Classics & The Hunger Games | The Ancient Inspiration Behind the Books [cc]

hi everyone welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new if you are an old time subscriber then you probably recognize this video title as something I've been promising to do on this channel for years like at least half a decade now I think I've said I'm going to film a video all about the classical myth and history references in Suzanne Collins Hunger Games well here I am many years later we are finally sitting down to film it I main part of been inspired by the fact that I recently saw

a ballad of song birds and snakes in the cinema so my love of Hunger Games was rekindled H but for whatever reason we're here we're here now presumably if you are watching you're either a fan of Hunger Games a fan of uh mythology history or all three and we're going to talk about all three here so basically what this video is going to be is a little bit of a deep dive on Suzanne Collins Hunger Games trilogy and um prequel a ballad of song birds and snakes looking at all of the references to clas

sical myth and ancient history within them predominantly breaking down um some of the characters who are named after historical or mythological characters and the person they are named after so I'll talk a little bit about The Hunger Games characters and the um sort of Easter eggs in there but this is largely going to be about the ancient side of things the mythology and the history whether it's Greek or Roman and I will be going into a little bit more depth in terms of like the myths and the hi

storical figures than I will in terms of Hunger Games I also feel like there might be some small spoilers i' I've not really thought it through but there could be small spoilers for Hunger Games so um just heads up if you've not read or seen the series and if you haven't what are you doing because Hunger Games are fantastic I highly recommend them love both the film franchise and the books um have watched and read them all multiple times so this is two things I love in one video and I'm excited

to share them with you but without further Ado let's get into it shall we now I actually want to start a little bit more broadly talking about the world of The Hunger Games series at panm where it is located the district and uh the history and storyline surrounding the Hunger Games uh themselves and then we'll get a little bit more into the characters but I think it's really interesting to note that Suzanne Collins has been quoted in interviews um referencing the ancient Greek myth of thesis and

the minor as a partial inspiration Behind The Hunger Games so I wanted to do a little bit of background and tell you about the story of thesis and the minur because it's one that I think a lot of us recognize the names of but don't know the details of and it's actually really interesting when you consider the overlap there now there's obviously a lot more to the Hunger Games that um goes beyond this myth that is unique and different and separate and all its own but there are certainly those str

ands there and you can see the Thematic overlap from a story that uh we first have cited over two Millennia ago to a story that we've all read and enjoyed um in the past few decades so let's talk about Theus and the minur so the story of the minur really starts with King Minos who is the ruler of the island creit now long story short Minos was supposed to sacrifice this beautiful white bull to Poseidon that the sea God had sent to him but it was such a beautiful specimen that he decided to keep

it and not sacrifice it to the gods which was obviously incredible disrespectful so in order to T punish Minos Poseidon actually casts a spell puts a curse on uses his magic on minos's wife paa which is just typical of ancient mythology the woman is the one that is really hard done by there gets drawn dragged into this whole punishment scenario but that's neither here nor there for right this moment um so the curse on paa is that she should fall in love with this buo naturally leading her to lus

t after it um and in order to consumate this lust she approaches uh the Kingdom's resident inventor dilus yes the same Deus who uh eventually goes on to invent wings that he and his son IUS used to escape CR and PAs goes to deis and says make me a heer suit make me a nice looking cow suit that the bill will fall in love with um yeah and he does it cuz this is his Queen what's see to do and she dresses herself in the billit uh Under This Spell bearing in mind so this is not a um nice story in any

way shape or form and she gets what she wants or what the spell makes her want and she falls pregnant so um pacif minos's wife uh Queen of the island is now pregnant um with a child that is not her husband and when the child is born he is half bull half man aka the minur um who gets his name from Minos and Taurus uh being built so that's where the Minotaur comes from and Mos not a fan not a fan of this uh this half bull stepchild of his wives um so he decides to have it sort of enclosed SL lock

ed away hidden in um a labyrinth something that would be very difficult for the minor to escape um but in which they can still send it offerings and food to keep it chill and uh therefore MOS once again goes to D list and says you know make me something to put the the the Minotaur in and he builds a labyrinth which is the famous Labyrinth of the thesis and the minor myth in which the minur lives so that's where the minor Labyrinth part of our story comes from but for the second half of our story

we need to go to Athens where we meet Theus so Theus is an Athenian Prince and for years now his people the people of Athens have had to sacrifice Vice a group of their young citizens oh there's a cat outside my window hello oh it just wants to come inside and say hello I guess this is how Prim fell um when she found uh that scraggly cat in a District 12 right back to the story so for years now the cisus people have been sacrificing um their men and women to the minor because of a deal that the

y made with King Minos after King minos's son died at the hands of the Athenians so there's various different versions of how the son died but because of that I'm a deal with struck in which uh Minos takes sacrifices a little bit like tributes from the Athenian people annually and places them in The Labyrinth where they are um killed eaten who knows by the minur and finally the year comes around where Theus says enough is enough I'm old enough now I'm going I am volunteering as one of this year'

