Screening Topographies of Classical Reception

In both the Aeneid and its contemporary descendant, the 2003-2009 television series Battlestar Galactica, a people uprooted from their homeland by a devastating war embarks upon a journey of exilic wandering in search of a prescribed home known only from prophecy and legend. Both narratives employ the space through which their exiled protagonists wander to reflect the experience of alienation generated by their sudden and irrevocable deracination.

The traditional material of ancient epic, honored more in the breach than in the observance, is kings and battles (to quote Vergil’s famous formulation at Eclogues 6.3, reges et proelia). (Hinds 2000 discusses the uses and abuses of this formula.) Screen epics set in the ancient world have applied this formula faithfully across a century of cinema, from Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), set during the Second Punic War, to Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), a retelling of the Moses story.

Federico Fellini’s commentary on his approach to Petronius’ Satyricon betrays a number of contradictions: scholars have observed his studied approach to the novel and its ancient cultural milieu (Solomon 2001; Sullivan 2001), as well as his claims to “disconcerting analogies” (Fellini 1970) between ancient Rome and twentieth-century Western society; such critics also repeat the director’s claims of a distanced approach to antiquity as a fundamentally unrecognizable past in which he has little or no emotional investment (cf. Paul 2009).

This paper will address the (re)creation of “third places” such as streets, markets, latrines, and bars in the depiction of ancient Rome in film and television in the last two decades. “Third places” is a term established by sociologist Ray Oldenburg (1989) to describe spaces that bring together people outside of home and work. The paper will examine these in-between spaces with an eye towards better understanding how onscreen space gets built and what are the subsequent effects on audiences.