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replace them in the 1960s, the pepla had more to do with moral simplicity and the triumph of the hero over the villain than they did with moral sophistication (Bondanella 161–162). Obviously, one should not identify reverence with moral simplicity: proper reverence will require practical wisdom and a refined sense of judgment under complex circumstances. The peplum films can hardly be said to test violence or manifest reverence in the way of Homer’s epic poetry. Other films in the sword and sandal genre are not so easy to dismiss, however. Even if the larger framework of good and evil in the sword and sandal genre is simplistic, it does not follow that reverence has gone missing in these films, or that violence is not simultaneously dramatized and called into question. In fact, reverence is a regular theme of sword and sandal films, whether in opposing wrongdoing, unmasking empty ritual or ritual leaders, or in disciplining battlefield violence.
An important aspect of heroic reverence is the wholeheartedness, or sense of mission, that guides the hero in his defense of important values. This is a testament to the power of the cluster of emotions connected to reverence : shame, respect, and awe. Spartacus never wavers in his commitment to free Roman slaves: not in the face of the decimation of his slave army, and not when Marcus Crassus announces, near the film’s tragic end, that Spartacus should be immediately crucified. Conan is of similar temper: like the metal his father had once used to craft swords, Conan is unyielding in his commitment to avenge the assault on his childhood village, an event that resulted in Conan’s parents’
murders and Conan’s subsequent enslavement. Spartan King Leonidas of the film 300 is challenged by encroaching Persian forces, cultural aliens whose mores are not Spartan and whose desires for empire seem insatiable. Though they are outnumbered and their defeat is more likely than their success, Leonidas and his Spartan men fight the good fight to preserve their Spartan heritage.
Spartacus, Conan, and Leonidas represent a deep loyalty, a purity of reverential commitment, stirred by respect for parents and family, traditions, and moral and political values. Their violence attempts a reverent response to the irreverence and wrongdoing of their opponents.
Spartacus, Conan, and Leonidas are not simple figures. They are approximations of Homeric heroes, especially in terms of the costs they must suffer in their journeys. Like so many of the Iliad’s heroes, Spartacus and Leonidas end up dead, unable to raise their newborn children. Conan falls in love with one of his quest mates, Valeria, only to lose her in a climactic battle ( Conan the Destroyer [1984], an altogether “schlockier” film than Conan the Barbarian, begins at the site of her funeral pyre). Sword and sandal films can thus recognize that heroic reverence will require suffering, and indeed that a hero’s fate is always, as it were, a double-edged sword.2
Sword and sandal films also tend to praise proper reverence rather than mere ritual or gesture. One of the staples of the sword and sandal film is the unveiling of false reverence, often in the form of priestly or religious reverence.
Spartacus is critical of Roman popular religion and its complicity with slavery,
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unbridled sexuality, and greed. Conan reviles the power of the cultic priest, Thulsa Doom, who murdered his mother. In 300, the Ephors, priests in charge of the local oracle, are paid by the Persians to pervert the oracle’s pronouncement. Though reverence is often associated with ritual behaviors and forms, empty or play ritual is irreverent and costly. Empty ritual behavior disrespects the values and traditions being ritually preserved while promoting the power of the interpreters and practitioners of the ritual or ceremony (which is especially problematic in a priestly cult, where priests hold a monopoly on these religious services and their attendant powers). Received religious customs are not always reverent.3
Finally, sword and sandal films tend to recognize that rituals are often troubling on their own terms, regardless of the attitudes or motivations that practitioners bring to them. The sword and sandal genre regularly uses virgin sacrifice to epitomize the intrinsically irreverent ritual or custom. This trend goes all the way back to Cabiria, though it is evident in both of the Conan films and others, such as Clash of the Titans (1981 and 2010). Similar reactions to intrinsically irreverent customs show up in other films in the sword and sandal genre, such as Spartacus’s treatment of slavery, gladiatorial battles, and crucifixion.
