Amour d’esclave (Pathé frères 1907) is a drama that explores themes of sexual desire restrained by social conventions. The story revolves around Polymos, a married Athenian citizen, and his passionate affair with Chloë, a slave dancer. The narrative culminates in tragedy when Polymos' jealous wife intervenes, leading to Chloë's demise and Polymos' suicide. This film anticipated a shift in France towards literary adaptations aimed at the middle class and reflected Pathé's strong financial position in 1907, marking a high point for French cinema. It exemplifies the early twentieth-century melodrama trope, in which passionate love leads to tragedy. Spectacle, enhanced by colour, dance and theatrical effects, is clearly more important than cinematic innovation or any particularly faithful reconstruction of ancient Greece.

Appearing in the Pathé catalogue in March 1908,  La Vestale (The Vestal) is a Pathé adaptation of Gaspare Spontini’s opera, based on a libretto by Barbet de Jouy. The film, credited to Albert Capellani, marks a revival of the opera of the same name. Famous during the Empire, Spontini’s version was rarely performed in the second half of the 19th century. Kicking off the revival of a classic work, the 1908 film La Vestale can be seen as a film produced for the sake of spectacle, its production methods mirroring those of the theatre. It can also be viewed as the end of an era. Indeed, Pathé did not participate in the adaptation of the bestsellers published during the same period, which were snapped up by other production companies, particularly Italian ones (Quo vadis?, The Last Days of Pompeii, and Fabiola or the Church of the Catacombs). In a sense, for the French company, Antiquity served as a backdrop rather than a narrative framework, and the focus of films such as La Vestale, Amour d’esclave, and also Idylle romaine, was primarily on romantic drama.

The Vitagraph Company, established in New York City in 1897 as one of the first film production companies in the United States, had begun making film versions of historical narratives and literary classics in 1908. After several adaptations of Shakespeare and well-known ancient themes (Virginius, Saul and David) early in 1909, they produced The Way of the Cross in the summer of 1909. The basic premise parallels that of the Polish novel Quo Vadis, naming the Roman military officer protagonist Valerius instead of Vinicius, the Christian woman Leah instead of Lygia. But the conclusion parallels more closely the English melodrama The Sign of the Cross in that these protagonists submit to martyrdom in the arena to conclude the story. Director J. Stuart Blackton employed his characteristic scheme of creating multiple sets (17) and filling them with as many as 50 actors and extras in a single scene (e.g., the gladiatorial arena). The film resembles some of the others on this website by including black slaves and a tableau modeled after a widely familiar Gérôme painting. The lone copy of the film is held by the BFI, albeit with German intertitles as it comes from the Joye collection.

Cléopâtre, as the first in the Pathé studio’s Série d’Art, places the queen theatrically at the centre of a resplendent Orientalist tableau filled with pharaonic monuments, lotus leaf pillars, exotic canopies and couches, black slaves, leopard skins and feathered fans, all showcased in stencil colour. Digging into the archaeology of this Egyptian environment played out before a French camera in a cold January exposes its colonialist tropes: the dangerous queen seduces Mark Antony but is overcome by Octavian, the true embodiment of the masculine West. However, the colonial rhetoric of the film turns out to be more complicated when compared with the Pathé film Le caprice du vainqueur with which it had been paired. Here Julius Caesar, as the embodiment of the Western imperialist in Egypt, is cruel and licentious. His demand that an innocent girl dance before him results in an uprising by the Egyptian people who burn down the palace and oust him from it. Overturning the discourses of colonialism, the West is here temporarily defeated by the East. This analysis explores how these two films shape Roman Egypt according to a complex, distinctively French, brand of Orientalism played out within a late nineteenth-century French culture of Egyptomania.

While most French silent films on Greco-Roman Antiquity in the collection of the British Film Institute are Pathé and Gaumont productions, a rare example is a film by the company Éclipse: Bélisaire (1910). It not only refers to a historical figure. It also relies on a long tradition of French literature, theatre and painting concerning the Byzantine general, while deviating from it in intriguing ways. Little is known about the film and who made it, and the actors remain unidentified. Yet, some information is known about the company that produced it: Éclipse. So detective work has been required to analyse this unusual antiquity film.

Phidias, renowned as the greatest sculptor of Greek antiquity and the lead artistic director of the Parthenon, is the subject of the 1917 French film L’Esclave de Phidias, directed by Léonce Perret. The film draws on aspects of Phidias's tumultuous life, focusing on a melodramatic narrative that explores his relationships and eventual exile, while largely neglecting his sculpture. Upon release during World War I, critics highlighted the film's artistry and the importance of its music, underlined by the special score composed for this film. Thanks to the joys of music, the artist finally capitulates to his model who is herself hopelessly in love with him.