Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Hunger Games, the Analogy To ??

A brief excerpt-description of Hunger Games placed in context:

...Like that ancient Greek hero, Katniss defies an oppressive empire and sparks a revolution. But it’s an update with a twist. Today’s Theseus is female, which calls to mind not only modern girl power but also ancient lore. Her character is inspired by the famous Amazon warriors and Atalanta, the great female runner of Greek myth. Katniss also recalls Artemis, goddess of the hunt—Diana to the Romans—because her preferred weapon is the bow and arrow.

Like imperial Rome, the country of “The Hunger Games” is a once-free society now dominated by a corrupt and rapacious capital city. A president exercises, in effect, the power of an emperor. He lives in a grand city called the Capitol, and his government feeds off its provinces, much as ancient Rome did. The people of the Capitol radiate a baroque and overripe luxuriousness, like the lords and ladies of imperial Rome, while the provincials are poor and virtuous.

This pattern goes back to the great Roman historian Tacitus (ca. 56-117), who drew a contrast between the primitive but free Germans and Britons and the decadent Romans who had lost their republican virtue under the Caesars. Tacitus would have understood why the bad guys in Ms. Collins’s Capitol have Latinate first names such as Coriolanus Snow, the coldhearted president, and Caesar Flickerman, the smarmy host of the televised version of the games....

"Girl-power" aside, that middle graf is.....ahhhh........gripping, indeed.

Those who fail to understand history shall be forced to re-live it--or something like that.

1 comment:

William said...

Whereas Rome took three or four centuries to rot from within, we in modernity can experience it in a little more than one.