frankel 2014: 150). On rape as a trope used to signify ‘monstrosity’ throughout the series, see Rosenberg (2012), who argues that most rape in the series is used to advance the plot, and those who commit it are cast as monsters. 25 Cf. Frankel (2014: 152) on why Dany has to lose her child: to dismantle ‘the male power structure that surrounds her as brother, husband, and conqueror-­son to create a newer form of rule’. 26 Schubart (2016: 111). 27 For Odysseus as a champion of the lower classes and debates surrounding the ‘lowlife tenor’ of the epic, see Hall (2008: 131–43).

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10  The Performance of War: Battle as Spectacle in the Iliad and Into the Badlands (2015–2019) Jo Wynell-­Mayow

Homer’s Iliad contains many vivid and detailed scenes of battle, utilising simile, dehumanisation and graphically gruesome imagery to make a spectacle of the heroes taking part in the Trojan War. The audience imagines these scenes in their mind’s eye, and Homer’s attention to detail makes this experience all the more immediate. However, there are also aspects of these battle scenes where we, the audience, must suspend our disbelief and accept events or episodes that seem less than realistic. This is usually in order to further the narrative, expand on a central theme or add elements of characterisation. In this way, the battle moves away from being a faithful retelling of ‘what actually happened’ and into the realms of ‘what the audience would like to hear’ (and also, ‘what the poet would like to show’.) Here especially, battle feels very much like a performed spectacle.1 The various chapters in War as Spectacle (Bakogianni and Hope 2015a) elucidate the idea of war as a performance, something to be watched and appreciated; these ideas will be applied here, in an investigation of the ways in which the AMC television series Into the Badlands (2015–19) adapts several aspects of Iliadic presentation of battle. In particular, ideas of ‘battle as spectacle’ help to create a framework for the specific visual aesthetic used throughout the show. First, the sheer variety of weaponry, martial arts skills and a supernatural ability known as the ‘dark gift’ present a visual spectacle for the viewer; in addition, the many fight scenes are filmed, costumed and edited in a stylised and spectacular way. With such scenes comes a requirement for the audience to suspend their disbelief and

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appreciate the battle scenes as spectacle for its own sake, as Homer’s audience must have done, and to this end, I. J. F. de Jong’s work on Homeric ‘realism’ is a valuable framework for understanding these aspects of the epic.2 Lynn Kozak has pointed out the rich vein to be mined in investigating analogies between ancient epic and the poetics of contemporary television serials; this chapter is anchored by this thinking, and will suggest ways in which one particular television show’s aesthetic can provide parallels with aspects of Homer’s ‘cinematic’ story-­telling.3 Some contextual information about Into The Badlands will now follow, for those readers unfamiliar with the show. It began with a six-­episode first season in 2015, followed with a ten-­episode second season in 2017, and ended with a sixteen-­episode third season in 2019. The show (henceforth referred to as ITB) is set in a post-­apocalyptic world, when - after some unspecified, catastrophic, worldwide event - guns have become obsolete, and the land and its localised resources are controlled by warlords called Barons. As the show begins, the foremost of these Barons are Quinn (Marton Csokas), The Widow (Emily Beecham), Chau (Eleanor Matsuura) and Jacobee (Edi Gathegi), and each commands teams of private bodyguards (called Clippers) and possesses a labour force (called Cogs) who are locked in conditions akin to slavery or serfdom. Central to the characterisation and thematic development of the series are the characters Sunny (Daniel Wu), a former Clipper for Quinn who decides to leave behind his former life of violence, and MK (Aramis Knight), a teenaged orphan trained and mentored by Sunny. As the three seasons progress, alliances between Barons crumble and are reconfigured, and the deaths of several key characters alter the balance between Barons, Clippers and the greater population. The third season sees the emergence of a new character, Pilgrim (Babou Ceesay), a charismatic and powerful religious leader who commands his own army of followers and with whom a phenomenon known as the ‘dark gift’ takes on newly dangerous significance. Because of the absence of gunplay, which is so prevalent in other popular current shows (of those contemporaneous to ITB, Westworld (2016–) and The Walking Dead (2010–) particularly stand out), violence between Clipper forces, Barons and other opponents instead hinges on impressive martial arts. These battle scenes, lavishly shot and painstakingly choreographed by expert fight coordinators, form some of the most entertaining, violent and spectacular vignettes of the show. In addition, a wide variety of specialised weapons, including samurai-­style swords and throwing stars, are used, principally

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to emphasise the physical dexterity and highly disciplined agility of the fighters. Each Clipper force is clothed in colour-­coordinated outfits, adding to the aesthetically spectacular quality of each scene. In this investigation it will be shown how the following categories reveal parallels with Homer’s vision of spectacular battle: variety of weaponry and attack; visual/aural aspects of battle; and suspension of disbelief in fight sequences. VA R I E T Y Iliad There are undoubtedly many ways to maim or kill an enemy in the Iliad. Part of what makes the poem seem so relentless in its violence is the variety of methods with which warriors are dispatched. Homer’s epic may end on a subdued note, with Priam’s pleas to Achilles for the return of Hector’s body and the sorrowful reception of this body by his family behind the walls of Troy, but until this point the violence is varied, spectacular and ever-­present. Even quieter moments of the epic, such as Hector’s ‘home visit’ in Book 6, are set against a backdrop of the war’s relentless drive: Hector berates Paris, who is ‘turning in his hands the curved bow’ (6.322)4 in the safety of a bedroom (rather than actually using it out on the battlefield!), and insists he must head back out to the battle because he has ‘learned to be valiant / and to fight always among the foremost ranks of the Trojans’ (6.444–5).5 A similar mood pervades the embassy to Achilles in Book 9, where Odysseus bookmarks the stated rewards promised by Agamemnon with an update of the current situation of the war and a plea to think of his fellow Achaeans’ plight (232–46 and 301–3). One of the most efficient ways to dispatch multiple enemy characters in the Iliad is through an aristeia - one key figure’s ‘moment of excellence’ in battle. These include the rampages of Agamemnon in Book 11, which is only ended by a wound which causes him to withdraw temporarily from battle; of Patroclus in Book 16, as he wears Achilles’ armour into battle and is only halted by death at the hands of Hector; of Diomedes in Book 5, which includes wounding two Olympian gods; and of Achilles in Books 20–2, which ends when he finally duels with and kills Hector, before hauling him off behind his chariot in bloody triumph. In the case of Diomedes in Book 5, his murderous rampage extends beyond the mortal Trojans to wounding even the goddess Aphrodite

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as she attempts to rescue her son Aeneas from the fray (5.336ff.) and the god Ares as he assists the Trojans (5.855–61). Diomedes had earlier been injured himself by Pandaros at line 98, but following removal of the arrow and a prayer to Athene, Homer says that ‘now the strong rage tripled took hold of him’ (5.136), and following this the number of his victims increases exponentially, with nine Trojans killed, Aeneas gravely wounded and two deities injured. The assistance of Athene in this cannot be discounted (particularly in the wounding of Ares, where, ‘leaning in’ on Diomedes’ spear, she ‘drove it into the depth of the belly’), and such divine intervention can be seen as a way of elevating the warrior beyond mortal capabilities, often rendering him virtually invincible. Additionally, we are presented with yet another way for the men of the Iliad to be wounded or killed: with a god assisting them, those enacting an aristeia have a supernatural force behind their own highly skilled talents for battle. By the end of the Iliad, the audience has witnessed 240 deaths, with wounds being dealt to ‘almost every part of the anatomy’, including parts of the head, neck, shoulder and leg;6 in a particularly memorable example, the Trojan Adamas is struck ‘between navel and genitals where beyond all places / death in battle comes painfully to pitiful mortals’ (13.568–9). This latter wound has been pointed out by Saunders as ‘aesthetically unpleasant’, particularly given the queasy image of Adamas being ‘pulled forward’ as Meriones extracts his spear from the wound (570–4).7 Unpleasant it may be, but it certainly paints a vivid picture for the ancient audience as they bear witness to every detail of Adamas’ demise, and I think this is key to the idea of presenting battle as a spectacle: it does not have to be pleasant to be compelling to listeners or readers.8 I find the phrasing of Gottschall most pertinent for discussing both the frequent and varied violence of the Iliad and that of ITB: he has described the Iliad as being ‘a catalog of indignities to the body’ with its ‘deranged, almost comic-­book-­like violence’.9 This interpretation naturally leads us to a comparative discussion of the variety and ingenuity of ITB’s makers in wounding and dispatching characters. ITB As mentioned above, the show features heavy use of martial arts and its associated weapons (primarily swords, daggers, crossbows and nunchucks), but other weaponry and ad hoc items are utilised to demonstrate characters’ adaptability and resourcefulness. Throwing stars are a popular weapon of the ‘Butterflies’, the Clippers of The

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Widow, and these are often shown to be capable of slashing multiple victims (when gathered in a circle) in an arcing motion, with no discernible slowing or disruption to the star’s trajectory. When not armed with their own weapons, characters improvise with whatever potential weapon is to hand, and these range from ropes, to pieces of wood or metal, to a ladder, to items in a marketplace. In a humourous touch which adds levity to a darkly threatening violent situation, the character Bajie (Nick Frost) uses a large fish and then an octopus to slap and fling at his assailants (3.6, ‘Black Wind Howls’). Amid the humour, this also fulfils the ‘battle as spectacle’ aspect of the Iliad in that the viewer is drawn in and captivated by the unexpectedness of such ‘weapons’ and the character’s success with them. Characters’ proficiency in martial arts frequently goes uncommented upon, as if it is a given in this world where the instant defence mechanism afforded by guns is not available.10 A particular element praised by critics is the prevalence of female characters who prove themselves just as skilled as male counterparts: in particular, The Widow is shown in many battle scenarios where her high kicks, swordplay and athleticism serve her well, particularly if she is ambushed and must think on her feet, as in episode 1.2, ‘Fist Like a Bullet’. The slow-­motion and closeup camera effects used when The Widow first realises she has been surrounded prepare the audience for upcoming action, and ratchet up the tension;11 the diegetic music previously playing in the bar recedes to be replaced by a subtler underscore and the sound of weapons being drawn, further focusing attention on The Widow’s perception of and position within the scene. This ambush begins with the martial arts trope of ‘one versus many’, but also showcases The Widow’s specific proficiency with throwing daggers, and her high-­heeled boots too are used as a deadly weapon. Wirework is also evident in this scene to enable an awe-­inspiring leap by The Widow onto the bar (although clearly physically impossible, this aspect of wirework is further discussed below). Any initial fear that she may be unprepared is allayed by her deployment of six daggers thrown with perfect precision and her ability to dispatch every member of the opposing side. When considering the Iliad’s reliance on the element of aristeia to prove a warrior’s superiority and divine ‘favouritism’, the ‘dark gift’ vignettes in ITB provide a notable parallel. This aspect of the series is introduced in the very first episode, ‘The Fort’, through the central character of MK, a teenager who is trained by the then Clipper Sunny. During an apparently accidental incident when attacked by another boy in the barracks, MK is shown to undergo a physical transforma-

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tion when his blood is drawn. This results in his eyes turning black or ‘dark’, and a supernatural strength overtaking him. An acrobatic flip followed by a mid-­air kick sends his opponent flying metres back into a large mirror; a flying shard of glass is then caught mid-­air by MK, who rapidly throws it back directly into the other boy’s eye. The rumours of MK’s ‘dark gift’ spread quickly to others, including The Widow, who hopes to co-­opt it, and MK, into her own battles. Later on, other characters are also shown to possess the ‘dark gift’, including Sunny, Pilgrim, Sunny’s baby son Henry, and several Clippers fighting for other Barons. Fight scenes involving one or more characters employing the ‘gift’ ramp up the impressive and spectacular aspects of ITB’s battle scenarios, particularly the ability to push or throw opponents with uncanny force and to react with great speed to incoming weapons. Another excellent example of this is seen in episode 3.1, ‘Enter the Phoenix’, where two young bodyguards of Pilgrim decimate a small garrison of forces with ease, catching and snapping arrows in mid-­flight, and performing somersaults that deflect a volley of missiles. Pilgrim, a character who only appears in season 3, also casts himself as a ‘messiah’ to those who join his community, taking on a religious role that some could interpret as zealotry or quasi-­divinity; the actor playing him (Babou Ceesay) has asserted ‘he does become a god’.12 What brings this into line with the divine guiding of an aristeia is that Pilgrim has the ability (possessed by no one else) to turn off the ‘dark gift’ of others. The near-­invincibility afforded by the ‘dark gift’ to those who possess it offers a parallel with the impressive visual spectacle of a Homeric hero’s aristeia; there is also the sense of a driving, unseen force guiding their combat abilities which only an equally supernatural force might stop. VISUAL/AURAL ELEMENTS Iliad Homer’s use of simile in the battle scenes of the Iliad is often celebrated; animal imagery is particularly favoured in order to convey not only the dehumanising effect of battle, but also the ferocity and valour of the men involved. A further effect of such animal similes, especially when a duel is set up as a predator-­and-­prey binary such as that of a hunting dog and a deer, is that it casts the battle as part of the natural order of life, implicitly suggesting the eventual winner. Hector is described as a ‘hunting hound ­­ . . . ­pursuing / a wild boar or a lion’

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(8.338–40); Agamemnon as ‘a lion seiz[ing] the innocent young of the running / deer’ (11.113–14); and Odysseus and Diomedes as ‘two wild boars / hurl[ing] themselves in their pride upon the hounds who pursue them’ (11.324–5). Such similes serve to underline the battle as a life-­or-­death struggle, drawing the audience in and maintaining a certain level of tension. Coffey’s assertion that ‘the bard derived his similes from things within his own and his hearers’ experience, though not necessarily their everyday experience’ underlines the way that this imagery can be drawn not just from mundane, everyday events, but also from exciting and spectacular occurrences.13 Similes can also be employed to cultivate a sense of pathos upon the death of a young, beautiful hero; in one particular example, the death of Gorgythion is described thus: He bent drooping his head to one side, as a garden poppy bends beneath the weight of its yield and the rains of springtime; so his head bent slack to one side beneath the helm’s weight. (8.306–8)

This kind of simile provides a sense that even amidst the constant slaughter and death of the Trojan War, beautiful imagery may still be present. In addition, the frequent use of tree imagery in Homeric death scenes also captures the death of a once-­strong, resilient soldier in naturally inspired terms: Imbrios ‘dropped like an ash tree / which, on the crest of a mountain glittering far about, cut down / with the bronze axe scatters on the ground its delicate leafage’ (13.178–80), while Simoeisios ‘­­dropped . . . ­like some black poplar’ (4.482) and Asios falls ‘as when an oak goes downs or a white poplar / or like a towering pine tree’ (13.389–90). Truly evocative scenes often skilfully weave together both visual and aural descriptive elements, and battle scenes (and particularly the point of a warrior’s death) in the Iliad are no different. The audience hears not only the description of where an arrow or spear pierces its victim or what part of the body is brutally wounded; on nineteen different occasions this is accompanied by a description of how ‘he fell thunderously’ and nine times ‘the armor clattered upon him’, adding an aural element to the death scene.14 A further element of these scenes is the ‘obituary’ of the fallen warrior - reference to his home town, where perhaps elderly parents, or wife and children, are hoping for his return, which will never occur.15 Such individualisation of death scenes - especially in view of the sheer amount of death within the Iliad - adds poignancy and sympathy, and some would say advances the case for arguing for the Iliad having undeniably tragic or ‘anti-­war’ tones.16

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ITB When we consider how this may be reflected in ITB, one aspect that has been remarked upon by many reviewers and journalists is the show’s visually arresting production design and costuming. This, combined with cinematography and sound design, provides some significant parallels with the aforementioned aspects of the Iliad. It is here that the audiovisual spectacle manufactured by producers of television is markedly different from the way in which the poet of an originally oral epic might create spectacle with only words; however, the effect can be remarkably similar for the respective audiences. Giovanni Lipari, costume designer on seasons 2 and 3, has discussed the necessity for providing ‘vivid, bold colors that would define groups of characters and families’.17 The existence of the Barons and their separate fiefdoms (complete with Clipper troops, Cog workforces, and pennant flags with individual emblems) provides the opportunity to visually define each grouping through colour and costume, and this has additional effectiveness in battle scenes. When placed within the largely grey and brown palettes used for background scenery, the colour of each force affords great contrast, both to each other and to the backdrop. The vividly red-­headed Widow is constantly clad in black, while her Clippers wear royal blue velvet; Quinn and his forces wear rich red leather coats and vests; Chau is most often in white with gold trim, and her troops likewise wear white jumpsuits and pith helmets.18 Pilgrim’s followers, like their leader, are eclectically garbed, though with common elements such as facial tattoos or scars, richly patterned trousers and coats, and hair braids - all of which give them the distinct look of a collection of misfits united behind one cult leader. In a scene from episode 3.8, ‘Leopard Catches Cloud’, a bird’s-­eye shot from above highlights the contrasting colour schemes of a central blue-­clad character (a former Clipper named Nathaniel Moon, played by Sherman Augustus) surrounded by the white-­clad troops of Baron Chau. It could be posited that this particular angle gives the television audience a kind of ‘god’s-­eye view’, which can be linked to the role of the Olympian gods as spectators of the Trojan War; this aspect, specifically alluded to in the Iliad at certain points (for instance, at the start of Book 4) when the Olympians are watching the action on the battlefields of Troy, is discussed further below.19 At other points, such as during battles shot with a wide-­angle lens where several characters wear each colour, this visual ‘guide’ enables the audience to follow the progression of each opposing side more easily.

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Many battles have a distinct setting that has been carefully chosen for its aesthetic value as much as its relation to the plot. In addition to the water-­tower showdown between The Widow and Nathaniel Moon in episode 3.1, ‘Enter the Phoenix’ (see below), two more examples serve to underline the spectacular element of battle: the final fight between The Widow and Chau, which takes place in a disused amusement park (3.12, ‘Cobra Fang, Panther Claw’), and a showdown between The Widow and The Master (Chipo Chung), which takes place outdoors in a snowy landscape (3.9, ‘Chamber of the Scorpion’). The Widow–Chau battle, with its gaudy fairground backdrop including clown-­ mouth entrance and merry-­ go-­ round, juxtaposes the joyous atmosphere of a circus with the deadly business of a sword fight between enemies. The rotating attractions and stalls provide a bright and chaotic atmosphere, but a merry-­go-­round horse is beheaded, as is, eventually, Chau herself. Contrastingly, The Widow–Master battle begins outdoors, with The Widow bursting out of a wooden trunk and fighting against The Master amid a snowstorm, before the two warriors crash through the floor to continue their engagement in an underground room, where there is an elaborate arrangement of candles all around the floor and walls. While the colours of the outdoor snow scene aesthetically spotlight the two main figures very effectively, the candlelit scene underlines The Master’s role as something akin to a Buddhist monk - contemplative, yet powerful both spiritually and physically, and ultimately a fighter who can defeat The Widow. A final aspect to acknowledge is the careful management of sound design. ITB’s creators, in assiduously replicating aspects of martial arts films that they admire, have taken great care to include sound design, which ‘adds a whole other texture to the show’.20 Weapons clang against immovable materials; throwing stars whip audibly through the air; characters’ hair and long coats make a theatrical swoosh when they leap. While it may not dwell on the groans of dying victims (just like the Iliad), the visceral nature of battle is audibly clear and there is no shortage of the sounds of steel weapons piercing flesh and blood gushing forth. The sound of armour clattering upon a warrior, familiar from the Iliad, is here prolonged and extended through the duels between opposing characters. The spectacle of such scenes is performed for us, the audience; the creators of the show have taken great care to stage-­manage these episodes with attention to aesthetic and aural detail.

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SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF Iliad Homer’s desire to describe combat engagements in elaborate detail for the audience means we must also suspend our disbelief for many battle scenes in the Iliad. For those of us who have never experienced battle first-­hand, modern films (particularly of the last thirty years or so) such as Saving Private Ryan (1998) or even Gladiator (2000) help to convey an overt sense of realism: illustrating an uncomfortably real sense of a crowded, savage battle, these films evoke the fear, panic and terror of war. While it is true that the Iliad is capable of evoking the clamour and chaos of battle,21 much of the fighting focuses in on ‘closeup’ encounters between two warriors, or, as mentioned above, on a singular aristeia. It is moments like this, when battle appears to be presented purely for the audience’s pleasure as a ‘spectacle’, and when there is a combination of intricately described detail and moments of high improbability, that provide some final points of comparison with ITB. When the film Troy was released in 2004, the film critic Roger Ebert noted with some disappointment that ‘the movie sidesteps the existence of the Greek gods’; but the involvement of the Olympians is just one aspect of ancient epic which, due to the element of the supernatural, a modern audience may struggle to ‘believe’.22 However difficult it may be to convey the Iliad’s field of battle complete with godly spectators (and occasional participants) in a way that appeals to modern audiences, the fact remains that in the Iliad, the fighting at Troy takes place as the Olympian gods watch with great interest, and occasionally their interest as spectators spills over into participation in order to assist one side or the other. In Homer’s positioning of the Olympian gods as watching and enjoying the spectacle of battle at Troy, ‘human achievements and human suffering are seen in a certain unique way. . . . We are able to share their viewpoint and to see human life as they see it, in its double aspect of greatness and littleness.’23 Griffin’s analysis has much to lend to the interpretation here of the divine audience of the Iliad fulfilling the same role as the televisual audience of ITB.24 Amongst the many gruesome injuries of the Iliad, there are certainly some stretches in credibility, including facial stabbing causing detached eyeballs to fall out (Peisander and Kebriones), improbable stab wounds traversing buttock, bladder and pelvis (Harpalion), and spear thrusts that are capable of shearing off heads and arms

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(Archilochus and Maris). Saunders, in an impressive analysis of the pathophysiology of wounding in the Iliad, suggests that rather than quibble with Homer’s less-­than-­exact physiological knowledge, we should understand his approach to be ‘cinematic’.25 In providing such viscerally described woundings and deaths, we can imagine Homer drawing his audience in further with his ever-­inventive scenes, each description allowing listeners to be entertained by the spectacle of battle, including those aspects of ‘sensational intensification’.26 In the particular instance of the Paris–Menelaos duel in Book 3, there is a sense of the battlefield ‘parting’ to let through the two warriors, placing the spotlight on those two characters most invested in the origins of the war. In fact, the amassed soldiers physically put aside their weapons in order to become spectators (along with us, the audience) of this duel which could potentially end the war then and there.27 Even those safely up on the walls of Troy are spectators, as in the teichoscopia (‘viewing from the walls’), we see Helen patiently describing and naming each of the prominent Greek leaders at the invitation of Priam (3.161–258), despite the fact that, as several scholars have pointed out, Priam would surely already know these names by the ninth year of the war.28 There is a further level of spectatorship in this scene: Paris escapes almost certain death because ‘Aphrodite daughter of Zeus watched sharply’, and, cloaking him in a thick mist, removes him from the battlefield to his own bedchamber (3.374–82). Myers has astutely pointed to the frequent use of the formulaic phrase ‘then you would see’ as a powerful way to pointedly engage the listener and involve them as an eyewitness of the spectacle of the Iliad’s battles.29 But even moments which are not an explicit, agreed-­beforehand duel can have a sense of ‘telescoping’ - zeroing in on two special warriors, the speech between them and the weapons cast. One particular example of this is the Glaukos and Diomedes episode in Book 6, where the two opposing warriors discover from their pre-­duel speeches an ancestral guest-­friendship relationship: Let us avoid each other’s spears, even in the close fighting. There are plenty of Trojans and famed companions in battle for me to kill, whom the god sends me, or those I run down with my swift feet, many Achaians for you to slaughter, if you can do it. But let us exchange our armour, so that these others may know how we claim to be guests and friends from the days of our fathers. (6.226–31)

Many of my students have found this situation almost comical in its extremes: why is no one else around to interrupt? Why would you

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want to exchange armour with your enemy? In order to push forward the idea of xenia (guest-­friendship) conveying civilised behaviour and transcending all situations, Homer creates for us a borderline-­ absurd scene where two warriors lay aside weapons and come to a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’. Although some suspension of disbelief may be required, it need not detract from our enjoyment of the poem as a whole; more importantly, the poet has focused in ‘closeup’ on two soldiers so that an underlying theme may be explored further, and to vary the plethora of more ‘wide-­shot’ scenes.30 ITB The use of wirework in martial arts cinema stunts has been absorbed into mainstream Hollywood films as far back as The Matrix (1999) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). ITB show creators Al Gough and Miles Millar, along with star Daniel Wu, have asserted that one of their primary aims in making ITB was to bring exactly this level of ‘authentic, Hong Kong-­style martial arts to television’.31 Within action scenes, wirework produces spectacular, if not necessarily credible, fight scenarios. I briefly mentioned wirework in The Widow’s ambush scene earlier; but it is deployed for battles involving many other characters, and not at all only the most accomplished Clippers - even the overweight (and comic) character Bajie is shown performing flips and impressive footwork in seasons 2 and 3. In terms of staging, wirework enables characters to use static objects such as cars and staircases to jump from or onto, often including impressive flips or aerial twists. In terms of audience enjoyment, it provides the viewer with spectacular set pieces wherein it seems characters are capable of almost superhuman feats of agility and balance - in fact, just as we saw earlier with the way aristeia scenes in the Iliad can come about as part of divine intervention. One of the most spectacular yet literally ‘unbelievable’ scenes featuring wirework is a duel between The Widow and Nathaniel Moon, which takes place around a tall disused water tower (3.1, ‘Enter the Phoenix’). Like the ambush from the first season, the moments just before battle commences are shot in slow motion, with closeups of both characters’ determined faces. The first half of the encounter is a fairly straightforward sword fight, although with the added wirework enhancements of high flips and, at one point, The Widow balancing with one foot on each of two sword handles planted in the ground. As the characters move around, the cinematography grants us further spectacle by switching between showing The Widow and

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Figure 10.1  The Widow (Emily Beacham) and Nathaniel Moon (Sherman Augustus) mid-­battle in Into the Badlands, ‘Enter the Phoenix’ (3.1, 2018). AMC.