s tributes I am um going to volunteer um as one of our sacrifices this year but my plan is not to just be sacrificed to defeat the Minotaur and end this deal which keeps leading to the death of all of my people so thesias goes off and when he arrives on cre uh he instantly takes the fancy of Minos and pasa's daughter Ari Adney now Ari Adney thinks yeah yeah I like the look of him um and there's a bit of woing going on and she offers to help thesis and of course you might have heard what happens

next Ari Adney gives Theus a ball of thread and this is a thread that Theus uses um to sort of chart his course through the Labyrinth so once he has slain the Minotaur he is able to once again escape and that's what happens it all seemingly has a happy ending ariadne gets on the boat to go away with thesis cuz really her dad's not that happy at this point only thesias ends up betraying her and abandoning her on an island so she definitely gets um the short end of the stick in that story unless y

ou consider the fact that she does eventually get to married dinis god of wine and parties but that is my brief very academic summary of The Myth of thesis and the minor and I think already you can see the parallels there I think the part of the thesis and minor myth that people are least familiar with is um the middle part for me at least when I talk to people is they're not familiar with the part in which Athens um has to give Athenian people to Minos to sacrifice to the bull in this Labyrinth

and that thesis volunteers to go one year I think that's the bit that often people aren't familiar with but actually it's really the bit that is the biggest um link I feel to the Hunger Games which is really interesting because as we know H because of the district's defeat they have to you know sacrifice their kids every year to the Hunger Games and when Prim Rose's name is called her sister Katniss Volunteers in her place so Katniss is in some senses our thesis um although I think Katniss is d

efinitely preferable given the way that thesis treats ariadne on the topic of Katniss is characterization though I have seen people draw parallels I think are worth mentioning here between Katniss and uh the Greek goddess Artemis or the Roman Goddess Diana who is the goddess of the hunt now I'm not sure if Suzanne Collins has ever acknowledged um any inspiration there but I think in a lot of ways the goddess emis or Diana has inspired many female figures who are seen as uh like huntresses she's

had an impact on just like our public Consciousness around that idea and uh in addition to the fact that Artemis Diana is a goddess of the hunt she's skilled with a bow and a she is also the goddess of young women and a virginal goddess and I think that can be seen as mirrored in catniss in the fact that she doesn't want um to take anybody as like a lover or a boyfriend or a husband and because of the political situation that she lives in um she might change her mind eventually but at this momen

t in time she's not interested in romantic love um at the very beginning of the story so I think that is like a worthy comparison I definitely think it's an interesting one moving on from mythology though to history I also think there are um parallels worthy of note in terms of panm and The Hunger Games links with Roman history particularly Roman history and I think you'll notice when we go through the character names there are more Roman names than there are say Greek names and most of the hist

orical names and historical um character inspiration comes from ancient Rome and I can very much understand how this came about and see the links there in particular in the popularity of the Roman amphithe and the gladiatorial fights that were held Within These amphitheaters which really reached their Peak during the early Roman Empire um so the first couple of centuries of uh this Millennia uh there was like a real peak in terms of um gladiatorial fighting um in which Gladiators often fought to

the death in which prisoners were often forced to fight to the death um in which also um people who had been uh taken during uh War or colonization were um basically just like murdered in front of everyone for popular entertainment the amphitheaters were a sight of violence they also set Gladiators up against wild animals from far off lands and it was just like blood and gore and horror and people turned up in their hundreds if not thousands to witness these fights and these games and to witnes

s this level of violence and the Roman Empire is by no means the only example of this I mean public executions were still a thing in Britain until the 1900s I mean there are plenty of examples throughout history of um quite horrific things being seen as entertainment and it's very easy to see um how a scenario like The Hunger Games could realistically come about given historically how similar things have also happened like in the Gladiator or fighting then perhaps like a little bit more LLY I th

ink it's also worth noting um that pan is a place of districts there is the capital and 12 Once Upon a Time 13 districts and Rome itself was a um Place separated into districts or provinces now there were more than 12 or 13 and the number of provinces varies depending on which emperor we're under and what time period we're in but it is a place of provinces so I think that is interesting in itself as well but now that we've covered some of the basis of the World building and where I see the conne

ctions between um history and myth and The Hunger Games let's move on to the characters so rather than run through characters as they're introduced in the books book by book I have decided to sort of separate them into subsections in terms of the um categories of ancient names they are drawing on so the first category are actually mythological figures um whose names are used in The Hunger Games uh books or in a ballad of song birds and snakes and I have covered all four books although is there a

possibility I've missed out a name or a character there certainly is so if you notice any that I fail to mention throughout this video please do leave them in the comments down below because I'm sure both myself and anybody else watching this video would appreciate it but like I said I'm going to start off with the characters whose names come from myth and this is where you see the greatest number of Greek names and that's possibly potentially because a lot of um names in Greek and Roman mythol

ogy are the same um but sometimes we find Greek names here uh that do have different names in Roman mythology so it's not like a a generic you know um uh just like standard Roman names have been used there is Greek names in there too and also interestingly enough and I don't know if this means anything I found that most of the mythological names came up in a ballad of song birds and snakes uh particularly given that that's one book versus three so yeah let's get into it shall we so first up we h

