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Martin Winkler, editor The Fall of the Roman Empire: Film and History Blackwell, 2009; 334 pages; $54-95
Edited and introduced by Martin Winkler, The Fall of the Roman Empire: Film and History is a collection of essays providing a wide-ranging treatment of the oft-maligned 1964 movie The Fall of the Roman Empire, from a variety of historical and cinematic perspectives. The book fits within the flourishing recent genre of scholarship exploring cinematic depictions of the ancient world. In the introduction, Winkler places The Fall in the appropriate thematic context of an ongoing 'dialogue' between the classical past and the America of the film's present. The Roman past has long served as a precedent, an ideal, and a warning to American political and cultural commentators, and The Fall provides a powerful example of this trend. Allen Ward in chapter 2, for example, makes particular reference to the spirit of "liberal internationalism" in a movie produced not long after the Cuban missile crisis.1
Yet at the same time, The Fall represents a fairly radical departure from the conventions of the epic genre, and the book highlights and lauds these differences with its peers. The sword-and-sandals spectacles that preceded it, most notably Quo Vadis, were fundamentally religious eschatologies, in which Roman decline was both prophesized and celebrated through the clash of paganism and Christianity.2 Conversely, in The Fall, decline is presented purely in Roman and secular terms: it comes not through military defeat, but moral corruption and the...