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Maciste ( ) is one of the oldest recurring characters in cinema. He cuts a heroic figure throughout the history of the cinema of Italy from the 1910s to the 1970s, even if most of the movies that featured him are considered to be of poor artistic quality. He is usually depicted as a Hercules-like figure, utilizing his massive strength to achieve heroic feats that ordinary men cannot.

The name of Maciste ultimately comes from a sentence in Strabo's Geography (Book 8, Chapter 3, Section 21), in which he writes: — "And in the middle is the temple of the Macistian Heracles, and the river Acidon." The epithet Μακιστίος (Makistios, Latinized as Macistius) is generally understood to be an adjective referring to a town called Μάκιστος (Makistos) in the province of Triphylia in Elis. However, in the first volume of the Dizionario universale archeologico-artistico-technologico (1858) Macistius is given as one among several epithets of Hercules (Ercole). In the second volume of the same dictionary (1864) this name appears Italianized as Maciste, defined as uno dei soprannomi d'Ercole ("one of the nicknames of Hercules").

In the original draft outline of the 1914 film Cabiria by director Giovanni Pastrone, the muscular hero's name had been Ercole. In the revised script, writer Gabriele d'Annunzio gave the character the name Maciste, which he understood (based on the above or similar sources) to be an erudite synonym for Hercules. By later writers using the character the original etymology was generally forgotten, and a folk etymology was constructed based on the name's superficial similarity to the Italian word macigno "large stone"; in the first of the 1960s films, Maciste tells another character in the film that his name means "born of the rock".

Maggie Günsberg in Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre claims that d'Annunzio used two sources: one from ancient Greek, makistos, meaning "longer," (though Doric Greek μάκιστος actually means "greatest", "tallest", or "longest in time") and the second from a supposed Latin word macis meaning "rock". No such word as macis exists in Latin. The Italian word macigno ultimately derives from Latin machina used in the sense of "millstone".

Maciste has not been a contender in any CBUB matches.