Maciste

Maciste (Italian pronunciation: [maˈtʃiste]) is one of the oldest recurring characters of cinema, created by Gabriele d'Annunzio and Giovanni Pastrone.

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).

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.

[1] 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").

In the original draft outline of the 1914 movie Cabiria by director Giovanni Pastrone, the muscular hero's name had been Ercole ("Hercules").

[2][3] In the revised script, writer Gabriele d'Annunzio gave the character the name Maciste, which he understood (based on the above or similar sources) to be an erudite synonym for Hercules.

His character and his plots remained consistent in whatever setting; he was always a populist Hercules, using his physical prowess to overcome the evil ruses of effete aristocrats and authority figures.

Some Italian sword and sandal films were not theatrically released in the USA; rather they premiered on American television in a syndication package called The Sons of Hercules, usually broadcast on Saturday afternoons.

Unlike the other Italian peplum protagonists, Maciste appeared in a variety of time periods ranging from the Ice Age to 16th Century Scotland.

However, in the first film of the 1960s series, he mentions to another character that the name "Maciste" means "born of the rock", as if he were a god who would appear out of the earth itself in times of need.

Maciste contre la Reine des Amazones was distributed in Italy as a "Karzan" film (a Tarzan imitation), while Les exploits érotiques de Maciste dans l'Atlantide was released, also in France, in a second version with hardcore pornographic inserts entitled Les Gloutonnes (literally: "The Gobblers").