Ancient Rome and Greece
Twelve films and series, across roughly sixteen centuries.
12 entries · about 26h 1m across the 10 with a published runtime
The other timelines here cover a war each. This one covers about sixteen centuries, which changes what the ordering is for: not a sequence of events you could follow, but the shape of the classical world, from a Bronze Age siege to the moment the last of it was burned in Alexandria.
Twelve entries, two of them long-form television, because the single most important thing that happens in this period has never been filmed as a film.
If you only watch 6
300, Alexander, Spartacus, Rome, Gladiator, Agora. That is about 12h 50m across the 5 with a published runtime. Between them they carry Greece at its defining moment, the Republic turning into an Empire, and the end of the classical world. The rest fill in the centuries around those.
How this is ordered
Ordered by when the events are set, not by when the films came out, which for this period means the list runs backwards through cinema history almost as often as forwards: a 1951 film sits between a 1976 series and a 2010 one.
Dates before the Common Era are negative in the data and run from largest to smallest, so the Trojan War at roughly 1184 BC opens the list and Thermopylae in 480 BC follows it. Where a film is set across decades, it is filed where it begins.
The historicity varies enormously and the entries say so. Troy and 300 are not history, they are an epic poem and a comic book respectively, and they are here because the events underneath them matter and nothing better covers either.
- 01Around 1184 BC
Troy
2004 · 2h 43m · The Trojan War, legendary
Not history, and it does not claim to be: this is the Iliad with the gods removed, which is a defensible choice and costs it the poem’s whole explanation of why anything happens. Here because the siege is the founding story of the Greek imagination and everything later on this list is downstream of people who knew it by heart.
Note. The 163-minute theatrical cut is listed. A 196-minute director’s cut exists and is the better film.
- 02480 BCCore ten
300
2006 · 1h 57m · Thermopylae, Spartan account
A comic book rather than a record, and the Persians in it are a fantasy. It stays because the battle is the moment Greece decided it was not going to become a Persian province, and because the film understands one true thing very well, which is that Sparta had turned the willingness to die into a civic product.
- 03336 to 323 BCCore ten
Alexander
2004 · 2h 55m · Macedon to Babylon
A famously troubled film about the man who put Greek culture from Egypt to the Indus, which is the single reason the Mediterranean that Rome later conquered was already Greek-speaking. Nothing else covers it, and the conquest matters more than the film’s reputation.
Note. The 175-minute theatrical cut is listed. Three longer cuts exist, up to 214 minutes, and the director has said the last is the one he stands behind.
- 0473 to 71 BCCore ten
Spartacus
1960 · 3h 17m · The Third Servile War
The only entry that looks at the thing the entire Roman economy rested on, which is that a very large share of the people in it were owned. It is also a film about the Hollywood blacklist wearing a toga, and both readings work at once.
- 0552 to 30 BCCore ten
Rome
2005 · 22 episodes · The Republic ending
The best thing on this list and the only serious treatment of the most important political event in Roman history, which is the Republic turning into something else. It is told half from the top and half through two soldiers, and the second half is what makes the first one land.
Note. Two seasons, 22 episodes, 44 to 65 minutes each. No total runtime is published.
- 0624 BC to AD 54
I, Claudius
1976 · 12 episodes · The Julio-Claudian court
Picks up almost exactly where Rome stops and runs the next eighty years as a court drama shot on videotape with no exteriors worth speaking of. It has aged strangely and not badly, and no film has ever attempted the same span.
Note. Twelve episodes in the British cut, around 50 minutes each. No total runtime is published.
- 07Around AD 26 to 33
Ben-Hur
1959 · 3h 32m · Judaea under Rome
Rome seen from a province it occupied rather than from the city, which almost nothing else here does. The chariot race is the famous part and the useful part is everything around it: what it was like to live somewhere the empire had simply arrived.
Note. 212 minutes excluding the overture, intermission and entr’acte, which the roadshow presentation included.
- 08AD 64 to 68
Quo Vadis
1951 · 2h 51m · Rome under Nero
The fire, the persecutions and the last of the Julio-Claudians, from the era when Hollywood made this period at enormous scale and complete confidence. Dated in its playing and still the only widely seen film about Nero, which is a gap worth noticing.
- 09Early second century AD
Centurion
2010 · 1h 37m · Caledonia, the Ninth Legion
A small, fast, violent film about the northern frontier, where the empire stopped expanding and built a wall instead. It is here for the geography: every other entry is set where Rome was winning.
- 10From AD 180Core ten
Gladiator
2000 · 2h 35m · Rome at its height
The film that brought the whole genre back, and the reason most people picture this period at all. The history is loose and the thing it gets right is structural: an empire large enough that the man at the top could be replaced by an idiot and it would keep running for a while anyway.
- 11Around AD 200
Gladiator II
2024 · 2h 28m · Rome, two decades later
Twenty-four years after the first and set about twenty after it, under emperors who were real and even worse than shown. Worth it for the argument it inherits rather than the one it makes, and it is the only entry filmed in the last decade.
- 12From AD 391Core ten
Agora
2009 · 2h 6m · Alexandria, a mathematician
Hypatia in Alexandria as the classical world ends around her, and the right place to stop. It is the only entry here whose protagonist is a scholar rather than a soldier or an emperor, and the only one about the loss of what all of the above had built.
What is missing, and why
The fall of the Roman Republic has no film. The most consequential political collapse in Western history, and the only thing here that covers it properly is twenty-two hours of television. That is why Rome is on this list despite being the longest entry by a distance.
Carthage and the Punic Wars. Rome fought its most dangerous enemy for over a century, lost tens of thousands of men in single afternoons, and then erased the city. There is no film of any standing about any of it, and Hannibal crossing the Alps is one of the best-known images in European history.
Greece outside Athens and Sparta. Effectively nothing. The Peloponnesian War, which is the subject of the first great work of history ever written, has no film.
Anything from the other side. Persia appears here only as the antagonist of 300, which is a cartoon of it. Egypt, Gaul, Judaea and Britain are all filmed as places Rome arrives at.
Ordinary life. Almost every entry is about emperors, generals or gladiators. Rome the series is the exception and is half about two soldiers, which is a large part of why it is the best thing on this list.
If you know a film that closes any of these, the correction address is on the contact page.
Corrections and additions go to watchinorder.in@gmail.com.