Abstract
The contradictory and fragmentary sources surrounding the historical Spartacus have, since the beginning of the controversy, also raised questions about the myth. (cf. Guarino, Spartakus. Analyse eines Mythos. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980) Producer Rob Tapert himself speaks of the “revival of a myth from the perspective of a gladiator”.
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Notes
- 1.
Spartacus, Season 1 Blood and Sand, Extras: Behind the Scenes.
- 2.
This frenetically acclaimed outburst at the end of season one, which directly follows the cathartic bloodbath for the gladiators, links to Appian’s lore from the Civil War (116.1): “At the same time Spartacus, a Thracian by birth, who had once served as a soldier with the Romans, but had since been a prisoner and sold for a gladiator, and was in the gladiatorial training-school at Capua, persuaded about seventy of his comrades to strike for their own freedom rather than for the amusement of spectators.”
- 3.
The actual killing scene is cut on the version released for the German market and cannot be seen.
- 4.
The FS series Rome can serve as a comparative foil, which is distinguished by its historical accuracy and attention to detail, but which does not degenerate into an end in itself. Producer Bruno Heller: “Our approach here was not to beat the audience to death with the visual spectacle. To make it beautiful, shocking and big while disregarding the characters is easy. The more real it is, the more the actors can take in and be those characters, play those larger-than-life characters, and at the same time be and seem true to life. […] At the time, [the Forum] was already 700 years old. So it’s more thrown together and disorganized than you’d think. It’s a lot dirtier and more worn, the pavement is cracked, the paint is peeling. Put all that together and you get a sense of urban reality. […] We knew from the beginning that we were going to get something fresh with historical accuracy, because movies and TV series about Rome in general are eclectically oriented to different eras. They throw together all sorts of things from different eras and coat it with a modern moral. […] Rome was a very brutal world. That prosperous successful society was built entirely on warfare. Romans were not successful merchants, philosophers, or engineers. A society with such ideals is naturally more brutal than others. So Romans, while brutal, are also free, and that’s what makes them so appealing to us. […] Today’s society represses animalistic urges. In ancient Rome, they were openly acted out. […] You did what you wanted and did everything to get it, and as often as possible, because life was short and very hard. Everybody followed these rules of the game, and that’s what gives it drama.”
- 5.
According to the series’ two historical consultants, Aaron Irvin and Jeffrey Stevens in the making of: “We wanted to show in the series that racism and prejudice existed in the ancient world and were based on cultural stereotypes. They just didn’t have anything to do with skin color, they didn’t have anything to do with appearance, they had to do with assumptions about origins.”
- 6.
In the Phaedo dialogue, Plato describes the system of subterranean streams as a myth that divides disparate souls according to their merits. He describes reliance on this myth as a “beautiful gamble”: “So for the sake of this a man must be of good cheer to his soul, who in life has let go of the other pleasures that have to do with the body and its adornment and care as something that does not concern him himself and by which he feared only to make evils worse. …and adorned his soul, not with strange ornaments, but with those peculiar to it, prudence, justice, valor, nobility, and truth, thus awaiting his journey to the underworld, to take it as soon as destiny shall call.”
References
Blumenberg, Hans (2006): Beschreibung des Menschen. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Guarino, Antonio (1980): Spartakus. Analyse eines Mythos. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.
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Wilke, T. (2023). The Myth and Spartacus: The Myth of Spartacus. In: Living and Dying in the Roman Republic . Palgrave Macmillan, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_12
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