This short closing chapter returns to the camera obscura as earliest film apparatus and considers a related projection device, the zoetrope, as it may be imagined to have existed in antiquity. The ill-fated epic Cleopatra (1963) was to have included a charming tribute to its own medium in a scene in which Cleopatra shows Julius Caesar a zoetrope as an example of advanced technology. The chapter then turns to the Hollywood melodrama Primrose Path for the most irresistible tribute in film history to the ancient Greeks. The chapter, and the book, ends on the most stupendous view of the Acropolis ever filmed, which appeared in the Cinerama travelogue Seven Wonders of the World.

By analyzing the topography of Selinous, a colonial foundation of the late seventh century BC, the chapter explores the way in which temple building and sacred architecture became subordinated to urban design. From the sixth century BC onward, Greek cult places and temples were increasingly seen as an expression of the urban rather than the natural landscape. This holds true for altars and temples at the center of cult places, but also for fountain houses that replaced or were built over natural fountains. The sacredness of a place was increasingly represented and communicated through monumental stone architecture. At the same time, the novel use of man-made images in Greek sanctuaries contributed to a radical change in which the presence of the gods was imagined and experienced. All this went along with a shift of power and agency from local groups to urban elites, who had the means to control the restructuring and reorganization of sacred landscapes. The violence of this shift is reflected in the iconography that tends to rationalize and sublimize violence against the non-Greek, non-urban, and non-male.

In this chapter we discuss the origins of Greek and Israeli archaeology in 19th-century concerns that accompanied European colonialism, the relation of archaeology to emerging Hellenic and Zionist nationalisms, and the enduring impact of imperial structures in 20th-century national archaeologies. We conclude with a brief consideration of the place of archaeology in the long history of Jewish–Hellenic entanglement, especially with respect to concepts of the idealized body.