This essay focuses on eleven Greek-subject films in the BFI National Archive, made between 1903 and 1927 in four countries, and argues that ancient Greece functioned for early cinema less as a body of stories to be adapted than as a repertoire of operations: a stock of things that could be done with bodies, costumes, poses, objects, substitutions, colour, and frames. What reached the studios was never a recoverable antiquity but a composite already assembled from translation, painting, sculpture, theatre, opera, dance, archaeology, and exhibition practices, which these films homogenise into a single world and differentiate only where a plot requires it. Each film is then read as testing unsettled possibilities of the medium, and is given a verb naming the relevant operation. Causation rarely sits where these stories assign credit, falling instead to slaves, objects, and uncredited performers whom the surviving records seldom name, and circulation is at once what the films depict and the condition of their survival, since colour, intertitles, lengths, and endings varied from copy to copy and are what each print has kept or lost. Read from the prints rather than from the synopses, these films are not attempts to reconstruct antiquity but records of a medium finding out what it could do.