“Every legend starts with a true story,” blares director Brett Ratner on the press release for Hercules. Socrates, I suspect, would have asked “whose truth?” The Greek past is slippery, so directors tend to project what they want on to the void. Ancient history becomes contemporary polemic. Alexander the Great, directed by Robert Rossen in 1956, charts two Fifties American obsessions: juvenile delinquency (amplifying stories of Alexander’s dysfunctional family) and the corruption of idealism by power. The 300 Spartans, Rudolph Maté’s 1962 version of the Battle of Thermopylae of 480BC, had Spartans and their Greek allies (for which read America and Britain) as freedom fighters standing up to a monolithic (in other words, Communist) threat. By 2007, and Zack Snyder’s 300, which dealt with the same battle, it was the diabolical Middle East that was presented as the enemy.