Librettists and composers began to create operas based on Greco-Roman myths in 1598, but operas based on ancient history did not appear until 1643, and Alexander operas not until 1651, when Sbarra’s Alessandro vincitor di se stesso and Cicognini’s Gli amori di Alessandro Magno, e di Rossane were produced. Source materials are problematic for identifying every received title accurately, but clearly the corpus of Alexander operas is large. Pagan divinities appeared in the earliest Alexander operas, particularly in prologues, but this was operatic convention, not because of Alexander’s divinity. Thereafter, Venetian operatic plot formulas often shaped Alexander’s characterisation, as did aristocratic patronage. But because the Alexander historians described so many types of episodes displaying a range of characterisations from magnanimous to vindictive, roles for the operatic Alexander varied widely, as did texts for individual productions. Metastasio’s Alessandro nell’Indie was the most frequently produced Alexander opera, enduring for nearly a century. But after the Napoleonic era production dwindled considerably.

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.

THE process of popularizing and commercializing ancient Greek music in the United States began in the 1870s, and by the late 1920s and 1930s, a number of publications as well as theatrical and radio performances had made a limited but credible impact on popular culture. What makes this process particularly interesting is that within the parameters of the history of Western music, ancient Greek music had until 1893 remained stubbornly arcane and widely misunderstood and misrepresented. That ultimately by the end of our period of study there were a number of public performances and commercial applications of ancient Greek music testifies to the powerful economic and commercial forces that accelerated during the latter third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth. But the recovery, study and publication of several ancient Greek musical texts had provided a new impetus for scholars to share their findings with fellow academics in both print and performance venues, and then the press found these to be inherently fascinating and continued to report developments to the public at large in national and local newspapers around the country, thereby helping to create the market for commercialization.

Because newspaper reports, announcements and reviews were so instrumental in creating and sustaining this small, unique market, the bulk of the data mined for this study required a search that would have been relatively difficult until a few years ago. The development of Proquest's digitized newspaper database has made focused searches of major American (and English) newspaper archives much more practicable within research library networks, as has the Library of Congress's website Chronicling America (www.chroniclingamerica.loc. gov). The emergence of publicly marketed, online newspaper archives like newspaperarchive.com and genealogybank.com has made available a variety of corpora containing searchable local newspapers. Together these contemporary resources allow scholars researching popular culture to delve into a period that produced and preserved sufficient amounts of traditional newspaper coverage to support the chronological survey presented in this study, which therefore claims to be neither comprehensive nor complete. Perhaps resources in the near and distant future will yield richer details about individual performances.