Other Final Website News

Today, I also have downloaded and installed Dreamweaver for the 30 day free trial on my PC. I used the handout from last week's class to set it up so that I can my site from home.

For my resources page, I am considering adding links to Worldcat or Google Books for the different print texts that I list. Worldcat records would be a good idea since it would allow visitors to find out what library has the materials and it automatically sets up to view the places closest to the IP address of the computer. I could also links to materials in Google Books if there are digitized copies of books I mention.

I considered linking the titles of the books and films to The Internet Movie Database or Amazon.com, but worried that might create too many links on my site and make it a little too busy. Also, these are outside commercial entities, and I do not want to seem like I am encouraging either enterprise.

I considered adding another page to my site, about films and books based on Classicists, like The Human Stain (book and film), The Lake of Dead Languages (book) and The Secret History (book). After careful consideration I decided that having 4 pages was enough to cover the material I was interested in and that a page about Classicists might seem out of place. Also finding source material would be considerably more difficult since they are not written about by reliable scholarly sources.

I have kept working on the text portion of the site and have completed 2 other titles, The Persian Boy and The Penelopiad. I plan to continue working on them doing a few over the next week so that I can focus more on the technical end of this project.

Text Example

The following is an example of what one entry will look like for my page.

Troy (directed by Wolfgang Peterson)

Summary: This film recounts the story of the Trojan War from its romantic beginning to its tragic end. The director made a strong attempt to portray the story realistically, without any supernatural or divine elements, despite the strong presence of the Olympians gods in the original source material.

Evaluation: The problem when it comes to creating a film version of the story of the Iliad, is that the story focuses upon the Greek champion Achilles, a bloodthirsty, lustful and selfish man. In order for him to be remotely likable to an audience, he has to be made into a better person by the end of the film, redeemed by love. The original Achilles in the Iliad is known mainly by his lack of shame, he never ever feels badly for anything he does, no matter how many people suffer or die from his actions. Other characters are similarly altered to make them more palatable to a modern audience, which makes them less interesting to watch.

The other great flaw in this adaptation is that the story of Troy becomes one of hope rather then tragedy. Homer foreshadows the fate of every major character in the Iliad within his work, and nobody lives happily ever after. Tragedy befalls every major character in the story usually through death or enslavement. The entire point of the story of Troy, is that it is an unavoidable disaster that creating suffering for everyone involved, Greek and Trojan alike. There are dozens of causes for the Trojan War in Greek mythology, all of which are touched upon at one time or another by Homer in the original text, impressing upon any reader how impossible it is that anyone will make it out of the conflict unscathed.

The strongest point of the film is probably the fighting style of Achilles, which seems appropriately superhuman. He is the divine son of a goddess and a legendary warrior, and he moves with the graceful ease of someone built for war.

Rating: C+ ; See it for the fighting, ignore everything else.

Resources:

Homer, Iliad. Translated by Samuel Butler. Perseus Project.

An excellent online translation taken from the a classic translation, includes in text hyperlinks to standard commentaries on the work. All text used is from out of copyright materials.

Homer, Iliad. Translated. by Stanley Lombardo. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.

This translation is done in colloquial English and is considered the most popular and accessible of the current print translations.

Quintus of Smyrna, The Fall of Troy. Translated by Arthur S. Way. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2005.

Written in 3^rd century C.E., based off of texts we no longer have access to, and thus a valuable resource regarding how the Trojan War ended.

Website Material

For my final website I have come up with the following final outline for the films and books I would like to cover:

Greece:

300 (film)
Alexander (film)
The Persian Boy (Book)

Rome:

Caesar (book)
Gladiator (Film)
I, Claudius (BBC Miniseries)

Troy:

Daughter of Troy (book)
The Penelopiad (book)
Troy (film)

Egypt:

The Alchemist (book)
Cleopatra (film)
The Mummy/The Mummy Returns (film series)

I have begun writing my text based on the following outline:

Summary (few sentence overview)

Evaluation (1-3 points about the film both positive and negative)

Rating (graded scale with one comment)

Resources (which will go on the final resources page for the site).

I would also like to include a few images for each page and have made arrangements to get my travel photos from Egypt and Italy sent from home. I plan to use the scanners at the University of Pennsylvania Library to create images that I can add to my site.

Similar Websites

There are not many websites that already cover this kind of information, and honestly the idea to use this as my final project topic came from Classics friends of mine and I often saying that such a thing should exist. Searching on the Internet led to several courses that cover this kind of material from an academic standpoint, but do not provide much information to the general public.

Some examples are:

The Ancient World in Film and Popular Culture (From the University of Warwick)

Ancient Rome in Film and Fact (University of Florida)

One general page I found that covers Classical material in popular culture is the Classics Pages News and Gossip About the Ancient World. This is a user-built site not affiliate with any institution so the accuracy of its information could be questionable. I thought that this site provided good snippets of information on this topic, but was more general and brief in its coverage. Berkeley's library also provides this list of films, Ancient Greece and Rome: Movies and Dramatizations but there is little in terms of in-depth review or analysis. It does provide links to the Internet Movie Database but does not include any review or evaluation of these items.

With my website I hope to include more information about specific films/books rather than a general overview. I am aiming for in depth coverage of a few items rather than comprehensive lists.

Website Challenges

Some of the challenges of this project would be to narrow the scope of what books/films I want to cover. There are tons of epic films and historical novels out there that borrow material from the ancient world, and it would be impossible to cover all of them. My strategy for this is to try and select only a few (3-5) items per page and to try and have a good mix of books and films if possible. I want to try and choose a variety of material from the very good, to the very bad.

For example, for the page on Greece, I might choose to cover the film 300 (which is known for its extreme violence and visual effects), the book The Persian Boy (a highly respected novel whose author has often been recommended reading in my Classics courses) and Reign (an anime adaptation of the life of Alexander the Great set in the year 3000 A.D. ).

Then after each little summary and review I would want to include links to resources for more information as well as some recommended books. Some websites I might want to include for the different films/books would be:

The Greek Mythology Link
This would be really great for the Troy page since it covers mythology and has a special section on Troy.

The Perseus Digital Library
This library provides both Greek/Latin and English translations of primary works of history and would be great for the history based films/books since I could link to specific texts.

Roman Emperors: The Imperial Index
This website (created by a Classics professor at Penn State) has a lot of information about the different Roman emperors so it would be excellent for the Rome page.

Final Website Overview

For my final website project I chose to create a website of Classically Inspired books and movies, using my own system of review based on their historical accuracy and quality. I chose this topic because I have a background in Classics and I have always enjoyed reading books and watching movies that take their inspiration from this area. I was thinking that I could divide my pages by regions, like Rome, Greece, Egypt and Troy (which would have been considered a real place by ancient societies). For each location I would select a few books and/or movies and create brief overviews, reviews and resources for more information about the actual people/events involved in the story. I plan on using pictures from my own travels abroad (as well as those of some friends with their permission) to avoid any copyright infringement.