A Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen by Arthur J. Pomeroy

Author:Arthur J. Pomeroy
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781118741443
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2017-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

Rossi and Greek and Roman Film Studies

The three miniseries discussed offer a substantial body of work for further exploration: at eighteen hours in total, they provide nearly as much material as the two seasons of BBC–HBO Rome. The use of anthropological themes as part of the landscape of Eneide calls for a study in its own right. For instance, after Aeneas has undergone his katabasis, Misenus is found dead, clutching a branch in his hand, as if fallen from a tree. The myth of the Golden Bough is thus transferred to the sacrificial victim, with Misenus recalling Odysseus’s crewman Elpenor, who greets his leader in the Underworld. At the same time, the arrival of the Trojans is portrayed as the influx of Iron Age peoples into a Bronze Age environment, most vividly when Aeneas’s sword cuts through Turnus’s bronze weapon on their first meeting (a scene that is not in the Aeneid). The tone is not of fascist imperialism, but rather an elegiac recall of the end of the age of heroes. Similarly, the depiction of Rome as a repressive society, where the city prefect Pedanius possesses files on dissidents and Tigellinus controls a repressive military force above the regular army, is a modernist reading that is absent from Sienkiewicz’s novel. While parallels have been drawn by Scodel and Bettenworth with the Holocaust and the German Generals’ Plot, more relevant for Rossi and his contemporaries would have been the situation in Italy under German occupation after Mussolini’s removal from power in 1943. The passive resistance of the Christian children together with the self‐sacrifice of Epicharis, a woman on the edge of society, recalls Rosellini’s Rome: Open City and its idealized depiction of a union of Marxists and Catholics against repression. That there are no scenes of chariots racing (the exception where Nero is shown practicing is deliberately uninvolving), a staple of “epic” versions of the novel since 1912 which has lent itself to parody in the Coen brothers’ Hail Caesar! (2016), is just one indicator of the desire to avoid typical film clichés (pace Scarrone 1985), as is the unusual absence of sex (represented only by Nero’s unsettling rape of Epicharis) or gratuitous violence. Violence there is, but the crucifixions of slaves, the mangling of Christians by lions (as Petronius notes in disgust, not a spectacle, but a carnival), and the burning of humans alive is not there for audience titillation.

At one time a typical response to the adaptation of texts on screen was to discuss the extent to which these versions are “faithful” to their sources or “authentic.” One Italian reviewer at the time of the original television screening lamented that the Eneide project would merely allow the viewers to avoid reading the original text. Such responses are, of course, versions of the theme that translation is a form of betrayal (traduttore traditore), a moralizing protection of property by suggesting that transfer is a violation of the rights of the original owner (or perhaps their heirs in a much later age).

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