Introduction

Abstract

The myths of classical antiquity—the vast period during which first the Greeks and then the Romans set the political and cultural course for the Mediterranean region and beyond—have fueled the cinematic imagination almost since the inception of film as an art form, as early as 1911 with Giovanni Pastrone’s silent film La Caduta di Troia.¹ Yet to authorize his cinematic version of the Trojan War in Troy (2004), screenwriter David Benioff (now well known as the co-creator of HBO’s Game of Thrones) turned specifically to Homer’s Iliad, as the title card before the film’s action proclaims.² Even in this televisual age, when screens are fertile ground for myths and myth-making, narrative authority still resides in canonized literary and visual texts that have been fixed in a transmittable form: from Homer’s Iliad and Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Sandro Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus (1486) and Antonio Canovas marble sculpture Perseus with the Head of Medusa (ca. 1800). Such canons constitute the cultural patrimony of the Western tradition, having long since become the measure by which cultural literacy is defined—at least by institutional gatekeepers who continue to exercise enormous influence over the preservation of cultural artifacts and the validation of individuals’ social status.