"Those Were the Greeks? The use and misuse of archaeology and ancient mythology in popular media," by Jamie Aprile
Have you ever watched a movie based on a myth or a play from ancient Greece and felt like you had learned something about history? Or maybe you were assigned to read the Iliad, and decided to watch Troy instead. This lecture will show some of the ways that modern directors pick and choose elements of ancient culture to build representations of the past that reflect ourselves more than they do historical fact. And sometimes, it's not just the details - they get the big picture wrong, too.
Jamie Aprile is an archaeologist and writer. She spent the first decade of this century pretending to live in Late Bronze Age Greece as a Mycenaean political economist, and has taught Classics at UCLA and the University of Texas at Austin.
