Allusions To History and Science
- Scorpus was a real person, a celebrated charioteer in Rome who won an unprecedented 2,000 races before being killed in a crash at the approximate age of 27. Scopas’s character is clearly based on him.
- In her afterword, Caroline Lawrence notes that most modern audiences’ knowledge of Roman chariot racing comes from the 1959 film Ben-Hur, which recreates the excitement of a chariot race but contains several historical inaccuracies. She says that the 1925 silent film Ben-Hur, which has footage of an actual fatal crash that occurred during filming, would probably give the viewer a better idea of what a real chariot race would have been like.
Read more about this topic: The Charioteer Of Delphi
Famous quotes containing the words history and/or science:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Whilst Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic outwards, making it an instrument with which he could interpret the facts of history and so arrive at an objective science which insists on the translation of theory into action, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, turned the same instruments inwards, for the examination of his own soul or psychology, arriving at a subjective philosophy which involved him in the deepest pessimism and despair of action.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)