Call it the Maximus effect. Four years after Russell Crowe played the rampaging Roman general in Gladiator, picking up an Oscar for his many pains, it seems we can't get enough of the ancient world. It's there in sales of classical literature and the tide of documentaries, like tonight's ABC TV offering of the First Olympian. It's there in the swelling number of ancient history students at high schools. It's there in video war games where elephants replace tanks, in blockbuster antiquities exhibitions, in areas as unexpected as modern psychotherapy. It's even there on the shelves of toy shops, in the shape of a Princess of Ancient Greece Barbie Doll, complete with golden serpent bracelet.
But most unavoidably, it's there on the big screen.
Twice already this year Hollywood has catapulted us back, togas flying, into the Greco-Roman world. First came Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ, then Troy, the latest interpretation of Homer's epic poem The Iliad that starred Brad Pitt and Australians Eric Bana and Rose Byrne.
The barrage is set to continue next month with the North American release of director Oliver Stone's biopic Alexander, in which Irishman Colin Farrell plays the boozing, bisexual Macedonian who forged an empire extending from modern Greece to India and Libya. "Follow him as he conquers the world" exhorts the publicity for a film that also boasts the star power of Sir Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemy and Angelina Jolie as Alexander's mother, Olympias.
Whether you choose to follow him or not - Alexander is due here in January - you can't help but be reminded that the classical period is box-office gold. It is as though, in our thirst for cultural references, we've fired up the retro-boosters and zoomed straight past 1980 to something closer to AD198.
The so-called sword-and-sandals movies appeared to have been forever abandoned by Hollywood in the wake of Elizabeth Taylor's 1963 exercise in excess Cleopatra, a film so lavish it almost bankrupted 20th-Century Fox. Movies like Quo Vadis, Ben Hur and The Robe had slayed 'em on screen in the dozen years beforehand, but after Cleopatra studios put the genre in a box, nailed it shut and entombed it for almost 40 years.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can say the corpse started twitching again in 1996 after Ralph Fiennes read extracts from Greek historian Herodotus during the Oscar-winning The English Patient.
That same year Canadian Ross Leckie had a bestseller on his hands with Hannibal, a rip-snorting novel retelling the famous story of the Carthaginian general's 218BC march over the Alps with elephants on his way to wage war against Rome.
Ancient themes received a further boost in 1998 when Greek-Roman stoic philosopher Epictetus figured prominently in A Man In Full, author Tom Wolfe's much-anticipated follow-up to Bonfire Of The Vanities.
A lesser-known American writer, Steven Pressfield, also made the bestseller list that year with Gates Of Fire, based on the 480BC Battle of Thermopylae when 300 Spartans teamed with 7000 other Greeks to hold back a vast Persian army for several crucial days. Then came Gladiator and its sustained $600 million assault on the box office.
Where Hollywood had spent decades banking on the future (think Star Wars, Alien and Terminator), it now became transfixed by the big rear-view mirror, especially one in which costs were contained by computer-generated crowd scenes. Leaving aside the cynics' view - that by delving back into ancient times, directors could pit goodies against baddies without risking political offence - Hollywood had suddenly given mass cultural endorsement to stories that had been kicking around for 2000 years or more.
Ask classical historians and archaeologists how much credit Hollywood should be given for the revived interest in their subject and you get a similar response. It's hard to measure, but it certainly hasn't done any harm.
Academics are also united in another opinion. Where you might expect them to be precious about having their passions dumbed down or inaccurately portrayed by Hollywood, most contend it doesn't really matter if Pitt's Achilles was more likely to have bedded his friend Patroclus than a slave girl, as long as the films awaken interest in the audience.
"They can always come along and get the real story from us later," says Associate Professor Dexter Hoyos, of Sydney University's Department of Classics and Ancient History. "It's if we don't get them in the first place that we have problems. And so far we haven't had any students coming to us after their first year saying it's not like it was in Gladiator."
Professor Peter Wilson, the university's head of classics, sees it as a two-way street. "I think the films are feeding something that's being asked for as much as generating interest," he says.