Moon from a bird’s-­eye shot above, to medium-­level shots and wide views. However, the true spectacle unfolds when the two characters begin to ascend the outside of the tower, partially using a narrow spiral staircase, but also through amazing leaps and footholds (Figure 10.1). All this is achieved with The Widow wearing her customary stiletto-­heeled boots, and Moon relying on only one fully functioning hand (the other hand, having been severed in a previous battle, has been replaced with a prosthetic claw). Reaching the top of the tower results in more fighting around the narrow rim, all the more spectacular for the element of clear danger and perilous height at which this is taking place. On further examination, the usage of the martial arts cinema trope of ‘one versus many’ also raises issues of credibility. A single warrior successfully defeating myriad opponents, while undoubtedly spectacular, is also fairly unbelievable: it requires a level of skill and timing that seem unlikely to co-­exist. However, as with aspects of the Iliad that require suspension of disbelief, these ‘one-­versus-­many’ vignettes serve to illustrate an individual warrior’s undeniable superiority. Sunny is shown several times throughout three seasons fighting multiple opponents alone, including twice in the very first episode,

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‘The Fort’:’ first against a team of nomads in a forest, then against Jacobee’s Clippers during a rainstorm. This swiftly sets Sunny up as an intimidating, near-­invincible force to be reckoned with. Other key characters such as The Widow, Pilgrim and Nathaniel Moon are also shown battling multiple foes in this type of scene, and each underlines the character’s combat prowess while showing off the spectacular qualities of viewing a single fighter demolishing a crowd of enemies. The deployment of martial arts skills in ITB is treated as a natural part of life by those proficient in them, although it is explained that Clippers are selected at an early age (perhaps early teens) and trained rigorously in what looks something akin to a Spartan agoge, each youngster being assigned to a senior Clipper to impart wisdom and train thoroughly (as seen in episode 1.1, ‘The Fort’). The Widow’s own adopted daughter Tilda (Ally Ioannides) serves as her foremost Clipper despite her teenage years, alongside a small army of largely female comrades. This aspect of how life is lived, and indeed how battle is fought, when paired with the absence of guns, helps create a kind of alternative universe to that of a contemporary viewing audience; and I would argue that for one to truly immerse oneself in and enjoy such an alternative world, suspension of disbelief must occur. The additional supernatural element of the ‘dark gift’ phenomenon - which perhaps would be more common in a fantasy series such as Game of Thrones (2011–19) or Stranger Things (2016–) rather than the post-­apocalyptic world of ITB - also adds to this dimension. The ‘dark gift’, and its increasing importance in the second and third seasons, allows the creators of the show to examine the ethics of possessing the gift, and how it might be used for nefarious purposes (for instance, by Pilgrim), or refused (for instance, by Sunny). In this way, just as the Glaukos–Diomedes armour exchange seems absurd while also shining a spotlight on the importance of xenia, the ‘dark gift’ can be unrealistic while also providing thought-­provoking plot developments. CONCLUSION Ancient portrayals of war and contemporary television portrayals of violence have much to say about their respective society’s attitude towards battle as spectacle. As Bakogianni has observed, ‘war has always both fascinated and repelled human beings throughout recorded history’,32 and this is also true for modern fictitious representations of battle and violence such as a show like Into the Badlands. The aesthetic values of Into the Badlands give a strong

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sense of battle as a spectacle which the viewing audience can appreciate for its beauty and magnificence, even amidst the violence. One of the tag lines used to promote the show is ‘In a world without guns, fighting is an art!’ Many of the battle scenes in the Iliad evoke pathos and admiration in Homer’s ability to paint a vivid image, pairing visceral visual violence with the sounds of a falling warrior and biographical detail about his family vainly awaiting his return; equally, the combat scenes in Into the Badlands can evoke the same emotions in us, as warriors are shown spectacularly arrayed and filmed performing impressive feats of skill. The talents of the art directors, cinematographers and fight choreographers, together with the actors portraying these characters, combine to create a war experience which evokes many elements in common with Homer’s vision of battle. Whether it is morally right to enjoy battle ‘as spectacle’ or not, it has an undeniable ability to captivate audiences both ancient and modern; and it is hoped that the present study has shown how spectacular aspects of combat continue to be used to entertain audiences many centuries after the Iliad first did so. NOTES   1 Throughout this chapter, I have referred to Homer’s ‘audience’ rather than readers, in reference to the original oral performance context of epic poetry.   2 de Jong (2005).  3 Kozak (2017: 4 and passim); see also her 2013 unpublished paper ‘Perception and Iliadic Violence’ (received via email from the author).   4 All references to passages from the Iliad are taken from the Richmond Lattimore translation (1961).   5 In addition, the tender scene between Hector, Andromache and their son Astyanax is ‘intruded upon’ by Hector’s war helmet scaring the baby (466–70); even Hector’s hopes for his son’s future include him ‘kill[ing] his enemy / and bring[ing] home the blooded spoils’ (480–1).   6 Garland (1981: 43).   7 Saunders (1999: 351).  8 Bouvier (2012: 85) argues that, rather than particularly revelling in describing such ‘human butchery’, Homer is simply composing ‘in response to his waiting audience’.   9 Gottschall (2001: 279–80). 10 Scenes in ‘The Fort’ and ‘Fist Like A Bullet’ in season 1 show a crowd of ‘colts’ or younger recruits being trained to become Clippers at Baron Quinn’s residence, and we are to assume that this happens in other baronies.

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11 This could be viewed as an additional parallel, in Iliad terms, to formulaic arming scenes (e.g., Paris’ arming in Book 3, Agamemnon’s in Book 11, Patroklos’ in Book 16 and Achilles’ in Book 19), which typically ‘single out’ a warrior before following him into a lengthy aristeia, or a duel. 12 ‘Into the Badlands Q & A: Babou Ceesay’ (2018: 5). 13 Coffey (1957: 116). 14 See Morrison (1999: 130) for a valuable analysis of components within Iliad death scenes. Surprisingly, less frequent are the impassioned groans of the dying man: for discussion of this, see Holmes (2007: 46–7) and Morris (1993: 41–2). 15 Griffin (1976: 162) especially notes the element of dying ‘far from home’ as conveying pathos. 16 For instance, see Griffin (1976: passim); Yamagata (2015: 47–9). 17 Moore (2018: 9). 18 Showrunner Miles Millar has expressed his desire to provide an alternative to the usual colour palettes of post-­apocalyptic shows: ‘We didn’t want to do the type of future you see in many post-­apocalyptic films, which are very desaturated, very dusty, very orange and red. We wanted it to be the opposite of that; lush, saturated, jewel-­colored. . . . What if, in the future, this world has been reborn in a way? Nature is prominent and dominant, almost encroaching on this civilization that is holding on by a thread. You see that in the jewel-­like greens and saturated reds of the uniforms that also symbolize the blood and brutality of this world’ (‘Into the Badlands: Miles Millar Q&A’ 2015: 4–5). 19 Myers (2015: 34–5). 20 Kurland (2015: 10). 21 ‘The noise, the dust and the density of the crowd are emphasized’ (van Wees 1988: 2). 22 Ebert (2004). 23 Griffin (1978: 21). 24 In addition to the Olympians, the Iliad also has a talking horse (19.404– 17) and the river god Skamandros holding a conversation with Achilles (21.212–26). My focus, however, is on the more prosaic examples where the audience of the Iliad must suspend their disbelief in order to appreciate the spectacle of battle. 25 Saunders (1999: 363). 26 de Jong (2005: 12). 27 Ebert (2004), in his review of Troy, found this a particular stretch; see, however, Solomon (2007: 489 n.22) for a defence against such criticisms. 28 E.g., Myers (2015: 26). 29 Myers (2015: 38). 30 Weil (1945: 26–7), in her discussion of the poem’s ‘few luminous moments’, describes how ‘the tradition of hospitality persists, even

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through several generations, to dispel the blindness of combat’. See also de Jong’s discussion of this ‘selective focus’ particularly in relation to this scene (2005: 17–19). 31 ‘Into the Badlands: Miles Millar Q & A’ (2015: 2). Certainly this is true for 2015 when the show began; however, by 2019 when ITB ended, a new show called Warrior (2019–), based on an original idea by revered martial arts proponent (and actor) Bruce Lee, had emerged on Cinemax. 32 Bakogianni and Hope (2015b: 1).

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11  Homeric Intimacy in NBC’s Hannibal (2013–2015) Lynn Kozak

Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (2013–15) focuses on the intense relationship between its two lead men, FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and serial killer-­ cannibal-­ psychiatrist Dr Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). Filling in details absent in the Thomas Harris Hannibal novels that the show is based on, Fuller conceives the show largely as an act of fan-­fiction,1 aligning in some ways with Suzanne Scott’s ‘fanboy auteur’.2 But it’s unclear whether we might categorise Fuller’s fan-­fiction as ‘slash’, which imagines homosexual relationships between canonically straight characters.3 Through three seasons and thirty-­nine episodes, Hannibal follows Will and Hannibal as they, and we, try to put a finger on exactly what kind of relationship theirs is. Bryan Fuller, openly gay himself, initially conceived of using the pair to investigate non-­sexual, homosocial intimacy, while still owning the show’s obvious homoerotic overtones: Will Graham is very definitely heterosexual, but that does not necessarily prevent us from a homoerotic subtext. It’s practically text in a couple of episodes just because we really want to explore the intimacy of these two men in an unexpected way without sexualizing them ­­ . . . ­And, to be absolutely clear, it is not sexual, but it’s beyond sexual. It is pure intimacy in a non-­physical way. But it is that intimacy between heterosexual men that I’m fascinated with because it does go beyond physical parameters to this very primal basic male bonding place. That, as a gay man, I am outside of, because it is unique. Because it is free of a sexuality and/or intimation of sexuality.4

Exploring such an intimacy, the show struggles to define its primary pair, variously referring to them as friends, as family, as nakama

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(Japanese for ‘close friends’) and even as ‘murder husbands’: the third season brings open discussion of Hannibal’s being in love with Will, and implies at least some level of reciprocity on Will’s part. Fuller admits that he pushed the relationship in that direction partly because of the desires of ‘Fannibals’ (the show’s fans),5 even confirming that the relationship, affectionately dubbed ‘Hannigram’, was, in fact, canon – in other words, a producer-­sanctioned fact of the storyworld. Despite these confirmations, the show itself never features a moment of sexual intimacy between the two men. More, in a 2020 Nerdist reunion of the Hannibal cast and creative team, Fuller again reiterated, discussing a possible show return, ‘I do think Will Graham is a heterosexual character, but sexuality is fluid and I think it would have to be a conversation where we would have to find, “What is the most authentic version of their relationship now?”’6 All of these bits of evidence have left many fans still to question: how exactly can we define the Hannigram relationship? This kind of intensely close intimacy between two men that never quite finds consummation in sexual acts, frustrating its definition, probably sounds familiar to Iliad fans, and it might come as no surprise that the only couple that Hannibal and Will ever compare themselves to in Hannibal are Achilles and Patroklos.7 In an extended scene in the show’s second season (2.12, ‘Tome-­Wan’), while the pair seemingly plot to kill their mutual friend, FBI Chief Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) and then run away together, they discuss Achilles and Patroklos at length. Hannibal sketches a copy of Nicholas Gé’s 1855 painting Achilles and the Body of Patroclus, which he describes as ‘Achilles lamenting the death of Patroklos’ to Will, and he says: ‘Whenever he’s named in the Iliad, Patroklos seems to be defined by his empathy.’ The show, and Hannibal himself, have defined Will Graham through his ability for ‘pure empathy’ from the pilot onwards, so that any regular viewer will understand that here Hannibal parallels Patroklos with Will. Then Will responds: ‘He became Achilles on the field of war, died there wearing his armour.’ So Will, at this point in the series pretending to Hannibal that he, too, is a killer, assumes and affirms Hannibal’s association of himself with Patroklos, and likewise then sees Hannibal as Achilles. Hannibal responds: ‘He did. Hiding and revealing identity is a constant theme throughout the Greek epics.’ Will responds: ‘As are battle-­tested friendships.’ Then Hannibal, full of Mads Mikkelsen’s brilliantly acted micro-­wistfulness, says, ‘Achilles wished all Greeks would die, so that he and Patroklos could conquer Troy alone’ (cf. Iliad 16.97–100). The men exchange a meaningful glance before

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Hannibal continues: ‘It took divine intervention to bring them down.’ Then Will turns away, and says, ‘This isn’t sustainable. We’re going to get caught.’ This brief interaction reveals shared themes between Hannibal and the Iliad, particularly in its destructive, romantic, frustrated grappling with intense intimacy between two men. This chapter will push this comparison between Achilles and Patroklos and Will and Hannibal further, understanding the diversity of both texts’ attempts to define these relationships within queer theoretical frames. Queer kinship provides multivalent modes of understanding, eschewing gender binaries and generational hierarchies (Freeman 2007: 310). Queer kinship, reflecting the ‘families we choose’ (Weston 1991), emphasises ‘freedom, creativity, and flexibility’ in relationships (Freeman 2007: 304), while queer intimacy embraces ‘diversity, fluidity, and possibility’ (Hammack, Frost and Hughes 2019: 556). This might be particularly true of relationships between men: ‘gay male culture rightfully prides itself on a greater comfort with the fluidity and ambiguity of boundaries between lover and friend. Former lovers become integrated into chosen kin sets more readily than among heterosexuals’ (Stacey 2005: 1927). Queer intimacies reject the rigid values and roles that reproductive or biological family structures determine and prescribe, participating in Halberstam’s ‘queer failure’, as a means of escaping ‘the punishing norms that discipline behaviour and manage human development’ (2011: 3),8 as well as in Edelman’s (1998) more radical embrace of the death drive. Edelman argues that ‘the true oppositional politics’ of queer sexualities lie in their capacity ‘to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and symbolic, on which the future as guarantee against the return of the real, and so against the insistence of the death drive, depends’ (1998: 23). In rejecting reproduction in order to truly experience jouissance, Edelman’s queer intimates hurtle towards ‘the future, and it’s every bit as lethal as the past; and thus what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us, is our willingness to insist intransitively: to insist that the future stops here’ (1998: 30). Edelman’s ‘no future’ is not the only queer future. Muñoz proposes instead queer utopias, the affective ecstasies that come from existing in a horizonal queer time, outside a normalized, linear, reproductive-­driven ‘straight-­time’ (2009: 25). Both the Iliad and Hannibal engage several of these theoretical possibilities in presenting their central relationships. Both pairs elude easy definition, moving fluidly between hierarchy and symmetry, friends and mentors, family and lovers, mirroring and then even

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­lurring and merging their individual components. Both couples b move towards mutual destruction, while both couples imagine worlds where there might have been another way. The rest of this chapter will go through both texts in detail, presenting how Hannibal’s queer intimacies reflect those of the Iliad. Both Will and Hannibal and Achilles and Patroklos start with one in a mentorship role over the other, so that both relationships hold tensions between this hierarchy inherent in the relationship between mentor and mentee and symmetrical friendship. Jack Crawford introduces Hannibal to psychologically profile and monitor Will as he works cases, immediately creating a push-­pull between Will being both Hannibal’s patient and his potential friend. As Will says in ‘Sakizuke’ (2.2): ‘Friendship requires symmetry. Patient/doctor is imbalance.’ As Will’s psychiatrist, Hannibal has to be Will’s ‘paddle’ (1.2, ‘Amuse-­bouche’) and ‘to protect him’ (2.1, ‘Kaiseki’); Will also later calls him a ‘mentor’ (3.5, ‘Contorno’). Hannibal’s power over Will becomes formational: by the third season, when Hannibal asks Will, ‘Where does the difference between the past and the future come from?’ Will answers, ‘Before you and after you.’ But Will contends that he, too, has occupied a formational role with Hannibal, asserting in the second season’s finale, ‘Mizumono’ (2.13), that he has changed Hannibal just as Hannibal has changed Will. Achilles’ and Patroklos’ friendship presents a similarly confused formational and somehow reciprocal hierarchy. Patroklos, fleeing home after murdering someone, comes to live at the house of Achilles’ father, Peleus. Once there, Patroklos claims that Peleus raised him as his own (we’ll return to this asserted familial bond later), and ‘named him as [Achilles’] sidekick’ (θεράπων, 23.90).9 This hierarchy blurs even more than that between Hannibal and Will, because while Achilles is of ‘higher status’ (11.786) and stronger than Patroklos, Patroklos is ‘older’ than Achilles (11.787), and Patroklos’ father tells him that he must ‘advise’ Achilles and ‘point things out to him’ (11.788f.). In Achilles’ prayer before Patroklos goes into battle, he reinforces the blurring of his friend/mentor role, referring to Patroklos both as his ‘companion/friend’ (ἕταρον, 16.240) and as his ‘sidekick’ (θεράπων, 16.244). When the Iliad does designate Achilles and Patroklos as friends, it often qualifies their friendship as uniquely intense. We saw Achilles refer to Patroklos as ‘companion/friend’ (ἕταρον), but more commonly, one is the other’s ‘beloved friend’ (φίλος ἑταῖρος). While ‘beloved friend’ describes other relationships in the Iliad, it only applies multiple times to Achilles and Patroklos (1.345, 9.205, 11.616, 17.642,

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18.80, 22.390, 23.178). Death determines its capacity for reciprocity, as Achilles is Patroklos’ ‘beloved friend’ only before Patroklos’ death, but Patroklos is Achilles’ ‘beloved friend’ only afterwards. After his death, Patroklos is also described as Achilles’ ‘most beloved of friends’ (19.315) and his ‘most beloved friend by far’ (17.411, 17.655). Hannibal pursues friendship with Will from almost the first moment he meets him, saying ‘we can socialize like adults – god forbid we become friendly’ (1.1, ‘Apéritif’). While Will rebuffs this overture, by ‘Coquilles’ (1.5), he makes no objection to Hannibal calling him a ‘friend’. In ‘Fromage’ (1.8), Hannibal tells his psychiatrist, Bedelia du Maurier (Gillian Anderson), about the ‘possibility of friendship’ with Will, even though he’s ‘a colleague and a patient’; in the next episode, ‘Trou Normand’ (1.9), he directly tells Will: ‘I’m your friend, Will.’ And by the end of the season, Bedelia tells Jack that ‘Hannibal refers to Will more as a friend than as a patient’ (1.13, ‘Savoureux’). But by that time, Hannibal has also framed Will for many of the murders that he himself has committed, landing Will in jail. So as the second season gets under way, Will denies Hannibal’s friendship: ‘You’re not my friend. The, uh, light from friendship won’t reach us for a million years. That’s how far away from friendship we are’ (2.1, ‘Kaiseki’). Despite this, Hannibal still sees himself as Will’s friend, testifying on his behalf, and, eventually, committing murders that contradict the evidence against Will in order to set him free. At Will’s trial, when asked about the nature of his relationship with Will, Hannibal first clarifies that he was never officially Will’s psychiatrist. When pressed as to why he’s testifying on Will’s behalf even when Will has accused him of the murders, Hannibal says: ‘Will Graham is and will always be my friend’ (2.3, ‘Hassun’). Hannibal’s friendship declaration here mirrors one of the most famous pop-­culture exchanges that has ever occurred between two male friends: Kirk and Spock. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Spock sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise. As he dies, behind the glass that protects the rest of the ship from lethal radiation, he declares to Kirk, ‘I have been, and always shall be, your friend.’ Hannibal references this exact Star Trek scene again in its third season, having Will put his hand on the glass wall that the now-­imprisoned Hannibal stands behind (3.13, ‘The Wrath of the Lamb’). These references point to a pivotal moment in understanding slash fan-­fiction,10 and again, push us back to Achilles and Patroklos, also paralleled with Kirk and Spock.11 This intertextuality loads Hannibal’s friendship declaration with past homoerotic weight.

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Perhaps ‘friend’ just won’t do as a term. Hannibal’s third season introduces the Japanese word nakama to describe Will and Hannibal, which Chiyoh (Okamoto Tao) suggests when Will says that he knows Hannibal ‘intimately’ (3.3, ‘Secondo’). Chiyoh then explains that ‘It’s the Japanese word for a very close friend, someone you share with.’ Will concedes: ‘Yes, we were nakama.’ The word also means a samurai’s attendant, paralleling Achilles and Patroklos in making Will into Hannibal’s ‘sidekick’ (θεράπων), and again conflating friendship and mentorship. This conflation between hierarchal mentorship and symmetrical friendship continues as Chiyoh explains the term further to Will later in the episode, when he has acted just as Hannibal would: ‘You were doing what he does. He’d be proud of you, his nakama.’ In both pairs’ relationships, symmetry emerges through quite literal mirroring and an ability to become the other. As Will describes Patroklos: ‘He became Achilles on the field of war, died for him there wearing his armour’ (2.12, ‘Tome-­Wan’). In the Iliad, Patroklos first tries to convince Achilles to return to battle to help the weakened Greeks, but then puts himself forward instead: ‘Give me your armour to wear on my shoulders, / so maybe they’ll think me you, and hold back from battle, / the Trojans’ (16.40f.). The ordering of ‘me you’ reflects the Greek word order (με σοὶ), further mirroring the two men. As Patroklos enters the battlefield in Achilles’ armour (with the notable exception of Achilles’ Pelian ash spear, which is too heavy for him; 16.130–42), the Trojans’ perspective seals the confusion between the two men: When the Trojans saw Menoitios’ strong son [Patroklos] himself, and his sidekicks, glinting in their armour each man’s heart began to pound, and their lines moved, thinking that Peleus’ fast-­footed son [Achilles], besides the ships had thrown away his rage and chosen friendship. So each man looked every which way how he might escape arduous death. (16.278–83)

Hannibal also explicitly shows Will’s and Hannibal’s being mirror-­ images of one another, and their consequent ability to take each other’s place. From their first meeting, Hannibal insists on the two being ‘just alike’ (1.1, ‘Áperitif’). In the first season, this seems one-­sided, because of Will’s ‘empathy disorder’, which Hannibal remarks allows Will to ‘assume his [Hannibal’s] point of view’ (1.1 ‘Apéritif’; 1.8, ‘Fromage’). But the second season allows for more fluidity between the two men. In the season’s premiere, with Will Graham in prison, Hannibal Lecter takes over Will’s position consulting with the FBI.

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Agent Beverly Katz (Hetienne Park) calls him ‘the new Will Graham’, and Hannibal, delighted by this, tells Bedelia, ‘I got to be Will Graham today’ (2.1, ‘Kaiseki’). Will, too, takes on Hannibal’s attributes. Midway through the season when he’s released from prison, Will undergoes a wardrobe change and a haircut (2.7, ‘Yakimono’) that echoes Patroklos taking on Achilles’ armour, as Will becomes more and more like Hannibal. Throughout the second and third season, the show more explicitly marks their reflective relationship through visual cues. Before Will’s trial in ‘Hassun’ (2.3), a montage intercuts between each man’s getting dressed, mirroring their timings of buttoning their shirts and putting on their ties. In a remarkable conversation in ‘Ko No Mono’ (2.11), rather than simply cutting back and forth between closeups of the two men, they make it appear as though, for a moment, each is talking to himself. A similar camera trick happens in the third season, when Hannibal is preparing Will to be eaten, and Will looks at Hannibal and sees himself (3.6, ‘Dolce’). The last half of season 3 puts Hannibal behind a glass wall in a cell, allowing for endless mirroring between him and Will, not just in their actual reflections, but also in their movements, mirrored as they walk both towards and along the glass wall (3.8, ‘The Great Red Dragon’; 3.9, ‘. . . And the Woman Clothed with the Sun’; 3.11, ‘. . . And the Beast from the Sea’). These visual cues speak to the two men’s broader mirroring dynamic: as Hannibal says, ‘I see myself in Will’ (1.12, ‘Relevés’). In ‘Tome-­Wan’ (2.12), the episode where Will and Hannibal compare themselves to Achilles and Patroklos, Hannibal asserts their reciprocal ability to inhabit the other - ‘I have an understanding of your state of mind. You understand mine’ - and then repeats his initial appraisal: ‘We’re just alike.’ Later that same episode, he repeats the sentiment, ‘You’re applying yourself to my perspective, as I’ve been applying myself to yours.’ Will counters: ‘You’re right. We are just alike.’ By the end of the episode, the two commit an atrocious assault on Mason Verger (Michael Pitts), and after this consecrating violence, their comparison to Achilles and Patroklos closes out the episode. By the third season, Jack Crawford confirms that Will and Hannibal are ‘identically different’ (3.6, ‘Dolce’). The second half of the third season, which I’ll refer to as the Red Dragon sequence, as it primarily adapts material from Thomas Harris’s 1981 novel Red Dragon, takes place three years later, with Hannibal in captivity. When Will seeks Hannibal out to get his help catching a new serial killer – the Red Dragon – Hannibal tells Will: ‘You just came here to

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look at me – came to get the old scent again. Why don’t you just smell yourself?’ (3.8, ‘The Great Red Dragon’). This mirroring leads to a clear breakdown in the borders between individuals: if each man might be the other, who is who? While Patroklos becomes Achilles on the battlefield, Achilles speaks about Patroklos as though he were a part of himself, or, actually himself. First, he describes ‘Patroklos, whom I valued beyond all companions, / as much as my head’ (18.81f.). Just a few lines later, Achilles doubles down on this metonymy, as he describes Hektor, who killed Patroklos, as ‘the destroyer of the beloved head’ (φίλης κεφαλῆς ὀλετῆρα, 18.114). The ‘beloved’ here, φίλης, can also mean ‘one’s own’, so that Achilles once again refers to Patroklos as ‘my own head’. Finally, when Achilles addresses Patroklos’ ghost, he repeats this notion of Patroklos as his own head: ‘Why, my honoured head, have you come here?’ (23.94). Of course, this blurring of parts and selves finds its fullest expression in Patroklos’ final request for Achilles, as his ghost asks Achilles that their bones be ‘enfolded together in the same vessel’ (23.91). Will and Hannibal, too, begin to enmesh throughout the series. On the one hand, Hannibal becomes a part of Will (and of Jack), a part that needs to, by the third season, ‘be cut out’ (3.6, ‘Dolce’; 3.4, ‘Aperitivo’). This dynamic first appears in the second season’s premiere (‘Kaiseki’), when Will tells Hannibal that ‘My inner voice sounds like you. I can’t get you out of my head.’ Hannibal attributes this to their friendship: ‘Friendship can sometimes involve a breach of individual separateness.’ While Will responds by ­ adamantly denying their friendship, by the third season, his position has ­ changed. In ‘Dolce’ (3.6), Will tells Hannibal, ‘You and I have begun to blur’, revealing that he feels guilty for all of Hannibal’s crimes. He goes on to say that he and Hannibal have become ‘conjoined’. Two beats later, there’s an extended sex scene between Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas) and Margot Verger (Katharine Isabelle) that literally blurs the two women together, superimposing their faces as they climax, their heads conjoined in the immediate aftermath. The same episode later similarly shows Will’s and Hannibal’s heads conjoined, then mirrored as antlers on the wendigo – one of the monstrous symbols that the show uses to stand in for Hannibal – and finally swirling together, all through a thyme-­ infusion’s steam vapour as Hannibal prepares to eat Will. While the blurring between Will and Hannibal might not be explicitly sexual, its framing Alana’s and Margot’s sexual blurring suggests a parallel (see Figure 11.1).

