Federico Fellini and Homer: Parallels and intersections

This essay is an outgrowth of the topic considered in the previous articles devoted to the image of ancient and modern Rome in Federico Fellini’s films, in which an attempt to analyse several Homeric motifs in Fellini Satyricon (1969) was made. The Italian film director acknowledged that he had dreamed to make a film based on the European ‘Book of the Books’, Homer’s duology – the Iliad and the Odyssey – about the heroes of the Trojan cycle of myths. Other coincidences in Fellini and Homer constitute the object of this study. Deliberate? Fortuitous? Archetypic? Fanciful? The very wording of the topic – Fellini Satyricon as Fellini’s Iliad – is provocative. The article identifies and discusses the parallels and intersections in the works of the two great masters – the Ancient Greek poet and the classic of Italian cinematograph, who lived almost three millennia apart.