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:
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“Copernicanism and other essential ingredients of modern science survived only because reason was frequently overruled in their past.”
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