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Figure 11.1  Blurring of Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). Hannibal, ‘Dolce’ (3.6, 2015). NBC.

Hannibal elaborates on their blurring in the next episode (3.7, ‘Digestivo’), telling Will, ‘Your memory palace is building – it’s full of new things, it shares some rooms with my own. I’ve discovered you there, victorious.’ The third season’s subsequent Red Dragon sequence visually manifests these shared memory-­palace rooms. In ‘. . . And the Woman Clothed with the Sun’ (3.9), Hannibal and Will occupy the same imagined spaces, from Hannibal’s office to a crime scene; in both ‘The Great Red Dragon’ and the series finale, ‘The Wrath of the Lamb’, Will and Hannibal meet up in Palermo’s Cappella Palatina (the ‘foyer’ of Hannibal’s memory palace, ‘Tome-­ Wan’), only to reveal, each time, that Hannibal is still in his cell, Will visiting him. The alternative sting to the show’s finale likewise shows the two men alone, impeccably dressed, seated so that they are perfectly mirrored in the Cappella Palatina, only to switch views to the ‘real’ Cappella Palatina, full of tourists and a lonely Jack Crawford, emphasising the shared, isolated, interior space that Hannibal and Will inhabit by the end of the third season. Hannibal expresses this shared interiority in a way that also points us to another framework for their intimacy – family – when he quotes Goethe’s Faust in ‘. . . And the Beast from the Sea’: ‘Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast, and one is striving to forsake its brother.’ Hannibal’s quote here uniquely expresses the idea of him and Will as brothers, an analogy that follows closely the symmetry and twinning that we’ve already discussed, while the image also erotically evokes

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the two men as soulmates. ‘Secondo’ (3.3) makes confusion between family and romance more explicit, as Bedelia and Hannibal twice discuss his feelings towards Will. The first discussion touches on the two men’s blurred roles and suggests their romantic pairing: Bedelia: [Forgiveness] requires two: the betrayer and the betrayed. Which one are you? Hannibal: I’m vague on those details. Bedelia: Betrayal and forgiveness are best seen as something akin to falling in love. Hannibal: You cannot control with respect to whom you fall in love.

But later in the episode, Bedelia and Hannibal revisit this conversation, this time drawing a clear parallel between Will Graham and Hannibal’s long-­dead sister, Mischa. Bedelia: What your sister made you feel was beyond your conscious ability to control or predict. Hannibal: Or negotiate. Bedelia: I would suggest what Will Graham makes you feel is not dissimilar. A force of mind and circumstance. Hannibal: Love.

This confusion of ‘loves’, between falling in love and the love for a sister, suggests an intimacy on a par with both but not easily contained by either. This fluidity compounds further because Hannibal has already expressed to Will that he was a father to Mischa, collapsing generational hierarchies: ‘She was not my child, but she was my charge.’ He goes on to say that ‘Abigail reminded me so much of her’ (2.11, ‘Ko No Mono’). Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl) forms the centre of Will’s and Hannibal’s familial feelings. In the pilot, Will orphans her by shooting her serial-­killer father, Garret Jacob Hobbs (Vladimir Cuthbert), and Will and Hannibal then save her life (1.1, ‘Apéritif’). The episode ends in a family-­evoking tableau, with Hannibal and Will framing Abigail in her hospital bed, Hannibal holding her hand.12 Will and Hannibal extensively discuss their mutual feelings of paternal obligations towards Abigail in the next episode, naming her as Will’s ‘surrogate daughter’ (1.2, ‘Amuse-­ Bouche’). By ‘Œuf’ (1.4), Will admits feeling paternal towards Abigail, and Hannibal says, ‘We’re her fathers now.’ But the season drives towards Will’s apparently murdering Abigail (he vomits up her ear in the season finale; 1.13, ‘Savoureux’), with the implication that Hannibal has framed Will and killed Abigail himself. This action’s repercussions are the focus of the show’s second season, first with Will in custody for the crime, and then, once

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Hannibal has contrived to have Will released, with the two men reckoning with what her loss means to their relationship. In one exchange between them, after Will asks Hannibal why he killed Abigail, he says simply: ‘Occasionally, on purpose, I drop a teacup to shatter on the floor. I’m not satisfied when it doesn’t gather itself up again. Someday perhaps a cup will come together.’ An image flashes of a teacup shattering and then gathering itself back together, signifying the queer possibilities that Hannibal hopes for with Will (2.11, ‘Ko No Mono’): by the second season finale, Hannibal reveals that he didn’t kill Abigail after all, but was merely waiting to ‘surprise’ Will with the fact she was still alive so that all three of them could run away together (2.13, ‘Mizumono’). In that moment, when Hannibal reveals Abigail to Will, Hannibal expresses a version of ‘queer time’ as he guts Will with a knife: ‘Time did reverse. The teacup that I shattered did come together. A place was made for Abigail in your ­­world . . . ­A place was made for all of us. Together.’ Then Hannibal moves to kill Abigail all over again: ‘Fate and circumstance have returned us to this moment – when the teacup shatters.’ He slits her throat. This temporal double-­ looping and the alternative space-­ time where Hannibal, Will and Abigail might have lived together as a family haunts the third and final season. Will creates a version of Abigail in the memory palace in his mind, and there she reiterates to him: ‘We were all supposed to leave together. He made a place for us’ (3.2, ‘Primavera’). By mid-­season, Will tells Hannibal, ‘The teacup’s broken. It’s never going to gather itself back together again’ (3.7, ‘Digestivo’). Hannibal responds, ‘Not even in your mind?’, suggesting that he has seen Abigail, too, in their shared memory palace. Finally, towards the end of season 3, with Will married to a woman and stepfather to her son, Hannibal tells him ruefully, ‘I gave you a child, if you’ll recall’ (3.10, ‘. . . And the Woman Clothed in Sun’). With their mutual parenting dead alongside Abigail, through the Red Dragon episodes, Hannibal still insists that Will is ‘family’, while placing his relationship with Will on a destructive collision force with Will’s actual family. In doing so, Hannibal plays the jealous ex, wreaking havoc on his former lover’s new life. Other characters around them also emphasise their possibly-­past spousal relationship. Will complains to the tabloid journalist Freddie Lounds (Lara Jean Chorostecki) about her dubbing him and Hannibal ‘murder husbands’. But he can’t really argue when she retorts, ‘you did run off to Europe together’ (3.9, ‘. . . And the Woman Clothed with the Sun’). When Will finally sees Bedelia again, after she had spent time with Hannibal in Europe through the third season, he calls her ‘the bride

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of Frankenstein’, only to have Bedelia counter, ‘We’ve both been his bride’ (3.10, ‘. . . And the Woman Clothed in Sun’). This past tense becomes present as Bedelia sees Will as Hannibal’s ‘bride’ again in ‘The Number of the Beast is 666’ (3.12): when Will accuses Bedelia of being ‘Bluebeard’s wife’, she answers, ‘If I’m to be Bluebeard’s wife, I would’ve preferred to be the last.’ This leads Will to directly ask: ‘Is Hannibal in love with me?’ Bedelia answers affirmatively, albeit obscurely: Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you and find nourishment in the very sight of you? Yes. But do you ache for him? . . . Once you catch the Red Dragon, your wife and son can go home again. Can you?

Will doesn’t answer either question, allowing us to surmise that he might indeed ‘ache’ for Hannibal, and that he can’t go home again – at this point in the series Hannibal has tried to have Will’s wife and stepson killed, and seems to have irreparably damaged Will’s relationship with both. This completes what Will had accused Hannibal of earlier in the series: ‘You’re fostering co-­dependency.’ Will elaborates: I bond with Abigail, you take her away. I bond with barely more than the idea of a child, you take it away. You saw to it that I alienated Alana, alienated Jack. You don’t want me to have anything in my life that’s not you. (2.12, ‘Tome-­Wan’)

Through this monologue, as the camera cuts back and forth between Will and Hannibal, a darkness obscures much of the frame, allowing only a blurred-­edge slice of each man’s face to peer through. The narrowing of the world around these men becomes literal. It’s at the end of this episode, seemingly responding to this conversation, that Hannibal tells Will, ‘Achilles wished all Greeks would die, so that he and Patroklos could conquer Troy alone.’ Hannibal fluidly places Will and Hannibal in familial roles with one another, from sibling pairs, to co-­parents, to spouses, to, perhaps, exes, and back again to lovers, eliding the differences between those roles through the intensity of their intimacy. While Hannibal and Will occupy these familial spaces, it comes at the expense of their other relations, in a parallel with Achilles and Patroklos that is both breathtakingly romantic and devastatingly nihilistic. The Iliad also uses a dazzlingly diverse number of familial relationships to try to understand Achilles and Patroklos. Perhaps the

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most famous comes in the simile that Achilles himself uses to describe Patroklos when he approaches him in Book 16: Why are you crying, Patroklos, like a little girl, Who runs after her mom wanting to be picked up, Grabbing her dress, and holding her back as she rushes, And stares at her while she cries, until she’s picked up? (16.7–10)

Achilles presents himself in this simile as the mother, so switching both men’s genders (Foley 1978: 21), while also inverting what we know of their age difference: he imagines different possibilities for their relationship that reconfigure their statuses but re-­enforce their intimacy. Achilles’ understanding of their relationship in fluid familial terms becomes even more pronounced when he addresses the corpse of Patroklos in Book 19. In a long monologue, Achilles claims that his grief from losing Patroklos dwarfs what he would feel if he lost his own father (19.322); or if he lost his own son (19.326). Then Achilles shifts to a new fantasy – now rather than all Greeks dying except for himself and Patroklos (16.97–100), he says that he wished that he alone would have died, so that Patroklos might have replaced him as a father to his son (19.328–33): it is not quite the teacup gathering itself back together, but an alternative space where Achilles would not have known grief. The narrator confirms the depths of Achilles’ grief for Patroklos, picking up his own claim as he laments Patroklos at his funeral in Book 23: As a father laments while burning his son’s bones, His newlywed son, whose dying grieved his parents, That’s how Achilles lamented, burning his friend’s bones. (23.222–4)

As Achilles continues to mourn Patroklos for another hour of Iliad performance time, his excess grief that he had claimed for Patroklos, over that for his father or for his son, does not go unnoticed by the gods. Apollo similarly suggests that Achilles’ grief for Patroklos unnaturally exceeds that one would feel for family: Someone would lose another person, even more loved, Whether a full-­blood brother, or even a son, And he would cry and lament, and then let it go. (24.46–8)

These are not the only places where Achilles’ grief compares to that of a parent. Immediately before Achilles addresses Patroklos after he has first died, the narrator compares Achilles to a lion who comes home to find that a hunter has taken his cubs, and who then

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turns to stalk the hunter in his anger (18.318–23). As with Hannibal, this simile turns us towards the destructive possibilities of familial intimacy (Mills 2000: 9), and Achilles tells the corpse that he, too, will now die, (‘so it has been allotted that both of us redden the same soil’, 18.329), but only after he kills Hektor (18.334–5). This is the final, disturbing way in which Hannibal parallels the Iliad in its treatment of its leads’ relationship. From the moment that Patroklos dies, Achilles vows that he will also die, but only after he slaughters scores of Trojans. It’s an iteration of Achilles’ prayer that ‘not one of all the Trojans could escape death, / nor one of the Argives, but we two could emerge from the ruin, / and we two alone could destroy Troy’s holy crown’ (16.98–100). In the end, Achilles and Patroklos both die, leaving reams of corpses and broken families in their wake. When Will tells Hannibal ‘we are conjoined’, he goes on to say, ‘curious if either of us can survive the separation’ (3.6, ‘Dolce’). In the show’s finale (3.13, ‘The Wrath of the Lamb’), the two men stand at the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea – they have just escaped police custody together, and are waiting for the Red Dragon, Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage), who wants to kill them. Hannibal tells Will, ‘You and I are suspended above the roiling Atlantic. Soon all of this will be lost to the sea.’ The two then go indoors and share a glass of wine, continuing their exchange as they wait: Hannibal: My compassion for you is inconvenient, Will. Will: If you’re partial to beef products, it’s inconvenient to be compassionate toward a cow. Hannibal: Save yourself, kill them all? Will: I don’t know if I can save myself. And maybe that’s just fine. Hannibal: ‘No greater love hath man than to lay down his life for a friend.’

Hannibal modifies the Bible verse (John 15:13) to convert the plural friends (φίλων) to the single, again narrowing focus to the pair. The sentiment comes startlingly close to Pausanias arguing in Plato’s Symposium that the gods loved Achilles best because he ‘sought revenge, not only to die on behalf of his love, but to die after him, on his behalf’ (180a). In the end, Achilles’ and Patroklos’s blood will stain the same Trojan soil, and the same vessel will enfold their bones. For Will and Hannibal, almost the moment Hannibal speaks these lines, Francis Dolarhyde shoots Hannibal through the window and enters through the shattered glass. A vicious struggle ensues between the three men, until Will and Hannibal succeed in killing him. Weak and bloodied from the battle, Hannibal helps Will up and embraces him, Will resting his head on Hannibal’s chest. Hannibal says that

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this is all he’s ever wanted for Will, ‘for both of us’. Will agrees, ‘It’s beautiful’, before pulling them both off the cliff and into the raging sea far below. Both Hannibal and the Iliad present central relationships between two men that defy definitions and exceed expectations. Both pairs are nominally friends, but they are also mentors and mentees, fathers and sons and sisters and brothers and mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, lovers. At once they are mirror-­images of each other and blurred, enmeshed, and conjoined. Both texts offer a diversity of descriptions and an exhilarating hint towards the broader possibilities that queer intimacies allow. Both offer queer utopias, imagined spaces where the relationships thrive in configurations that circumstances have denied. But the horizons both relationships rush towards are deadly – tragic romances drenched in great, gothic gouts of blood. Madeline Miller, whose 2012 prize-­winning novel Song of Achilles adapts the Iliad’s Achilles and Patroklos into a sexual and romantic partnership, said ‘It felt like it was a love story already.’13 Bryan Fuller similarly said, in first imagining Will and Hannibal, ‘It really is a love story, for lack of a better description, between these two characters.’14 NOTES Many thanks to Amanda Potter for including me in this volume and for her many helpful comments.   1 Scarano (2014).   2 See Scott (2013a and 2013b). Fuller’s approach, as I have argued before, is arguably ‘transformational’ rather than ‘affirmational’ (Kozak 2018: esp. 131–6­), which significantly challenges Scott’s fanboy auteur falling into the category of an ‘affirmational’ fan (2013a: 441). For more on the distinction between the two, see Busse (2013: 73–91, 82).  3 For a strong argument affirming Fuller’s work as slash, see Gledhill (2019), esp. 79–80.   4 Bryan Fuller, interviewed in Halterman (2014).   5 See Dibdin (2015).   6 As quoted in Knight (2020).   7 For scholarly debates over the nature of Achilles’ and Patroklos’ relationship in the Iliad, see especially Fantuzzi (2012: 188–266) and Clarke (1978).   8 For an application of Halberstam’s queer failure to Hannibal, see Daniel (2019).   9 All translations are my own; texts are from Homer (1902). 10 Henry Jenkins (1993/2006) uses this Star Trek scene in particular

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to explain the phenomenon of slash, famously saying, ‘slash is what happens when you take away the glass’. In analysing recent Achilles/ Patroklos slash, Sinha (2017: 154 n. 7) goes back to Kirk/Spock as the ‘original’ slash pairing. It’s also worth noting that Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller has worked extensively in the Star Trek franchise, writing for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–9), writing and co-­producing Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001), and co-­creating, writing, producing, and consulting for Star Trek: Discovery (2017–), and he wrote this episode of Hannibal, ‘Hassun’. Fuller’s love of Wrath of Khan emerged later, too, in his hiring Khan-writer Nicholas Meyer on as a writer for Discovery, tweeting out the news himself on 26 February 2016. See https://twitter. com/BryanFuller/status/703316565555412992. 11 For comparisons between Achilles and Patroklos and Kirk and Spock, see Greven (2014: 207); Frazer Lamb and Vieth (2014: 103) also note that Jane Aumerle, ‘one of the first K/S writers’, also explicitly paralleled the pairs. 12 This tableau repeats in the first season finale, ‘Savoureux’, with Jack and Hannibal framing Will’s hospital bed after Jack shoots him in Garret Jacob Hobbs’s kitchen, exactly where Will had shot Hobbs. As I have said throughout, Hannibal asserts fluidity within all of its close relationships, though focuses most intensely on that between Hannibal and Will. 13 As quoted in Day (2012). Philip Womack’s (2012) Telegraph review critically asserted that ‘Miller’s prose often reads like homoerotic slash fiction.’ 14 Italics my own. As quoted in Hibberd (2012).

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12  The Gods in Epic Television: The Homeric Cosmos in Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009) Meredith E. Safran

According to Herodotus, Homer gave the Greeks their gods, influencing all subsequent representations (Histories 2.53).1 In the epics attributed to Homer, the Olympian gods articulate and integrate levels of the hierarchical cosmos, or ordered world, through three roles: as objects of worship in human society; as the ruling class in divine society; and as guarantors of cosmic integrity, from regulating individual humans’ morality to protecting the interconnected web of events conventionally called fate. While their presentations in Homeric epic and historical religious contexts were not identical,2 the Olympians portrayed in the Iliad and Odyssey were worshipped by these poems’ intended audiences, which lent credibility to their cosmic significance in the epic world. So long as the Olympians’ centrality to the narrative world reflected audiences’ lived experience, epic’s universal order required neither explanation nor justification. Once audiences could no longer relate to these characters as superior beings in their lived experiences, let alone understand how it feels to credit cosmic stability to the Olympians, participants in the ongoing epic tradition found themselves challenged to represent the significance of these gods, including on screen.3 This chapter examines how the television series Battlestar Galactica (2003, 2004–9; henceforth, BSG) engages with the Homeric epic tradition, focusing on how it retains the Olympians’ three roles by distributing them across three types of superhuman beings. Their connection within this cosmos becomes a mystery whose revelation is central to achieving narrative telos.

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Meredith E. Safran B AT T L E S T A R G A L A C T I C A A S EPIC TELEVISION

In Film and the Classical Epic Tradition, Joanna Paul examines how widespread use of the term ‘epic’ relates to the literary tradition rooted in the Homeric epics.4 Not only does BSG engage with this tradition through plot and poetics, but epic as a discursive mode also befits two major phenomena shaping BSG’s production and initial reception in the United States: the ‘new golden age of television’, conventionally dated from The Sopranos’ debut in 1999; and the epochal rupture caused by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. BSG numbers among creatively ambitious post-­9/11 American screen texts whose protagonists face existential crises shaped by greater powers, from shadowy global cabals to ineffable forces. Charlotte Higgins and Corinne Pache first noted resemblances between BSG and Homeric epic’s pre-­ eminent ancient successor, Vergil’s Roman epic the Aeneid.5 An overview of BSG’s master-­plot illuminates the extent of this resemblance and thus BSG’s appeal for classical reception studies. The prologue for the 2003 mini-­series, which serves as the series pilot, relates that the Cylons once waged a long war against the protagonists, an American-­style people called the Colonials. After years of war, the Cylons suddenly agree to an armistice and leave the Colonies. In their absence, the Colonials let down their guard, enabling the Cylons to infiltrate their (fire)walled citadel: the Ministry of Defense mainframe. Once their deceptive, feminised machine convinces a prominent consultant to violate military security protocols, the Cylons secretly gain full access from a willing, if unwitting, insider. The Colonies fall quickly to the enemy’s fiery attack. A mid-­ranking military officer, Commander William Adama (Edward James Olmos), learns of the assault from afar and leads the crew of his warship, the Galactica, in a determined but futile defence. Finally, a female authority figure convinces Adama to think as a father: only flight will save their people. Evacuation to the designated safe zone is complicated when Adama’s son almost dies due to the principled obstinacy of their superior, President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), who refuses to abandon vulnerable civilians. Meanwhile, an officer called Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) convinces his beloved flight partner Boomer (Grace Park) to abandon him to death on the Colonies for a chance of saving their people’s future. Over four seasons (2004–9), that future entails Adama and Roslin guiding the survivors on a perilous voyage punctuated by divine portents and failed resettlement

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attempts, including one named for their former capital city – and likewise doomed. The one viable settlement will be at a prophesied destination, the home of ancestral relatives known solely from prophetic scriptures – until Roslin herself begins experiencing visions. After years of searching, including an aborted attempt to merge with the only other surviving humans and their female commander, and a journey to receive revelation by unlocking a sacred tomb with a divine golden arrow, the Colonial refugees locate their destination: Earth. The war for settlement requires cooperation with Cylons who also have ties to the planet and have been alienated by their tyrannical leadership, but founding a new society together requires abandoning aspects of identity that shaped their toxic past. The series finale extends this achievement 150,000 years forward, recasting the series’ events as the ancient foundation narrative for human civilisation on Earth today and identifying one character as the ancestor of all modern humans. The alignment of BSG’s master-­plot with the Aeneid’s attracts epic poetics,6 including the vast scale of the narrative world, heroic protagonists whose struggles outline that world’s morality, and the spectacular nature of its events and settings. The high stakes that generate epic’s serious tone may be amplified when the narrative is aetiological for an audience’s community. But even aetiological epic maintains a distance from its audience’s contemporary world, whether set in the ‘historical’ past of classical antiquity or the speculative other-­time of science fiction. While Paul restricts her study to films set in classical antiquity, she observes that science fiction worlds offer a comparable ‘epic distance’; for example, how Star Wars (1977) combines futuristic technology with ancient temporality and spatial remoteness for its setting of ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’.7 BSG’s affiliation to science fiction was immediately evident to its American audience. The series’ broadcast home was the Sci Fi Channel (after 2009, Syfy), and Moore was rebooting a cult classic associated with Star Wars: Glen A. Larson’s Battlestar Galactica (1978–9).8 Moore retained Larson’s Twelve Colonies as a planetary system settled millennia ago by interstellar travellers from the now-­ lost planet of Kobol, long at war with hostile robots. But Moore’s Cylons weren’t aliens; the Colonials created these artificially intelligent robots, which became self-­ aware, revolted and upgraded themselves. Moore’s Colonials thus enact the ‘modern Prometheus’ theme of humans ‘playing god’, then falling victim to their own ­creations.

