Les Martyrs Chrétiens, released in English as Christian Martyrs, plunges viewers into Nero’s arena in the aftermath of a Ben-Hur-like chariot race whose traces still litter the Circus: the film begins where a famed painting of an upturned chariot ends. A procession of ‘those who are about to die’ advances before the emperor, culminating in the arrival of the Christian martyrs, one of whom is both crucified and devoured by a lion through a cinematic trick that inspired one of the earliest ‘behind-the-scenes’ reports in film history. The tableau continues with a lion tamer confronting his beast in the guise of a gladiator painted by Gérôme. The scene is described, and perhaps narrated, using words from the novels Quo Vadis? and The Last Days of Pompeii. Even the panoramic camera movement that opens the film, seemingly proclaiming the novelty of cinema’s gaze upon antiquity, ultimately reveals itself to be rooted in a network of pictorial and lantern-slide traditions. By tracing such connections, this analysis shows how Christian Martyrs exemplifies the inter- and multi-mediality of early cinema, situated at the crossroads of literary, performative, pictorial, and spectacular traditions through which the medium appropriated and refashioned the ancient world.