Athanasius I of Alexandria, also called Athanasius the Great, Athanasius the Confessor, or, among Coptic Christians, Athanasius the Apostolic, was a Christian theologian and the 20th pope of Alexandria. His intermittent episcopacy spanned 45 years, of which over 17 encompassed five exiles, when he was replaced on the order of four different Roman emperors. Athanasius was a Church Father, the chief proponent of Trinitarianism against Arianism, and a noted Egyptian Christian leader of the fourth century.
Constantius II was Roman emperor from 337 to 361. His reign saw constant warfare on the borders against the Sasanian Empire and Germanic peoples, while internally the Roman Empire went through repeated civil wars, court intrigues, and usurpations. His religious policies inflamed domestic conflicts that would continue after his death.
Constantine I, also known as Constantine the Great, was a Roman emperor from AD 306 to 337 and the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. He played a pivotal role in elevating the status of Christianity in Rome, decriminalizing Christian practice and ceasing Christian persecution in a period referred to as the Constantinian shift. This initiated the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Constantine is associated with the religiopolitical ideology known as Caesaropapism, which epitomizes the unity of church and state. He founded the city of Constantinople and made it the capital of the Empire, which remained so for over a millennium.
Julian was the Caesar of the West from 355 to 360 and Roman emperor from 361 to 363, as well as a notable philosopher and author in Greek. His rejection of Christianity, and his promotion of Neoplatonic Hellenism in its place, caused him to be remembered as Julian the Apostate in Christian tradition. He is sometimes referred to as Julian the Philosopher.
The 360s decade ran from January 1, 360, to December 31, 369.
Flavius Valerius Constantius, also called Constantius I, was a Roman emperor from 305 to 306. He was one of the four original members of the Tetrarchy established by Diocletian, first serving as caesar from 293 to 305 and then ruling as augustus until his death. Constantius was also father of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome. The nickname "Chlorus" was first popularized by Byzantine-era historians and not used during the emperor's lifetime.
Maciste is one of the oldest recurring characters of cinema, created by Gabriele d'Annunzio and Giovanni Pastrone. He is featured throughout the history of the cinema of Italy from the 1910s to the mid-1960s.
Sword-and-sandal, also known as peplum, is a subgenre of largely Italian-made historical, mythological, or biblical epics mostly set in the Greco-Roman antiquity or the Middle Ages. These films attempted to emulate the big-budget Hollywood historical epics of the time, such as Samson and Delilah (1949), Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and Cleopatra (1963). These films dominated the Italian film industry from 1958 to 1965, eventually being replaced in 1965 by spaghetti Western and Eurospy films.
Bartolomeo Pagano was an Italian motion picture actor.
The fall of the Western Roman Empire, also called the fall of the Roman Empire or the fall of Rome, was the loss of central political control in the Western Roman Empire, a process in which the Empire failed to enforce its rule, and its vast territory was divided among several successor polities. The Roman Empire lost the strengths that had allowed it to exercise effective control over its Western provinces; modern historians posit factors including the effectiveness and numbers of the army, the health and numbers of the Roman population, the strength of the economy, the competence of the emperors, the internal struggles for power, the religious changes of the period, and the efficiency of the civil administration. Increasing pressure from invading peoples outside Roman culture also contributed greatly to the collapse. Climatic changes and both endemic and epidemic disease drove many of these immediate factors. The reasons for the collapse are major subjects of the historiography of the ancient world and they inform much modern discourse on state failure.
Emperor and Galilean is a play written by Henrik Ibsen. Although it is one of the writer's lesser known plays, on several occasions Henrik Ibsen called Emperor and Galilean his major work. Emperor and Galilean is written in two complementary parts with five acts in each part and is Ibsen's longest play.
Barbatio was a Roman general of the infantry under the command of Constantius II. Previously he was a commander of the household troops under Gallus Caesar, but he arrested Gallus under the instruction of Constantius, thereby ensuring his promotion on the death of Claudius Silvanus. In 359, both he and his wife Assyria were arrested and beheaded for treason against Constantius, possibly as part of a plot by Arbitio, a senior cavalry commander, and another exponent of the forms of scheming and political intrigue that became such a part of the later Roman Empire.
Le Giornate del cinema muto is an annual festival of silent film held in October in Pordenone, northern Italy. It is the first, largest and most important international festival dedicated to silent film and also is present in the list of the top 50 unmissable film festivals in the world according to Variety. The Pordenone Silent Film Festival is a non-profit association, whose president is Livio Jacob. The director from 1997 until 2015 was David Robinson. In 2016, Jay Weissberg became director. Other members of the festival board are Paolo Cherchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli, Piero Colussi, Luciano De Giusti, Carlo Montanaro, Piera Patat.
The Philadelphion was a public square located in Constantinople.
Luigi Mancinelli was an Italian conductor, cellist and composer. His early career was in Italy, where he established a reputation in Perugia and then Bologna. After 1886 he worked mostly in other countries, as principal conductor at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London and at the "Old Metropolitan" Opera House in New York, and in other appointments in Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.
Constantine and the Cross is a 1961 historical drama film about the early career of the emperor Constantine, who first legalized and then adopted Christianity in the early 4th century. The fictionalised film only stretches as far into his life as the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in AD 312.
Giuseppa Iolanda Menichelli, known professionally as Pina Menichelli, was an Italian actress. After a career in theatre and a series of small film roles, Menichelli was launched as a film star when Giovanni Pastrone gave her the lead role in The Fire (1916). Over the next nine years, Menichelli made a series of films, often trading on her image as a diva and on her passionate, decadent eroticism. Menichelli became a global star, and one of the most appreciated actresses in Italian cinema, before her retirement in 1924, aged 34.
Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire began during the reign of Constantine the Great in the military colony of Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem), when he destroyed a pagan temple for the purpose of constructing a Christian church. Rome had periodically confiscated church properties, and Constantine was vigorous in reclaiming them whenever these issues were brought to his attention. Christian historians alleged that Hadrian had constructed a temple to Venus on the site of the crucifixion of Jesus on Golgotha hill in order to suppress Christian veneration there. Constantine used that to justify the temple's destruction, saying he was simply reclaiming the property. Using the vocabulary of reclamation, Constantine acquired several more sites of Christian significance in the Holy Land.
The Two Gladiators is a 1964 Italian peplum film directed by Mario Caiano and starring Richard Harrison.
