Cherchez la femme – Alexandre Dumas may not have realized that The Mohicans of Paris, his serial novel that began to appear in 1854, was to provide the modern world with one of its most famous sayings. What Johann Wolfgang Goethe had earlier called das Ewig-Weibliche (“the eternal feminine”) at the conclusion of his Faust has always been irresistible and fascinating to men.

Cinema, the prime medium to express men's dreams and fantasies, has featured an infinite variety of women since William Heise directed The Kiss for Thomas Edison's company in 1896. The title encompasses the scandalous film's entire “plot” of less than a minute. The Kiss provoked calls for instant censorship of the fledgling medium. But the allure of women has proven irrepressible. Georges Méliès made the first film based on an ancient love story in 1898 (Pygmalion and Galatea) and the first one to feature an ancient vamp in its title in 1899 (Cleopatra), thereby initiating the return of women from ancient literature, history, and myth. As the case of Helen of Troy demonstrates, there is no better medium to search for and find the eternal feminine of Greece and Rome than the cinema.

The depiction of ancient women in film warrants a far longer treatise than two chapters of one book can provide. The three examples I look at in this chapter reinforce what the preceding chapter on Helen of Troy has already indicated: classical film philology is extremely wide-ranging, not least where women are concerned.