This is an excellent review of the Sword and Sandal Genre in cinema. I’m not sure what the correlation is to novels, however. It’d be interesting to compare.

I’ve been contemplating writing an article for the Romance Writers of America monthly zine about the rise of the ancient historical; I hope it has staying power.

This is more than a little past my time period, but I cannot resist an ancient Roman sword-and-sandal epic and this one looks better than any recent such endeavor. This review makes it sound rather promising.