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.

In addition to other early Pathé film titles on antiquity,  the BFI National Archive holds a copy of the 1910 Pathé frères film Cléopâtre (Cleopatra), directed by Ferdinand Zecca and Henri Andréani. The film is mostly based on the French stage play Cléopâtre by Victorien Sardou and Émile Moreau (1890), which was in turn inspired by William Shakespeare’s play, but it also bears similarities with nineteenth-century painting. The film contains a typical tableau-like style and histrionic acting, reminiscent of the stage. The lead role was performed by the acclaimed stage actress Madeleine Roch, who previously had acted in several stage plays set in antiquity and acted in various historical films at Pathé around 1910. Cléopâtre also typically follows the Western Orientalist tradition in representing the East as feminine and cruel.