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Yet BSG’s poetics also align with epic. Outer space provides a vast and dangerous arena for the elite fighter pilots whose code of honour is challenged by struggles on and off the battlefield. They engage in spectacular single combat to protect the Galactica, which doubles as the Colonials’ citadel and the lead vessel of the civilian fleet. The portentous tone generated by these existential stakes is amplified by mystical visions of presumed divine origin and the narrative’s grand aetiological framing. Like Star Wars and countless other science fiction texts that have sipped from the Hippocrene,9 Moore and his writers tapped both the Iliad, for character work like reshaping Larson’s rapscallion pilot Starbuck into an Achilles figure, and the Odyssey, for the obstacles and uncertainties shaping the Colonials’ homeward voyage.10 Such embrace of epic aligns with Moore’s 2003 statement on science fiction, which rejects technophilia in favour of human drama and cites The West Wing (1999–2006) and The Sopranos (1999– 2007) as aspirational peers.11 Moore’s ‘naturalistic science fiction’ displaces celebration of humanity’s technological mastery by focusing on human relationships, morality and meaning in the cosmos. Even before the attack, Adama turns a speech commemorating the Cylon War of over forty years ago into a meditation on the Colonials’ moral frailties, including failure to take responsibility for creating the Cylons. His observation ‘we never answered the question “why”: why are we as a people worth saving?’ becomes the series’ central moral question (Mini-­series), posed before an external audience that was also confronting uncomfortable questions raised by a historical moment befitting epic. BSG’s production and broadcast fell within the period of American history shaped by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’. The attacks were famously experienced as media events, and in the ‘flow’ of television, journalistic coverage of historical events aired side by side with fictive interpretations, forging new political myths of sanctified heroes engaged in an existential conflict, framed by a Manichaean world view.12 Through the prophylactic distance created by BSG’s futuristic setting, Moore prescribed allegorical interpretation of onscreen events, some clearly echoing 9/11’s iconic imagery.13 As the Colonies fall, a protagonist witnesses the capital city’s bombing on live television; as a massive workplace burns, bodies fly out to certain death (Mini-­series). In the aftermath, a wall of ‘missing person’ flyers becomes a memorial (1.1, ‘33’). Beyond explaining and memorialising the attacks and their causes, the regular series likewise treated controversial domestic and foreign policies associated with the ‘War on Terror’.14

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A medium long denigrated as offering mere commercial entertainment may seem an unlikely venue for such intense cultural work. However, Joanna Paul’s arguments for the transmedial valuation of epic poetics, from the literary tradition to film, may also be applied to television that has evolved beyond the ‘boob tube’.15 Since the late 1990s, networks have encouraged greater experimentation with cinematic production quality, moral complexity, detailed world-­building, and heavily serialised episodic structure comprising a unified narrative.16 Such ‘complex television’, associated early with HBO’s watershed series The Sopranos, characterised the ‘new golden age’ of television. A decade after earning a ‘universal acclaim’ rating on Metacritic, a 2005 Peabody Award and a 2009 United Nations seminar,17 BSG continues to draw critical raves:18 for artistic craft, and for continuing relevance to an America still processing the consequences of 9/11.19 Religion played a significant role in Americans’ understanding of 9/11 as a cosmic event. The Republican Party and conservative evangelical Christians’ mutual embrace under ‘born-­again’ President George W. Bush (2001–9) inflected public discourse about 9/11, which was frequently couched in a ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative that cast Muslims as the Manichaean Other.20 BSG’s central conflict also involves theological dispute: between polytheistic Colonials and monotheistic Cylons. Moore thus incorporates religion differently from Larson, whose BSG was informed by his Mormon upbringing.21 Moore’s BSG keeps a critical distance from religion while embracing the human quest for transcendence. Here the strand of science fiction that wonders what lies beyond humanity’s ken overlaps with the Homeric epic tradition’s certainty that higher beings exist within a greater order.22 O LY M P I A N S , L O R D S O F K O B O L A N D HUMAN SOCIETY Venerating a cohesive group of anthropomorphic gods is an organising feature of Colonial and Homeric societies. Colonial society includes a traditional mainstream religion, with a mythos conveyed through sacred narratives, ritual acts and speech, and faith in the gods at the centre of myth and ritual.23 While priests preside over political inaugurations and military funerals (Mini-­series), Colonial government and society are secular, and religious institutions are not active players. Nevertheless, individual characters occasionally pray privately (Mini-­series; 1.5, ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’) and often invoke the

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gods casually, in expletives or thanksgiving. Fundamentalism shapes two colonies’ regional identity (2.3, ‘Fragged’; 2.17, ‘The Captain’s Hand’; 3.14 ‘The Woman King’) but not even true believers claim to interact with their gods. An oracle is featured as a marginal if recognised part of Colonial religion (3.3, ‘Exodus Part 1’), and Colonials generally accept their gods’ distance, encountering them only as icons or statues (Mini-­series; 1.13, ‘Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part 2’). When the non-­religious President Roslin begins experiencing visions that recall the sacred texts, however, believers credit their gods as the source (1.12, ‘Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part 1’; 2.3, ‘Fragged’). While the audience of Homeric epic conventionally enjoys direct access to divine action through the Muse’s offices, the vast majority of human characters, even designated communicants, accept the gods’ existence on faith.24 Chryses may interpret the plague striking the Greek army as fulfilment of his prayer to punish Agamemnon for disrespecting him (Iliad 1.37–52), but Apollo never interacts with his priest.25 The prophet Calchas interprets coded signs for the Greek army, also without direct interaction with the gods (Iliad 1.68–72). Neither priest nor prophet represents an institution beyond the shrine Chryses maintains or the army Calchas currently services. Rare occasions when gods address humans directly are not witnessed by others, as when Athena stops Achilles from assassinating Agamemnon before the entire Greek army (Iliad 1.188–200). When Agamemnon reports a private prophetic dream to the council of kings, however, they credit the gods as its source (Iliad 2.53–83). Most intriguingly, the gods at the centre of both Homeric and Colonial religions are named Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena and so on. Whereas Larson had used Neo-­Antique pastiche to ornament the Mormon underpinnings of Colonial society,26 Moore appeared to adopt the Olympian system: the Colonial Apollo is ‘son of Zeus, good with a bow, god of the hunt, and also a god of healing’ (1.3, ‘Bastille Day’), and Athena is ‘the goddess of wisdom and war, usually accompanied by the goddess of Victory’ (3.6, ‘Torn’). The sacred scriptures contain prophecies attributed to an ancient oracle named Pythia, and a city named Delphi is their centre of religious life. But the Colonial gods have a different mythos as ‘Lords of Kobol’, who inhabited the now-­lost planet whence a mass exodus, millennia ago, led to the founding of the Twelve Colonies. According to the Scrolls of Pythia, Zeus cursed humans’ departure by decreeing that any return ‘carries a cost in blood’, as Hera watched Athena throw herself off a cliff in despair (2.6–7, ‘Home, Parts 1–2’). Since Lords of Kobol apparently lack immortality, their status may be an example of

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euhemerism, whereby exceptional individuals are later (mis)remembered as gods.27 Like Homeric epic, whose heroic yet ontologically problematic hemitheoi (half-­gods) threaten cosmic stability, BSG acknowledges how godlike power results in destructive arrogance: specifically, the ability to create life without biological reproduction. Adama’s critique of how the Colonials ‘played god’ in creating the Cylons (Mini-­ series) echoes in the ‘Final Five’. Their initial epiphany as luminous forms in mystical visions (3.8, ‘Hero’; 3.12, ‘Rapture’) yields to the revelation that they are not gods. They are, rather, brilliant scientists from Kobol’s lost thirteenth tribe who helped the Colonial Cylons create the humanoid models that destroy the Colonies (4.15, ‘No Exit’). The Five did not intend this destruction, but could not control what their capabilities had wrought, much as Achilles, Odysseus and other heroes cause more destruction than intended in exercising the special superhuman capabilities that distinguish them from the vast majority of humankind. BSG attributes such abilities not to the Lords of Kobol, but to the humanoid Cylons. O LY M P I A N S , H U M A N O I D C Y L O N S A N D DIVINE SOCIETY Audiences who assume that divine forces prioritise human good may be surprised to learn that the Homeric cosmos was not made for humans, nor are humans presented as the culminating achievement of creation in ancient Greek thought. Humans live in the gods’ world. Of that vast extended divine family one small branch, the Olympians, summited the cosmic hierarchy through the most consequential event in universal history, per Homer’s near-­contemporary Hesiod: a violent uprising against the then-­ruling branch and its tyrannical leader, led by his children (Theogony 453–506, 617–720). This decade-­long war ends with Zeus succeeding his defeated father as king and establishing a new and lasting cosmic order that encompasses all gods and mortals. At his hall on Mount Olympus, the ruling class – siblings, consorts and children of Zeus – gather to affirm social ties, pursue status and influence, and quarrel (e.g., Iliad 1.533–604, 4.1–72, 8.1– 40, 20.4–30, 22.166–87; Odyssey 1.26–95; Aeneid 10.1–117).28 Regarding humans, Apollo seems to express a normative opinion in describing the mortal multitudes as no more worthy of attention than leaves on a tree that flourish for a season, then die (Iliad 21.461–7). Human displays of respect towards divinities in the form of sacrificial offerings can attract divine patronage (Iliad 1.35–52),

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and gods do occasionally become emotionally invested in specific humans, though not always to the human’s benefit. The Iliad (1.1– 67), Odyssey (1.1–79) and Aeneid (1.1–80) all begin with a god exacting retribution from a human whose disrespect has offended the god’s status claims. The practice of theoxeny also enables gods in disguise to visit humans and assess their just deserts, good or bad.29 Olympians thus not only enjoy supremacy within their world, they also maintain its moral order. Cylon society resembles that of the gods in Homeric epic. While BSG’s narrative construction privileges the Colonials’ perspective, the series accommodates the Cylon view, including in gatherings through which the humanoid models affirm social ties, compete for status and influence, and air conflicts (e.g., Mini-­series; 3.1, ‘Occupation’). The models who appear throughout the series regard each other as siblings and themselves as superior to non-­humanoid Cylons, thus placing themselves atop a new world order (4.2, ‘Six of One’). The Colonials’ contemptuous rejection of Cylon status claims results in their uprising. Relative to the Colonial ruling order, the humanoid models conceptualise themselves as ‘the children of humanity’ and frame their destruction of the Colonies as enabling their rightful succession (Mini-­series; 1.3, ‘Bastille Day’). In destroying a society that they have judged to be morally irredeemable, humanoid Cylons exact retribution like Olympians. While debating what to do about the humans who survived the Colonies’ destruction, their anthropomorphism allows them to walk among humans, and some models become emotionally attached to specific Colonials. Traditional anthropomorphic representation of the twelve Olympians can obscure their ontological difference from humans. Olympians are stronger and faster, powered by a substance called ichor instead of blood (Iliad 5.337–42). While they do feast and sleep (Iliad 1.584–2.2), immortality categorically separates them from humans, though gods can be severely punished by imprisonment, exile and coma (Iliad 5.385–91; Hesiod, Theogony 793–806).30 The Olympians can assume forms other than their conventional human appearance; in epic, they most commonly transform themselves into known associates suitable for manipulating specific human characters (e.g., Iliad 2.17–34, 3.121–45, 3.385–420, 4.73–104, 13.43–65; Odyssey 1.102–320, 2.382–3.373, 6.20–43; Aeneid 1.695–722). Some gods transform matter with technology, as when Hephaestus forges autonomous metal workshop assistants (Iliad 18.417–21). Importantly, the Olympians’ knowledge of the world is vast: beyond the knowledge born from an eternity of experience, they can perceive

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fate, the ordered web of events stretching into the future that humans cannot apprehend (Iliad 1.53–6, 2.155–67, 16.439–44, 20.290–348, 22.177–81; Odyssey 1.32–62; Aeneid 1.261–96). BSG assigns similar qualities to the humanoid Cylon models, twelve in number (Mini-­series). They are stronger and faster than humans, powered by their unique biochemistry (Mini-­series; 1.3, ‘Bastille Day’; 1.8, ‘Flesh and Bone’). While they can eat and sleep, they need do neither (1.8, ‘Flesh and Bone’). Cylons enjoy functional immortality through ‘resurrection’ technology; when one body is irreparably damaged, its consciousness downloads into another copy of that model (Mini-­ series). Cylons can be punished with ‘boxing’, when an entire model line’s consciousness is deactivated and put into storage, combining imprisonment, exile and coma (3.12, ‘Rapture’). Unlike the clunky metal Colonial-­made Cylons, the humanoid models can manufacture bodies indistinguishable from humans. They know vastly more about the world due to their cumulative experiences and advanced information-­sharing technology (3.6, ‘Torn’). The Cylons’ oracular beings, called hybrids, access cosmic knowledge through ‘the stream’, a flow of cryptic information about past, present and future (3.6, ‘Torn’; 4.7, ‘Guess What’s Coming to Dinner?’). The humanoid model most attuned to the stream, Two, aka Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie), mixes prophetic truths with strategic lies in his encounters with Colonials (Mini-­ series; 1.8, ‘Flesh and Bone’). TWO SEQUENCES: A DV E N T A N D R E T R I B U T I O N , DISGUISE AND DESERTS Two early sequences illustrate how BSG’s humanoid Cylons echo Homeric Olympians in morally framed interactions with humans. The in medias res opening of the mini-­series introduces the series’ signature humanoid Cylon, Six (Tricia Helfer) enacting the retributive violence customarily dispensed by an Olympian at the start of a Homeric epic. As the written prologue provides its brief history of the Cylons, exterior shots of a spacecraft docking with a small remote station yield to a Colonial military officer setting up his desk inside this embassy’s empty receiving hall. He reviews schematics of 1978’s clunky ‘centurion’ model and drowses in his chair as the prologue concludes ‘No one has seen or heard from the Cylons in over forty years.’ The unexpected activation of the hall’s sliding doors initiates a mood of fearful anticipation. As the officer reacts

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to the entrance of two upgraded centurions, he realises that these behemoths are merely an advance guard for the owner of ominous approaching footfalls. The introduction of this figure generates the confusion, terror and awe that a god’s advent should inspire. A towering, glamorous woman emerges from the doorway and moves head-­on towards the camera. Her frontal approach puts the audience in the officer’s position; a jump-­cut accelerates and intensifies her advance. Her red suit burns against the drab grey interior and the overhead lights illuminate her platinum hair in bright flares. She dominates the space, bypassing the chair across from the officer to loom over him and pose a question that no human would ask: ‘Are you alive?’ When the flummoxed man stammers ‘yes’ she murmurs ‘Prove it’ before leaning down to kiss him, invading his personal space as explosions sound nearby. Terror and confusion play across his face as he submits. A slight audio effect enhances her unnervingly calm and cryptic pronouncement ‘It has begun’ while the keening score swells like a synthetic heavenly choir. The camera cuts to an exterior shot of the station before pulling back to reveal a mountainous spaceship disgorging a missile that splinters the tiny station on impact. Minutes later, the same woman appears in the Colonies’ capital city, as if nothing had happened – recognised only by the audience. The audience is again in the position just occupied by the Colonial officer: lacking insight into this ominous being’s nature and intentions, unable to understand the meaning of her presence, experiencing a disturbing loss of mastery over the (narrative) world. By sharing in that sense of vulnerability, the audience experiences an affective dynamic often associated with horror. Instead of eliciting disgust or alienation from its ‘monster’, however, BSG frames this uncanny being as awesome, attractive and supremely dangerous – much like a god.31 This being’s advent also announces the kind of divine retribution that commonly initiates epic’s action. Indeed, the officer died as a representative of the offending Colonies, which soon suffer the same spectacular end – much as Juno’s attack on Aeneas’ fleet in Aeneid Book 1 presages his account of the divinely assisted destruction of Troy in Book 2. In the second sequence, several Cylon models enact a test reminiscent of theoxeny. Impersonating a trusted associate to motivate action is common in epic, as when Poseidon impersonates Calchas to encourage the Ajaxes to rally (Iliad 13.43–65). Throughout the Odyssey, Athena’s many disguised interventions in guiding Telemachus and Odysseus underscore the role of theoxeny and tests

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generally in its narrative world.32 Cylons cannot change their forms at will, but the innumerable copies of each model allowed an Eight to be planted as a sleeper agent on Galactica as pilot Sharon Valerii, call sign ‘Boomer’. During the fall of the Colonies her navigator, Karl ‘Helo’ Agathon, convinced Boomer to give his seat to a brilliant scientist and leave him behind. Moore had intended to thus kill off this gender-­flipped Creusa figure, but audience interest in Helo produced a new storyline: Boomer returns to the Colonies to rescue him (1.1, ‘33’).33 But it’s not Boomer; a different, self-­aware Eight impersonates Boomer to administer a potentially fatal test of Helo’s character, observed by other Cylons. These observing Cylons enact a trope familiar from not only literary Homeric epic, but also its cinematic descendants. As Helo and ‘Boomer’ search for aid in a deserted city, he observes ‘I feel like I’m in a movie’ and ‘someone must be watching out for us’ (1.3, ‘Bastille Day’). Cut to an extreme high-­angle shot of the pair, now ant-­like figures moving through the miniaturised city. The vantage point is that of Models Five (Matthew Bennett) and Six, the ‘Trojan Horse’ both on the Colonial station and at the Ministry of Defense. They stand high atop a nearby skyscraper, a ‘peak’ of the urban landscape, assessing the pair’s progress and musing on humans. Their faces increasingly fill the frame against a flat blue-­sky background, emphasising their godlike stature, compared to the tiny figures below. This discrepancy in size, and the sense that Olympians are playing with humans in a fabricated environment, recall Ray Harryhausen’s influential depictions in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Clash of the Titans (1981) – which themselves recall scenes of Zeus, Hera and other Olympians sitting atop the mountain peaks above Troy as invested spectators in human events (e.g., Iliad 8.41–52, 13.10–16, 14.153–8).34 The Cylons’ test culminates in two centurions ‘capturing’ ‘Boomer’ to see if Helo will risk his life to save hers. When he does, the Cylons confirm what Classicists already knew: Karl Agathon is a good man (agathon = Greek ‘good’). While it may seem late for the Cylons to assess individual humans’ morality, this Eight’s growing love for Helo, and similar attachments between other models and specific humans, contribute to diverging perspectives among the Cylons concerning their genocidal actions. Eventually, the models split into irreconcilable factions and violently attack each other in council (4.2–3, ‘Six of One’ and ‘The Ties that Bind’), as the Olympians do during the Trojan War (Iliad 20.23–40, 21.383–513). Instead of ultimately reaffirming their group solidarity, however, the Cylons remain divided over whether to follow ‘the Plan’: not that of their tyrannical

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leader One (Dean Stockwell), but the cosmic plan protected by BSG’s third refraction of the Homeric Olympians. O LY M P I A N S , M E S S E N G E R S A N D THE COSMIC PLAN Olympians frequently deploy their power to serve personal ends; indeed, the charge of ‘moral anthropomorphism’ has long been used to invalidate their authority.35 Yet Homeric epic repeatedly affirms that Olympians can and do subordinate their personal preferences to the overarching framework of forthcoming events, or fate.36 Whatever the origin of this schedule of outcomes, which takes no account of moral deserts, its continually manifesting blueprint of future history is known to the gods yet exists apart even from the plan of Zeus (dios boule). This distinction becomes most evident when Olympians intervene in human affairs to ensure fate’s fulfilment, even contrary to their personal interests. While Homeric epic does not explore the larger ramifications of an event within fate’s expansive web failing to manifest, an important area of divine mastery – knowledge of the future – would thereby logically become destabilised. So would the reign of Zeus, which promised to end cosmic instability by imposing an order morally superior to that of his predecessor (Hesiod, Theogony 453–506, 617–720). The Olympians therefore have the most at stake and the greatest obligation to ensure the integrity of fate. The Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid repeatedly spotlight the Olympians’ role in protecting fated events from impulses, human or divine, that could prevent fate’s fulfilment. In the Iliad, Hera sends Athena to stop their favoured Greeks from abandoning the war before Troy’s fated fall (1.53–6, 2.155–67); Poseidon preserves Aeneas’ fate to lead the Trojans by preventing his unfated death at Achilles’ hands, despite loathing the Trojans (20.290–348). When Zeus twice proposes to save a different favoured mortal from imminent and long-­fated death, Hera and Athena object successfully (16.439–44, 22.177–81). The Odyssey opens with Zeus complaining about a mortal changing his own fate for the worse by ignoring divine warnings against wrongful behaviour, prefiguring the suitors’ end; Odysseus’ foolish arrogance too would have caused his unfated end, until Athena’s intervention restarted his fated homecoming (Odyssey 1.32–62). Although the aetiological nature of the Aeneid suggests fate’s security, given that its ‘prophecies’ were history to Vergil’s audience, knowledge from Jupiter’s Scrolls of Fate does not stop Juno or Venus from exerting their will on human events, such that Dido ‘perished neither in the

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course of fate nor by a death she had earned’ (Aeneid 4.696).37 Ultimately, Juno lifts her embargo on the progress of fate by allowing Aeneas’ settlement in Italy, and the Olympians’ shared commitment to the cosmic plan resumes (Aeneid 12.791–842).38 The concept of a plan is always present in BSG, although what constitutes ‘the Plan’ and who is responsible for enacting it develop along with the series’ cosmic structure. Initially, the concept of a plan is identified with the humanoid Cylons; each episode opens with the reminder ‘they have a plan’. Some models refer to the destruction of the Colonies as part of ‘God’s plan’, an apparent moral paradox reminiscent of Achilles sending multitudes of his own Greek allies to their deaths in fulfilment of the dios boule, or Zeus’ plan (Iliad 1.1– 7). However, a central tension in the Iliad pits Zeus’ obligation to discharge a personal debt to Achilles’ divine mother by enacting this plan against his commitment to ensure fate, which includes Troy falling to that same Greek army. BSG too eventually reveals that, while Cylons do understand more about the cosmos than humans, the true Plan ensures a future for both peoples and cannot be achieved if one exterminates the other, for whatever reason.39 Whereas Homeric epic’s intended audience would accept the Olympians’ ability to balance pursuit of personal interests with common interest in preserving fate,40 BSG deploys other beings to ensure the Plan. They can take whatever form most credibly encourages an opportunely positioned person to advance it. Much as Zeus and the Olympians achieved cosmic stability by stopping the cycle of succession among the gods, the Plan of BSG’s transcendent beings aims to end the cycle of domination and violence that eventually fells all civilisations, including Kobol and the Colonies. Provocatively, the primary Plan-­protecting being assumes the guise of the series’ pre-­eminent humanoid Cylon, yet is visible, audible and palpable to only one human: Gaius Baltar (James Callis), the scientist for whom Helo sacrificed his evacuation. What Baltar sees is the Six whom he allowed into the Defense mainframe. Season 1 showcases his panic and confusion at the sudden appearances of a being who manipulates him emotionally and physically, as necessary, to ensure adherence to the Plan: behaviour reminiscent of Athena’s intervention with Achilles in Iliad 1, and a dynamic that persists throughout the series (see Figure 12.1). This mysterious being’s impersonation of the Cylon ‘Colonial horse’ and use of rough methods to contend with Baltar’s arrogant scientism and self-­preservation instinct beg the question: friend or foe? Eventually, it discloses its nature and purpose: as an ‘angel of

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Figure 12.1  A divine messenger impersonates Cylon Model Six (Tricia Helfer, left) to guide Gaius Baltar (James Callis, right) into enacting the Plan. Battlestar Galactica, ‘Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part 2’ (1.13, 2005). David Eick Television/ R&D TV/NBC Universal/Universal Media Studios/Universal Productions.

God’ or ‘messenger’ (angelos = Greek ‘messenger’) who facilitates the plan attributed to ‘God’, an entity that seems virtually coextensive with the Plan (3.6, ‘Torn’). Yet only these messengers seem capable of taking actions necessary to ensure the Plan’s manifestation, much as Homeric fate is invested with authority but lacks power, which the Olympians must provide in its defence. This ‘God’ is no white-­ bearded Abrahamic patriarch choosing favourites; in fact, as one messenger observes to another, ‘you know it doesn’t like to be called that’ (4.21, ‘Daybreak, Part 3’). As the painstakingly enlightened Baltar explains to the Colonials and Cylons in the series finale (4.21, ‘Daybreak, Part 3’), Call it god or gods or some sublime inspiration or a divine force that we can’t know or understand, it doesn’t matter – it’s here, it exists, and our two destinies are entwined in its force ­­ . . . ­God’s not on any one side. God’s a force of nature, beyond good and evil.

This depersonalised, disembodied being doesn’t demand recognition; it produced a blueprint for ending the destructive cycle of supremacist violence, for others to enact. In the Plan-­preserving messengers – primarily one that manifests as a humanoid Cylon – BSG preserves the Olympians’ function as guardians of fate. CONCLUSION Like many participants in the ongoing epic tradition, Battlestar Galactica tells its own story, for its own audience, and succeeds or

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fails as a narrative experience on those terms. Homeric epic provides many materials for BSG’s post-­9/11 American allegory, including a cosmic framework within which such catastrophic human suffering can assume greater meaning. A significant part of the characters’ experience entails coming to grips with the expansiveness of that cosmos, particularly its transcendent aspect. The Olympians provide a model for the key organising functions that articulate different zones of engagement in the cosmic hierarchy: human society, superhuman/divine society and the transcendent order of the Plan/fate. That BSG distributes the Olympians’ roles across three types of being reflects the contemporary sensibilities to which BSG adapts all its cultural influences. Within this framework, Homeric epic and BSG agree on one more key concept: that the smallness of an individual relative to that cosmos is not the same as insignificance. The moral agency of individuals, human or otherwise, matters. Just as Achilles must agree to return his enemy’s corpse for burial to restore order in the Homeric cosmos (Iliad 24.22–76, 468–692), Baltar concludes: ‘You want to break the cycle, break the cycle of birth, death, rebirth, destruction, escape, death: that’s in our hands, and our hands only’ (4.21, ‘Daybreak, Part 3’). Recognising the integrated nature of this cosmos reinforces, rather than foreclosing on, human (or divine, or Cylon) responsibility for preserving a world whose diachronic order extends to encompass even the audience, across a distance that only epic can credibly span. NOTES Thanks to Amanda Potter and Hunter Gardner for inviting me to contribute to this volume and to audiences at the 2016 Celtic Conference in Classics and the 2016 Film & History Conference for their feedback.   1 See Herodotus (1920, trans. Godley).   2 On the representation of Greek gods in mythic versus religious contexts, see, e.g., Larson (2016).   3 Paul (2013: 107–22); Maurice (2019).   4 Paul (2013: 1–35).  5 Higgins (2009); Pache (2010). My monograph, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press, will further explore this relationship.   6 Paul (2013: 1–35).   7 Paul (2013: 18–21).   8 Gallagher (2014); Giles (2016).   9 See, e.g., Rogers and Stevens (2015). 10 Per my September 2016 telephone interview with Moore (Moore 2016), who did not recall the writers discussing the Aeneid.

