In Popular Culture
- Gordon Scott portrayed Mucius in the sword-and-sandal film Hero of Rome (1964), a film loosely based on this story.
- A similar hand-burning feat of endurance was famously performed by G. Gordon Liddy. It involved holding his hand over a lighter flame until the flesh burned. According to the Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward book All the President's Men (1974), Liddy did this once at a dinner party. When someone asked "What's the trick?" He replied, "The trick is not minding." When Liddy entered prison for his Watergate crimes he allegedly used this trick to intimidate other inmates.
- The same “trick” was also attributed to T. E. Lawrence in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence (played by Peter O'Toole) extinguishes a match with his fingers. Seeing this, the character Potter tries it. Potter: “Ow! It damn well 'urts!” Lawrence: “Certainly it hurts.” Potter: “Well what's the trick then?” Lawrence: “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”
Read more about this topic: Gaius Mucius Scaevola
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)