Ben-Hur won eleven Academy Awards in 1959, a record it shared with Titanic and The Lord of the Return of the King for decades, and it is the film against which all subsequent Roman epics have been measured — usually unfavorably. William Wyler’s production was the most expensive film ever made at the time of its release, employed tens of thousands of extras, built the largest film set in history for the chariot race sequence, and ran for three hours and thirty-two minutes. It was also, by the standards of its genre, serious in ways that the epics of the preceding decade were not.

The 1963 Cleopatra directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz — or rather, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and then by Mankiewicz after Mamoulian was fired, with extensive interference from the studio and the cast throughout — cost approximately forty-four million dollars, which was enough to nearly bankrupt Twentieth Century Fox, take four years to complete, survive the death of one director, the illness and near-death of its star, and the most extensively documented off-set romance in Hollywood history. The resulting film runs for four hours and seventeen minutes in its complete version. It is simultaneously one of the most expensive disasters in studio history and a more interesting film than its reputation suggests.

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator arrived in 2000 and revived the sword-and-sandal epic as a commercially viable genre after a forty-year hiatus. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It made Russell Crowe a star. It sent tourism to Rome’s Colosseum surging. It also contained enough historical inaccuracy to sustain a small academic industry of correction, none of which has diminished its cultural influence by a measurable degree.

What Scott got right is worth acknowledging first, because the film’s defenders are not entirely wrong. The production design is serious in a way that the 1950s epics it superficially resembles were not. The texture of a Roman legionary camp — the tents, the equipment, the organizational density — reads as the work of people who had looked at the archaeological record. The Colosseum sequences capture something real about the theatrical staging of Roman spectacle: the trap doors, the dramatic entrances, the relationship between the crowd and the performance. The physical scale of the arena, the way it processes tens of thousands of people, the machinery beneath the floor — all of this is handled with a seriousness that rewards attention. And the relationship between Maximus and his soldiers in the opening battle sequence reflects genuine research into how Roman generals cultivated personal loyalty among their troops.

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 love is thwarted by a corrupt Roman senator, and the eruption of Vesuvius happens to provide the third act. The volcano is plot device rather than subject. This is a reasonable choice for a commercial action film built on a historical catastrophe; it is not the choice that a serious engagement with Pompeii’s destruction would have made.

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 and political dramas that constitute most of Hollywood’s Roman output. It is a frontier film, a journey narrative, set in Roman Britain and the territory beyond Hadrian’s Wall, and it is interested in questions that the arena films are not: what does it mean to serve an empire at its geographical and civilizational limits, and what does Rome look like from outside?

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 commercial failure that it effectively ended the sword-and-sandal epic as a Hollywood genre for a generation. It also happens to be a substantially better film than its reputation suggests, more historically serious than most of its contemporaries, and in certain respects a more honest engagement with the period it depicts than the celebrated Gladiator that covered similar ground thirty-six years later.