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11 Moore (2003). 12 See, e.g., Faludi (2007); Birkenstein, Froula and Randell (2010); Paget and Lacey (2015). 13 Moore (2003); Ott (2008: 17). 14 See, e.g., the fourth suite of chapters in Steiff and Tamplin (2008: 171–245), titled ‘Battlestar Iraqtica’. 15 Paul (2013). 16 See, e.g., Mittell (2015). 17 See Metacritic’s series page at Metacritic (2009) and press releases at Peabody (2005); United Nations Creative Community Outreach Initiative (2009). 18 See, e.g., Sepinwall and Seitz (2016: 155–8); VanDerWerff (2020). 19 See Ott (2008). 20 See Rountree (2012: 43–66). 21 On Larson’s Mormonism and BSG, see Wolfe (2008); Neumann (2012). 22 On science fiction and religion, see Cowan (2010). 23 On Colonial religion in BSG, see Klassen (2008); Neumann (2011). 24 Kip (2000) disentangles characters’ understanding of the gods from the narrator’s. 25 For Iliad Books 1–12 see Homer (1924, trans. Murray); for Books 13–24, see Homer (1925, trans. Murray). 26 See Macaulay-­ Lewis and von Stackelberg (2017: 7–9) on the Neo-­ Antique. 27 On euhemerism, see, e.g., Roubekas (2017). 28 For Odyssey Books 1–12, see Homer (1919, trans. Murray); for the Aeneid, see Virgil (1916, trans Fairclough). 29 On theoxeny, see Reece (1993); Loudon (2011). 30 For Hesiod’s Theogony, see Hesiod (2018, trans. Most). 31 On attempts to achieve the appropriate effect of divine epiphany, see Maurice (2019: 154–9). 32 See Reece (1993); Loudon (2011). Even without a typical hospitality setting, putting the divine self in human custody to test morality arguably forms the core of this mythic narrative. 33 As discussed in the mini-­series commentary (2003) by Ronald Moore, David Eick and director Michael Rymer. 34 On divine spectatorship in the Iliad, see Myers (2019). 35 Allan (2006). 36 Duffy (1947) provides a useful catalogue of terms and passages. 37 On the contingency of fate in the Aeneid, see Hejduk (2013). 38 However, see Feeney (1984). 39 On the Plan in BSG, see Wetmore (2014: 65–6). 40 See Kip (2000); Allan (2006).

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13  Towards a Definition of Twenty-First-Century Epic: Audience Responses to Game of Thrones (2011–2019) and His Dark Materials (2019–) as Epic Television Amanda Potter Production companies use the term ‘epic’ to encourage viewers to watch their films and television series. On the HBO official website for Game of Thrones, the touchstone for twenty-­first-­century televisual epic, new viewers are advised that ‘over 70 episodes of epic television await’ them.1 The BBC website advertises Troy: Fall of a City (2018) as ‘an epic story of love and war, intrigue and betrayal’.2 In the MGM press release announcing the release date for Ben-Hur (2016) that film’s epic credentials are brought to the fore; the film is described as a return to ‘Lew Wallace’s epic novel’, bringing ‘this epic film back to the big screen’.3 The official Netflix website for the fantasy series The Witcher (2019–) describes the show as an ‘epic series of monsters, magic and fate’,4 and the BBC press release announcing the cast and creative team for their adaptation of the Philip Pullman novels His Dark Materials, a co-­production with HBO, describes the series as ‘a television event of truly epic proportion’ depicting the ‘epic journey’ of protagonist Lyra.5 Epic presupposes quality, and also draws comparisons with successful epics from the past, whether ancient epic poems or earlier epic films and television series, but the production companies are not clear on what they mean by epic. This is hardly surprising: as Joanna Paul has argued, ‘the conventions of epic change and evolve’ over time, and ‘the cinematic genre’ of epic is flexible.6 We can therefore include historical films set in antiquity or more recent history, Westerns,

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s­cience fiction and fantasy within the epic genre; in fact, any text can be included where ‘epic distance’ exists, a distance between the world of the viewer and the world of the epic text, allowing for the exploration of the ‘recognized features of epic – spectacle, heroism, tradition and so on’.7 Production companies may wish to convey the idea of a grand scale, multi-­layered story-­telling and three-­dimensional characters, but viewers and reviewers do not always agree with the claims of these companies, which are just as likely to create an epic failure as a successful epic. Troy: Fall of a City is described by Telegraph critic Ed Cumming as a ‘disappointing saga’ when compared with the Iliad,8 and the series scores only 3.8/10 on IMDb,9 while The Witcher has had mixed responses when compared with Game of Thrones, being described by critics as a ‘missed opportunity’,10 using ‘blood and boobs’ to ‘fill the Game of Thrones void’.11 In order to understand what viewers expect from epic television I will start by discussing viewer responses to Game of Thrones obtained via an international audience study, the Game of Thrones Audience Research Project, conducted from 2016 to 2017.12 Many of the respondents to this project specifically used the word ‘epic’ in response to questions about the series in comparison with other written and visual texts. I will then move on to discuss the results from my own small-­scale viewer research into the first season of the HBO-­BBC series His Dark Materials, to understand whether this series, described on the BBC website as ‘an epic tale of stolen children and the mysterious substance of Dust’,13 lives up to viewers’ expectations of epic. GAME OF THRONES AS EPIC T E L E V I S I O N   PA R A D I G M Browse through a review of HBO’s phenomenally successful fantasy series Game of Thrones and the term ‘epic’ will crop up sooner or later. George R. R. Martin uses the genre terms ‘epic fantasy’ and ‘history’ as descriptors for his Songs of Ice and Fire books.14 Lucy Mangan, writing for The Guardian, describes the final episode as ‘epic’, as ‘it was true to the series’ overall subject – war’.15 The battle scenes in particular are marked out as epic; notable examples are ‘The Battle of the Bastards’ (6.9), which won seven Emmy awards,16 and the battle for Winterfell in ‘The Long Night’ (8.3), which is the longest battle sequence that has been screened so far on film or television.17 The term ‘epic’ here is used to denote quality, scale and the broad theme of war, commensurate with the paradigm of

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 Responses to Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials 219 ancient epics, Homer’s Iliad. Some reviewers use the term ‘epic’ more broadly; Rebecca Jennings, writing for news site Vox in April 2019 and anticipating ‘The Long Night’, finds epic battle scenes ‘boring’, but humourously enthuses about other epic elements of the series: Game of Thrones is, at this moment, the biggest TV show in the world. This is because Game of Thrones is very fun and very good and a lot of very epic things happen in it: There are epic one-­liners, epic hair, epic stares, epic costumes, and epic bone sessions, and they are all set to a very epic theme song. Dragons, of course, are inherently epic, as is the goth-­glam icon the Night King.18

In popular books by academics, parallels are drawn between ancient epics and Game of Thrones. Medievalist Carolyne Larrington turns to the Odyssey to highlight the similarity between the name of Cersei and that of Circe the sorceress,19 and between Lady Lysa Arryn’s situation as a woman alone in her castle beset by the Knights of the Vale and that of Penelope living among her would-­be suitors.20 Classicist Ayelet Haimson Lushkov, concentrating primarily on Martin’s novels, suggests that ‘the Game of Thrones saga can usefully be read as a prose epic’, encompassing ‘epic ideas, motifs and storytelling techniques’, and frequently invokes the Odyssey, the Iliad and the Aeneid to make ‘connections’ between Game of Thrones and ‘our historical and literary past’.21 Other scholars focus on the difference between Game of Thrones and the epic genre as they understand it. For writer and translator Marta Eidsvåg, the ‘scope’ and ‘setting’ conform to what would be expected from epic fantasy, but unlike the norms for this genre ‘there is no Good and Bad (or evil) side in an epic struggle, there is good and evil both in almost every single character’.22 John Wilkinson highlights the difference between Game of Thrones and nationalist epics, as ‘multiplicity’ rather than unification is promoted.23 ‘Epic’, then, continues to be a malleable term that reviewers, critics and scholars can use and abuse for elements in a series that they like, or even dislike. I aim to expand our understanding of the term ‘epic’ in the twenty-­first century by turning to the opinion of viewers who enjoyed Game of Thrones but who are not trying to inform popular opinion on news sites, or to make an academic argument. The Game of Thrones Audience Research Project was conducted by forty-­two researchers in fourteen countries. Respondents were recruited via fan sites, and over 10,000 responses to the online survey were collected from October 2016 to September 2017. One of the primary aims of the project was to ‘track changes in the cultural

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valency of “fantasy” by understanding how viewers responded to the series’.24 Although no questions were asked specifically about the series as epic, a number of respondents used the word ‘epic’ in their responses to three questions in particular. These were on why Game of Thrones is important as something to follow and enjoy and as a commentary on our world, anything in particular about the viewer personally that would help the researchers in understanding the viewer’s feeling about the Game of Thrones series and/or books, and comparisons with other books or series. The questions were sequenced as shown in the grid.

Question

Response type

Mentions of the word ‘epic’ in responses

 2

How important is Game of Thrones to you, both as something to follow and enjoy, and as a commentary on our world?

Scaled response

N/A

 3

Can you tell us why you have made these choices (re: importance as enjoyment and commentary)?

Free format response

 75

12

Are there other films, books, TV series or games that you would compare with Game of Thrones? Can you tell us how?

Free format response

620

23

Is there anything particular about you personally that would help us understand your feelings about Game of Thrones (whether as books or as TV series?)

Free format response

 86

Question number

In 19 of the 75 responses to question 3 that use the word ‘epic’, this precedes the word ‘fantasy’, and indicates that the respondents view Game of Thrones within the epic fantasy genre, with some, for example, comparing the series to the works of Tolkien. More interesting in terms of defining what the term ‘epic’ means to these viewers is its use to precede the word ‘story’. For some viewers, ‘epic story’ denotes universality of theme: ‘an epic story about timeless human themes’, and ‘one can relate this epic story everywhere and at every period of time’. A small number of viewers relate ‘epic’ to a revival of epic stories and themes from the past, so ‘traditional epic themes of fate and heroism’. One respondent specifically draws parallels with ancient epic:

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 Responses to Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials 221 G. R. R. Martin uses Greek mythology with great respect in an attempt to elevate it to its prior status of greatness; his epic will become classical as Homer’s classic [sic] have become.

This same respondent elaborates on his comparison with the works of Homer in his response to the later question comparing Game of Thrones to other books or series: An epic of such scale that creates a whole new world with such detail can only be compared with great products of the human mind. Details that can only be found in Homer’s epics and the most detailed and fascinating description of Achilles’ shield that was a figment of his literary imagination; only one example among the many of his works. The other would be the fascinating world ­­of .  .  . ­Tolkien.

For this viewer Game of Thrones stands up well to a comparison with the great ancient epics of Homer and the great epic fantasy novels of Tolkien. ‘Epic’ denotes quality. However, for many viewers the idea of ‘epic story’ is not bound up with epics of the past, but rather involves complex characters and complex plotlines with unexpected twists, which lead to a compulsion to continue to watch to find out what happens next: ‘I’ve come to passionately love (or hate) a lot of the characters, and I am dying to find out how this epic story ends’; it is ‘an epic story to get lost in’; ‘it is bold and epic and with fleshy female characters’; and ‘I’m deeply involved in these brilliant characters’ epic journeys.’ This complexity of plot and character links with the epic scale specifically mentioned by four further respondents: for example, the ‘epic scale of the world that keeps expanding’; ‘it often has unforeseen events, and feels big in scale’; and ‘a huge epic with many characters’. Plot and character are primary reasons why these viewers enjoy the show and why it is epic. The term ‘epic’ is also applied to other areas of the series that are seen as superior to other shows, so ‘epic scenery’, ‘epic piece in terms of acting, film, costume, makeup etc.’, and watching Game of Thrones is ‘like watching an epic 80+ hour movie with high production value[s]’. The term ‘epic’, then, is used by many viewers to denote quality. It justifies why viewers like Game of Thrones, and why to them the series is better than other televisual offerings. The term can mean a range of things to a range of viewers. To some it is about grand scale and the well-­rounded depiction of a world that is different from our own, whilst having many similarities that we can relate to (the need to navigate relationships with family members, friends and lovers, to conform to or break out from roles assigned to us by our class, gender or ability/disability etc.). To others it is

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about believable characters who are neither good nor evil, but who are worth investing time in, and complex plot twists that keep them guessing. According to one respondent, ‘I think this is the most epic show ever, I love series and movies and I don’t think that there is any other show that is so good.’ Eighty-­ six respondents offering additional personal information that is relevant to their views on Game of Thrones as a response to question 23 use the word ‘epic’.25 These viewers state that they love, like or are fans of epic, whether this is epic fantasy in general, medieval or historical epic,26 or in a few cases mythology or specific epics, so that for one respondent (in addition to the viewer mentioned above) ‘my favorite book is the Iliad in the original Greek’. The frequent use of the term ‘I love’ intersecting with the word ‘epic’ (‘I love’ is used by 29 respondents, sometimes more than once in relatively short responses) indicates how invested these viewers are not only in Game of Thrones but also in the idea of epic. Again, the theme of epic as a marker of quality comes through in responses: ‘I love the epic scope of the series, the spectacular locations, the cast of thousands, great ensemble of actors’, comments one viewer, and another proclaims themselves to be a ‘lover of grandiose, epic, lavish, on screen opulence’. By far the greatest unprompted use of the word ‘epic’ in the survey is in response to question 12 on comparing Game of Thrones to other books and series, where 620 respondents use the term. A vast range of books and series is provided as examples, across a range of genres. Epic fantasy or epic medieval fantasy is mentioned 133 times as a genre, with many respondents drawing comparisons with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Peter Jackson’s films of it (2001–3, with c.  400 mentions) for ‘its epicness, quality, fantasy genre’, epic battles and medieval epic background. ‘World-­building’ is a term that recurs in relation to both Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, often in conjunction with a comment on the epic quality of both series of texts. Many respondents compare Game of Thrones favourably with Lord of the Rings; so for example: It’s that same kind of epic saga, but it’s more ‘real’. In other words, actions have greater consequences, people die, plans don’t always work, ‘good’ doesn’t always (if ever) triumph over evil.

Respondents also draw comparisons with many other fantasy books, the most frequently mentioned after Lord of the Rings being the Harry Potter series (with 48 mentions); the books of Robin Hobb, Terry Goodkind, Steven Erikson and Robert Jordan; and Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Not all respondents agree with the com-

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 Responses to Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials 223 parisons made by others; one respondent, comparing the series to Lord of the Rings, comments that ‘GoT is not a fantasy, it is an epic. It is concerned with [the] human psyche in a sociological context, that happens to contain extra-­human elements.’ Game of Thrones is continually held up as being better than other examples from the fantasy genre because of the depth and complexity of the characters and the more ‘realistic’ feel. One respondent calls the works of other fantasy writers ‘wannabe epics’. The Star Wars films (1977–) are used as examples of epic films from the science fiction genre (with 39 mentions) and Frank Herbert’s Dune series as epic novels (29 mentions), as are ‘epic space opera TV shows’ such as Star Trek (1966–) and Battlestar Galactica (2003–9), together with The Expanse (2015–) and Westworld (2016–). Series set in the modern world without fantasy elements are also compared to Game of Thrones, with the most mentioned being The Wire (2002–8), Breaking Bad (2008–13), The Sopranos (1999–2007) and House of Cards (2013–18), which is described as ‘epic drama’ by one respondent. The zombie series The Walking Dead (2010–) is mentioned by a number of respondents as a show that can be compared to Game of Thrones. The term ‘epic’ is expanded so that ‘epic political drama’ and even ‘epic soap opera’ are used as descriptors for series with modern or future settings. ‘History’ is also a term used alongside epic by thirty-­nine respondents to question 12, and numerous examples of historical drama series are provided by respondents, with Vikings (2013–20), The Last Kingdom (2015–), The Tudors (2007–10) and HBO Rome (2005–7) each being mentioned a number of times, as well as the historical time-­travel drama Outlander (2014–). The term ‘epic battle’ is used by 14 respondents, and one qualifies his use of ‘historical television series’: ‘by historical I really mean “involves swords and bows”’. The boundaries between historical epic and mythical/fantasy epic blur for viewers of Game of Thrones, who enjoy the medieval historical and martial context as well as the ‘epic mythology’ of the series, so that one respondent describes the genre as ‘mythical epic’. The works of Homer are compared to Game of Thrones by five respondents, and one provides a useful analysis of the epic genre: I definitely see GoT (well really ASOIAF [A Song of Ice and Fire]) as coming in the tradition of epics like Lord of the Rings, a tradition stretching all the way back to ancient epics like the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, but challenging a lot of the classic epic themes. Central to the epic genre is the idea that the histories of civilizations fit into narrative frameworks, that certain people have grand destinies, or even just small but crucial roles to play

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in the unfolding of fate, and that there is glory (or tragedy) in watching these heroic figures reach their moments of narrative fulfilment. ASOIAF certainly builds a narrative like this, and there are lots of characters (Jon, Daenerys, et al.) who feel centrally important, in the sense of fate, to the historic events unfolding. But ASOIAF manages to intertwine these stories with countless others at every scale, down to inconsequential commoners. Whether or not there are gods, or a grand struggle of humans vs. others, or fate, the characters are deeply real people making day to day decisions. Some of them get lucky breaks in life, most don’t. It’s gritty, realistic, slice of life storytelling placed within this grand genre where characters are usually subordinate to their archetypes.

The term ‘epic story’ or ‘epic story-­telling’ reoccurs (37 occurrences), as do ‘epic saga’ (37), ‘epic scale’ (35), ‘epic scope’, (24) and ‘epic world’ or ‘world-­building’ (14). This idea of largeness and complexity of narrative, characters and setting is key to why people enjoy Game of Thrones and why they find it to be an example of epic. The word ‘epic’ is also used widely by individual respondents to describe other aspects of the series that they like, so ‘epic moments’, ‘epic adventure’ and ‘epic quests’. Comparisons with the ‘blockbuster’ movie and its ‘grand scale of production’, a ‘vast cast’, ‘epic proportions’ and ‘epic length’ also resonate throughout the responses. These responses confirm at scale what was found about viewers’ use of the term ‘epic’ in responses to the other questions relating to Game of Thrones, namely that viewers use ‘epic’ to denote quality (a term used by 22 respondents) and complexity (by 39 respondents) and to describe what they like, thus affirming that what they like is quality and complex. THE EPIC POTENTIAL OF H I S D A R K M AT E R I A L S Season 1 of the HBO-­BBC production His Dark Materials is based primarily on the first book in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, Northern Lights, first published in 1995,27 about the journey of eleven-­year-­old Lyra to the Arctic to find her friend Roger, who has been kidnapped along with many other children. The coming-­of-­age story, where Lyra learns the truth about her parents, also features fantastic elements, including daemons, the animal companions of humans, talking bears and flying witches. The first season aired from November 2019,28 over two years after the Game of Thrones survey had closed.29 However, a couple of respondents in the Game of Thrones research survey do mention Philip Pullman’s trilogy as books that could be compared to Game of Thrones and could potentially be described as

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 Responses to Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials 225 epic. One respondent qualifies this comparison by stating that Game of Thrones ‘is far more in depth and the good vs. evil is less defined’, so that Game of Thrones ‘stands alone in a lot of ways’. In an extended article for BBC Culture entitled ‘Why His Dark Materials is the Fantasy Epic for Our Times’, David Jesudason also draws parallels between the then concluded Game of Thrones and the HBO-­BBC fantasy series about to be aired: The epic nature of the story suits a lavish slow-­burn TV series more than it does a feature film format and will hopefully give Pullman’s series the cultural reach of Game of Thrones. Like GoT, His Dark Materials features a huge cast of characters and a complex plot.30

The BBC were keen to extol the epic credentials of the series in the lead up to its airing; on the BBC website the first line of the description of His Dark Materials is: ‘Secrets and dangers lie ahead for young Lyra Belaqua in an epic tale of stolen children and the mysterious substance of Dust.’ In online interviews, cast members comment on Lyra’s ‘epic journey’ and how the design has ‘got to be epic. It’s got to be on a grand scale’ (Ruth Wilson),31 and how the series is ‘just more’ than a ‘faithful adaptation of the books people love’ (Lin-­Manuel Miranda), while Pullman himself explains how his work is suited to ‘long form television’.32 As with Game of Thrones, ‘epic’ here means ‘large’. On Pullman’s website the books are described as ‘an epic trilogy of fantasy novels’,33 and elements of the His Dark Materials books can be directly compared to ancient epics, both broadly in terms of the trilogy’s quest theme, and also in specific instances such as the journey to the Underworld in The Amber Spyglass, first published in 1997. And the scene that perhaps most memorably invokes ancient epic is the fight between the bears Iorek Byrnison and Iofur Raknison, described using extended Homeric similes, like an aristeia from the Iliad, in Northern Lights.34 The literary epic quality of the fight between the bears is lost in the televisual version, as is the gruesome depiction of death, again reminiscent of certain death/battle scenes in the Iliad, when Iorek rips off Iofur’s jaw, a scene toned down for family viewing.35 In order to understand whether viewers found the television series to be epic when compared with the books, and the reasons for this, I created a short survey and posted a link to fan sites from 5 January 2020, just two weeks after the final episode aired on 22 December 2019.36 This allowed me to collect data from viewers who had recently watched the complete series on its first airing. Although the

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survey remained open, I collected 165 responses over the two weeks from 5 January to 19 January 2020, and used the data collected over this short period, when the series was still fresh in viewers’ memories from its first airing, to inform my proposed definition of epic television for twenty-­first-­century viewers. The respondents come from all age groups, from under 17 to over 56, with the largest number (74 per cent) aged 18–35.37 Sixty-­six per cent of respondents are educated to a first or higher degree level, in a fairly even split between humanities and other disciplines (31 per cent versus 35 per cent, with only three Classicists among the humanities students). Unsurprisingly, the majority of respondents identify as female (61 per cent), as female readers/viewers tend to dominate in fandom,38 and His Dark Materials features a female protagonist, Lyra, who is the hero of the first novel and series. However, this skew towards the female is less marked than in previous surveys I have conducted, and attests to the universal appeal of Pullman’s novels and the television series.39 Again unsurprisingly, the vast majority of respondents recruited from fan sites were already fans of the books before they came to the television series, and only 8 per cent had not read the books before watching the series. Of the 151 respondents who had read the books, 95 per cent answered ‘yes’ to my question on whether they would describe the books as epic. By far the reason most frequently given for the books being epic is the creation of multiple worlds/universes (given by 49 respondents). This can be compared with the importance given to world-­ building by the Game of Thrones respondents. Other top-­scoring reasons given for the His Dark Materials trilogy being described as epic are scale and scope (33), story and plot (32), characters (31), epic themes (29), fantasy (13) and battles or war (9), all again directly comparable to the terms associated with ‘epic’ in the Game of Thrones research. There are also some differences, as a high number of respondents in the His Dark Materials survey refer to religion, the Christian God or mythology (22), adventure or quest (20), the journey of the hero (17), and coming of age or personal development (8), ideas which do not come out as so strongly related to the epic genre in the Game of Thrones research. These differences between responses across the two surveys are likely to have arisen because of the differences in the types of modern epic we are being presented with. Both Pullman’s and Martin’s books, and the television versions of these works, fall within the fantasy genre, but Martin’s books could be better described as medieval, historical epic, with multiple viewpoint characters, whilst Pullman’s

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 Responses to Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials 227 books are set in a quasi-­ modern, steampunk world, focusing on the heroic journey initially of just one young character, Lyra, and later also a second young character, Will. Both Martin and Pullman feature religion in their works, but Pullman engages directly with Christianity and Milton’s Paradise Lost, so that the idea of the ‘war against god’ resonates with respondents from primarily Christian societies or backgrounds, and one respondent even states that Pullman’s books are ‘about as epic as the bible but better written’. Also, Pullman’s books appeal to all ages, while Martin’s work is adult in content, and many respondents to the His Dark Materials survey comment on reading the books as young readers. Seven respondents describe reading Pullman’s books as a ‘life-­changing’ experience, as ‘they have the power to change us, you are not the same person after reading these books’. The mix of topics relevant to us all today, including ‘death, loss, abuse, honesty, truth, control, power’, all integral to ‘human existence’, make the books epic for readers. His Dark Materials can therefore be compared to ancient epics featuring the journey of a hero, such as the Odyssey (mentioned by one respondent), but can also be seen as more relevant to us today. According to one respondent: I think that Pullman deliberately used tropes and elements of an epic, but combined them with the mundane. The work is epic in scope, and follows the journey of a hero, but simultaneously resists the elevation of the hero and the work to a higher plane. Pullman brings the epic down to earth.