ave iio Jasper who is one of the students at the Academy in a ballad of song birds and snakes so um of Ages with Cory Elena snow who attends school with him and becomes um a mentor during the 10th Hunger Games and it's interesting cuz a lot of the characters in this section um of my my little list are actually um students at the Academy in a ballad of song birds and snakes it feels like a lot of those students have um Greek myth inspired names which is interesting I guess so the io of Greek myth

ology uh was the daughter of a nymph a mortal woman whom Zeus took against her will now I do disturbingly find quite often her refer to asus's lover in texts and online posts but most if not all of the ancient texts contain no consent between them so I just so I just I just want that acknowledged basically um but IO is um taken by Zeus um and forced to become his lover we could see H which upsets Zeus's wife Hera now Zeus has quite a lot of Affairs consensual and non-consensual so non-consensual

would not really be Affairs but considered Affairs uh by Hera his wife and these make her very angry and very jealous but she can't take out her rage on Zeus so um unfairly she obviously takes out her rage on H the women that he has either abducted or seduced and in this case h she comes after IO but in order to protect IO from Hera Zeus turns her into a heer or a cow um and IO in this scenario becomes becomes a cow presumably so he can go to Hera I haven't taken a new lover or abducted any wom

en recently I just got a nice cow but Hera knows exactly what's going on so she asks Zeus to have I or the cow as a present she goes that is a lovely heer can I have it and Zeus doesn't really have any reason to say no because uh he doesn't want to tell her that this is actually a mortal woman that he turned into a cow so without any concern for Io he just gives her away in order to keep an eye on I the cow um and not have Zeus steal her back H Hera sends one of her servants Argus um who is like

a 100 eyed um giant to watch over her but not willing to give up Zeus sends Heracles to slay Argus and then steal back iio for him which then results in Hera sending a gadfly to um forever hover over IO and sting her and irritate her and just like torment her now eventually I does manage to escape across the sea to Egypt where she marries a king and turns back in to a human woman so it's not all bad the ending is definitely better for than the beginning um but that is that's that's the story of

IO in terms of any like connection between the character of IO in a ballad of song birds and snakes and the character of IO in mythology I can't really see any and that is the case for I'd say most of the characters here especially when it comes to Side characters particularly Side characters who have mythological or historical names I don't really see a blaringly obvious connection to why they have that name although some of the the more Central characters there are um however I don't think th

at really matters I still think it's a fun reference so let's carry on to the next character like I mentioned we have a lot of Academy students including the next one which is epah moss from a ballad of song birds and snakes she gets her name from epah a princess of Greek mythology and the daughter of agam no now fanah is another woman with a tragic tale she is taken from her home by her father who has promised her mother and her that she is to be married off to the hero Achilles and that's wher

e that's where he's taking her it's during the tojan war and he's like you're going to marry Achilles and he takes her off um but instead of marrying her off to Achilles he sacrifices her in the hopes that it will give them better conditions H in which to fight and sail and just I mean I just really feel for ifig it really sucks um but in some versions of the story that's that's exactly what happens if a Jani is sacrificed and some others she is Spirited Away by a goddess um from this whole situ

ation although not much else um is known of her after that and if she does end up in the Underworld there's actually a story by Amy Scott Hines which you can read online for free about ifah falling in love in the Underworld and um kind of starting aresh which I absolutely adore called The Virgin Brides that I'll link down below for you to read because it's just beautiful the next mentor and student from a ballad of song birds and snakes is Andre clle Anderson yeah Andre Anderson who is named aft

er the Fable character Andre from isup's fables in many ways this Fable is similar to The Lion and the mouse Fable and you might recognize some of the Beats from it Andre CLE um is an escaped slave who hides away in a cave only to discover that this cave is the home of a lion this lion however has a thorn in his paw which of course Andre being the nice chap is offers to remove and a wonderful friendship begins so that is Andre and where he comes from mentor number four is panie price who is natu

rally named after panie the goddess of spr ring and queen of the underworld in Greek mythology so uh you probably know who panie is she is the daughter of Deiter and uh the wife of Hades although she is abducted by him in the original mythology and she then spends part of her year every year in the Underworld which is the winter month and the rest of the year above um on the earth with her mother which is spring autumn summer when things grow and things are happy um I won't go into tons of death

about the myth of pan and Hades because it's a long one and I actually have an entire video dedicated to it and why it's not really the cute romantic story that you think it might be um so I will link that down below or somewhere on the screen um but pran is an incredibly powerful um famous well-known goddess of Greek mythology who actually long predates many other gods and goddesses in terms of our evidence for names and characters she's also known as Cory um and she has a mystery cult with he

r mother demer um so she's really really important in terms of the ancient Greek pantheon and ancient Greek culture so um worth learning more about if you're interested student number five I told you there were a few is Arachne crane who is named after Arachne other women who things just don't go great far to be honest so Arachne is an IM mortal woman who is just fantastic at weaving like Arachne knows how to use Al loom how to use thread how to just like make the most beautiful tapestries um an