Common to films in the genre is a distaste for exploitation and abuse of the vulnerable; yet, in this distaste, interestingly, modern incarnations of heroic epics begin to complicate their own representations of violence in relationship to reverence. In their treatment of specific violent customs or rituals as intrinsic markers of villainy, these films apparently succumb to anachronism, since both ritual sacrifice and slavery, for example, were part of Greek religion and culture. That said, historical accuracy is not the aim of these films, not even the more sophisticated ones. Nor is it the most obvious aim of Greek poetry and story-telling. A dramatic or memorable tale is a much more communicative device. Indeed, the best evidence suggests that ancient “singers of tales” would have adorned or redacted their epics as suited to the occasion and the audience (Lord 3 –12). Moreover, since the resources for peplum narratives come from a whole mythic background culture, they do still maintain a kind of integrity or texture, in spite of anachronism, and they continue to reflect a concern for reverence, albeit one that their Greek ancestors might not have recognized. Most importantly, sword and sandal films’ portrayals of violent contests still resonate with their audiences in forceful, yet ambiguous ways: champions who are suffering, heroes who will die, and the inescapability of external, uncontrollable forces—these are reminders of a person’s place in the world, however fictionalized they turn out to be.
Reverence and Violence ... Really?
Perhaps the greatest of the ambiguities for modern audiences accustomed to religious emphases on love and forgiveness, or political conceptions of human
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rights and dignity, is the deep, apparent conflict between violence and reverence.
The Greeks did not share this reaction to violence, and perhaps that is the rhetorical force of Homer’s interrogation of it. From a modern stance, however, can reverence possibly be fit to violence?
In general, modern violence possesses the same fundamental ambiguities that Homer recognized nearly three millennia ago. Moreover, reverent commitment to important values is still thought to be central to the ethics of contests and war, even though there is currently more disagreement about whether violence is ever justified than any Greek society is likely to have experienced.
Though contemporary violence is often different in means (for instance, modern technologies of warfare) and context (terrorism, for example, or the visual depictions of violence common to film, video games, and television) from the violence of the Greeks, ancient lessons about reverent and irreverent heroes are still appropriate to it.
Consider another of Homer’s epic heroes, the cunning Odysseus. When Odysseus returns to Ithaca, he unleashes his violent skill on Penelope’s greedy suitors. He is backed by the goddess Athena, who has worked on his behalf throughout his tortuous return home: guiding him, inspiring him, sometimes directly intervening in his affairs, such as by clouding others’ visions of him as she does on Ithaca. Odysseus’s violence is bloody, and yet, in response to the suitors’ violations of his estate’s hospitality, justified, and even reverent; such is the importance of hospitality to Greek mores. Odysseus’s violence is reverent not simply because it is justified, but because it is skillful or excellent as well.
Odysseus is an expert with his bow. The suitors have the first chance to use the weapon, and it could mean Odysseus’s defeat. They fall short. Only Odysseus has the virtue required to pull the bow. He is not a weak-minded layman trying out his new weapon, but a seasoned veteran who knows why, when, and how to fight.
> As readers of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (a sardonic retelling of the events of Odysseus’s return to Ithaca) know, however, while Odysseus may have been justified in killing the suitors, it does not follow that his treatment of Penelope’s maidens is justified or reverent. Odysseus has the maidens hanged, putatively, for some kind of complicity in the suitors’ exploits, though these charges seem trumped up. Odysseus’s reverent use of violence (both in justification and in means or skill) does not extend to the murder of non-threatening innocents after the fight has been won. Typically, it is the heat of glorified battle that leads to heroic irreverence, as in the cases of Hector and Achilles. Here, it seems to be a much cooler kind of act, and arguably the worse for it, absent as it seems to be of proper reverence and a sense of appropriate shame and respect.
