Maciste

Maciste (Italian pronunciation: [maˈtʃiste]) 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.

He is usually depicted as a Hercules-like figure, utilizing his massive strength to achieve heroic feats that ordinary men cannot. Many of the 1960s Italian movies featuring Maciste were retitled in other countries, substituting more popular names in the titles (such as Hercules, Goliath or Samson).

Name origin

There are a number of references to the name in literature. The name of Maciste appears in a sentence in Strabo's Geographica (Book 8, Chapter 3, Section 21), in which he writes: ἐν δὲ τῷ μεταξὺ τό τε τοῦ Μακιστίου Ἡρακλέους ἱερόν ἐστι καὶ ὁ Ἀκίδων ποταμός – "And in the middle is the temple of the Macistian Heracles, and the river Acidon." The epithet Μακίστιος (Makistios, Latinized as Macistius) is generally understood to be an adjective referring to a town called Μάκιστος (Makistos) in the province of Triphylia in Elis.

In the first volume of the Dizionario universale archeologico-artistico-tecnologico (1858) Macistius is given as one among several epithets of Hercules (Ercole). In the second volume of the same dictionary (1864) this name appears Italianized as Maciste, defined as uno dei soprannomi d'Ercole ("one of the nicknames of Hercules").

According to William Smith's A Dictionary of Greek and Roman mythology, Macistus (Μάκιστος) was "a surname of Heracles, who had a temple in the neighbourhood of the town of Macistus in Triphylia". Makistos was also the third child of Athamas and Nephele, according to the Greek mythology.