d weave the most beautiful images in all of Greece so much so that she gets a little bit arrogant and talks about how amazing she is um perhaps even comparing herself to the goddess of Athena who if you don't know aside from being the goddess of war and wisdom is also the goddess of weaving and Athena or any of the Gods really don't like to uh be compared to Mortals they don't like when Mortals act as if they're as good as them they have EOS and for that reason Athena comes down furious with Ara

chne and demands that they compare their skills so they they go about having a little competition where they both make a tapestry to see who's better and Athena is obviously beautiful Athena is fabulous at her job um but arachn is also incredible and intricate and not only is it beautiful and intricate and expertly done uh such skilled craft Wanship um went into it it also depicts a lot of the terrible things done by the Greek gods and goddesses it depicts them um mistreating Mortals Act like ch

ildren doing terrible things and this just further angers Athena and maybe Arachne should have seen that this wasn't the best way to go but it is sort of like an embarrassment and it shows Athena up and she's Furious um so she decides uh to put a spell on Arachne turning her into a spider so that she can forever weave her little web and that is uh where we also get the um name for arachnet from so yeah that is Arachne number six and seven at least I think this is six and seven are actually two t

wins and they are Apollo ring and Diana ring two students once again who are twins and named after twins so Diana and Apollo are actually the Roman names um for the gods although I say Roman names Apollo is called Apollo in Greek mythology and Roman mythology but Diana 's equivalent in Greek mythology in terms of like synchronization syn synchronism in mythology is emus so we have the Roman um twin god and goddess Diana and Apollo who are the twin children of Leto and Zeus now Apollo and emis th

ere's two much to say about in uh one video or Apollo and Diana I forget what I'm talking about sorry Apollo and Diana in one video so um just for like quick reference for anybody who's not familiar Apollo is most famous probably as the God of Prophecy music medicine um what have you and um Artemis is probably best known again as I've already mentioned earlier as the goddess of the hunt um of the wild of young girls and um they are like I mentioned twins so it makes sense that twins would be nam

ed after them there's a little Connection in terms of the actual characters and the mythological figures but lastly for mythological names in a ballad of song birds and snakes we actually have a character who I'm going to talk about in tandem with a character from the original trilogy even though the characters are seemingly unrelated their mythological names are not and that is Remis dittle who is a game maker in training in The Ballad of song birds and snakes and Romulus thread who is a partic

ularly brutal Peacekeeper in the Hunger Game series so again I don't know of these two characters being connected in any way but the names Romulus and Remis are inextricably tied together in Roman mythology Romus and rumis are the legendary ancestors of Rome um who are supposedly Det descended from the hero anas from Troy who is in turn the son of the goddess Aphrodite or Venus so like a long line of mythological connection there for for Rome's Legacy you know like a little bit of propaganda the

re and Romulus and Remis were brothers and founders of Rome so they were the two babies who were abandoned and initially like sustained and raised by a She Wolf who nursed them um then taken in and eventually go to set up Rome but things do not go so well in the end for romeus and Remis because they end up having a big disagreement and in essence this argument really starts with which Hill should be the central Hill of where they found Rome like this is where it all starts they're just like I li

ke this hill no I like this hill after Remis insults him Romulus kills Remis and uh becomes the primary leader and founder of Rome equally making the Palatine Hill the center of uh the Kingdom so yeah that's the story of Romeo and Remis uh I mean it really seems like extremes that they went to there and that leaves me with three final uh characters with mythologically inspired names uh one of which or two of which come as a pair and that is cter and Pollock so if you're familiar with The Hunger

Games you may know cter and Pollock as two brothers who are part of Katniss's camera crew in mocking j h so they help her film The like promo Rebel inspirational videos that they send out to um the like re Reon in the capital um to show that Katniss is on their side and the two cameramen are caster and poock uh pox being a avox who had his tongue removed when uh he still lived in the capital and they are actually named after a pair of brothers from Greek mythology caster and poock who you may kn

ow as the brothers of Helen of Troy so cast and Pollocks were um Spartan princes uh who were often known as the desur and as a Jew that's what they were known as in Greek whereas in a Roman myth they are known as Gemini so they are the origin of the Star Sign or the namesake of the Star Sign Gemini and therefore like the astrological symbol of Gemini and in the end um of Castor and Po's myth they are actually turned into a star sign now there's lots of myths surrounding cter and poock um but the

one uh that that marks the end of their story in which they become these star signs um is one in which Caster is dying and pox is given a offer by Zeus King of the Gods and and this offer is that pox who has been given immortality can come and live on Olympus um as an immortal being with the gods or he can half his immortality and share it with his brother thus um becoming these beings in the sky and of course um with so much love for his brother that's exactly what pox does he shares his immor

tality and that is how they become a star sign which is quite a lovely story and a Lov the ending um for all that there is tragedy involved and then lastly for mythological namesakes we have linia and linia is the redheaded avox girl from the Hunger gam series who Katniss recognizes um when she first arrives at the capital as a girl that she saw one time in the woodlands and Fields outside of District 12 and she saw her presumably trying to escape the capital um but then being caught and taken b

