ABSTRACT
If historical films set in ancient Rome have now become a legitimate object of study for both classicists and historians, then what work needs to be done to write a history of such films? According to the terms recently set for cinema's own strategies for screening history, these films form part of an integrated regime of historical representation that constitutes the historical capital of twentieth=century cultures, and the reference period selected for projection ceases to be arbitrary and instead generates historical meaning through its relationship with other, extra-cinematic discourses about the past. Knowledge of those intertexts facilitates the exploration of how historical films function within a culture. 1 The reminiscences of cinema-going in the 1930s offered by Gore Vidal and Federico Fellini, their respective recollections of the neoclassical public architecture of Washington or the various Fascist celebrations of ancient Rome, suggest one important set of intertexts for the production and consumption of films about Roman history—namely the deployment of ancient Rome in the formation of the national identities of the United States and Italy.
