Over the many centuries since the Greek philosopher Plato committed it to writing, the story of Atlantis, the city destroyed by Poseidon, god of the sea, has captured people's imagination. From the treatises of renowned thinkers to the jingoistic discourses of nation states to the explorations of adventure archaeologists, two questions in particular recur: did Atlantis exist, and where was it? On 2 June 2010, ‘Atlantis: The Evidence’ (henceforth ‘Atlantis’), an episode of the BBC2 historical documentary Timewatch series, set out to investigate. As the title suggests, the aim was to gather and evaluate clues: these were to reveal that the Platonic myth referred to the Bronze Age town of Thera, which was destroyed during a massive volcanic eruption towards the end of the second millennium BC. This theory was hardly new. However, in the use of digital technology in the assemblage and display of evidence, ‘Atlantis’ built a distinctive account of Atlantis- Thera before, during and after the eruption. In this, the programme conformed to the emerging digital aesthetics of historical documentaries on television. However, the scale and diversity of digital tools used for visualisation make ‘Atlantis’ an illuminating case study not only for the treatment of an ancient Greek myth on British television, but for the impact of digital technologies in the documentary genre.

Across the creative industries, digital tools have become ubiquitous in the production of audiovisual images, especially through CGI, by which means environments and their inhabitants – and therefore historical places and people – can be produced. At the same time, academics today use digital technologies to visualise places distant in time and space via interactive mapping, 3D models and prototypes: techniques that are frequently described as ‘cyber-archaeology’. In both cases, digital tools offer new opportunities for representing the past, mimetically and schematically. The application may be for entertainment or for education, or both, but always the result is constructive of the past. So, for example, video games are increasingly analysed as forms of (hi)storytelling, by which players navigate landscapes and engage with narratives that immerse them in, and thereby develop a sense of, the past.

In the Greek popular imagination, vengeance was enacted by mighty heroes such as Achilles killing his enemy Hector in revenge for the death of Patroclus (Il. 22.271–2; Aeschines 1.145), by enraged husbands such as Odysseus slaughtering the suitors trying to seduce his wife (Od. 22.61–4), or by noble sons such as Orestes avenging the murder of his father (Od. 1.296–302; 3.193–200). Classical Athenians depicted themselves emulating these heroes in attempting revenge through the law courts (e.g. Antiphon 1). These examples demonstrate that a variety of methods were thought to be available to men to achieve vengeance, including the use of superior physical force, of disguises and trickery, and of the institutions of the state. Women, though, were more limited in their options. While literary evidence suggests that women, such as Hecuba (Il. 24.194–216), were closely associated with bloodthirstiness and a desire for revenge, they were generally deemed too weak to kill a grown man on their own using physical force. Even those women who reached the highest positions in the social hierarchy in places other than Athens are generally represented as too weak to act against men without the aid of other men: their power is restricted to the power of speech by which they can incite, persuade or deceive. Women who wish to achieve revenge are usually shown soliciting help from others, especially male kin, to achieve their ends. Alternatively, women were thought capable of prevailing if they employed deception, used poison or set a trap. Women are also depicted using curses in an attempt to achieve revenge. In Athens, women's powers to achieve legal revenge were very limited as they could not take cases to court themselves, but had to persuade men to act for them.

In this chapter, I explore the potential for women to achieve revenge through the use of another speech mode: gossip. In the first part of the chapter, I examine how gossip is depicted in Greek literature, with a particular focus on Attic oratory. Members of society, regardless of gender or status are able to hear and pass on gossip, and despite its lack of reliability, its strength is such that unsubstantiated rumours are sufficient to discredit or destroy the person involved.

