Classical Literature on Screen

Martin M. Winkler is University Professor and Professor of Classics at George Mason University, Virginia. His most recent books are Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo's New Light (Cambridge, 2009), The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology (2009), and Arminius the Liberator: Myth and Ideology (2015). He has also published numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews, and edited several essay collections on classical antiquity and film.

Part I. Creative Affinities: Ancient Texts and Modern Images: 1. The classical sense of cinema and the cinema's sense of antiquity; 2. Pasolini's and Cocteau's Oedipus: no quarrel of the ancients and the moderns in the cinema age; Part II. Elective Affinities: Tragedy and Comedy: 3. Medea's infanticide: how to present the unimaginable; 4. Striking beauty: Aristophanes' Lysistrat; Part III. Non-Elective Affinities: Plot and Theme: 5. 'More striking': Aristotelian poetics in Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, and Alfred Hitchcock; 6. John Ford, America's Virgil; Part IV. Counter-Affinities: Ideological and Narrative Distortions of History: 7. Fascinating ur-fascism: the case of 300; 8. Good Nero; or, the best intentions; Part V. Aesthetic Affinities: portraits of ladies: 9. Regal beauties in Franco Rossi's films of the Odyssey and Aenid; 10. Helen of Troy: is this the face that launched a thousand films?