Classical antiquity in modern art and culture

thumb|This poster for Goliath and the Barbarians (1959) by [[Carlo Campogalliani illustrates many people's expectations from films of this genre.]] Sword-and-sandal, also known as peplum (: pepla), is a subgenre of largely Italian-made historical, mythological, or biblical epic films mostly set in the Greco-Roman antiquity or the Middle Ages. These films attempted to emulate the big-budget Hollywood historical epics of the time, such as Samson and Delilah (1949), Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and Cleopatra (1963). These films

play written by Leconte de Lisle