On Saturday 21 July 1990, at 8.45pm, BBC2 screened Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis as the last in the fifth season of the anthology drama series ‘Theatre Night’. Immediately after the ‘TWO’ logo faded, a pillar of yellow flame flickered up the centre of the black screen, a gong sounded and the words ‘The War Plays of Euripides’ appeared in white font over the flame. That plural is the only thing remaining in the televisual record to indicate that director-translator Don Taylor had wanted Iphigenia to stand as the first in a series of three televised Euripidean plays (with The Women of Troy and Helen), standing as a parallel to his earlier production of three Sophoclean plays: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. These three had been broadcast as a stand-alone series under the title The Theban Plays over three nights of a single week in 1986. But the parallel ‘trilogy’ was never to be completed. Far from being a beginning, Iphigenia would turn out to be the last ‘Theatre Night’ (there was no sixth season), the last time Taylor worked for television, and the last British television broadcast of a production of Greek tragedy for almost twenty-five years.

Despite this irony, Taylor's Iphigenia made him the most prolific director of Greek tragedy on British television (with a total of four plays), and the only one to tackle the genre more than once; his wish to direct a second trilogy on television reflects his firm belief that the medium was ‘merely the latest extension of a dramatic tradition that reached more or less unbroken back to Aeschylus’. His significance for Classicists interested in the twentieth-century reception and dissemination of Greek tragedy is assured. His significance in the broader history of British television drama has been identified as lying in his eloquent protest against mainstream developments in the field: he represents a range of people and approaches ultimately left behind by those developments. Although most of his television oeuvre in fact consisted of material written for the medium, his productions of Greek tragedy can be seen as exemplary of his determination to make what he considered quality drama available to a mass audience, whatever their origins.

The Trojan Hecuba, widow of Priam, enters Hamlet – Shakespeare's second revenge tragedy – in the player's rendition of Aeneas’ speech to Dido. After Pirrhus’ bleeding sword has fallen on Priam, Hecuba, her body, we are told, worn out with childbearing, covered only by a blanket, is distracted with fear and grief at her loss, milking tears from the burning eyes of heaven. The player performs with tears in his eyes and, according to Polonius, manages to ‘turn’ his own colour to match his performance. The evocation of Hecuba's emotion is too much for Polonius and he asks for ‘no more’. Hamlet too is deeply affected and in his ensuing soliloquy he muses on the performance he has witnessed:

Hecuba is here the paradigm of the grieving, lamenting woman evoking pity in the actor who recounts her story and in the audience. It is a role that Hecuba assumes in Euripides’ tragedy as she asks Agamemnon to pity her, to look at her as at a picture, studying her sufferings, ‘homeless, forlorn, of all mankind most wretched’ (E. Hec. 811). And it is as a figure of pity that Hecuba produces such empathy in player and audience. And, yet, as Hamlet remarks in a brilliantly compacted line, the player and Hecuba have no relationship: ‘What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?’ In this chiasmus there is an implicit contrast between a fictive and an actual cause for grief, the player's and Hamlet’s. The submerged contrast emerges in the strange ‘he to Hecuba’ with its suggestion of a deeply personal, familial, relation. What is significant here is the choice of Hecuba as a figure to embody the power of fiction to move actor and audience alike, offering, as Tanya Pollard has stated, ‘a distinctive model of tragic impact, one that shadows, complements, and competes with that produced by men’.

This chapter addresses the 1979 television series The Serpent Son. This was an adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, his 458 bc depiction of the return of Agamemnon from the Trojan War and his murder by his wife Klytemnestra (in the first play, Agamemnon), the subsequent return of his exiled son Orestes, who together with his sister Electra kills his mother and her lover Aegisthus in revenge (in the second play, Choephoroi), and Orestes’ pursuit by the Furies, spirits of vengeance, and his subsequent trial and acquittal under the auspices of the goddess Athena (in the third play, Eumenides).

The Serpent Son was made by BBC Television. It comprised three episodes, each matching the three original plays: ‘Agamemnon’, ‘Grave Gifts’ (a variation on the ‘jug-bearers’ of the Greek title, Choephoroi) and ‘Furies’ (the avenging forces who become the more beneficial ‘good spirits’ of the Eumenides). The BBC had a strong tradition of radio productions of the Oresteia, perhaps most famously in a 1956 production of a translation by Philip Vellacott which was published later the same year by Penguin Classics.