That interest, it seems, is not confined to the uninitiated. Professor Wilson enthusiastically relates the story of Oxford University colleague Robin Lane Fox, best known for his books The Search For Alexander and Alexander The Great: A Biography. When Oliver Stone went searching for an expert to guide his directorial hand, Lane Fox became an eager collaborator. "He told me how he'd get a phone call from Oliver at 4am asking what a fourth century BC Macedonian window looked like," recalls Wilson. "He got completely involved in it - so much so that he waived his fee on the condition that he be given a place in the film's major cavalry charges."
For all that Hollywood gets the headlines, such intersections of academia and popular culture are far more frequent on the small screen. Cable TV's National Geographic and Discovery channels have been drivers of and outlets for interest in the classical period, with its universal stories and enduring mysteries. And when free-to-air television executives have sufficient confidence to program such documentaries in prime time, you can feel certain someone's telling them there is a large audience for it. After the documentary Who Killed Alexander The Great? drew 1.24 million viewers to the ABC in May, knocking over Channel Ten's Big Brother in the process, nobody at Aunty is quibbling.
Archaeologist Craig Barker believes television has provided another, less obvious, contribution to rising interest in his craft. An education officer at Sydney University's Nicholson Museum, home to one of the country's best antiquities collections, Dr Barker credits shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation with having raised the profile of forensic investigation. "The difference with us is that we can be investigating crime scenes that took place 2000 years ago, not two weeks ago."
Dr Barker does have recent events to thank, however, for giving greater immediacy to the age he often inhabits. Wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East have piqued curiosity about the historical, political and religious forces in those regions. And the return of the Olympic Games to Athens, with an ambitious opening ceremony loaded with ancient heroic symbols, transported a global audience back to Greece's golden age and its legacies of democracy and philosophy and culture and myth.
The ceremony's various references would have been especially pertinent for NSW's ancient history students, nearly 10,000 of whom will sit their Higher School Certificate exam on November 4. Having overhauled modern history this year, the subject is now threatening to outstrip physics and chemistry in popularity.
If Maximus played his part, so too did the rejigging of the syllabus in 1999, when more archaeology was inserted into the first six weeks of a subject spanning from 6000BC to the fall of Rome at the end of the fifth century. Rather than launching straight into 2800-year-old poems - not quite in the style of J.K. Rowling - the subject was given immediate animation by studying Tutankhamen's tomb and Ice Man, the 5300-year-old Stone Age hunter found frozen in remarkable condition high on the Austrian-Italian border.
Erin Spike is a year 11 student at Baulkham Hills High School, one of the few public schools to also offer Latin. Nearing the end of her first year of ancient history, during which her class put together its own Roman feast and went to see Troy, the 15-year-old is quick to sum up its appeal. "I was really interested to see how people lived in a time so far removed from our lives," she says. "It is inherently really, really fascinating and no one is dropping it for the HSC."
And how did she rate Troy after studying The Iliad?
"Well, I didn't go into it thinking it would be historically accurate. But because it wasn't so focused on detail, it was free to be entertaining. I thought it captured the spectacle of the saga."
True to her original rationale, Spike says she is not so much attracted by epic stories as the minutiae of everyday life. Which is why she thought it was really cool to be able to email University of Queensland molecular archaeologist Dr Tom Loy to ask about his work on the Ice Man project.
That ageless fascination with unravelling the past is confirmed by Macquarie University's Blanche Menadier. An honorary research associate who has excavated Troy nine times over 15 years, Dr Menadier decided to offer a voluntary archaeology class at her daughter's primary school. "Eighteen kids turned up every week before school," she says, clearly rejoicing in the power of her subject.
You don't have to look far for other examples of that power. Capitalising on Hollywood's multimillion-dollar promotional budgets, museums around the world have been enjoying record crowds after dusting off their antiquities. Nicholson Museum's current exhibition, Troy: Age Of Heroes, has been a hit with visiting school groups. In London, meanwhile, 1.7 million visitors queued over summer to see the British Museum's Troy and Olympia exhibits.