Beautifully controlled violence is central to the sword and sandal film as well, whether in the simple power of the strongman’s embrace, or the more ter-rific violence of the sword, dagger, club, or bow. The heroes of sword and sandal films are jeopardized in some fashion by human irreverence and specially posi-
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tioned to do something about it. The skillfulness of the violence used by the heroes of these films is sometimes natural: Hercules (of the peplum films Hercules [1958], Hercules the Avenger [1965], and many others) and Perseus (of Clash of the Titans) possess a divine heritage that makes them champions even without considerable practice. In other cases, violent skill is learned, often as a result of an adversary’s initial act of irreverence: for instance, Spartacus and Conan are raised as slaves, only to become fighters in blood sports that prepare them for their reverent tasks. Across these films, however, one finds heroes, trained or natural, set to take on irreverence with violent, controlled force and proper ends.
Spartacus, for instance, has a hard-earned understanding of his humanity.
His years of enslavement in a quarry, being whipped and beaten, have made sure of that. He has been hardened, so when he is sold off to gladiatorial training, his body and mind are already well-prepared for its discipline. In his training, he quickly distinguishes himself, earning the respect of his fellow gladiators and the scorn of his trainers. After he escapes, Spartacus travels the countryside using his prowess to free slaves and grow an army. He takes prisoners and prizes rather than killing mercilessly. He uses his skills reverently, controlling his violence to the end. Though Spartacus’s army is almost wholly slaughtered, and Crassus, who has become a military dictator on pretense of needing dictatorial powers to quell the slave rebellion, is searching for Spartacus in order to publicly humiliate him, Spartacus’s soldiers remain loyal to the cause and to their leader.
They are systematically crucified along the way to Rome until only Spartacus and Crassus’s former slave, Antoninus, are left. Crassus forces them to fight and, in a final act of reverent control of his violent skills, Spartacus kills Antoninus in order to save him from crucifixion. He has borne many costs for leading a slave uprising, though the most uplifting and tragic is yet to come. As Spartacus hangs dying from his cross, his wife, Varinia, and his newborn son are being whisked away from Rome. They see him, and he sees them, though there is nothing that can be done to save him.
One could tell similar stories about Conan’s control of his sword or Leonidas’s skill in the Spartan phalanx. Of note, however, is that, in the hands of contemporary film writers and directors, great heroes are less apt to suffer because they lose control of themselves than they are because of their reverent commitment to a good cause. Thus, sword and sandal films seem to praise the violence of the warrior in a way that overemphasizes his or her agency, as if even the most skillful warriors never behave badly, which is contrary to what one finds in Homer. Though the best sword and sandal films also show that their heroes impose tragic costs on themselves and others, they may fail to capture the most important lesson a warrior should learn, especially one who can wage war from afar: it is not merely a matter of fate that violence brings about suffering — the hero’s own skilled attitudes, desires, and actions are also, and perhaps more centrally, responsible.
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Regarding the context of contemporary violence, it is true, and happily so, that most people enjoying sword and sandal films will not be acquainted with the kind of violence and suffering described by Homer. Indeed, the con-scription of men for the Vietnam War was American society’s last widespread encounter with an unchosen, largely impersonal demand for citizens to contribute to war-making (which is not to say that veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not, like Achilles, wondered why they were fighting).
Arguably, in this context, glorification of heroic violence in the sword and sandal films (or in the video games that often now accompany them) so decontextualizes heroic violence and desensitizes us to it as to become irreverent, cheap emotional props for militarism and ethnocentrism.