A ‘MODERN TELEVISION VERSION’

The script for The Serpent Son was ‘translated and adapted’ by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish, according to the front page of the camera scripts. McLeish had studied Classics at Oxford, whilst Raphael had taken the same subject at Cambridge, and so they both knew Greek. The text is a translation made by the authors, working from Denys Page's Oxford Classical Text, and then modified for stage performance, rather than being an adaptation based on other English translations (as is the case, for example, with Seamus Heaney's version of Sophocles’ Antigone, titled The Burial at Thebes). Raphael and McLeish had originally been commissioned to do the translation in 1976, having approached the BBC with a project that had emerged out of conversations with their friend Michael Ayrton. Subsequently, the commission was changed to Agamemnon alone, plus Euripides’ Medea and Sophocles’ Antigone, before reverting to the original idea of the Oresteia.

INTRODUCTION

The unexplained disappearance of the Ninth Roman Legion somewhere in Britannia, probably during the reign of the emperor Hadrian, has offered recent filmmakers the opportunity to explore Roman imperialism at a distance from the capital and the corruption that frequently colors the city of Rome in literary and cinematic discourses. The depiction of soldiers far from Rome, under duress, and under attack from native forces using guerilla tactics allows filmmakers to comment on the perils of modern imperialist ventures, especially Bush-era intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. From such depictions emerges a composite portrait of the Roman legionary soldier who participates in the imperialist project, but experiences first hand the casualties of that project, and who reluctantly defers to bureaucrats who never deign to get their own boots on the ground. In this chapter, I focus on one element of that composite, Centurion Quintus Dias in Neil Marshall's film Centurion (2010), and demonstrate how his character departs from traditional representations of Roman military virtue. I argue that this departure prompts a reassessment of the epic film genre, as well as the nationalist values the genre frequently underwrites.

In order to demonstrate just how Quintus diverges from other soldier-heroes who contribute to the composite observed above, we should initially contrast the near contemporaneous release of The Eagle (2011), based on Rosemary Sutcliff's novel The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), which covers historical ground similar to that explored in Centurion. The Eagle offers viewers a vulnerable but brave Channing Tatum as Marcus Flavius Aquila, who hopes to restore the honor lost by his father, who had led the Ninth Legion on its disastrous final expedition. Marcus’ resistance to and disdain for the Roman administrators hoping to secure the borders of Britain from a safe distance is duly noted, particularly in a scene where the hero criticizes the inexperienced “silk-assed politician's son” for making ill-informed pronouncements on the fate of the Ninth. Still, the film's overall endorsement of Roman military values remains largely unshaken, as Marcus successfully recovers the standard of the Ninth, and returns it to at least nominally appreciative Roman senators. Marshall's Centurion takes a similar soldier’s-eye view of the mystery of the Ninth Legion, but ultimately disavows traditional constructions of military heroism, leaving its titular hero without an army or nation.

Females have been routinely associated in the Western tradition with vindictive emotions and vengeful crimes. Colourful examples of the stereotypical vengeful female can be identified all the way from Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, whose spectre wakens the chorus of foul Erinyes (Latin Furies) to avenge her murder in Eumenides, to Alex Forrest in Adrian Lyne's dismally sexist 1987 revenge movie Fatal Attraction and beyond. This essay explores the role played in this triumphant feat of patriarchal ideology by the identity, gender and role of the Erinys.

One stalwart of the Renaissance tragic stage was the vengeful female – and especially the retaliatory mother – and she was fundamentally informed by the classical models, especially Clytemnestra and Medea. Tamora in the late sixteenth-century Shakespearean Titus Andronicus actually dresses up to accost her enemy, Titus, in the costume of ‘the dread Fury’ (5.2.82), called also ‘Revenge, sent forth from th’ infernal kingdom’ (5.2.30). Or remember Tamyra's terrifying speech in George Chapman's The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois of 1613, ‘Revenge, that ever red sitt’st in the eyes / Of injured ladies, till we crown thy brows / With bloody laurel, and receive from thee / Justice for all our honour's injury’ (1.2.1–4). Few invectives have gone so far as the nineteenth-century Swiss-French satirical poet Jean-Antoine Petit-Sens who was believed to have said that an angry woman is vindictive beyond measure, and hesitates at nothing in her bitterness, but many would recognise the sentiments expressed in Rudyard Kipling's famous lines from ‘The female of the species’ (1911), ‘But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other's tale / The female of the species is more deadly than the male’ (15–16).