ack to the capital where she um is is forced into this life of SL basically as in avox with her tongue cut out and her namesake levinia is actually a princess of Roman mythology and the wife of the hero inas who I also mentioned earlier in connection to Romulus and Remis like Greek and Roman myth are both incredibly interwoven and although there aren't a ton of references to her in ancient texts there is a um novel from her perspective written by a famous science fiction fantasy author Ursula ka

ywin that you might want to check out if you're interested in a story from Lin's perspective but I also think it's interesting that character who doesn't often have a voice in myth and doesn't get mentioned very often or given an opportunity to speak is also used as the name um for an avox in Hunger Games and I don't know if that's something that that Susan cullins was thinking when she chose that name then we have a character again from a ballad of song birds and snakes and one of the students

and mentors which is Lisa strata vicar who doesn't get her name from either mythology or history but instead um a literary figure so Lissa strata is the um protagonist and um titular character of the play Lissa strata which is a comedy by the Greek playright Aristophanes and in Lissa strata the character of Lista strata um initiates a sex strike in which wives and Mistresses what have you refused to have sex with their partners and husbands until the end the war it's story that has since inspire

d quite a few like retellings including films like shyra which similarly sees the women of the story H using a sex strike to try and end uh the war between two gangs um it's it's one that like a lot of people have kind of like heard about I think can like reference or reference in other things it's it's had quite an impact on um pop culture I would say um but yeah it's neither mythological nor historical it's it's just a play just a play just nothing e but like that's that's where her name comes

from next up we have five names all of which um I believe at least um are originally taken from the names of Roman emperors and this is also the point in the video which I'd also like to address another kind of overarching theme in terms of the ancient references in Suzanne Collins Works which I think are really interesting so as we've seen already there are a bunch of different characters um named after figures from classical myth in ancient history and there are many more to come particularly

named after figures from um ancient Roman history like Emperors or empresses or generals or uh writers or politicians and a few other Greek ones um mixed in there too and what you might have already noticed with the names I've mentioned so far and will probably continue to notice with the names I'm about to mention is that almost all of these characters are characters who are originally from the capital so the district if you can call it District of panm which is in charge where the wealthiest

live um where people have the most freedoms the people that take the most joy in watching The Hunger Games and those that don't have to sacrifice children to the Hunger Games so the elite the capital of the elite um are the ones with the ancient names and I think that is very much intentional it has to be in terms of uh the writing and characterization of her characters Suzanne Collins has chosen often the names of very wealthy Roman Elites um from Roman Imperial and Republican history um to nam

e her Capital characters after so I think that's interesting and worth noting and bearing in mind so who are these Emperors first up we have Titus he was a tribute from district 6 in a previous Hunger Games that Katniss mentioned in which he ended up completely losing it and committing cannibalism he started eating the other dead tributes and this was not something that the spectators enjoyed and he is named after the Roman Emperor Titus so Titus was emperor of Rome not for terribly long actuall

y from 79 CE to 81 CE and he was a member of the flavian dynasty who were the Dynasty uh that H created the Coliseum interestingly enough who built the infamous Coliseum or as it was actually known in ancient Rome the flavan amphitheater which also brings up the next character I wanted to mention who is flavus one of Katniss's like makeover team in the books um because I assume he is inspired by either Titus as well or just generally uh members of the flavian dynasty because flavus was a name sh

ared by numerous members of this dynasty and this family so it's not a specific emperor in this instance but I just I just thought it was it was relevant I don't want to miss off the list uh moving on to another Emperor though and one of probably the most infamous Emperors um and well-known Emperors of ancient Rome today and that is is Nero so this is another character who is named in a ballad of song birds and snakes um called Nero price and he is a um big businessman oh my God what is the word

h basically like a train tycoon um he a he's a businessman who's very wealthy um and a neighbor of uh the Snows but he is named after Nero and it's interesting because one of the first times you hear about Nero in a ballad of song birds and snakes is when um you hear about snow and um well corus and his cousin Tigress witnessing um Nero do something really really brutal like really violent and brutal at the beginning of the novel in a sort of early flashback scene and you see this on screen in

the film as well I don't know if they use his name um but interestingly enough the emperor nle is Infamous because of how brutal and like wild he was supposed to have been so Nero definitely managed to reain for longer than Titan and he also came before Titus he was part of the Julio claudian Dynasty the dynasty previous to the flavian Dynasty and um he ruled Rome from 54 CE to 68 CE and there are so many stories about Nero many of which are probably made up some of which are exaggerated and oth

ers of which probably did happen but um that is the nature of a lot of our history text from that time is they almost read like gossip Rags of the Empire like suetonius and tacitus particularly suetonius like that stuff really feels like gossip but a lot of that gossip is about Nero like there's a lot written about Nero because of some of the stuff that he was supposed to have done and some of the stuff he definitely did do but he was definitely very violent very unpredictable um he loved his li