Furthermore, the sword and sandal films are not uniformly respectful of reverent limits on violence, and this does present a complication, analogous to the complications in Odysseus’s treatment of Penelope’s maidens. Some recent entries in the genre would seem to succumb to the genre’s own association between villainy, empty ritual, and uncontrolled violence. The film 300 began what may become a trend of digitizing violence, enabling a level of spectacle unrealizable in earlier film or television, even if it is hinted at in a couple of scenes of spurting blood and piled bodies in Kubrik’s Spartacus. The series Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010 –present) devotes substantial airtime to digitized blood splatter, decapitation, and battlefield carnage. The anti-realism of these new, gory visuals is, one might maintain, deeply irreverent, for it does not capture anything like the sense of awe, respect, and shame that one can track in Homer’s heroes, even when they are slaughtering other warriors on the battlefield; nor does it invite its heroes to suffer because the slaughter inevitably gets out of hand. Similarly, video games that take players on heroic journeys do not clearly invest in them a sense of the tragedy of violence, of its deep, abiding costs, or of the hero’s skillfulness in battle somehow tempting him to violate the limits of reverent violence (indeed, at their worst, new entries in the film genre may fail to recognize that there are reverent limits on violence, substituting spectacle for meaningful content, just as some video games apparently reward violations of these limits).
Of course, sword and sandal films are in an obvious way intended to decontexualize violence. This is part of their fantasy element. Some of them may decontextualize and glorify violence without recognizing its costs. Yet one can acknowledge all of this while also seeing that the best of these films praise violence when it is justified and controlled by a deep sense of reverence, and that they help to develop an understanding of the hero’s mortality and necessary weakness. In these best cases, violence is put into the service of the hero’s wholehearted attempt to preserve or promulgate important values, and the hero’s efforts are complicated, even if they are not complicated in exactly the manner of Hector, Achilles, and Odysseus.
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Masculinity and the Endlessness of Violence
Two additional concerns about reverence and violence in sword and sandal films are worth considering here as well: one is quite new, the other is rather old. The first concern has to do with the connection between violence and masculinity: the sword and sandal genre seems to be guilty of parading around white male violent heroes whose actions more or less reproduce familiar, patriarchal constructions of masculinity for their audiences. Hercules, Spartacus, and Conan are white, muscular, and beautiful. Or consider 300, where masculinity is put into the service of dominating both women and other
“Others” (in this case, the Persians, whose leader is semi-human and androgynous in appearance, and whose mores are arguably perceived to be wrong primarily because they are not Spartan). If masculinity fears androgyny, then reverence appears to be only a
masked call to preserve masculine claims to power and control. Indeed, at its strongest, this critique might suggest that reverence itself is nothing more than patriarchy, especially if it justifies masculine violence.
There is no denying that Greek myth and epic poetry champion masculine, heroic values. Yet by vilifying false reverence and empty custom, sword and sandal films arguably erode patriarchal power structures even as they perpetuate them. By endorsing justified, controlled violence, these films sanction violence but also restrain it. As MacIntyre pointed out, the Homeric poems disclose that the hero and the villain are each equally destined to die. Some sword and sandal films obviously have little cognizance of this, even if they recognize that good narratives require some dramatic complications. More complex films in the sword and sandal genre accept the basic ambiguity of the hero’s fate, and they respond to it with a reverence that does not blindly adhere to a moral or religious or social code but reminds us of the abiding values of family, friendship, community, sympathy, and humility.
In Reverence, Woodruff recounts the story told by Herodotus of King Croesus of Lydia, who thought himself the happiest and most fortunate of all beings.
The sage, Solon, upbraided him, “Call no man happy until his life is over” (82).
Croesus ignored Solon’s counsel, took up arms against Persia, and soon found himself defeated, preparing to be burnt to death. As the fire around him began grow, Croesus spoke aloud, regretfully of course, recounting Solon’s advice.
The Persian king heard him, was reminded of his own humanity, and ordered the fire extinguished. The story is important because of its reminder that reverence is a basic capacity to feel awe, respect, and shame. Here, as Woodruff points out, the Persian king is not gracious out of some local Persian custom, but because of a fundamental human kinship with Croesus. In the sword and sandal films’ violent responses to irreverence, they, too, look not to promulgate a masculine violation of women and other Others (even when they do), nor to perpetuate masculine systems of religious, political, or social organization (even
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