She-avengers lurk in diverse genres and media at all levels of culture, cumulatively affirming the ideological shibboleth that women are especially vengeful. The subtitle of an anonymous novella purporting to recount a true story, published in London in 1732 as The Perjur’d Citizen, is simply Female Revenge. It is a lurid account of the psychological subjectivity of a slighted woman, a figure ‘actuated by a Fury’. Matilda is spoilt, rich, and outraged when her fiancé Calamus absconds. He prefers a (much nicer) bride called Lucy. Matilda is now ‘ready to burst with Rage and Envy; a thousand different strategems ran thro’ her Mind, to poison the Felicity of this happy Pair’.

At a climactic moment in Laxdala saga, one of the most popular of the sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur), the hero Kjartan Óláfsson challenges his beloved foster-brother and cousin Bolli .orleiksson to decide whether or not to attempt to kill him in vengeance. The moment is the culmination of a feud that has developed between the kinsmen after Bolli steals Kjartan's lover Gu.rún Ósvífrsdóttir from him. Following a series of increasingly humiliating slights, the two men finally stand before each other:

The choreography of Bolli's act dramatically illustrates how the necessity for vengeance conflicts with homosocial bonds in the saga. Though Kjartan initially encourages Bolli to enter the fight (while addressing him as frændi, ‘kinsman’), he throws down his weapon as soon as he turns on him. Bolli, for his part, strikes Kjartan's deathblow before immediately sweeping him up, possibly in a single movement, so that his determination to kill his cousin and the love that he demonstrates by holding him as he dies appear almost concurrent. Bolli's oscillation makes visible the scene's central dilemma: whether it is a greater níðingsverk (deed of a shameful man) for a man to restore his manhood by killing his kinsman or to forbear vengeance for the sake of their kinship while enduring tarnished masculinity. In throwing down his weapons, Kjartan chooses forbearance at the risk of emasculation, while Bolli chooses the restitution of manliness at the cost of kin slaying.

This chapter explores two television programmes, Ulysses 31 and Odysseus: The Greatest Hero of Them All (hereafter Odysseus), for the ways that each retells the myths about Odysseus, with their origins in Homer, for a television audience of children in the 1980s. These two television series merit discussion because they offer individual responses to the myths that were contemporary with one another and aimed directly at children. Ulysses 31 was a Franco-Japanese production and animation, while Odysseus was a live-action, story-to-camera BBC production. Both programmes were initially transmitted in the UK (1985–6) as part of the BBC's newly created Children's BBC on BBC1, and each reconfigured the hero Odysseus and his myths by drawing on different aspects of 1970s and 1980s film and television culture in order to contemporise the classical material. The chapter shows how this was achieved through a combination of innovative storytelling techniques and creative use of the mode of television and televisual animation coupled with a detailed knowledge of the myths of Odysseus. Moreover, these two programmes provide contemporary examples of localised (British) and international (Franco- Japanese) production contexts so that it is possible to compare how these local and international contexts shaped the format and creativity of each programme. Ultimately this study highlights the way that Ulysses 31 drew on popular film culture and Japanese techniques in animation, framing Odysseus’ heroism via cinematic appeal in order to make the stories of Odysseus resonate with new audiences, whereas Odysseus adapted the BBC's Jackanory story-to-camera format and so constructed an anglified Odysseus that contemporised the character and his setting for British audiences of the 1980s while still evoking the wit and wiles of the Homeric Odysseus.

