It’s safe to say that we no longer believe in the gods of the ancient world — or rather, that most of us no longer believe in their literal existence, but some of us have faith in their box-office potential. This two–part video series from Vanity Fair examines a variety of movies and television shows that have drawn on Greek and Roman myth since the mid-twentieth-century, including Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans, Troy, and Disney’s Hercules. Offering commentary on their faithfulness to the source material is Peter Meineck, Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University.
Not that he insists on holding these entertainments to rigorous standards of accuracy. “I would not use the term ‘accuracy’ at any point in Xena: Warrior Princess, because it’s fantastic,” he says at one point. But then, when it comes to the stories told by ancient Greeks and Romans, we’re dealing with rather fantasy-rich material from the start.
Heightened, augmented, refined, and syncretized over many generations, they’ve come down to us in forms that reflect more or less eternally human notions about the forces that govern reality and its vicissitudes — ready made, in some cases, to incorporate into the latest twenty-first-century superhero spectacle.
Possessed of distinctive physical traits, temperaments, superhuman powers, and even grudges, the many gods of the polytheistic antiquity were, in their way, the comic-book heroes of their time. And just as we have different “universes” of characters to choose from, different eras and cultures had their own lineups of deities, none quite the same as any other. “At the pinnacle of this teeming numinous universe were the Olympians, the twelve gods headed by Zeus and Hera,” says ancient-history Youtuber Garrett Ryan in the Told in Stone video above. “The Greeks influenced Roman religion virtually from the beginning. By the time Rome emerged into the full light of history, the Roman gods had been assimilated to their Greek counterparts.”
Hence our recognizing Greek Olympians like Poseidon, Artemis, Athena, and Dionysus, but also their Roman equivalents Neptune, Diana, Minerva, and Bacchus. “There seems to have been little doubt in Romans’ minds that their chief gods were the same as those of the Greeks,” Ryan says. “The Greeks, for their part, generally accepted that the Romans worshipped their gods under different names — while also being “eager collectors of exotic deities,” many of which could be found within their own vast empire. The result was a bewildering profusion of gods for every occasion, Greek-inspired or otherwise: an omen of the more-is-better ethos that the Hollywood blockbuster would embrace a couple of millennia later.
Related content:
How Arabic Translators Helped Preserve Greek Philosophy … and the Classical Tradition
How Rome Began: The History As Told by Ancient Historians
A Virtual Tour of Ancient Athens: Fly Over Classical Greek Civilization in All Its Glory
Behold Ancient Egyptian, Greek & Roman Sculptures in Their Original Color
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.