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

Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture (Greece and Rome Live)

Humor & Entertainment

Nisbet, Gideon

Movies

Bristol Phoenix Press, Univ of Exeter

After Virgil: The Poetry, Politics and Perversion of Roman Epic (Bristol Phoenix Press - Greece and Rome Live)

 What constitutes an epic? Are epics all about kings and battles and glorifying the victors? And why do women so rarely appear in epics? These are questions that Virgil’s successors explored in their poetry in the 120 years after the Aeneid achieved its status as a classic and set the standard for Roman epic. In After Virgil—the first general introduction in English devoted to the post-Virgilian epic—Robert Cowan surveys the works of Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, Statius, and Silius Italicus, among others, investigating how these poets employed both myth and history to explore the relationships between the gods and mortals, tyranny, civil war, issues of gender, and, above all, what it meant to be Roman under the emperors. Cowan dedicates each chapter to a single theme and explains how these later poets imitated, interpreted, reacted against, and even perverted those standards laid down by the Aeneid.

Literature & Fiction

Cowan, Robert

History & Criticism

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Books by Bristol Phoenix Press, Univ of Exeter