Ancient Epic in Film and Television

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 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. Hunter Gardner is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature (OUP, 2019). She is co-editor of Nostos: Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures (Ohio State University Press, 2014), Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy (OUP, 2013).

Gardner and Potter have produced a fascinating collection of essays on epic screen productions that defines the epic genre outside its traditional parameters and covers a wide variety of shows across different decades from the 1980s to 2021.

• Introduction: The past and future of ancient epic – Amanda Potter and Hunter GardnerPart I: Surge and splendour: Ancient epic conventions on the silver screen1. Spatial projections in ancient and screen epic: A view with (a) room – Dan Curley2. Allusions to Homeric epic in contemporary films, 1984-2019 – Jon Solomon3. “Mighty saga of the world’s mightiest man”: Is there such a thing as a modern Hercules epic? – Emma Stafford4. Vergilian echoes of horror in Snowpiercer (2013): Engine and empire without end – Jennifer Rea5. A Roman Epic in Modern Japan Screening Rome as Empire Nostalgia in Takeuchi Hideki’s Thermae Romae (2012) – Monica Cyrino6. Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Helen of Troy and the Trojan Horse – Kirsten DayPart. II: From gold to platinum: Epic conventions on the small screen7. 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 Magerstädt8. Travels with Odysseus and the Odyssey in twenty-first-century television documentaries – Fiona Hobden9. Many (un) happy Returns in HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011 – 2019) – Hunter Gardner10. The Performance of War: Battle as Spectacle in the Iliad and Into the Badlands (2015 – 2019) – Jo Wynell-Mayow11. Homeric Intimacy in NBC’s Hannibal (2013 – 2015) – Lyn Kozak12. The gods in epic television: The Homeric cosmos in Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) – Meredith Safran13. 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 PotterAfterword – Joanna Paul