Booksellers have similar stories to tell about sales of classical literature. Around the time Brad Pitt was flexing his pecs, retailers Angus & Robertson saw weekly sales of The Iliad jump from 10 to 100. Sales of the book in Britain, helped by publishers Penguin giving the covers a makeover, trebled between 2002 and 2003 and are still heading skyward.
Still on books, classicists were quick to pounce on J.K. Rowling's dip into Greek mythology as the inspiration for her Hippogryph, the half horse, half gryphon (or griffin) ridden so thrillingly by Harry Potter in The Prisoner Of Azkaban. After Brad and Harry, it only needs David Beckham to start quoting Ovid for ancient history to get full cultural sanction.
In a less scholarly vein, the fascination with the ancient world has already extended to video games. Two of this year's best-received games are Rome: Total War, in which players can "direct vast armies led by legendary generals including Julius Caesar and Hannibal", and Shadow Of Rome, in which a Roman soldier sets out to win a gladiatorial contest to save the life of his father, accused of murdering Julius Caesar.
It was about a hundred years after Caesar's death in 44BC that another influential figure was born who is now making his presence felt. Epictetus held that our lives are not unsettled by actual events, but by the way we choose to see and respond to those events. His ideas were picked up and developed by American Albert Ellis, whose 90th birthday in New York City last year provided an opportunity to celebrate a man hailed as the greatest living psychotherapist.
Celebrated by some as more important than Sigmund Freud, Ellis is the author of titles such as The Case For Promiscuity and How To Stubbornly Refuse To Make Yourself Miserable About Anything - Yes, Anything! Among the 200 guests who paid their respects last year were Nicole Kidman and her father Antony, a Sydney clinical psychologist and Ellis disciple. "You look wonderful," Kidman junior reportedly told Ellis. "Thanks - you look OK, too," replied Ellis.
What position will the ancient world ultimately command in our lives? On this the classical scholars are again of one voice. With greater exposure, the possibilities of the internet, less intellectual snobbery and - above all else - its continuing influence on our modern world, the classical period will always be relevant.
By way of evidence, Professor Wilson points to the 100-plus people of all ages who paid money and eschewed a sunny spring Sunday to attend a full-day discussion of The Iliad as part of the university's continuing education program. "And that was before Troy came out," he says.
Professor Hoyos cites resurgent interest in ancient languages. The author of Latin: How To Read It Fluently notes that the number of NSW high school students studying Latin fell to about 130 in the mid-1980s. That number has now climbed back to 170-odd: an admittedly small group but, he hopes, evidence that the language is finding favour in a new generation.
Dr Barker is similarly sanguine about ancient history's prospects at high school level. Having seen Nicholson Museum visitor numbers escalate sharply over the past six years, he thinks it may be that ancient history is reassuringly manageable in an information age where quantity can overwhelm quality.
"Mentally and conceptually, I think it's easier to sit down with Herodotus and a couple of broken pots than being bombarded with so much information about other subjects," he says. "It's almost Victorian in its simplicity."
Dr Menadier shares her colleague's optimism, to a point. Even in her native US, where she saw a trend towards sexing up the subject in the 1980s, Dr Menadier can't imagine classical studies returning to the high-water mark of the 18th and 19th centuries, when an interest in archaeology and ancient languages and culture was the mark of a gentleman. "But after being on the wane in the second half of last century," she says, "I think it is finding its level again."
While it seeks a level, Hollywood will be doing its best to keep the pot - or should that be urn? - boiling.
Dr Menadier and Professor Wilson are among those hoping that Australian director Baz Luhrmann persists with his own Alexander the Great project, for which Leonardo DiCaprio has been cast as Alexander and Nicole Kidman as Olympias. Other epic ventures in the pipeline are George Clooney's take on Pressfield's Gates Of Fire and Hannibal The Conqueror, adapted from Leckie's novel and starring Vin Diesel as General Hannibal Barca.
Of one thing we can be sure. Hollywood will tire of sword-and-sandals movies again. But, as Dr Barker observes, "ruins and exotic locations never go out of fashion".
