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Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted marble better than anyone who has ever lived. The cool translucence of Pentelic and Carrara stone, the way light passes through alabaster, the specific warmth of Cipollino against the blue of the Mediterranean sky — these qualities are rendered in his …
Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii is not a film about the eruption of Vesuvius. It is a film about a slave-turned-gladiator and a merchant’s daughter whose …
Rome has been a film subject since the beginning of cinema, and the relationship between Hollywood’s Rome and the historical record is complicated in …
There is a specific category of object that exists in every tourist market in the world: the miniature Eiffel Tower, made in China, sold in Paris, …
Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, based on Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth, occupies a different register from the gladiatorial epics …
Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire was released in 1964, ran for nearly three hours, cost twenty million dollars, and was such a catastrophic …
Popular history is a machine for producing confident errors, and Rome is one of its most productive subjects. The combination of genuine drama, …