Spectres of Rome

I started writing what I thought would be a short piece about the enduring popularity of stories of Ancient Rome in England, forgot how long I'd spent writing on and researching classical reception cumulatively over the last three or four years, and ended up with this, a fairly undisciplined story of the power of Rome over the Western Imaginary. Then, after recording, as I edited I kept just generating more takes, and so the video is heavily annotated with tangents that, if voiced, might have produced a three hour monstrosity. Pause if you like, ignore them if you don't, it's easier for everybody this way I expect. The music is a series of pieces and phrases from Debussy, Perpetuel Poulenc, and Satie, the former's Les Collines d'Anacapri, about the bright hills of Italy, and the latter's Ogives, which he made after spending a long time in what we might call a medieval state of mind. The footage is from a series of travelogues from the fifties, which, as a time in which it was acceptable to film your entire holiday in 16mm, I look back on as a sort of Augustan golden age of the Public Domain. Ancient Sources Hesiod, Works and Days Homer, Iliad, Odyssey Virgil, Aeneid Horace, Odes (including the Ode to Mount Soracte) Ovid, various Livy, Ab Urbe Condita Cicero, Letters to Atticus Pollio, histories Tacitus, histories Pliny the Elder, Natural History Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers Medieval / Renaissance Dante, Inferno Petrarch, Letters to the Ancient Dead Early Modern Shakespeare, Julius Caesar; Antony and Cleopatra; Titus Andronicus; Coriolanus Addison, Cato Modern Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Spengler, The Decline of the West Graves, I, Claudius Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents Fermor, A Time of Gifts Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art Pater, Walter, various Harris, Robert, Imperium trilogy Fisher, Mark, Ghosts of My Life Agamben, State of Exception Bachelard, Poetics of Space Film / Television Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Ben-Hur (1959) Spartacus (1960) Cleopatra (1963) Gladiator Megalopolis The Hunger Games series Percy Jackson series Planet of the Apes Succession Poetry Mandelstam, Osip, various Byron / Shelley, various Gladstone, translation of Horace's Odes Speeches Enoch Powell, Rivers of Blood (1968)