When I thought of Los Angeles, prior to my first trip there this summer, my mind would be flooded with images of the Kardashians, wellness influencers, and film stars. I had been brought up on a diet of reality TV that had painted this city as the quintessence of modern America.

The perceived modernity of LA seems to be connected with its perpetually sunny, Mediterranean climate. In the words of Eve Babitz, in this city ‘time is a trick since there are no winters. There are just earthquakes, parties and certain people’. Nothing moves forwards or backwards, so the past doesn’t seem to exist.

Yet, for a city often seen as ephemeral, constantly building and deconstructing film sets of other times and other places, there is woven into the landscape a surprisingly persistent fascination with the classical world. Indeed, LA’s sense of impermanence may explain why this city can’t resist the pull of the past, borrowing antiquity’s aura of endurance to make a sense of its own identity.

Nowhere is this impulse clearer than in the Getty Villa, perhaps the city’s most obvious ‘classical site’. This miraculous space, modelled on the Villa Papyri at Herculaneum from the first century BC, transports an incredibly kitsch version of Rome to the hills of Malibu. When it opened to the public in the 1970s, the Getty Villa was met with almost universal derision from academics, but loved by the public; it was a Disneyland of antiquity. Whatever one’s feelings about it, the more interesting question is why it exists at all.

Throughout its history, the United States has looked at antiquity, and Rome in particular, to root a relatively new nation in a more remote past. Why? As Maria Wyke notes, to give the US ‘cultural legitimacy in the eyes of Europe’. We see this most obviously in the US’ political structure; it has a senate, just like Rome, and also senators, and the motivation for this is obvious. During the founding of the US, the Roman republic was evoked as a precedent for a new government and country trying to establish itself.

For a city often associated with the ephemeral, then, there is a strong argument that the Getty Villa exists for the same reason: to give the city ‘cultural legitimacy’ in the absence of authentic ruins that might connect it to the past. The site was always conceived to be a spectacle. However, following the death of its owner, the Getty Villa has slowly expanded to house genuine fragments from archaeological sites; the motivation, Paul Goldberger wrote for the New Yorker in 2006, was to ‘give its strange building a chance to be taken seriously’. It is possible to detect in such an obvious attempt to impose the Roman world on the Malibu landscape, then, a desire to cement LA’s status as a cultural capital, one rooted in a certain ideal of western civilisation.

Classical architecture can be found not only in Malibu, but scattered throughout LA. Houses with great white columns resembling ancient temples have long served as America’s architectural shorthand for status and pedigree. Cher Horowitz’ mansion in 1995’s Clueless, and Jeff Bezos’ $165 million estate in LA both represent the use of the neoclassical style as a way for those to visually communicate their power and wealth in the city. Similarly, the Disney headquarters is overlooked by a Greek-style Temple, complete with 19-foot-high columns in the shape of the Seven Dwarfs. Here, in the most kitsch way possible, the classical style is used to attest to the imagination and power of the Disney brand. Repeatedly, then, we see classical architecture being appropriated by LA to help to make expressions about the city and its inhabitants.

Not only on the land but also on the screen, we find an attempt to use antiquity to shape American identity. The appeal of Rome for Hollywood is obvious; it lends itself naturally to narratives of decadence, sex, sprawling battle scenes, and impossibly beautiful bodies. This obsession with the perfect physique is something LA has directly inherited from antiquity. Just as the Greeks were obsessed with obtaining the beautiful body and gym culture, modern LA also pursues the perfected body in its studios and gyms. Sword-and-sandal epics absorbed this fixation with gleaming torsos.

But beneath the camp surface lies a deeper attempt to use antiquity to express ideas about America. In the 20th century, when the swords-and-sandal phenomenon truly began, films set in Rome were largely used to dramatise the tension that existed between republic and empire, precisely the dilemma the US was facing in its rise to global dominance.

Spartacus (1960) is one such case. Released during the Cold War, the eponymous hero has often been seen by critics as a representation of freedom-loving America, fighting against his oppressors in the same way the States was fighting against Russia. At the same time, the author of the Spartacus novel, Howard Fast, was reported to have become interested in the story of Spartacus while incarcerated for his allegiance to the Communist Party; Spartacus can just as easily be seen as a prototype for those supporting Marxist ideals in America as he can be claimed as an allegory for America’s anti-Soviet struggle.

The film clearly has an interest, too, in American Civil Rights, through the character of Draba (played by Woody Strode), a black gladiator whose self-sacrifice inspires Spartacus’ rebellion. According to Wyke, ‘in locating the inspiration for revolt largely in the brave defiance of a black gladiator, Spartacus acknowledges the central role of black activists in the emerging protest movements which, in 1960, confronted Kennedy’s new administration’.

The capacity of swords-and-sandal epics to reflect and provoke questions about American identity has been a constant feature throughout the genre’s history. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor in the title role, is another, rather curious, case in point. Cleopatra, in her desire for world unity, is often seen as a reflection of the newly elected President Kennedy; a screenplay outline for Mankiewicz’s epic explicitly attributes to the director a description of the queen as an ‘early-day Kennedy’.

By the end of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, films like Gladiator or 300 began to suggest a critique of empire. Most recently, much of the discussion surrounding Gladiator II and its differences to the first Gladiator have focused on the ways in which the film’s treatment of empire, democracy and gender have been influenced by the post-9/11 and ‘MeToo’ worlds. What has remained constant is the use of Rome as a vehicle for thinking about America itself.

Through the Getty Villa and the Hollywood sword-and-sandal epics we can trace a surprising attempt by a city so closely associated with modernity and the future to use ancient history to make a sense of itself. The ruins and the scripts might be fabricated, but behind them lies a very real attempt by LA to borrow from the classical past in order to see itself more clearly and stabilise its sense of identity.