ke performances his Gladiator games he even liked to make people listen to him listen uh playing music and uh loved the spectacle of everything so I think like that also plays into the themes of The Hunger Games and so I think that does also play into the themes of like the establishment um and the early Hunger Games which is interesting to not then since we seem to be working backwards we have Claudius temples Smith next who is one of the presenters of The Hunger Games like one of the voiceover

television presenters for the show in Hunger Games and uh he is named after Claudius who is the Emperor prior to Nero and Claudius is actually Nero's stepfather SL adoptive father so Nero's mother was agripinaa the younger and agrio the younger was one of claudius's wives so he'd been married prior to agripina um and adopted her son from her previous marriage when they got together um L thus leading to Nero becoming um Emperor after him although their families were all intertwined to a certain

extent already and Claudius reigned from ce41 to c54 when Nero took over again there are so many stories surrounding um these Emperors I cannot go into detail about all of them but I had to say one of my favorite stories about Claudius H which very very well might not be true but is also one that a lot of people repeat because of how entertaining it is is um that he was actually found hiding behind a curtain when he was appointed Emperor so his predecessor Caligula dies and Claudius thinks oh no

maybe I'm going to be next and he ends up hiding behind these curtains only to be found by the Roman petorian guard and um declared to be Emperor and yeah I I I I guess it's probably it's it's more than likely just some sort of rumor to characterize Claudius as a bit of like a wet napkin but it's a fun story then lastly we actually have a much later Roman emperor in the shape of Aurelius so the character that um this references is Dr Aurelius from mocking G um the doctor who treats Katniss um f

or her trauma and her mental health after everything that happened with The Hunger Games and then the Rebellion um and then afterwards even her killing president coin and who's also peta's doctor so um that is a character that very much just comes up kind of at the end of the books um but his name comes from the emperor Aurelius who reigned during the second century CE and what I think is probably most interesting in terms of this comparison is that um Aurelius was a philosopher as well as an em

peror so he was known as like a philosopher philosop philosopher Emperor he wrote philosophical texts specifically stoic philosophical texts stoicism being a philosophy founded by the ancient Greeks in the helenistic era and one that um Marcus relus was a follower of so his text that he left behind because not all of the Roman emperors um wrote books or wrote works that have survived um if they wrote any at all um have become one of his like long lasting legacies I feel like people still read Ma

rcus aurelius's meditations and I wonder if that is why this doctor who treats um Katniss um for her like mental health and her trauma is named after aelius because he is also known as a philosopher like I wonder if that's the connection if there was any intentional connection at all moving away from Emperors though the next category I have is women of the Imperial family so empresses or Daughters of Emperors um including in fact agrip so there's a character in The Hunger Games a um gymnasium tr

ainer called agripina sickle who is presumably named after agripina either agripina the elder or agripina the younger or both um agripina the younger being the daughter of agripina the Elder and agripina the younger being the empress um who was married to Claudius I've already mentioned and the mother of Nero now she along with Nero had a ton of rumors about her um she was meant to be very manipulative because you know women are and there was lots of rumors and stories floating around her about

things that she did to gain power for herself or for her son um how she like got into marriage with Claudius um some really like disturbing stories about her relationship with her son Etc um and she's definitely one of the most infamous as women I think of Imperial Imperial Rome in contrast with agrio the younger's reputation though um one of the most supposedly beloved empresses of ancient Rome was actually its first Empress Livia who was the wife of Augustus previously known as Octavian who wa

s the first emperor of Rome so Livia's reputation was as a real like family woman of outstanding values who represented everything Rome was meant to represent on a moral level and that was in part part of augustus's propaganda regime because uh Augustus was very much trying to put forth this like ideal family this ideal um unit of like Roman citizens to his people and these values and he introduced a lot of like moral morality laws we could call them morality laws which dictated how people shoul

d behave how they should get married um how they should have children etc etc so it was all part of this like image um and a lot of what we know about Roman emperors and empresses really is about propaganda either from them or their their dissenters so um that was that was Livia and I actually can't remember if I mentioned but she is the namesake of Livia cardu who is another one of the students SL mentors in a ballad of song birds and snakes and lastly for Imperial women we have Octavia Octavia

in The Hunger Games being another member of Kat is prep team so the men and women who get her ready for all of her events and make her look fabulous for the capital and know all of the trends and she again could be named after various women now I've mentioned one individual for most of um the characters so far I've named but bear in mind these are just names so although there's often a most famous example of this name it's likely not a name that only one person owned that only one person had lo

ts of people probably had that name lots of people definitely had that name and Octavia is one of those names lots of people were called Octavia and there are a couple of famous octavas at that those being Octavia the Elder Octavia the younger and Claudia Octavia so Octavia the Elder was the half sister of Octavian AKA Augustus the first emperor of Rome Octavia the younger meanwhile was the full sister of Augustus and half sister of Octavia the Elder um so she was augustus's younger sister imagi

ne having two siblings with the same name and then Claudia Octavia was actually the daughter of Claudius from a previous marriage a marriage prior to his marriage to agripina the younger and this meant that she obviously wasn't biologically related to his adopted son Nero and became uh the wife of Nero which was supposed to be a sort of like way of connecting Nero's lineage further to the previous Emperor he was married to her daughter but their their their relationship was not a good one um but

