From sword-and-sandal epics to biblical blockbusters, this course examines how filmmakers have reimagined the ancient Mediterranean world on screen. Students watch and critically analyze twelve films – including Gladiator, Troy, 300, Cleopatra, Gods of Egypt, and The Prince of Egypt – paired with the ancient texts that inspired them, from Homer's Iliad to the Book of Exodus to Egyptian myths of Horus and Seth.

Beyond spectacle, the course asks harder questions: How do these films distort or illuminate the past? What do their anachronisms reveal about the era that made them? How do gender, empire, and cultural bias shape cinematic retellings of antiquity? Students hone skills in historical research and film criticism, writing movie reviews that place popular cinema in conversation with scholarship and ancient sources. The result is a course that treats blockbuster entertainment as a serious lens for understanding both the ancient world and our own.