Three of the seven respondents who do not find the trilogy to be epic and provide reasons for their answer are working with a less broad definition of epic. These respondents state that they would only define poetry as epic, or that the books are not epic in the ‘traditional sense’, although according to other definitions such as ‘scale’, ‘heroic deeds’ and ‘multiple worlds’, then a broader definition of epic could apply. Some respondents comment on how the story starts small, in terms of one person’s (Lyra’s) adventure, but becomes epic as the trilogy progresses. It is therefore unsurprising that the number of respondents who find the television series, based on the first book, to be epic drops, to (a still respectable) 72 per cent, lower than the 95 per cent for the books. The reasons given by many respondents for not finding the series to be epic are that the content of book 1, and also therefore series 1, is ‘introductory’ and unfinished, so the trilogy as a whole is epic, but not the first part alone. A number of respondents comment that ‘it’s not quite there yet’, and it is ‘yet to be seen’ whether the series becomes epic in the second and/or subsequent seasons. Some

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respondents compare the series unfavourably to other ‘larger’ films and television series that they find to be more epic (Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Game of Thrones). Other reasons given for the series not being epic are the lack of grand scale, so that the series ‘feels a lot smaller than the books’, and the lack of ‘spectacle’, particularly in the battle scenes, which do not include the ‘gruesome elements’ from the books, such as the fight between the bears commented on above. Also, there is found to be a lack of character development and the books’ themes of heroic quest and ‘man vs god’ are thought to be missing in the series. Ultimately, for one respondent, ‘there’s something about season 1 that doesn’t feel as “large” as a modern epic should be’. Of those who do find the series epic, 24 respondents comment that this is for the same reasons as apply to the books, and specific elements that are given as reasons for the books being epic are repeated, including the story (for 7 respondents), themes (for 4 respondents) and particularly the nature of the story as a heroic journey or quest (for 4 respondents). Fourteen respondents feel that the television series is epic because it is ‘true to the books’, and four state that there are some small changes to the books that enhance the series (such as bringing in Will’s story from The Amber Spyglass). However, 7 respondents think that the series, though epic, is not yet as epic as the books. Respondents also focusd on the medium of television, and so find the series epic because of the quality of the acting (11 respondents), the quality of world-­ building (10 respondents), the cinematography, settings and locations, and music (each mentioned by 8 respondents), and the designs, costumes and special effects (each mentioned by 7 respondents). Scope and scale also come up again, mentioned by 8 respondents, and 4 respondents comment that the big budget and high production values contribute to the epic quality of the series. Five respondents find the series exciting or gripping, leading them to want to watch more. As well as answering a question on why they find the series epic (or not), respondents are asked to articulate what they enjoy about the series. For those respondents who describe the series as epic, most enjoy the series for the same reasons. As with the Game of Thrones research, the frequent recurrence of the term ‘love’ (61 times) to describe the respondents’ relationships with the books and the series (such as ‘I love this story so much’) shows the level of emotional engagement readers and viewers have with these epic texts. A small number of respondents comment that His Dark Materials is an epic series suitable for all viewers, and one respondent, a teach-

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 Responses to Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials 229 ing assistant, finds that the series is ‘going to be epic for kids’, in the same way that Game of Thrones is epic for adults; as this respondent observes, ‘ever since the series started, all the kids have been raving about His Dark Materials’. Grappling with the requirement to find a definition of epic, another viewer finds that the series brings about an indescribable ‘feeling of epicness’. This need to find a definition for television epic is tricky for viewers, who realise that the ancient epic may not be a suitable paradigm. For example, one respondent finds that the series is: Certainly an epic in concept, the storytelling, general setting, set, costumes, etc. I’m familiar with epics as the idea of the hero story but I’m less familiar with what might go into the modern definition of the epic. One thing that makes it feel a little different is that so far the scenes and sets remain mostly small scale, intimate or familiar and have very few breakouts into large scale scenes/battles/etc. but that seems to be a bonus for the storytelling and relationship building even if it’s perhaps a negative for establishing the stakes of a fight/battle like in the final episode. I think regardless of the scale however that it still fulfils the ultimate role of a fantasy epic in all other aspects.

Of course if we were to compare the Iliad with His Dark Materials (as one respondent does, and finds Pullman’s work more epic, though unfortunately does not explain why), a mix of small, intimate scenes that build character (Hector with Andromache and Astyanax in Book 6 comes immediately to mind) and larger-­scale battle scenes would seem entirely appropriate to the epic genre in both cases. C O N C L U S I O N : I L OV E E P I C T E L E V I S I O N By looking at intersecting responses to the two audience studies we can propose a working definition of epic television that will encompass series aimed at adults and younger audiences, within historical and modern-­day fantasy settings. Key elements that are required in order for a series to be classified as epic by viewers are overall large scale and scope, complex and believable characters, a setting in a fully articulated world or worlds, and a strong story. High production values in acting, scenery, costumes and special effects also help. Definitions of epic may be slightly different for different viewers, but where viewers’ opinions tend to coalesce is on what they like, or even love, and this is invariably what they describe as epic. So ‘epic’ continues to be a marker for what twenty-­first-­century viewers think of as quality, popular and successful. Production companies will continue to use the term to sell their products and we, the viewers, will make our own judgements on whether we agree with their assess-

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ments. And our own assessments will tend to be based on whether we like ‘epic bone sessions’ or epic bear battles (or both of the above). NOTES   1 Morton (n.d.).  2 ‘Troy: Fall of a City’ (n.d.).   3 Maison (2014). Reviews of the finished film compared it unfavourably to its 1959 predecessor; however, see West (2020), who discusses these reviews and offers an alternative argument that the film is successful in creating a new type of epic hero.  4 ‘The Witcher’ (n.d.).  5 BBC Media Centre (2018).   6 Paul (2013: 14–15).   7 Paul (2013: 17–21)   8 Cumming (2018).   9 IMDb (n.d.-b). 10 Hilton (2019). 11 See Power (2019). 12 I would like to thank Professor Martin Barker for providing access to the unpublished survey responses for use in this chapter. The research findings are published in Barker, Smith and Attwood (2021). 13 ‘His Dark Materials’ (n.d.). 14 Flood (2018). 15 Mangan (2019). 16 Hughes (2016). 17 See, for example, Dahl (2019) and The Credits (2018). 18 Jennings (2019). 19 Larrington (2016: 3). 20 Larrington (2016: 41). 21 Lushkov (2017a: x). 22 Eidsvåg (2017: 152). Eidsvåg was writing before the end of the series, where the battle with the Night King is a more traditional Good versus Evil conflict, although in its aftermath the ambiguities of the living human characters once again come to the fore. 23 Wilkinson (2015: 2). 24 The project objectives and some of the insights obtained were shared by project principal investigator Martin Barker at a presentation at the MeCCSA conference at Brighton University on 8 January 2020. 25 There is very little crossover between respondents using the term ‘epic’ in their response to question 2 and those using it in their response to question 23, and so the total number of individuals using the term ‘epic’ spontaneously across the two questions is 159. 26 Martin has been widely quoted as having based his books on the medieval period of British history, now known as the Wars of the Roses; see,

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 Responses to Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials 231 for example, Flood (2018). When I met Martin at a book signing in London in August 2014 I asked him about this, and he confirmed that 80 per cent of his books are based on medieval history and 20 per cent on ancient history. 27 I refer to the 2015 collected trilogy ebook version throughout. 28 Before series 1 was aired, series 2, based on the second book in the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, had already been filmed, and the series aired in 2020. 29 The series was shown on BBC1 in the UK and HBO in the US. 30 Jesudason (2019). 31 ‘The Challenges of Designing His Dark Materials’ (2019). 32 ‘Adapting His Dark Materials’ (2019). 33 Pullman (n.d.). 34 See Northern Lights, ch. 20, ‘Mortal Combat’, in Pullman (2015). For a discussion of the classical elements in the His Dark Materials trilogy see Kleczkowska (2015) and Hodkinson (2016). 35 Metro and The Sun reported on fans’ disappointment at this scene; see Woodcock (2019) and Robinson (2019). 36 See Potter (2019) for details of the survey. 37 Age groupings were 17 or under, 18–25, 26–35, 36–45, 46–55 and 56 and over. 38 See Jenkins (1992: 1). 39 For example, online surveys from 2011 on new Doctor Who (2005-­present) episodes ‘The God Complex’ and ‘Curse of the Black Spot’ attracted responses from fans who were 83 per cent and 85 per cent female respectively, for a series featuring a male protagonist (the Doctor was played by Matt Smith in the episodes). For some insights gained from these surveys see Potter (2016 and 2018).

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Afterword Joanna Paul

On the final page of my 2013 book, Film and the Classical Epic Tradition, I restated what had, for me, become one of the dominant themes of my investigation into the relationship between epic poetry and the cinematic form: that epic is best understood as a genre ‘which is continually susceptible to being shaped and reshaped by the societies that produce and consume it’, and which is characterised by ‘a continual process of adaptation and renewal’ (306). The special literary and socio-­cultural potency of the genre in antiquity was the driver of a poetic tradition that spanned a millennium, from Homer and the earliest epic cycles through to the works of the Flavian poets and beyond. Crucially, my book argued, this tradition could then be said to have gained new life by leaping into new forms – in other literary and dramatic genres, such as the novel, but with particular and perhaps unexpected success in film. My own testing ground for this proposition was relatively narrow, my analyses confined largely to Hollywood films set in antiquity. But ever-­present, lurking at the edges of my discussions, were the myriad other possibilities for epic’s ‘adaptation and renewal’ in different directions – where it might inhabit narratives with non-­ancient world settings, for example, or adopt new forms or media entirely. The present collection is therefore a welcome opportunity to test those hypotheses, and to suggest new ones. Offering multiple perspectives on the ongoing ‘expansion’ of the epic genre, the essays here contribute to our understanding of the forms that epic narratives might take in the twenty-­first century, and prompt us to ask important questions about the work that they

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might do in shaping and challenging contemporary notions of individual and communal identities, nationalism and globalism, and the very power of story-­telling itself. It is no surprise that one of the core findings of this volume is that the foundational narratives of the classical epic tradition – the Homeric epics – continue to be instrumental in the genre’s development. Since its earliest days, the cinematic medium has been interested in retelling the stories of the Trojan War, and it carries on doing so in ways that can be remarkably similar to the narrative techniques of the ancients, as Kirsten Day demonstrates in her analysis of screen Helens and their affinity with the figure of the (Trojan) horse. Other kinds of films find different inspiration in Homer: by surveying just some of the 150-­plus allusions to Homer that he has tracked through a variety of contemporary films, Jon Solomon reveals something of the broader cultural meaning of these epics. In films as diverse as The Thin Red Line (1999) and Tully (2018), even the briefest of allusions to Homer stand as shorthand for assumptions about certain kinds of educational backgrounds, often betraying a cultural elitism that many see as ingrained in the classical epic tradition. Given the depth to which Homeric epic has permeated filmic narratives, then, its reach into the medium of television might also come as no surprise – but the potential for the epic tradition to unfold in this direction is only now beginning to receive the attention it needs. TV adaptations of ancient epic were only a peripheral concern of my 2013 book, which perhaps unconsciously perpetuated assumptions about television as a less important, less culturally prestigious medium – one that was even incapable of, or at least ill-­suited to, the continuation of the epic genre. But the landscape around television has changed remarkably over the past decade or so, in terms of production, consumption and scholarship. The twenty-­first century has been proclaimed a new ‘golden age’ of television in which a rich array of dramatic (and, to a lesser extent, comedic) series benefit from high-­quality writing and acting with production design to match, and enjoy widespread critical acclaim and high viewing figures, on a global scale. If television is no longer the poor relation of cinema – or indeed of the novel, or of theatrical drama – then there is no reason why it cannot be seriously considered as a candidate for hosting an ongoing epic tradition, and so it is entirely appropriate that many of the essays here are devoted to exploring TV’s relationship with epic. The resulting picture is not a straightforward one, though. As we might expect, TV producers have looked to ancient epics – again, primarily Homer and the related mythological corpus – for ­narrative

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inspiration, but as Sylvie Magerstädt shows, recent series like Troy: Fall of a City (2018) have been dismissed as ‘epic failures’. Although it might be assumed that the lengthier narrative time of such a series better serves the multiple, complex strands of an epic, reviews lamented the stilted acting, disappointing script and unsatisfactory characterisation. The success of much ‘golden-­age’ TV drama often rests on just the kind of intricate, realistic psychological drama and tension that was seen to be lacking here, as if the makers of Troy: Fall of a City could not disentangle themselves from the notion that an epic hero is shaped by deeds and external action more than by a convincing inner life. Yet other shows have had much more success in reconciling the psychological realism required of a TV drama protagonist with an epic narrative’s possibilities for heroic and spectacular action. The contributions by Hunter Gardner and Meredith Safran convincingly suggest that, when television has successfully taken up the baton of the epic tradition, it has mostly run away from Graeco-­Roman antiquity and towards other narrative settings, especially to the worlds of fantasy (Gardner on Game of Thrones (2011–19)) and science fiction (Safran on Battlestar Galactica (2003, 2004–9)). My earlier interpretation of the epic tradition rested on the idea that a sense of epic distance is a constitutive feature of that tradition, in all its post-­antique manifestations, and the analyses of these two very popular drama series here confirm that proposition. The close affinities between these TV productions and the epic tradition play out in all sorts of ways, from the appropriation of an epic ‘cosmic framework’ in Battlestar to the depiction of Game of Thrones’ Daenerys as a character shaped by nostos and vengeance, much like an ancient epic hero. The concerns of many ancient epic narratives – fate, justice, nation-­building, fame, leadership and so many more – find a comfortable home in these differently distanced worlds. It is as if, freed from having to reanimate and revoice the ancient heroes themselves, with all their cultural baggage, screenwriters are better able to explore epic themes, using the templates of the classical epic tradition as a guide, rather than a constraint. The related idea of using epic as a ‘companion piece’ – or, to frame it in terms I outlined in 2013, as a ‘heuristic tool’ – also permeates other chapters here. Classical epic can surface in interesting and often productive ways in modern screen texts, not in the form of overarching narrative templates or as focal points for allusion, but in the way that ancient epic might guide us towards a more nuanced understanding of the film or TV programme. So, for example, essays

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here propose that our understanding of Snowpiercer (2013) and its examination of fate and destiny can be enhanced by reading it alongside the Aeneid (Jennifer Rea); that one can analyse the Iliadic qualities of the battle sequences in Into the Badlands (2015–19) (Jo Wynell-­Mayow); or that we can usefully compare the ‘queer intimacies’ of Hannibal (2013–15) and the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos (Lynn Kozac). To be sure, methodological caution should still attend such approaches; back in 2007, Simon Goldhill urged us to pay close attention to exactly ‘how classical paradigms are transmitted in modern cultural forms and with what power or influence’ and to ask ‘what investments are we to have in such classical paradigms, or in helping others see the modelling by which stories are told?’1 More could still be done, I would suggest, to unpick the investment that we continue to have in epic, such that we reach for it so readily as a ‘heuristic tool’. The temptation to pick up the epic tradition and run in unexpected directions with it has characterised twenty-­first-­century screen epics in other ways too. Monica Cyrino’s account of the Japanese film Thermae Romae (2012) reveals not only how epic traditions resonate on a global scale, but also how the very tropes of epic themselves become instrumental in thinking through its underlying themes. Crucially, Cyrino’s analysis reveals how, as we continue to track epic traditions through film and television, we are dealing with an accumulative, layered tradition in which the conventions of epic film become as significant as those of epic literature. Thermae Romae is less concerned with appealing to that ancient tradition than it is with reaching for the tropes of cinematic representations of Roman antiquity (as determined by Hollywood and European film industries), and using these to construct and explore its own narrative of national identity and Japan’s relationship with an imperial past. In a similar vein, but with very different subject matter, Emma Stafford shows how the epic credentials of twenty-­first-­century Hercules films rest more on their relationship with (and emulation of) certain aspects of Hollywood epic – such as the spectacular sets, or the conventional figure of the gladiator – than they do on any affinity with ancient epic. As I have argued elsewhere, such self-­referentiality and heightened awareness of tradition are established features of the epic genre in cinema as much as they were in antiquity. Other characteristics of the epic genre continue to reverberate on (and beyond) the screen in interesting ways. My own research suggested that the collective experience of cinema-­going is not dissimilar to the role of ancient epic in speaking to and reinforcing communal

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identity; therefore it might be assumed that the epic tradition in television, understood as a domestic medium, consumed individually, falls short of this requirement. But it would be misguided to dismiss TV in this way. Quite apart from the dramatic change to film viewing habits, at the time of writing, necessitated by the Covid-­19 pandemic – in which major movies have been distributed only through home-­ based streaming services, viewed on televisions or tablets rather than the big screen – there are other ways in which small-­screen epics potentially fulfil a similar socio-­cultural function. Amanda Potter’s work on TV audiences sheds light on the viewing communities that coalesce around ‘epic television’ such as Game of Thrones and the shared expectations of the genre that emerge from those communities. Similarly enlightening is Fiona Hobden’s examination of TV documentaries about the Odyssey, which takes as its cue the long-­ established concept of ‘bardic television’, thus linking ancient epic and television as instances of ‘oral delivery to large audiences’, delivering narratives which mediate and communicate ideas about a culture and a community. In the programmes Hobden discusses, television provides a platform for an ongoing unfolding of the epic tradition in particularly thought-­provoking ways, and I want to end by following those lines of inquiry, and identifying the ‘next steps’ that they lead scholars and practitioners in this field towards. Two of the documentaries privilege the role of the artist-­poet, thereby illuminating the metapoetic dimension of the epic tradition which is sidelined in many of the other receptions under discussion here. Simon Armitage and Akala both go on literal and metaphorical journeys in an attempt to understand not only the characterisation of Odysseus, but also the poetic genius of Homer, and the creative texture of the epic tradition itself. This has two main effects. First, viewers find that the psychological complexity that was lacking in Homeric adaptations like Troy: Fall of a City might instead be located in the figure of the modern poet, whether Armitage or Akala, who is depicted as a kind of proxy for both Odysseus and Homer. As the boundaries between Armitage and Odysseus seem to blur, Hobden shows, the documentary insists on a kind of subjectivity through which epic narratives infiltrate and inhabit the contemporary artist, poet, reader or viewer, offering us a language for making sense of experience; and in turn inviting the artist, poet, reader or viewer to inhabit the narratives, especially when the subject literally follows in the footsteps of the epic poet or hero. Remarkably similar effects could be observed in another recent television series, the quasi-­documentary The Trip to Greece

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(2020), in which comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon also frame their culinary tour as a journey ‘in the footsteps of Odysseus’. As with Armitage’s tour, this becomes more than simply a conceit for an itinerary, as Coogan too experiences a blurring of the boundaries between himself and the hero; thoughts of his own home, and a dying father, punctuate the narrative and we even see dream sequences in which Coogan appears to be inhabiting the role of Aeneas. Second, with the artist-­poet at the centre of the renewed epic narrative, engagement with the epic tradition hinges not on a search for documentary ‘truth’ about or faithful recreation of its stories, but rather on an acknowledgement of epic’s vitality as a springboard for creativity. As Akala creates a new work in response to the Odyssey, he also demonstrates how his own hip-­hop tradition and the Odyssey inform understanding of each other. Crucially, this dialogue between ancient and modern epic also foregrounds one of the most important aspects of the entire epic tradition, especially the corpus of Homeric receptions: the fact that it does not belong only to a narrowly conceived, Eurocentric ‘Western civilisation’, but rather has been adopted and adapted in the service of a diverse array of cultural contexts, and to confront contemporary cultural and socio-­political crises. Screen adaptations such as Troy: Fall of a City have engaged with this to an extent, through the casting of a black Achilles, for example; but there are many more pressing questions to ask about how epic film and TV might be complicit in perpetuating the myth of the whiteness of antiquity as much as they challenge it. In these documentary approaches, then, television offers a powerful reminder that the epic tradition and its ongoing presence in the modern world rest on far more than narrow conceptions of spectacle and heroic action; epic is a mode that connects us with much wider concerns to do with story-­telling, cultural identity, morality and more. These are not insights that can be gained only via the small screen, of course, but television (and perhaps especially documentary) is a medium that captures the constituent characteristics of the journey, and of the creative performance, in a way that written texts might not. These screen engagements with epic must therefore take their place alongside the full range of ‘adaptations and renewals’ of epic in the contemporary world, in which, for example, poet Kae (formerly Kate) Tempest can reframe the epic poem for a twenty-­first-­century urban setting in which ‘we are still mythical ­­ . . . ­permanently trapped / somewhere between the heroic and the pitiful’ (2013), and in which a live oral performance of this ‘everyday epic’ activates a significant connection to the ancient tradition. Tracking epic beyond film and

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television adaptation and reception also requires us to remain alert to the many other ways in which epic narratives can be told and retold; there is surely more to come, for example, as we seek to understand how they unfold, and with what effects, in recent computer games such as Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. As Dan Curley’s chapter here reminds us, epic as a genre is characterised by its far-­reaching spatiality, and its capacity to make space for other genres and traditions. It resists essentialising. There can be no final answer to what epic ‘is’ – but as the multiplicity of approaches here demonstrate, and the additional questions they raise, its presence persists in the modern world in thought-­provoking and unexpected ways. NOTE 1 Goldhill (2007: 260).

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Filmography

47 Ronin (1941). Directed by Mizoguchi Kenji. Shochiku. 300 (2006). Directed by Zack Snyder. Warner Bros. 300: Rise of an Empire (2014). Directed by Noam Murro. Warner Bros. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Metro-­ Goldwyn-­Mayer. The Adventures of Hercules (Le avventure dell’incredibile Ercole) (1985). Directed by Luigi Cozzi. Cannon Italia SrL. Agora (2009). Directed by Alejandro Amenábar. Focus Features/Newmarket Films. Akala’s Odyssey (2018). Produced and directed by J. Rourke. Greenacre Films/Immovable Ltd/BBC. Amateur (1994). Directed by Hal Hartley. American Playhouse. Aquamarine (2006). Directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum. Storefront Pictures. The Avengers (2012). Directed by Joss Whedon. Marvel Studios. Battlestar Galactica (1978–9). Created by Glen A. Larson. Glen A. Larson Productions/Universal Television. Battlestar Galactica (2003). Developed by Ronald D. Moore. R&D TV/Sky TV/USA Cable Entertainment. Battlestar Galactica (2004–9). Developed by Ronald D. Moore. David Eick Television/R&D TV/NBC Universal/Universal Media Studios/Universal Productions. Battlestar Galactica Commentary (2003). With Executive Producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick and Director Michael Rymer. R&D TV/Sky TV/USA Cable Entertainment. Ben-Hur (1959). Directed by William Wyler. Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer. Ben-Hur (2016). Directed by Timur Bekmambetov. MGM. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925). Directed by Fred Niblo. Metro-­ Goldwyn-­Mayer. B-Girl (2009). Directed by Emily Dell. Two Camels Films. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014). Directed by Alejandro G. Iñarritu. New Regency.

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Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). Directed by Bryan Singer. GK Films. Breaking Bad (2008–13). Created by Vince Gilligan. High Bridge/Gran Via Productions. Bright Star (2009). Directed by Jane Campion. Pathe. Britannia (2017–). Created by Jez Butterworth, Tom Butterworth and James Richardson. Sky/Amazon. The Browning Version (1994). Directed by Mike Figgis. Percy Main. Bushido (1963). Directed by Imai Tadashi. Toei Company. Cabiria (1914). Directed by Giovanni Pastrone. Itala Film. Chi-Raq (2015). Directed by Spike Lee. 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. The Cider House Rules (1999). Directed by Lasse Hallström. Film Colony/ Miramax. Cinema Paradiso (1988). Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore. Cristaldifilm. Clash of the Gods (2009). Produced by S. Miller. HISTORY. Clash of the Titans (1981). Directed by Desmond Davies. Metro-­Goldwyn-­ Mayer. Clash of the Titans (2010). Directed by Louis Leterrier. Warner Bros. Cleopatra (1963). Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Twentieth Century Fox. Cold Mountain (2003). Directed by Anthony Mingella. Miramax/Mirage Enterprises. Coraline (2009). Directed by Henry Selick. Focus Features. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Directed by Ang Lee. Sony Pictures. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004). Directed by Guy Ferland. Lions Gate Films. Django Unchained (2012). Directed by Quentin Tarantino. The Weinstein Company. Doctor Who (2005–). Created by Sydney Newman, Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffat, Chris Chibnall. BBC. Dreamgirls (2006). Directed by Bill Condon. DreamWorks. Easy Virtue (2008). Directed by Stephan Elliott. Ealing Studios. Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). Directed by Ridley Scott. Chernin Entertainment. The Expanse (2015–). Created by Daniel Abraham, Mark Fregus, Ty Franck and Hawk Ostby. Alcon Entertainment/Hivemind. Five Scouts (1938). Directed by Tasaka Tomotaka. Nikkatsu. Freedom Writers (2007). Directed by Richard LaGravenese. Paramount Pictures. Free Enterprise (1999). Directed by Robert Meyer Burnett. Mindfire Entertainment/Triad Studios. Full Metal Jacket (1987). Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Natant. Stanley Kubrick Productions/Warner Bros. Game of Thrones (2011–19). Created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. HBO.

