The Twilight of Olympus: Deicide and the End of the Greek Gods

Abstract

The divinities of ancient Greece have been a staple of cinema from at least as early as Aphrodite’s appearance in the Italian silent short film La Caduta di Troia (1911), and they have continued to appear regularly in films based on ancient Greek myths.1 Other screen texts have reinforced the importance of the Greek gods in modern popular culture, from the God of War video game series (2005-), to the Percy Jackson film franchise (The Lightning Thief, 2010; Sea of Monsters, 2013), to the television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–1999) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001). But the Greek gods are also part of antiquity’s “radical alterity”;2 that is, screen texts use the gods to mark out how different ancient Greece was from the modern West through their arrogance and fickleness. This vision of divinity is problematic for modern Western audiences whose cultures are heavily influenced by Christian ideas, and so some screen texts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries foretell Olympus’ demise.3 This chapter analyzes inflections of the “twilight of the Greek gods” motif in films and television programs, to make sense of what they communicate about how the West wants to view the legacy of classical antiquity.4