On Screen · Late Roman Republic · Actium, Acarnania, Greece
Apocalypse docuseries turns to AI to recreate Rome's Battle of Actium
The French franchise known for restored archive film moves to 31 BC, using artificial intelligence to imitate footage of a war nobody filmed.
News reports
Actium, Greece The French documentary franchise Apocalypse is making its first season set outside the 20th century. Apocalypse Civilizations: Rome centres on the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. It will use artificial intelligence to recreate the look of the archive footage the series is known for, Deadline reported.
Imagissime, a Paris-based label of the French media group Mediawan, is producing the season with Mediawan Kids and Family. Thomas Marlier directs. His recent credits include Secret Sardinia Mysteries of the Nuraghi and Fontainebleau, la vraie demeure des Rois. Deadline did not give a broadcaster, a release date or an episode count.
AI in place of archive film
Earlier seasons were built on restored and colourised archive film of 20th-century history. No film exists for antiquity. The producers say the new season will combine historical, archaeological and documentary research with AI. The aim is to recreate the look and feel of archive footage while keeping the immersive style of the collection.
Through an unprecedented alliance between historical research and artificial intelligence, the film resurrects antiquity with an unparalleled level of realism. Every face, every ship and every landscape is grounded in ancient sources, the latest archaeological discoveries, and the work of leading international specialists.
Release announcing Apocalypse Civilizations: Rome
Deadline's report does not name those specialists. It also does not say which ancient sources or archaeological discoveries the images draw on. No outside historian or archaeologist is quoted in the report.
The franchise was created by CC&C, the company of historians and documentarians Daniel Costelle and Isabelle Clarke and producer Louis Vaudeville. Mediawan bought CC&C in 2017. The first series aired in 2009. According to Deadline, the franchise has been broadcast in 165 countries and seen by more than 100 million viewers. In France it is shown on France Télévisions.
31 BC. Rome rules the known world yet is collapsing from within. In the waters off Actium, two heirs to Caesar clash for control of an empire they once shared: Mark Antony, allied with Cleopatra, and Octavian. Out of this fratricidal war emerges a new political order that will shape the Western world for centuries.
Synopsis of Apocalypse Civilizations: Rome
What texts and ruins say about Actium
The battle was fought off Actium, a headland at the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf in north-western Greece, near modern Preveza. Octavian's fleet, commanded by Marcus Agrippa, defeated the ships of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The two escaped to Egypt and both died there the next year. In 27 BC Octavian took the name Augustus.
Octavian was Julius Caesar's great-nephew and his adopted heir under Caesar's will. Antony had been Caesar's close ally and fellow consul. The two shared power for about a decade before the final break.
The fullest accounts of the battle come from later Greek writers. Plutarch described it in his Life of Antony more than a century after the event. Cassius Dio wrote more than two centuries after it. Both wrote under the empire that Octavian founded.
The main archaeological evidence is on land. Octavian founded the city of Nikopolis, meaning "Victory City", on the northern shore of the strait. On the hill where his camp stood he built a victory monument. Its terrace wall once held bronze rams taken from captured warships. The rams are gone, but the sockets cut for them survive and give an idea of the size of the ships.
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