Nos Spectaturi Te Salutamus

On a recent Monday, I found myself down at the Commonwealth Club for a talk, "The Ancient Roman World on Film" presented by the Humanities Forum. Dr. Gary Devore from Stanford was the speaker. He spoke about the way directors manipulated the image of cinematic Romans to present them as Us, Them, Both, and Neither. The Romans were Them in The Sign of the Cross (1932), a bland Victorian pseudo-historical piece spiced up and sexed up as only Cecil B. deMille could do. Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) presented a remarkably pro-Communist message for its day, while being aggressively pro-family. Allegiance to a cause and its leader spans the political spectrum. In Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire, which Devore described as the "thinking man's epic" in contrast to Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), the Romans are both Us and Them, and serve as a warning to our era. Fellini's Satyricon (1969) absolutely rejects the possibility of identifying with the ancient Romans; Satyricon is a reaction to Fascist use of Roman symbols and the Mussolini-penned Roman epic Scipione l'Africano.