for a well she was indeed Empress of Rome after having previously been the daughter of an emperor of Rome I just had to go the camera battery because apparently I've been filming for that long back to the topic of this video some will say that Rome did exist before the Empire and of course they would be right there was the Republic there was also before the Republic but there are some names of Hunger Game characters that seem to stem from figures of the Roman Republic particularly that very end

bit that big bad dramatic bit where there was many or two Triumph ites and uh the empire was sort of of brought in so what kind of led to the end of the Republic in the beginning of the Empire and of course the natural person to start with here is juliia Caesar who is the namesake of the character Caesar flickerman another television host for The Hunger Games who interviews all the contestants very jovially before they go to their death um so you may know juliia Caesar um but if you don't or yo

u only know a little bit about him it's worth noting that Julius Caesar was not an emperor I think this is one of the biggest repeated pieces of misinformation about Julius Caesar is that he was a emperor of Rome the Empire didn't exist during Julius Caesar's time um Julius Caesar was of course assassinated um during this time of political upheaval in the Republic and he was um a political leader and um a soldier and a well-known figure and all of that jazz but he was not an emperor however the

first emperor of ancient Rome who I mentioned already Augustus previously known as Octavian was his great nephew so they were related and um they were very much connected in terms of augustus's rise to power um but Julius Caesar was was never an emperor just a really famous Roman general and Statesman um who was assassinated in 44 BCE on the 15th of March which is why the 15th of March is now known by some as the AIDS of March um or by me as my partner's birthday but I've already mentioned this

word triumph FR and Julia Caesar was one of the co-founders of the first Roman Triumph FR which was a um Ally ship an alliance of three powerful Roman men specifically Julius Caesar Pompei and crus and crus is another name who appears in The Hunger Games so Cris snow is the father of Cory Elena snow AKA President Snow um who is dead for all of the events of all the books like he's not in the books he's only referenced particularly of course in a ballad of song birds and snakes which is all from

Cory Linus's Snow's perspective and but he's also one of the co-founders of the original Hunger Games so Cris um was really the one that first pushed for um and publicized the idea of The Hunger Game so he played a large role in this situation even coming about again crus was a powerful political figure an incredibly wealthy member of the Roman Elite who um served um in the Army and then was also a part of the political scene particularly as a member of the first Triumph r as I already mentioned

you may remember though if you've seen or H read a ballad of song birds and snake that it wasn't all Cris um in terms of The Hunger Games conception H there was of course also Casa High bottom so Casa High bottom is the dean in a ballad of song birds and snakes um who was the one that originally came up with the idea of The Hunger Games although he was not as adamant about actually setting it in motion as crus was crus was the driving force for um Casa it was just an idea and Casa is also named

after a Roman figure of the Republic in fact one of the Assassins of Julius Caesar I don't know why I'm smiling so much when I say that so Casa was a Senator member of the Roman senate um and one of the um main Co conspirators to come up with the whole idea around juliia Caesar's assassination but of course Casco was not alone this was a um teamwork assassination and one of its other like famous members and leaders was bruus another political figure in ancient Rome who was responsible for the a

ssassination of Julius Caesar and bruus is the namesake of another one of the tributes in The Hunger Games series specifically a Victor from a previous Hunger Games who represented District 2 and was then um pulled back back in during the 75th Hunger Games when um each district had to offer up previous Victors as their tributes rather than children I will say I am sorry um if I've not gone into a terrible amount of detail about any of these figures that you'd like to learn more about obviously t

his is quite a long video is quite a large expansive topic uh that features a lot of different people so there's just not really space in this video um but if you'd ever like more ancient history um videos then you just have to let me know uh send me your requests and I do have an ancient History Podcast as well that's ancient history so um always happy to explore these topics in more depth this is just a bit of an overview and in saying that I'm really going hard on the overview section for thi

s next part um because as far as I'm concerned um none of these people are that important that's obviously not true um but there's only so much I can say about them um without this getting incredibly dull and dry if you're not that interested Ed in Roman political history um so these characters are characters named after either like generals or politicians or senators or soldiers and we have Kato aka the same Kato who is in uh the games with Katniss and P in book one who dies in the um Arena um

he is named after either Kato the elder or the younger I don't know I don't know I I wonder though if it's specific or if it's just I like the name Kato both Kato the Elder and Kato the younger Father and Son however were both Roman Senators for anyone who's interested then we have sinna AKA um The Glorious Mastermind behind all of Katniss's phenomenal costumes who is of course named after Lucius Cornelius sinner a soldier and Roman Consul during the Republic sanus plint the not really best frie

nd of coralina snow in a ballad of song birds and snakes given the kind of things that Corina says about him um who who is um previously a resident of the districts that ends up in the academy at the capital who is named after Lucius Olas sanus a soldier and friend of the emperor Tiberius gas Breen another student and Mentor in a ballot of song birds and snakes um who is named presumably after gas the grandson of the Emperor Augustus porsa who is um Peter's sinner basically who came up with Pete