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Filmography

Get Hard (2015). Directed by Etan Cohen. Gary Sanchez Productions/ Warner Bros. Girl, Interrupted (1999). Directed by James Mangold. Columbia Pictures/ Red Wagon Entertainment. Gladiator (2000). Directed by Ridley Scott. DreamWorks/Universal Pictures. The Godfather (1972). Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures. Gods and Monsters: Homer’s Odyssey (2010). Produced and directed by J. Holdsworth. BBC. Godzilla (1954). Directed by Honda Ishiro. Toho Studios. The Good Thief (2002). Directed by Neil Jordan. Alliance Atlantis Communications. Hannibal (2013–15). Created by Bryan Fuller. NBC. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008). Directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg. New Line Cinema/Kingsgate Films. Helen of Troy (1956). Directed by Robert Wise. Warner Bros. Helen of Troy (2003). Directed by John Kent Harrison. USA Network. Hercules (Le fatiche di Ercole) (1958). Directed by Pietro Francisci. Embassy Pictures/Galatea Film/Lux Film/Warner Brothers Pictures. Hercules (1983). Directed by Luigi Cozzi. Cannon Italia SrL/Golan Globus Productions. Hercules (1997). Directed by John Musker and Ron Clements. Walt Disney Pictures/Buena Vista Pictures. Hercules (2005). Directed by Roger Young. Hallmark. Hercules (2014). Directed by Brett Ratner. Paramount Pictures/Metro-­ Goldwyn-­Mayer/Flynn Picture Company/Radical Studios. Hercules Against the Moon Men (Maciste e la Regina di Samar) (1964). Directed by Giacomo Gentilomo. Nike Cinematografica/Comptoir Français de Productions Cinématographique. Hercules and the Black Pirate (Sansone contro il Corsaro Nero) (1962). Directed by Luigi Capuano. Romana Film. Hercules Conquers Atlantis (aka Hercules and the Captive Women, Ercole a la Conquista di Atlantide) (1961). Directed by Vittorio Cottafavi. Woolner Brothers Pictures. Hercules of the Desert (La Valle dell’Eco Tonante) (1964). Directed by Tanio Boccia. Cineluxor. Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994). Hercules and the Amazon Women; Hercules and the Lost Kingdom; Hercules and the Circle of Fire; Hercules in the Underworld; Hercules in the Maze of the Minotaur. Directed by Bill Norton. NBC Universal. Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–9). Created by Christian Williams. MCA Television/Pacific Renaissance Pictures Ltd/Renaissance Pictures. Hercules in New York (1970). Directed by Arthur A. Seidelman. RAF Industries. Hercules Reborn (2014). Directed by Nick Lyon. The Asylum.

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Hercules Returns (1993). Directed by David Paker. Philm Productions. Hercules Unchained (Ercole e la regina di Lidia) (1959). Directed by Pietro Francisci. Galatea Film/Lux Film/Warner Bros. Higher Learning (1995). Directed by John Singleton. Columbia Pictures/ New Deal Productions. His Dark Materials (2019–). Created by Jack Thorne, based on the novels by Philip Pullman. BBC/HBO. Homecoming (1948). Directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer. The Hot Choc-late Soldiers (1934). Directed by Walt Disney. Walt Disney Productions. House of Cards (2013–18). Created by Beau Willimon. MRC/Netflix/Panic Pictures/Trigger Street Productions. The Human Stain (2003). Directed by Robert Benton. Miramax/Lakeshore Entertainment. I, Claudius (1976). Written by Jack Pulman (based on the novel by Robert Graves), produced by Martin Lisemore. BBC. Immortals (2011). Directed by Tarsem Singh. Virgin Produced/Rogue/ Atmosphere Entertainment/Hollywood Gang Productions. Incident at Loch Ness (2004). Directed by Zak Penn. Eden Rock Media. Insect Woman (1963). Directed by Imamura Shohei. Nikkatsu. Into the Badlands (2015–19). Created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. AMC. Ithaca (2015). Directed by Meg Ryan. Co-­Op Entertainment. Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Directed by Don Chaffey. Morningside Productions. Joe Versus the Volcano (1990). Directed by John Patrick Shanley. Warner Bros/Amblin Entertainment. Jude (1996). Directed by Michael Winterbottom. BBC Films. Kato Flying Squadron (1944). Directed by Yamamoto Kajiro. Toho Studios. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017). Directed by Guy Ritchie. Warner Bros. Pictures. The Last Kingdom (2015–). Created by Stephen Butchard. Carnival Film and Television. The Legend of Hercules (2014). Directed by Renny Harlin. Summit Entertainment/Millennium Films. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). Directed by Wes Anderson. Touchstone Pictures. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Directed by Peter Jackson. New Line Cinema. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002). Directed by Peter Jackson. New Line Cinema. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Directed by Peter Jackson. New Line Cinema. Loverboy (2005). Directed by Kevin Bacon. Bigel/Mailer Films. Loves of Three Queens (1954). Directed by Marc Allégret. Cino del Duca.

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Filmography

Macguyver (1985–92). Henry Winkler/John Rich Productions. The Man without a Face (1993). Directed by Mel Gibson. Icon. Marcantonio e Cleopatra (1913). Directed by Enrico Guazzoni. Società Italiana Cines. Mary Shelley (2017). Directed by Haifaa al-­Mansour. BFI/HanWay Films. The Matrix (1999). Directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Warner Brothers. Mediterraneo (1991). Directed by Gabriele Salvatores. A. M. A. Penta. Mel-O-Toons (1960). ‘The Trojan Horse.’ No director indicated. New World Productions. Le Mépris (1963). Directed by Jean-­Luc Godard. Rome Paris Films. Mighty Aphrodite (1995). Directed by Woody Allen. Sweetland Films/ Magnolia Pictures. The Mighty Hercules (1963–6). Directed by Joseph Oriolo. Trans Lux. Molly’s Game (2017). Directed by Aaron Sorkin. STX Entertainment. The Myth of the American Sleepover (2011). Directed by David Robert Mitchell. Roman Spring Pictures. Naked (1993). Directed by Mike Leigh. Thin Man Films. Napoleon (1927). Directed by Abel Gance. Ciné France. The Natural (1984). Directed by Barry Levinson. TriStar Pictures. Never Back Down (2008). Directed by Jeff Wadlow. Summit Entertainment. Never Die Alone (2004). Directed by Eric R. Dickerson. Bloodline Films. Noise (2007). Directed by Henry Bean. Seven Arts Pictures. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Directed by Joel Coen. Touchstone Pictures. The Odyssey (1997). Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. NBC. Olympus (2015). Created by Nick Willing. Syfy. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010). Directed by Chris Columbus/Thor Freudenthal. 1492 Productions/Sunswept Entertainment/Dune Entertainment/TSG Entertainment. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013). Directed by Chris Columbus/ Thor Freudenthal. 1492 Productions/Sunswept Entertainment/Dune Entertainment/TSG Entertainment. Pompeii (2014). Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson. TriStar Pictures. The Preppie Connection (2015). Directed by Joseph Castelo. Coalition Films. Princess Mononoke (1997). Directed by Miyazaki Hayao. Studio Ghibli/ Toho Studios. Puccini for Beginners (2006). Directed by Maria Maggenti. Eden Wurmfeld Films. Quo Vadis (1951). Directed by Mervyn Le Roy. Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer. Racing with the Moon (1984). Directed by Richard Benjamin. Jaffe-­Lansing. Rashomon (1950). Directed by Kurosawa Akira. Daiei Film. The Reader (2008). Directed by Stephen Daldry. Mirage Enterprises/The Weinstein Company.

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Riddick (2013). Directed by David Twohy. Riddick Canada Productions. The Robe (1953). Directed by Henry Koster. Twentieth Century Fox. Rome (2005–7). Created by Bruno Heller, William J. MacDonald and John Milius. HBO/BBC. A Room with a View (1985). Directed by James Ivory. Goldcrest Films International. Run Lola Run (1998). Directed by Tom Tykwer. X-­Filme Creative Pool. Samson and His Mighty Challenge (Ercole, Sansone, Maciste e Ursus gli invincibile, aka Combatei dei giganti, Le grand défi) (1964). Directed by Giorgio Capitani. Senior Cinematografica/PE Films/Les Films Régents. Saving Private Ryan (1998). Directed by Steven Spielberg. Dreamworks Pictures. Scales: Mermaids Are Real (2017). Directed by Kevan Peterson. Fromage Pictures. Scent of a Woman (1992). Directed by Martin Brest. Universal Pictures. Scipione l’Africano (1937). Directed by Carmine Gallone. Consorzio Scipione. Seven Samurai (1954). Directed by Kurosawa Akira. Toho Studios. The Simpsons, Season 13 (2002). ‘Tales from the Public Domain’ (= Episode 14). Created by James L. Brooks, Matt Groening and Sam Simon. Gracie Films/20th Century Fox Television. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003). Directed by Patrick Gilmore and Tim Johnson. DreamWorks. Sirens (1994). Directed by John Duigan. British Screen/Samson Productions. Smart People (2008). Directed by Noam Murro. Miramax. Snowpiercer (2013). Directed by Bong Joon-­ ho. Opus Pictures/The Weinstein Company. Sommersby (1993). Directed by Jon Amiel. Canal+. Song One (2014). Directed by Kate Barker-­ Froyland. Worldview Entertainment. The Sopranos (1999–2007). Created by David Chase. Chase Films/Brad Grey Television/HBO Entertainment. Spartacus (1960). Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Bryna Productions. Spartacus (2010–13). Created by Steven S. DeKnight. STARZ. Spirited Away (2001). Directed by Miyazaki Hayao. Studio Ghibli/Toho Studios. The Spitfire Grill (1996). Directed by Lee Zlotoff. Castle Rock Entertainment. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004). Directed by Stephen Hillenburg and Mark Osborne. Paramount Pictures. Star Trek (1966–9). Created by Gene Roddenberry. Desilu Productions/ Paramount Television. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Directed by Nicholas Meyer. Paramount Pictures. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–9). Created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller. Paramount Television.

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Filmography

Star Trek: Discovery (2017–). Created by Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman. CBS. Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001). Created by Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Jerry Taylor. Paramount Television. Star Wars (1977). Directed by George Lucas. Lucasfilm Ltd. Stranger Things (2016–). Created by the Duffer Brothers. Netflix. Sur les traces d’Ulysse (Auf den Spuren des Odysseus) (2017). Produced by C. Bernheim and E. Schocker. RTS. The Ten Commandments (1956). Directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Paramount Pictures. Terra-X: Superhelden-Odysseus (2018). Directed by Robert Schotter. NFP. Thermae Romae (flash anime series) (2012). Directed by Tani Azuma. Fuji Television. Thermae Romae (feature film) (2012). Directed by Takeuchi Hideki. Fuji Television/Toho Studios. Thermae Romae II (feature film) (2014). Directed by Takeuchi Hideki. Fuji Television/Toho Studios. The Thin Red Line (1999). Directed by Terence Malick. Fox 2000 Pictures. Thor (2011). Directed by Kenneth Branagh. Marvel Studios. Thor: The Dark World (2013). Directed by Alan Taylor. Marvel Studios. Thor: Ragnarok (2017). Directed by Taika Waititi. Marvel Studios. Tolkien (2019). Directed by Dome Karukoski. Fox Searchlight Pictures. Tokyo Story (1953). Directed by Ozu Yasujiro. Shochiku. The Trip to Greece (2020). Directed by Michael Winterbottom. Revolution Films. The Trojan Horse (1961). Directed by Giorgio Ferroni. CCIC. Troy (2004). Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Warner Bros. Troy: Fall of a City (2018). Created by David Farr. BBC/Netflix. The Tudors (2007–10). Created by Michael Hirst. Peace Arch Entertainment. Tully (2018). Directed by Jason Reitman. BRON Studios. Ulee’s Gold (1997). Directed by Victor Nunez. Clinica Estetico/Nunez-­ Gowan. Ulysses (1954). Directed by Mario Camerini. Lux Film/Paramount Pictures. Unforgiven (1992). Directed by Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros. Unterwegs mit Odysseus (1979). Directed by Tony Munzlinger. ARD. Vikings (2013–20). Created by Michael Hirst. World 2000 Entertainment/ Take 5 Productions/MGM. The Walking Dead (2010–). Created by Frank Darabont and Angela Kang. AMC. The War at Home (1996). Directed by Emilio Estevez. Motion Picture Corporation of America/Touchstone Pictures. Warrior (2019–). Created by Jonathan Tropper. Cinemax/HBO Max. The West Wing (1999–2006). Created by Aaron Sorkin. John Wells Productions/Warner Bros. Television.

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Westworld (2016–). Created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. Bad Robot/ Jerry Weintraud Broductions/Kilter Films/Warner Bros. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Directed by Robert Aldrich. Associates and Aldrich. White Squall (1996). Directed by Ridley Scott. Hollywood Pictures. The Wife (2017). Directed by Björn L. Runge. Silver Reel. The Wire (2002–8). Created by David Simon. HBO. The Witcher (2019–). Created by Lauren Schmidt. Netflix. Woman in the Dunes (1964). Directed by Teshigahara Hiroshi. Teshigahara Production. Wrath of the Titans (2012). Directed by J. Liebesman. Warner Bros. Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001). Created by Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and John Schulian. MCA Television/Renaissance Pictures. X-Men (2000). Directed by Brian Singer. Twentieth Century Fox. Yojimbo (1961). Directed by Kurosawa Akira. Toho Studios.

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Notes on Contributors

Dan Curley is Associate Professor of Classics at Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY). His teaching and research interests include ancient tragedy, Latin poetry and the classical world in screen media. Common to all of these is the creation and transformation of mythical characters for reading and viewing communities. Recent work includes Tragedy in Ovid: Theater, Metatheater, and the Transformation of a Genre (2013); ‘Divine Animation: Clash of the Titans (1981)’ in Classical Myth on Screen (2015); and ‘The Hero in a Thousand Pieces: Antiheroes in Recent Epic Cinema’ in Epic Heroes on Screen (2018). Monica S. Cyrino is Professor of Classics at the University of New Mexico. Her research centres on the reception of the ancient world on screen, and the erotic in ancient Greek poetry. She is the author of Aphrodite (2010), Big Screen Rome (2005) and In Pandora’s Jar: Lovesickness in Early Greek Poetry (1995). She is the editor of Rome, Season Two: Trial and Triumph (2015), Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World (2013) and Rome, Season One: History Makes Television (2008), and co-­editor of Classical Myth on Screen (with Meredith E. Safran, 2015) and STARZ Spartacus: Reimagining an Icon on Screen (with Antony Augoustakis, 2017). She has published numerous essays and gives lectures around the world on the representation of classical antiquity on film and television. She has served as an academic consultant on several recent film and television productions. Kirsten Day is Associate Professor and Chair of the Classics Department at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Her publications include Cowboy Classics: The Roots of the American Western in the Epic Tradition (2016), along with a number of articles on classical receptions and women in antiquity. She is also editor of a special

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issue of Arethusa entitled Celluloid Classics: New Perspectives on Classical Antiquity in Modern Cinema (Arethusa 41.1: winter 2008). Hunter Gardner is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of the monograph Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature (2019). In addition to working in the field of Latin literature, she teaches and publishes on the reception of Graeco-­Roman antiquity in cinema and popular culture. She has published numerous articles on the topic, including a recent piece (2018) on Neil Marshall’s epic–thriller hybrid Centurion. Fiona Hobden is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. Her research explores the society and culture of ancient Greece and contemoprary receptions of classical antiquity. She is co-­editor, with Amanda Wrigley, of Ancient Greece on British Television (2018). Lynn Kozak works at McGill University in Montreal and primarily researches serial poetics in Homeric epic and in contemporary Anglophone television shows. They’re a huge Iliad fan and a Fannibal, and delighted for the chance to combine those interests in this volume. Sylvie Magerstädt is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Notre Dame Australia in Sydney. Her research focus is on myth and film broadly conceived and her books include Philosophy, Myth and Epic Cinema: Beyond Mere Illusions (2014), Body, Soul and Cyberspace in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (2014) and TV Antiquity: Swords, Sandals, Blood and Sand (2019). She is currently working on a research project on virtues and character on screen. Joanna Paul is a Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University. Her research covers a range of different aspects of the reception of antiquity in the modern world, with a particular focus on contemporary popular culture. She has published widely on cinematic receptions of antiquity, including a monograph on Film and the Classical Epic Tradition (2013), and on modern receptions of Pompeii. Amanda Potter is a Visiting Fellow at the Open University, where she was awarded her PhD in 2014 for her thesis on viewer reception of

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classical myth in Xena: Warrior Princess and Charmed. Her main research interest is public engagement with the ancient world, including audience reception of classics in popular film and television, and creative engagement with classical mythology and ancient history. She has published on a number of television series and films including Xena: Warrior Princess, Charmed, Doctor Who and spinoffs, Wonder Woman, Game of Thrones, HBO’s Rome and STARZ Spartacus. Jennifer A. Rea is Professor of Classics and Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Gender, Sexualities and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on classical reception in modern science fiction and fantasy. She is the author of Legendary Rome: Myth, Monuments and Memory on the Palatine and Capitoline (2008) and Perpetua’s Journey: Faith, Gender and Power in the Roman Empire (2017). Meredith E. Safran is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where she also served as Co-­ Director of the Trinity Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies. She has contributed to Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World (2013), Companion to the Ancient Greek and Roman World on Screen (2017) and Epic Heroes on Screen (2018) and has edited Classical Myth on Screen (2015, with Monica S. Cyrino), Roman Comedy: Performance, Pedagogy, Research (Classical Journal, Fall 2015, with Laurel Fulkerson) and Screening the Golden Ages of the Classical Tradition (2019). Her monograph Battlestar Galactica: An American Aeneid for the 21st Century is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. Jon Solomon is Robert D. Novak Professor of Western Culture and Civilization at the University of Illinois. His book The Ancient World in the Cinema, revised and expanded in 2001, has played a foundational role in furthering the study of classics in the film and popular culture. He is also the author of Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster (2016) and is currently preparing volumes II and III of Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan God. Emma J. Stafford is Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Leeds. She is author of numerous works on Greek myth, religion and iconography and their post-­classical reception, including Worshipping Virtues: Personification and the Divine in Ancient Greece (2000) and Herakles (2012). She is also coordinator of the Leeds-­based project

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Hercules: A Hero for All Ages (https://herculesproject.leeds.ac.uk/), which explores receptions of Herakles from the end of antiquity to the present day. Jo Wynell-Mayow completed her undergraduate studies and PhD at Victoria University of Wellington, where her dissertation focused on the representation of Amazons both in ancient Greek and Roman culture and in modern film and television. She teaches at Redmaids’ High School in Bristol, introducing students every day to the wonders of Latin verbs, Greek sculptural masterpieces and the Amazonian background of Wonder Woman.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations 300 (2006), 119 300: Rise of An Empire (2014), 119 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 39 Achelous, 51 Achilles, 101, 106, 183n11, 204, 206, 207 battle for Troy, 26, 28, 31–2n21, 131, 170, 212–13 in film, 20, 31–2n21, 98, 106, 109, 127, 238 reclusiveness, 27–8, 46 relationship with Patroklos, 3, 11, 28, 186–7, 188–92, 196–9, 236 return of Hector’s body, 28, 170, 215 shield of, 44, 45, 221 vengeance seeking, 160, 164 Adventures of Hercules, The (1985), 58 Aeneas, 104, 171, 210, 212, 238 founding of Rome, 67, 69, 71, 76, 79, 213 influence of gossip, 70, 71, 75 relationship with Dido, 70, 80n9 self-questioning nature, 67, 69, 75–6, 80n21 violence/warfare, 9–10, 71, 75–7, 79, 80n20, 160, 164 Aeneid see Vergil/Virgil: Aeneid Aeolus, 145 Aeschylus, 56, 101 Agamemnon, 101 Agamemnon, 28, 46, 106, 107, 108, 131, 159, 170, 174, 206 Agora (2009), 9, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 28–30, 30 Akala, 11, 136, 146–9, 237, 238 Akala’s Odyssey (2018), 11, 136, 146–7, 149 Allégret, Marc, 103, 114n39 Allen, Alfie, 161 Allen, Woody, 35

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Amateur (1994), 42 Anacreon, 99, 106 ancient epics as popular media, 2, 13n8, 43, 45 Anderson, Gillian, 189 Anderson, Wes, 43 Andromache, 26, 110, 111, 115n53, 125, 182n5, 229 anime, 85, 87, 90 Antaeus, 51 anthropomorphism, 61, 205, 208, 212 Aphrodite, 107, 170–1, 178 Apollo, 12, 18, 23, 26, 51, 197, 206, 207 Apollodorus, 53, 101, 102, 103 Aquamarine (2006), 43 Ares, 51, 171 Argonautica (Apollonious Rhodius), 27 Argonautica (Valerius Flaccus), 51 Aristotle, 123, 127–8, 129 defining of epic, 3, 10, 13n8, 21, 120, 157 Ethics, 129 Poetics, 10, 52, 120, 132 tragedy, 120–1, 123, 126, 130–1 Armitage, Richard, 198 Armitage, Simon, 11, 140–3, 237, 238 Astyanax, 115n53, 182n5, 229 Athena, 12, 37, 41, 42, 60, 102, 105, 206, 212 athleticism, 172 authenticity, 8 Avengers, The (2012), 61 Bacon, Kevin, 38 Bady, Aaron, 77, 78 Bakogianni, Anastasia, 168, 181 Bale, Christian, 20 Bana, Eric, 20, 109 Barhom, Ashraf, 23

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Index

Barker, Charles, 139 Barker-Froyland, Kate, 42 Barrymore, John Drew, 105 Barthes, Roland, 13n2, 34, 36, 37 Battlestar Galactica (2004–9), 210, 214, 223 function of gods, 6, 11–12, 201, 207, 212, 214, 215 gender roles, 5 Homerian epic tradition, 201, 202, 204, 208–9, 213, 214–15, 235 reception of, 205 Beatty, Robert, 103 Bell, Jamie, 69 Ben-Hur (1959), 21, 83 Ben-Hur (2016), 1, 4, 7, 14n19, 217 Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ (1925), 20 B-Girl (2009), 40, 44 Bigagli, Claudio, 39 Bingham, Adam, 85 Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (2014), 33–5, 36, 37, 40 Blanshard, Alastair, 54, 60 Blondell, Ruby, 101, 106, 109, 112, 115n49 Bloom, Orlando, 20, 109 Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), 34–5, 37 Bradley, David, 157 Bradley, John, 162 Breaking Bad (2008–13), 223 Bremmer, Ewan, 68 Bremmer, Ian, 85 Bright Star (2009), 41 Britannia (2017–), 119 Browning Version, The (1994), 41 Brydon, Rob, 238 Burgoyne, Robert, 54 Burrows, Saffron, 26 Bush, George W., 205 Bushman, Francis X., 20 Butler, Shane, 14n24, 39 Byers, Steve, 61 Byrne, Rose, 28 Cabiria (1914), 19–20, 22 Caine, Michael, 35 Cairns, David, 103, 114n32 Caldwell, John T., 124 Callis, James, 107, 213, 214 Camerini, Mario, 103, 113n2 Campion, Jane, 41 Canavan, Gerry, 77, 78, 81n30 cannibalism, 69, 135, 136, 185, 192 capitalism, 6, 81n30 Capitani, Giorgio, 57, 60 Carnera, Primo, 56 Carter, Helena Bonham, 17

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Carter, Jim, 107 Castelo, Joseph, 42 Chorostecki, Lara Jean, 195 Christian triumphalism, 24 Cider House Rules, The (1999), 35, 37, 40 Cinema Paradiso (1988), 43 Circe, 38–9, 43, 56–7, 137, 142, 219 Clarke, Emilia, 153, 153, 166n4, 166–7n24 Clash of the Gods (2009), 10–11, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140 Clash of the Titans (1981), 60, 137, 211 Clash of the Titans (2010), 119, 137 Clay, Jenny Strauss, 24, 25, 150n2 Clements, Ron, 62 Cleopatra (1963), 21, 33, 84 Close, Glenn, 37 Cody, Diablo, 45 Coffey, Michael, 174 Cold Mountain (1993), 39 colonialism, 83, 84, 148, 202–9, 210, 211, 213–14 computer-generated imagery (CGI), 4, 59, 63, 126, 137, 138, 149 consumerism, 79 Coogan, Steve, 238 Coraline (2009), 43 Cornish, Abbie, 41 Cottafavi, Vittorio, 57 Cousteau, Jacques, 43 Cox, Sam, 23 Cross, Beverley, 60 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), 179 Csokas, Marton, 169 cultural activism, 149 Cumming, Ed, 218 Cupid, 21 Curley, Dan, 5, 8–9, 12, 239 Curtin, Kevin Thomas, 36–7 Cuthbert, Vladimir, 194 Cylons, 12, 202–5, 207–14 cynicism, 125, 156 Cypria, 101 Cyrino, Monica, 10, 109, 115n53, 236 dactylic hexameter, 2, 9, 21–2 Daldry, Stephen, 41 Dancy, Hugh, 185, 193 Dark Tower (King), 223 Davis, Mackenzie, 45 Day, Kirsten, 10, 234 Dayne, Bella, 110, 125 de Jong, Irene J. F., 169 Deleuze, Gilles, 6–7, 14n18 Demeter, 37

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DeMille, Cecil B., 20 Denecke, Wiebke, 89, 96n33 Dhavernas, Caroline, 192 Dickerson, Eric R., 35 Dillane, Stephen, 46 Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004), 41, 43, 44 Django Unchained (2012), 160 Doctor Who (2005–), 276, 231n39 documentaries, 3, 5, 10–11, 84, 136–9, 142, 144, 146, 149–50, 151n25, 237–8; see also Clash of the Gods (2009); Clash of the Titans (1981, 2010); Gods and Monsters: Homer’s Odyssey (2010); Sur les traces d’Ulysse (2017) Donnelly, Patrick, 35 Douglas, Kirk, 83, 95n6 Dreamgirls (2006), 33 Dune, 223 Dunleavy, Trisha, 122 Earnshaw, Katherine, 147 Easy Virtue (2008), 43 Ebert, Roger, 177 Eccleston, Christopher, 41 Edelman, Lee, 187 Eidsvåg, Marta, 219, 230n22 elitism, 234 Elley, Derek, 13n5, 54–5 Elliot, Andrew, 4 Elliott, Alison, 39 Ellison, Ralph, 148 Emmanuel, Nathalie, 161 empire, and violence, 4 epic as marker of quality, 12, 222 use of space, 12, 17, 29, 223 epic, process of adaptation, 94, 120, 233 epic film popularity, 13n13, 33, 35, 47, 83, 84, 91, 98, 106, 119, 122, 137, 229 epic genre, plasticity of, 5 Ercole e la regina di Lidia (Hercules Unchained, 1959), 56 eroticism, 19, 22, 54, 154–5, 193–4; see also homoeroticism euhemerism, 207 Euripides, 10, 27, 53, 58, 100 Evans, Chris, 67, 73 Evans, Rhiannon, 66, 75 Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), 20 exoticism, 106 Expanse, The (2015–), 223 Fanning, Elle, 46 Fantoni, Sergio, 57