For viewers in the UK both programmes were seen within the same transmission context when they first aired on Children's BBC, 1985–6. Therefore, although the genre and mode of production are points of divergence between the two programmes, they do share a context of transmission at the very start of the BBC's new programming format, Children's BBC, created by Pat Hubbard, Head of Presentation at the BBC in 1985.

Hercules films and television programs have proliferated in three clusters of concentrated production and wide popularity. The first consists primarily of the European “ancients” produced between 1958 and 1965; the second of the 1990s television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, its spinoffs, and the Disney film (1997); and the third of the recent 2014 Hercules products that have been offered in the new millennium. Classical reception studies focusing on the modern era often require the preliminary steps of identifying, collecting, and surveying the corpus to be investigated. This is certainly true for the filmed Hercules corpus studied here, so the relatively limited critical and scholarly analysis that has already been published will be relegated to the scholarly citations, while the purpose here is to survey the corpus, the origins of each cluster, their chronological span, media types, and plot range. In this instance, in assembling the Hercules corpus of the past sixty years, we will see the various characterizations of the ancient hero. Also a significant by-product will be the observation that the mythological figure Hercules has generated an extraordinarily large and varied number of filmed products that differentiates him from other successfully dramatized legendary figures.

CLUSTER ONE

The first cluster begins with Italian producer Federico Teti, who in 1957 invited a 1950s Mr. Universe, Steve Reeves, to play the role in Galatea Film's Le fatiche di Ercole, directed by Pietro Francisci, a film that claimed to have adapted Apollonius’ Argonautica but focused more on physical, political, and romantic labors for Hercules. The film might have languished in Italy, but Joseph E. Levine, as he told Variety, refurbished it for American audiences and spent enormous sums of money on promotion.

In William Adolphe Bouguereau's Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1862) (Figure I.1), Orestes turns away from his mother, Clytemnestra, whom he has killed to avenge the murder of his father, Agamemnon. Horrified rather than triumphant, Orestes is pursued by the Erinyes, or Furies, the three snaky-haired chthonic deities responsible for punishing blood crimes. Bouguereau's Clytemnestra – draped in red fabric, more swooning than dying – is utterly unlike the ferocious, ‘man-minded’ woman portrayed by Aeschylus (ἀνδρόβουƛος, Ag. 11), whose first thought on discovering that Orestes has returned is to defend herself with an axe (Cho. 889). Her graceful, relatively bloodless death contrasts also with the queasy intimacy created in the corresponding scene of Euripides’ Electra, in which Clytemnestra clings to her son, begging for mercy (1214–17) and showing him her breast (1207); in this version, Orestes describes how he hesitates, eventually covering his eyes with his cloak before slitting her throat (1221–3), as ‘the legs which [he] was born through’ (lit. her fruitful limbs - γόνιμα μέƛϵα, 1209) bend beneath her. Instead, Bouguereau romanticises and domesticates Clytemnestra, contrasting her pathetic figure with the ferocious energy of the Furies, a juxtaposition that recalls Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz's claim that female characters in Greek tragedy are represented as either sacrificial or vengeful.

This scene, and its many renditions and reinterpretations, expose some of the stereotypes and contradictions inherent in the complex interrelationship of revenge and gender. As in the case of Orestes, revenge is frequently depicted as a man's job: women incite and men act, performing the killings that establish their masculinity and protect their honour. Yet, while conceptualised as a quintessential masculine activity, revenge simultaneously unleashes the female Furies and the violent, ‘feminine’ emotions which threaten a man's reason and self-control. Hunted by the ‘hounds of his mother's hate’ (μητρὸς ἔγκοτοι κύνϵς, Aesch. Cho. 1054, cf. 924), Orestes is driven to near madness by their pursuit, his manliness undone by the same act that establishes it. Women, of course, also take revenge, as when Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon to requite the sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. However, scholars are divided as to whether female avengers should be interpreted as honorary men, heroes in their own right, monstrous inversions of gender norms, or conduits through which male subjectivity is formed.