r's costumes in tandem with Sinner and um has the Roman name Porsche a famous example of whom is the daughter of Kato the younger fvia cardu who is the game maker Plutarch Heavens be's assistant who presumably gets her name from the um aristocratic FIA of the Roman Republic who was um famed for her various uh relationships including a marriage to Mark Anthony and Corina snow AKA President Snow now Cory linaa snow is very very clearly um and I think it's been acknowledged named after the Shakespe

are character and there are various other Shakespeare references throughout the Hunger Games including character names and some of that overlaps with classical mythology and ancient history because Shakespeare in turn took a lot of his names and his characters and his inspiration from these topics as well um so for example there is a character named cresa um in The Hunger Games um and although there's no cresa in ancient mythology Shakespeare did create a play called cres and trus trus and cresa

which is set during the Trojan War so like there's a lot of interweaving there but corus is an ancient Roman name and there is um one notable um soldier sgen who was also called coralus but the inspiration is clearly Shakespeare in this incident um because of various other things um I don't have time to get into here um and because I am more interested in anient history than I am in Shakespeare sorry and those are my quick summation characters that I don't care to go into detail about um but I

do have five final names I want to talk a little bit more about because these are all characters whose names are also the names of ancient Greek or Roman writers um so those are the final five I want to talk about starting with why not Plutarch hensby because we just mentioned him so you probably know plutar um as the game maker in Catching Fire and uh mocking J and he takes his name from the ancient Greek writer plutar so plutar was actually alive during the Roman Empire and he's probably best

known for his series of parallel lives so these were texts in which you would take two figures um and write about their lives side by side so they could be either quite recent or contemporary political historical figures or figures of ancient myth um so for example he wrote parallel lives of thesis who we've mentioned already and Romulus who we've mentioned already he also wrote parallel lives of other writers like deos the Greek rhetoric and Cicero the Roman rhetoric but in addition to his para

llel lives he also wrote a of other texts including um lives of the Roman emperors um so he is quite a rich source now for Antiquity um and you'll probably come across his work if you end up studying ancient history of the Greeks or the Romans realistically because he wrote about so many of them um and he's a really interesting read to be honest so that is H Plutarch then we have strael plint H the father of sanus plinth from a ballad of song birds and snakes who is named after stra another Gree

k writer who was alive during the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire so he lived during that crossover period um and he wrote geographical texts so his best known work in the the one which um survives um the best is the geographica which is a description of various different places including Greece and Rome Asia Minor where sto lived um in a variety of different places did he travel to all these places we'll probably never know um but it's really interesting to get a

geographical historical perspective um from a contemporary living at the time um and they're really again valuable texts if you're looking to study ancient history in terms of Roman writers we have plenny the Elder who is the namesake of plenny Harrington another one of the mentors s students from um a ballad of song birds and snakes and plyy the Elder was actually a resident of Pompei who lived in the first century BCE and he is best known for his works on Natural History so again in the world

around you in nature and he actually died during the eruption of vvus which led to the destruction of Pompei supposedly when he was trying to help rescue um a a friend and that friend's family so um that's a really tragic ending as is um realistically what happened in pompe in general it's a really incredibly sad story um he does have a nephew Pliny the um younger who we actually get this story of his death from then we have the namesake for Sen craine the game maker in the first Hunger Games b

ook um who was a stoic philosopher again stoicism being the same philosophy that Marcus aurelus purported that um was um conceptualized during the helenistic era in ancient Greece and he lived during the early Roman Empire but finally for characters and uh for writers we have lucretius and this is actually my favorite so I saved it for last so lucus is actually the full name of Lucky flickerman AKA Lucius flickerman um the television presenter from a ballad of song birds and snakes and he gets h

is name from the Roman writer and philosopher lucus who wrote deram nura and deram nura is actually one of my favorite Ancient Ancient text I find it fascinating um it is a work of Epicurean philosophy which again is just a topic I find fascinating I love epicurian philosophy it was a philosophical school again founded during the helenistic era in Greek by epicurus funnily enough um and uh Lucius wrote a sort of overview of this philosophy and it was a philosophy that basically believed in atoms

a very very very early rudimentary version of atomic theory in which we are all made up of tiny tiny tiny little things called atom um and uh that that is where the term atom comes from and I just love theuma so I wanted to finish on lucretius and make sure anybody who has stuck her into to the end of this video goes and picks out because it's just fantastic and fascinating but for reference lucrecias lived during the final years of the Roman Republic and that brings me to the end of this video

I have no idea how long it's going to be after I've edited it we'll all find out I guess um but hopefully it was worth the wait if you have been waiting on it and hopefully you enjoyed it if uh you watched it even partially or all of it although you won't be hearing this if you only watched part of it um I'd love to talk more about this topic in the com coms down below obviously I couldn't go in depth about everything because it's such a big big topic and it's four books um so yeah if we can ke

ep the conversation going that would be so much fun I'd really enjoy that and let me know what other videos you'd like relating to ancient history in classical mythology and I'll see see what I can do um but until next time everybody happy reading and I'll see you all again soon bye everyone