Wired reprises an oldie but a goodie:

• April 24, 1184 B.C.: Trojan Horse Defeats State-of-the-Art Security (Wired)

Lengthy piece in the Miami Herald on the ongoing popularity of Gladiator/Roman movies … along the way, they interview some Classicists:

From the biblical epics of the ’50s to the toga dramas of the ’60s through more recent hits such as “300,” “Gladiator,” “Braveheart” and TV series such as “Hercules,” “Xena: Warrior Princess,” “Rome” and I, Claudius,” it seems there is always an audience out there that is as equally entranced by the ancient world as the modern – even if the genre is often dismissed as sword-and-sandal or toga trash.

[…]

No one knows that better than those who teach the classics for a living. They understand why some view movies/TV shows about the eras with which they are fascinated with a jaundiced eye.

“That’s a legacy of the ’50s, those great Roman biblical epics that were so serious. … but there were fake beards and visible smallpox vaccinations,” says Matthew Brosamer, an associate professor of English at Los Angeles’ Mount St. Mary’s College, who specializes in the literature of Roman, Middle Ages and Renaissance eras. “Literate moviegoers didn’t respect them.”

Richard Armstrong, associate professor of classical studies at the University of Houston who has taught a course on how Rome is perceived in cinema called “Epic Masculinity,” says in an e-mail response that the accents also get in the way. “Part of it is that we have these odd conventions that the Romans had British accents, while all the Christians sound like they’re from Kansas.”

(Actually, in “The Eagle,” Scottish director Kevin Macdonald flipped the script and wanted American actors to portray Romans and British actors to play their slaves and occupied peoples. “He wanted to make a bit of a political statement,” Tatum says.)

Of course, there’s the undercurrent of homo-eroticism which was most famously lampooned in “Airplane!” with the line from the late Peter Graves: “Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”

Not to mention sex in general which, in Hollywood’s eyes, Romans seemed to be having all the time with anyone, anywhere.

Armstrong thinks that Starz’ “Spartacus” series is aping the worst aspects of “Caligula,” the 1979 Roman Empire-era film produced by Penthouse magazine’s Bob Guccione that was derided at the time for being pornographic.

“‘Spartacus’ aspires to that level of transgression,” says Armstrong. “I think the constant juxtaposition of sex and utter brutality oversimplifies whatever it wants to say about the ancient world, and reflects more the worlds of cage fighting and the Playboy Channel than Rome, or Capua where it’s actually set. … Pretty boring unless you’ve never seen naked people before.”

That sense that the ancient world strutted to a different moral drummer is why some think that so many are intrigued by that time period. We can live vicariously through these characters and accept behavior from heroes and villains that we would be repulsed by if set in the contemporary world.

“Why can we be titillated by sexual situations involving Roman slaves but would perhaps object to modern pornography about sex slaves? Putting those actions among those ‘decadent Romans’ lets us turn our fantasies to 11 while displacing all, or almost all, the guilt,” sums up Ricardo Apostol, assistant professor of classics at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University in an e-mail. He teaches a course called “Sword and Sandal: The Classics in Film.”

“Some people can consume it that way, as straight ‘awesome.’ Others, needing a little more distance, ironize it into a guilty pleasure or camp,” he continues. “But it all comes down to the same thing, and our projections onto the Romans say a whole lot more about us than they ever could about them.”

Yet, for all of that, they feel there is also an upside to all this Hollywood revisionism. “The best of the genre, as in the case of HBO’s ‘Rome,’ can help give a sense of the texture of ancient life – not so much the ‘facts,'” says Armstrong.

Sums up Apostol, “Spectacles like these not only get students in the door, they offer ready starting points for discussions. … And, for students, it’s much more exciting and rewarding to hear that, no, Spartacus was not fighting against the institution of slavery, than it ever could be to hear random facts about a bunch of dead people that they never heard about. … I can only say to Hollywood: Keep ’em coming.”

• Gladiator-epic fans give genre a fighting chance – Movies Wires – MiamiHerald.com.

I’ve always found it strange that the powers-that-be in those universities who decide to shut down Classics departments don’t realize the butts-in-seats side of things … it’s not like there is ever a long period without this sort of movie …

This is kind of interesting, and I might have to track this book down … from an interview in Newsweek with Tom Payne about his book Fame, inter alia:

You bring up the theme of sacrifice—for example, you link Britney Spears’s meltdown with the ritual killing of Iphigenia, who, legend has it, was sacrificed so that Greek ships could sail to Troy, and who became famous because of it. Do we tear down or sacrifice celebrities to satisfy a very primal human need?

One of the most harrowing things I’ve found is the idea that when we make a sacrifice, or when the ancients made sacrifices, it was very important to them that the offering was seen to be willing. And I think it’s very helpful for us, when we think about celebrities, that while they may be going through a horrible time, they also seem to have chosen that life.

and later:

Although you do talk about how there’s a gender difference in the fame game. Lindsay Lohan—she’s basically living this Rolling Stones–type life, but yet we think of Mick Jagger as a rock god, and we think of her as someone on the verge of a meltdown.

Yeah. I’d like to come to a different conclusion, but there does seem to be something very ancient about that as well. It does seem, when you go back to tragedies, when you look at Iphigenia, or you look at other sacrifices, it does seem to be that there’s something particular about the sacrifice of a young woman.

• via Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Madonna: History and Fame – Newsweek.

Mentioned this on facebook last week … forgot to post it here. Here’s the incipit:

Even though Homer’s Iliad was written approximately three thousand years ago, the character of Achilles is still alive and well. He is forty one years old, lives in Mississippi, and spends his autumns and winters in Minnesota. Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre is the modern-day embodiment of the legendary warrior Achilles.

The first and most obvious trait that the two legends share is that both men are primadonnas whose narcissistic tendencies can become a major annoyance and nearly impossible to deal with. In the case of Favre, he did not want to attend the Vikings’ training camp, and so he simply refused to join the Vikings in 2009, saying he would remain retired from the New York Jets. Midway through camp, Favre had an unsurprising change of heart and decided to play again, for the Vikings. After this decision was made, reports swirled that part of the reason Favre was so unwilling to join the Vikings because he did not want to share a room with any of his teammates. This selfishness is a direct parallel of the character of Achilles.

In Book I of the Iliad, the Greek warriors take two Trojan women, Chryseis and Briseis, to be their concubines, and it turns out that the Greeks’ leader Agamemnon chose Chryseis to be his, but she is the daughter of a priest named Chrysus, who summons the help of the gods to get his daughter back. A plague hits the Greek camp, and Agamemnon gives Chryseis back, but insists on taking Briseis, the woman who Achilles had claimed as his own. This infuriates Achilles, who then stays in his tent and refuses to participate in the war. [more …]

• via Brett Favre and Achilles: Legends Never Die | xtrapoint football.