My first encounter with a film about the Ancient World was Pietro Francisci’s Hercules Unchained (1957), loosely ‘based on’ Sophocles’s swansong play Oedipus at Colonus. American bodybuilder Steve Reeves in the title role epitomised the 1950s love affair with sword-and-sandals movies, typically Roman rather than Greek, despite this one being set in ancient Thebes and Lydia (although it was filmed in Rome). I was a lad of 10 when I watched it and yet it has stuck with me, almost 70 years later.

Sometimes films are not just escapism – but real-world news of the day. One such was Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963), memorable chiefly for the offscreen love affair of Elizabeth Taylor (playing Cleo) with Richard Burton (Antony). It was shot at Cinecittà, Rome, for a then record-busting one million-plus dollars. Would that the quality of the film had matched its cost, but as it was a box-office flop, it put paid to ‘ancient world’ movies for more than a generation. Fans of the genre could at least console themselves with Jason and the Argonauts (1963), the ultimate ‘quest’ film – or will that title be grabbed in 2026 by Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey? It is memorable partly for its plot (spoiler alert: it’s not original) and for its acting, with Honor Blackman as Hera, but especially for cinematographer extraordinaire Ray Harryhausen’s special effects – animation and stop-motion.

I had started learning Latin at eight, ancient Greek at 11. By the age of 14, I was a fully-fledged Classicist, aiming to study that subject at university. My well-meaning father, a bank employee innocent of any classical learning, thought that a visit to our local cinema in Putney, southwest London, to view The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) would be just the thing to advance my studies at the difficult age of 17. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Roman Empire even in the West did not actually ‘fall’ in the late second century AD (reign of Marcus Aurelius – father of Commodus, see below). In the event – I report with some shame – I derived rather more pleasure from watching Sophia Loren as Lucilla, daughter of Marcus Aurelius and sister of Commodus, than instruction by the movie’s (nonexistent) historical authenticity. It seems extraordinary that director Anthony Mann was ‘inspired’ by a reading of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (2026 is the 250th anniversary of the publication of that masterwork’s first volume).

It also seems a little implausible that The Fall of the Roman Empire should have been the backdrop to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000). Again, this is a history-lite, indeed historically near-impossible, conceit. The eponymous gladiator is one Maximus (‘The Greatest’), an invented character whom even Emperor Commodus sees fit to take on in the Colosseum amphitheatre. Yes, the real Commodus did take part in staged gladiatorial ‘contests’, but theatre is more the word for those. The film is nevertheless memorable for its battle and individual-combat scenes and its background music score (Hans Zimmer). It understandably polled no. 2 in the 2025 BBC poll of ‘best’ history films. As saliently here, it restored the reputation of ‘ancient world’ films as box office material. But did that entirely justify Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy or Oliver Stone’s Alexander? That’s a rhetorical question.

The silver screen is one thing, the small screen quite another. In my early twenties, when there was little choice in terms of channels on British TV, I, like hordes of my contemporaries, was glued to Up, Pompeii (1969-70). Comic actor Frankie Howerd’s enslaved Lurcio steals every episode – harking back to the Roman ‘New Comedy’ of Plautus and (possibly formerly enslaved) Terence. Altogether in a different, tragic key was the series I, Claudius (1976), a 12-part adaptation by screenwriter Jack Pulman of poet and novelist Robert Graves’s prize-winning 1934 novel of that name together with his Claudius the God (1935). It was a smash-hit adaptation for the small screen. Derek Jacobi’s stuttering eponymous Clau-Clau-Claudius was just one of many standout portrayals of the simply awful members of the ghastly Julio-Claudian ruling Roman dynasty founded by Augustus (né C. Octavius). A lesson to us all – and especially to actual or would-be dictators everywhere and everywhen. Will they ever learn…

In a different register altogether are factual-historical documentaries, a genre associated in Britain with the names of Simon Schama and Bettany Hughes. Historian-journalist Michael Wood, now a Professor in Public History, set the bar high with his In the Footsteps of Alexander (BBC, 1998). Much of the world where Alexander – Alexander III, ‘the Great’ – led a campaign of often brutal conquest between 334 and 323 BC is now out of bounds to western journalists and documentarists. Thank Zeus therefore for Wood’s experiential documentary series, a homage to as well as on-foot exploration of the Macedonian’s unique passage from today’s Greece, through Turkey and the Middle East as far east as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

If I may be allowed a coda of self-congratulation, I declare an interest as historical consultant on the Atlantic Films-PBS production The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization (2000). The title perhaps still needs some work, but the visuals, inspired by director Cassian Harrison, were pioneering. Other claims to fame include a voice-over by Liam Neeson. I wrote the book of the series under the same title (BBC Books).

I declare another interest. Again I was the consultant on the (UK) Channel 4 series The Spartans (2002), and wrote the book, but the star of this and many another historical TV documentary is pioneer female documentary presenter Bettany Hughes.

To conclude, it would be remiss of me not to at least mention some more artful, experimental and even bizarre film versions of the classics. Perhaps fortunately, I have only read about the erotic-drama Caligula (1979): parental guide – sex & nudity, severe violence and gore. Malcolm McDowell in the title role is said to be brilliant – certainly, what was written about Roman Emperor ‘Little Boot’ lends itself to extreme impersonation.

Most experimental is Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, a romantic fantasy-tragedy. Only the names of some of the characters are ancient Greek. The – utterly contemporary – plot is Cocteau’s alone, redolent far more of 1940s Paris than of mythical ancient Greece.

Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s life was as violent as his art; he was abducted, tortured and murdered in Rome’s port of Ostia aged 53 in 1975. Not before he had directed a brilliant Medea (1969) based on the original by Athenian tragedian Euripides, but filmed not in Corinth but in – among many other locations – Aleppo, Syria. It starred US-born Greek operatic diva Maria Callas, her only movie role (though she sang Cherubini’s operatic version many times over many years).

In Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (after Petronius, a courtier of Emperor Nero whom historian Tacitus dubbed ‘arbiter of elegance’), also of 1969, stories are told within stories in an exceptionally complicated series of scenarios. Production design is of the highest quality. As always with Fellini, images remain in the mind’s-eye memory for long, sometimes for ever. Finally, Greek-Cypriot director Michael Cacoyannis’s Electra (1962) is simply one of the best-ever film versions of an ancient Greek play – this one again based on Euripides (not the more famous Sophocles version). Here, princess Electra of Mycenae is married off, willy-nilly, not to a husband of comparable social status but to a local peasant-farmer. That plot-twist to the accepted myth was probably Euripides’s own. The movie’s title-role was taken by Irene Papas, the ne plus ultra of tragic heroines on the boards as well as in the silver screen. She also starred in one of my favourite – non-classical – films, Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, his 1979 re-imagining of the 1945 memoir of impoverished pre-war life in the Italian Mezzogiorno by antifascist doctor, painter and writer Carlo Levi (played brilliantly by Gian Maria Volonté). O si sic omnes.