In Popular Culture
- Gordon Scott portrayed Mucius in the sword-and-sandal film Hero of Rome (1964), a film loosely based on this story.
- A similar hand-burning feat of endurance was famously performed by G. Gordon Liddy. It involved holding his hand over a lighter flame until the flesh burned. According to the Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward book All the President's Men (1974), Liddy did this once at a dinner party. When someone asked "What's the trick?" He replied, "The trick is not minding." When Liddy entered prison for his Watergate crimes he allegedly used this trick to intimidate other inmates.
- The same “trick” was also attributed to T. E. Lawrence in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence (played by Peter O'Toole) extinguishes a match with his fingers. Seeing this, the character Potter tries it. Potter: “Ow! It damn well 'urts!” Lawrence: “Certainly it hurts.” Potter: “Well what's the trick then?” Lawrence: “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”
Read more about this topic: Gaius Mucius Scaevola
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.”
—Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985)