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Faris, Sean, 44 feminism, 47, 154–6, 166n4, 166–7n24; see also Game of Thrones; gender politics Ferrigno, Lou, 58 Ferroni, Giorgio, 103, 105 Fiennes, Ralph, 41 Figgis, Mike, 41 Fiske, John, 136 Foley, Helene P., 197 Fratantuono, Lee, 70, 80n9 Free Enterprise (1999), 47 Freedom Writers (2007), 42, 43 Freeman, Elizabeth, 187 Frost, Nick, 172 Full Metal Jacket (1987), 43 Fuller, Bryan, 185–6, 199, 199n2 fundamentalism, 206 Gallone, Carmine, 82 Game of Thrones (2011–19), 11, 153, 181, 235 audience relationship, 7, 218, 219–23, 226, 228–9 as epic, 12, 14n27, 154, 157, 217, 218, 219–26, 229, 237 gender politics, 5, 154, 156 homecomings, 159, 161–2, 163 vengeance, 160, 164, 166n22 violence/warfare, 158, 159, 164, 166n20 xenia (hospitality), 158 Garai, Katey, 41 Garai, Romola, 41 Gardner, Hunter, 11, 235 Gé, Nicholas, 186 gender subversion, 5, 57 Gerôme, Jean-Leon, 60 Get Hard (2015), 42 Gladiator (2000), 4, 58, 59, 83, 93, 106, 177 globalism, 6, 234 Godfather, The (1972), 160 Gods and Monsters: Homer’s Odyssey (2010), 11, 136, 140, 142, 143 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 193 Gold, Natalie, 34 Goldhill, Simon, 236 Good Thief, The (2002), 38 Goodman, John, 39 Görg, Galyn, 106 Gottschall, Jonathan, 171 Greene, Steve, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128 Griffin, Jasper, 177, 183n15 Griffith, D. W., 6 Guillory, Sienna, 106, 108 Gyasi, David, 106, 127

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Index

Hades, 52, 137 Halberstam, Judith, 187 Hall, Edith, 33, 160 Hallström, Lasse, 35 Halmi, Robert, Sr., 121 Hanks, Tom, 42 Hannibal, 19–20 Hannibal (2013–15), 193, 200n12 Achilles/Patroklos allusions, 3, 11, 186–92, 196–9 homoeroticism, 3, 11, 185–95, 198–9, 236 Red Dragon episodes, 195, 198 Hardie, Philip, 70, 80n12 Harlin, Renny, 58 Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008), 43 Harris, Ed, 68, 73 Harris, Thomas, 185, 191 Harrison, John Kent, 106–7, 108 Harryhausen, Ray, 60, 65n33, 211 Hartley, Hal, 42 Hartley, John, 136 Hauser, Carl, 44 Hauty, Chris, 44 Hawksley, Rupert, 126 Heard, Amber, 44 Hector, 20, 22, 26, 28, 31–2n21, 106, 109, 125, 131, 164, 170, 173, 182n5, 229 Hedlund, Garrett, 28, 98 Helen of Troy (1956), 62, 103, 104, 104, 114n33 Helen of Troy (2003), 103, 104, 106, 108 Helen of Troy, 100, 113n2, 114n39,42,44, 115n53 abduction by Paris, 25, 51, 106–7, 125 and Agamemnon, 107, 108 association with Trojan Horse, 102, 103–4, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110–11, 112, 113n18, 234 beauty of, 104, 107, 109, 112 entry into Troy, 22–3, 23, 24, 109 film/television portrayals, 10, 20, 62, 102–11 gender politics/roles, 19, 98–100, 106, 107–8, 127 link to Pandora, 101, 102, 104, 111 and Priam, 22, 25, 178 Helios, 52 Hephaestus, 208 Hera, 12, 52, 60, 61, 206, 211, 212 Herakles (Euripides), 58 Herbert, Frank, 223 Hercules (1983), 58 Hercules (2014), 9, 31n7, 58, 119 Hercules (Disney, 1997), 58, 61, 62

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281

Hercules (La fatische di Ercole) (1958), 9, 49, 50, 56, 59, 60–1 epic tradition, 49–51 Hercules Against the Moon Men (1964), 57 Hercules and the Black Pirate (1962), 57 Hercules Conquers Atlantis (1961), 57 Hercules Furens (Seneca), 58 Hercules in New York (1970), 58, 61 Hercules of the Desert (1964), 57 Hercules peplum films, 3, 9, 49, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63n1, 64n15 Hercules Reborn (2018), 58, 59 Hercules Unchained see Ercole e la regina di Lidia Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (Films and TV series) (1994–9), 58, 61, 106, 119, 121, 128 Hercules: The Thracian Wars, 9 Hermes, 28 Herodotus, 201 heroism, 4, 120, 126, 143, 145–6, 149, 152, 218, 220 Hershkowitz, Debra, 71, 80n12 Hesiod, 3, 13n9, 51, 52, 101–2, 104, 207, 208, 212 Hideki, Takeuchi, 82; see also Thermae Romae (2012) Higgins, Charlotte, 202 Higher Learning (1995), 44 Hinds, Stephen, 14n23, 19, 31n6 His Dark Materials (2019–), 224 audience response, 14n27, 226–7 epic tradition, 12, 217, 218, 225, 227, 228–9 Game of Thrones comparisons, 14n27, 225 Hobden, Fiona, 10, 237 Hollander, Tom, 34 Homer, 8, 12, 17, 22, 52, 63, 132, 150, 157, 214 aristeia, 11, 170–3, 177, 179, 183n11, 225 audience of, 36, 100, 112, 160, 168–9, 171, 174–8, 182nn1,8, 183n24, 201, 206, 213 Capture of Oichalia, 51–2 cosmos, 201, 204, 207, 213, 215 criticism of, 3, 13n9, 127–8, 154 death scenes, 160, 164, 174, 183n14,15 epic tradition, 22, 201–2, 205–7, 209, 211–13, 215, 218–19, 221, 223, 233–4, 238 film adaptations, 9, 10, 25, 28, 62, 120, 123–4, 126, 140, 146–7, 237 film/television allusions, 35–6, 37–8, 38, 39–46, 51, 120

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Index

Homer (cont.) gods’ depictions, 6, 12, 25, 61, 62, 177, 201, 206, 208–9, 211–12 hero archetype, 160–1, 164, 173 hip-hop, 11, 136, 146–9, 238 intimacy, 3, 11, 28, 187–8, 199, 229 kleos, 6, 36, 158 moral ambiguity, 3, 128 suspension of disbelief, 168–9, 170, 177, 179–80 violence, 11, 19, 168, 170–1, 182 see also Iliad; Odyssey Homeric epic, 8, 33, 40, 44–5, 61–2, 157, 201, 202, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211–13, 215, 234 Homeric realism, 169 homoeroticism, 3, 11, 185, 189, 200n13 Hong Kong action cinema, 11; see also Into the Badlands (ITB): martial arts; martial arts Hope, Valerie M., 168 Hopkins, Anthony, 46 House of Cards (2013–18), 223 Hughes, Sarah, 128 Human Comedy, The, 38 Human Stain, The (2003), 46 Hunter, Louis, 125 Hurt, John, 67 Hyginus, 102 I, Claudius (1976), 4 Iliad, 18, 53, 128, 183n2 aristeia, 171, 172, 179, 183n11 film/television adaptations, 28, 62, 120, 122–3, 126, 218 homoeroticism, 3, 11, 186, 188–90, 196–7 popular culture allusions, 9, 11, 33, 39, 43–7, 51, 124, 175, 177, 187–8, 198–9, 204, 219, 222–3, 225, 229, 236 portrayal of gods/goddesses, 25, 62, 175, 201, 206, 208–13, 215 and spectacle, 22, 25, 168, 172, 178 violence/warfare, 11, 19, 160, 164, 166n20, 168, 170–4, 176–8, 180, 182, 183n14 Immortals (2011), 47, 61 imperialism, 4, 5, 10, 53, 82, 83–4, 85, 86–7, 88–90, 92–4, 236 Iñarritu, Alejandro G., 33–4, 36 Incident at Loch Ness (2004), 34–5 intertextuality, 8, 14n23, 91, 122, 189 Into the Badlands (ITB, 2015–19), 6, 180 aesthetics, 175, 176, 181–2 aristeia, 172–3, 177

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martial arts, 168, 171, 172, 179, 180–1, 184n31 post-apocalyptic setting, 169, 181 violence, 11, 168, 169–70, 171, 181, 236 Invisible Man, 148 invocation of muse, 18, 19 Isaac, Oscar, 20 Isabelle, Katharine, 192 Ithaca (2015), 38 Jacobi, Derek, 4 James, Paula, 66 Jason and the Argonauts (1963), 64n17, 211 Jason, 27, 55–6, 61 Jennings, Rebecca, 219 Jesudason, David, 225 jidaigeki, 84 Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), 42 Johnson, Dwayne “The Rock,” 58 Joon-ho, Bong, 67 Judaeo-Christian tradition, 6, 23–4, 26, 28, 29–30, 57, 132, 140, 205, 226–7 Jude (1996), 41 Juno, 71, 80n12, 212–13 Jupiter, 36, 70, 71, 75 Keaton, Michael, 34 Keats, John, 41 Kelly, Craig, 107 King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017), 43 King, Stephen, 223 Knight, Aramis, 169 Knowles, Beyoncé, 33 Konchalovsky, Andrei, 103, 113n2 Kosloski, Emily, 107 Kozac, Lynn, 11, 236 Kross, David, 41 Kruger, Diane, 20, 109, 115n49 Kubrick, Stanley, 39, 83 Kurosawa, Akira, 84–5 LaGravenese, Richard, 42 Lamarr, Hedy, 103 Larrington, Carolyne, 219 Larson, Glen A., 203, 204, 205, 206 Last Kingdom, The (2015–), 223 Lee, Spike, 35 Lee, Sung-Ae, 91 Legend of Hercules, The (2014), 58–60, 59 Leigh, Mike, 42 LeRoy, Mervyn, 83 Levine, Joseph, 50, 55 Lewis, Ronald, 104

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Index

Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The (2004), 43 Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd, 31n9, 62 Lloyd, Harry, 155 Lord of the Rings trilogy, 35, 222–3, 228 Loverboy (2005), 38, 40 Loves of Three Queens (1954), 103, 114n33 Lucanio, Patrick, 54, 62 Lushkov, Ayelet Haimson, 8, 14n23, 156–7, 166n20, 219 Lutz, Kellan, 58, 59 Lyon, Nick, 58 McAvoy, May, 20 McCarthyism, 83, 95n7 McDonnell, Mary, 202 MacGuyver (1985–92), 140 Madden, Richard, 157 Magerstädt, Sylvie, 10, 235 Maggenti, Maria, 42 Malamud, Bernard, 36, 37 Malamud-Smith, Janna, 37 Malek, Rami, 34 Malick, Terence, 38, 38 manga, 10, 87, 89–90, 91–2, 97n44,47 Mangan, Lucy, 218 Marcantonio e Cleopatra (1913), 84 Mari, Yamazaki, 87, 97n44; see also Thermae Romae (2012) Marlowe, Christopher, 98 Marsden, Matthew, 107 martial arts, 44; see also Into the Badlands (ITB) Martin, George R. R., 7, 157, 219, 221, 226–7, 230–1n26 Game of Thrones, 1, 5, 11, 12, 154, 156–65, 166n20, 181, 217–29, 223, 235, 237 Song of Fire and Ice, 7, 152, 156, 161, 166n5, 218 see also Game of Thrones Martin, Richard P., 139 Martindale, Charles, 8, 14n24 Martin-Jones, David, 6, 7 Mary Shelley (2017), 46 masculinity, 14n19, 98 Matrix, The (1999), 179 Mediterraneo (1991), 39 Mel-O-Toons, 103 Menelaus, 26, 98, 100, 103, 105, 108–9, 178 Mercury, Freddie, 34, 37 Mighty Aphrodite (1995), 35 Mikkelsen, Mads, 185, 193 militarism, 84, 85, 86, 94

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283

Miller, Madeline, 199, 200n13 Mills, Sophie, 198 Milton, John, 227 Minerva, 23 Minghella, Max, 20 mini-series, 1, 108, 123; see also Battlestar Galactica; Helen of Troy mini-series; Odyssey mini-series; Troy: Fall of a City Mintzer, Jordan, 87 mise en scène, 25 Miyao, Daisuke, 84 Miyazaki, Hayao, 85 modern Hercules epic, 50, 62–3 Molly’s Game (2017), 43 Momoa, Jason, 155 Moore, Ronald D., 203–4, 205, 206, 211 Moore, Steve, 9 movement-image, 6–7, 14n18 Mozzato, Umberco, 20 multiculturalism, 146, 148 Muñoz, José Esteban, 187 Musker, John, 62 Mussolini, Benito, 83 Myers, Carmel, 20 Myers, Mike, 34 Myers, Tobias, 178 Myth of the American Sleepover (2011), 41 mythic epics, 125, 132 Naked (1993), 42 Napoleon (1927), 21 nationalism, 5, 82, 84, 90, 94, 219, 234 Natural, The (1984), 36, 37 Nelson, Robin, 124 Never Back Down (2008), 44 Never Die Alone (2004), 35 Noise (2007), 43 Nolte, Nick, 38 nostos (homecoming/return), 39, 42, 152, 154, 160; see also Game of Thrones: homecomings Novarro, Ramon, 20 O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), 39 Odysseus, 170, 174, 207, 237, 238 as everyman, 10–11, 139–40, 148, 149 film/television portrayals, 128, 136–8, 138, 139–45 and the gods/goddesses, 51, 128, 141, 210–11, 212 moral ambiguity, 3, 129 and Penelope, 37, 135 popular culture allusions/connections, 38, 41, 42, 152, 154, 158–64

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Index

Odysseus (cont.) return to Ithaca/Ithaka, 11, 37, 128, 135, 160, 162, 163, 164–5 see also Akala’s Odyssey Odyssey, The (1997 mini-series), 62, 103, 106, 113n2, 128, 133–34n48 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles), 57 Olmos, Edward James, 202 Olympus (2015), 131, 132 audience reception, 10, 120, 122, 129 character development, 124–7, 129 conventions of tragedy, 121, 122, 130, 132 critical reception, 121–2 fantasy elements, 122, 131–2 portrayal of gods, 125, 132 optimism, 94, 145 Outlander (2014–), 223 Ovid, 21–2, 25, 27, 51 Pache, Corinne, 102, 202 paganism, 23–4, 26, 29, 60 Pagano, Bartolomeo, 20 Pallas, 76, 164 Pandora, 10, 100–2, 104, 105, 107, 109, 111 Paris, 70, 101, 105, 108, 110, 125, 130, 170, 183n11 duel with Menelaus, 26, 103, 178 entry into Troy, 22–3, 24, 23, 102, 109 in film, 20, 103, 104, 107–9 in television, 110, 111, 125–6 Park, Hetienne, 191 Parke, Grace, 202 Parke, Reg, 57 Pastrone, Giovanni, 19 Paul (apostle), 26 Paul, Joanna, 2, 6, 12, 13n5, 30–1n1, 202, 205, 217 Penelope, 19, 37, 39, 135, 219 Penikett, Tahmoh, 202 Periclymenus, 51 Perseus, 61 Pirrie, Chloe, 110, 125 Pitt, Brad, 20, 98 Pitts, Michael, 191 Plato, 3, 13n9, 158, 198 Podestà, Rossana, 104, 104 Pollux, 107 Pompeii (2014), 4, 97n48 Poseidon, 100, 111, 210, 212 Potter, Amanda, 12, 114n42, 237 Preppie Connection, The (2006), 42 Priam, 22–3, 25, 28, 106, 108, 110, 178 Prince, 148 Princess Mononoke (1997), 85 Prometheus, 100, 203

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propaganda films, 72, 73, 84, 90 psychological climax, 40, 47 psychological comfort, 78 psychological complexity, 124, 132, 237 psychological distress, 141 psychological drama, 235 psychological realism, 235 psychological tension, 124 Puccini for Beginners (2006), 42, 97n42 Pullman, Philip His Dark Materials adaptation, 217, 225–7, 229 Northern Lights, 224, 225 Putnam, Michael C. J., 76 Quaranta, Lidia, 20 Quinn, Antony, 61 Quintus Smyrnaeus, 110 Quo Vadis (1951), 57, 83 racial norms subversion, 5 racism, 7, 42, 106 Rapaport, Michael, 44 Rashomon (1950), 84 Ratner, Brett, 58 Rattigan, Terence, 41 Rea, Jennifer, 236 Reader, The (2008), 41 realism, 168, 177, 223, 224, 235 animation, 139 and Classic Hollywood, 55, 60 and Homer, 168, 169 see also visual realism reception studies, 8, 13n11, 14n24, 66, 82, 89, 202 reconstruction of past, 1–3, 60, 84, 137 Redford, Robert, 36, 37 Reeves, Steve, 49, 55, 105 reges et proelia (kings and battles), 2, 4, 9, 18–19, 20–2, 30 Regina, Chris, 121 Reitman, Jason, 45 Return of Ulysses, The, 33 Richie, Donald, 86 Riddick (2013), 43 Rigg, Diana, 161 Rise of an Empire (2014), 119 Robe, The (1953), 21 Rohl, Kacey, 194 Rome (2005–7), 223 Romm, James, 7 Room with a View, A (1985), 17 Roth, Philip, 46 Run Lola Run (1998), 6 Ryan, Meg, 38

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Index

Safran, Meredith E., 11–12, 235 Salvatores, Gabriel, 39 Samson and His Mighty Challenge (1964), 57, 60, 65n25 Sands, Julian, 17 Saroyan, William, 38 Saunders, K. B., 171, 178 Saving Private Ryan (1998), 6, 177 Scales: Mermaids Are Real (2017), 43 Scent of a Woman (1992), 45 Schechter, Edie, 35 Schubart, Rikke, 155, 156, 163, 166n8 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 61 scientism, 213 Scipione l’Africano (1937), 82 Scott, Ridley, 4, 19, 41, 83, 106 Scott, Suzanne, 185, 199n2 Sedgwick, Kyra, 38 Semonides, 99 Seneca, 58 sensationalism, 139, 149 Serapis, 23, 26 Serato, Massimo, 103 Sernas, Jacques, 104 Seven Against Thebes (Aeshylus), 57 Seven Samurai (1954), 84 Sewell, Rufus, 107 Shahabudin, Kim, 54, 60 Shieber, Tom, 37 Simpsons, The, 103 Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003), 43 Sirens (1994), 43 Skarsgård, Stellan, 107 Slabber, Lise, 110 Slater, Christian, 45 Smart People (2008), 43 Smith, Gary A., 55 Smith, Maggie, 17 Snowpiercer, 73, 78, 81n30 Aeneid as companion text, 4, 9–10, 66, 67–8, 79, 236 as dystopian, 4, 6, 67, 76, 78, 79 gossip/rumour role, 71, 75 leadership roles, 67, 68 violence as survival necessity, 66, 75 Sobchack, Vivian, 1, 2, 5, 123 Socrates, 3, 158 Solomon, Jon, 9, 234 Sommersby (1993), 39 Song One (2014), 42 Sophocles, 57 Sopranos, The (1999–2007), 202, 204, 205, 223 Sorkin, Aaron, 43 Soteriou, Mia, 155

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285

Spaghetti Westerns, 58 Spartacus (1960), 21, 59, 83 Spartacus (2010–13), 83–4, 119, 128 spatial projections/spatiality, 3, 8–9, 17, 26, 27, 29, 30, 30–1n1, 157, 203, 239 speculative fiction (SF), 4, 5, 6, 13n8,12 Spence, Sarah, 70 Spencer, Octavia, 74 Spirited Away (2001), 85 Spitfire Grill, The (1996), 39 Stacey, J., 187 Stafford, Emma J., 9, 236 Stanford, W. B., 33 Stanton, Rob, 158, 163, 166n14 Star Trek franchise, 199–200n10, 223 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), 189, 199–200n10 Star Wars franchise (1977–2019), 144, 203, 204, 223, 228 Steel, Alan, 57 Steenberg, Lindsay, 154, 156 Steenburgen, Mary, 42 Stolworthy, Jacob, 119, 124 Stranger Things (2016–), 181 supernatural, 60, 120, 168, 171, 173, 177, 181 Sur les traces d’Ulysse (2017), 11, 136, 143, 145–6 Swanby, Grant, 110 Sweeting, Adam, 125 Swinton, Tilda, 68 swords and sandals epics, 4 Syson, Antonia, 70, 75 Tallarita, Andrea, 122, 123 Tao, Okamoto, 190 Tasker, Yvonne, 154, 156 Telemachus, 135, 160, 210–11 Tempest, Kae (Kate), 238 Ten Commandments, The (1956), 20 Tennyson, Alfred, 43 Theocritus, 10, 100 theoxeny, 208, 210 Thermae Romae (2012), 5, 10, 87–8, 90, 93 dual-image Gladiator formula, 83, 93 empire nostalgia, 82, 85, 86–7, 89–90, 94–5, 236 Theron, Charlize, 45 Theseus, 52, 61, 107 Thomas, Richard, 75 Thor films (2011–16), 61 Threlfall, David, 110 time-image, 6–7 Tolkien (2019), 43 Tolkien, J. R. R., 220, 221

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Index

tourism, 144 Transperceneige, Le, 67 Trip to Greece, The (2020), 238 triumphalist narratives, 6, 24 Trojan Horse figure, 10, 20, 98, 100, 102–3, 104, 108, 109–10, 112, 113n18, 211 Trojan Horse, The (1961), 103, 104, 105 Troy (2004), 9, 17, 19, 20, 23, 23, 31–2n21, 35, 47, 109, 126, 137 exteriority/interiority, 26, 27 portrayal of gods, 25, 62, 98 reviews, 177, 183n27 spatial filming strategies, 22–4, 26 Troy: Fall of a City (2015), 10, 62, 106, 110–11, 124, 128, 217, 237 failure to capture audiences, 120, 122 racial subversion, 238 reviews, 119, 122–3, 133–4n48, 218, 235 Tudors, The (2007–10), 223 Tully (2018), 45, 234 Turner, Sophie, 156 Turturro, John, 39 Ulee’s Gold (1997), 39 Ulysses (1954), 62, 64n18, 103, 113n2 Ulysses, 40, 42, 57, 105 Unforgiven (1992), 160 Ustinov, Peter, 57 Valerius Flaccus, 51 Valverde, María, 20 Varma, Indira, 161 vengeance, 136, 160, 198 in Aeneid, 75–6, 166n20 in Game of Thrones, 11, 152–5, 157, 159–61, 164–5, 166n22, 235 in Iliad, 160, 166n20 in Odyssey, 150, 152–3, 159–61 Venus, 67, 212 Vergil/Virgil, 8, 66–7, 77 Aeneid, 4, 5, 9–10, 18–19, 51, 67, 70–6, 79, 100, 160, 202, 212 Ecologue, 2, 18 portrayal of gods, 12, 102 role of Fama (goddess), 70, 75, 80n4 role of fama (rumour/gossip), 70–1, 75, 80n4 Vergilian epic, 8 Vikings (2013–20), 223

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visual realism, 131 Vivante, Bella, 105 Von Doviak, Scott, 121, 125, 126 voyeurism, 144 Wadlow, Jeff, 44 Walcott, Derek, 148 Walking Dead, The (2010–22), 169, 223 War at Home, The (1996), 44 Ward, Sarah, 74 West Wing, The (1999–2006), 204 Weston, Kath, 187 Weston-Jones, Tom, 125 Westworld (2016–), 169, 223 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), 46 Wheatley, Helen, 4 Whelan, Gemma, 161 White Squall (1996), 41 Whitmey, Nigel, 107 widescreen, 9, 21–2, 24, 25, 26 Wife, The (2017), 45 Wilkinson, John, 7, 219 Willing, Nick, 121–2, 130 Wilson, Ruth, 225 Winkler, Martin, 43, 47n9, 114n44 Winslet, Kate, 41 Wire, The (2002–8), 223 Wise, Robert, 103, 104, 114n33 Witcher, The (2019–), 217, 218 Wrath of the Titans (2012), 119 Wu, Daniel, 169, 179 Wyke, Maria, 82 Wyler, William, 83 Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), 106, 119 xenia (hospitality), 11, 28, 154, 157, 158–9, 179, 181 X-Men (2000), 43 Yojimbo (1961), 85 York, R. A., 36, 37 York, Tom, 125 Young, Damian, 34 Zeus, 12, 36, 46, 53, 57, 60, 61, 63, 101, 102, 107, 178, 206–7, 211, 212–13 Zlotoff, Lee, 39–40 Zoppelli, Lia, 58

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