Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Spartacus and Starz’s Search for a Brand Identity
By: Dr. Thomas J. West Iii
Tags: TV Series, Television, Pop Culture, Classics, Culture

Through three full seasons and a prequel miniseries, Spartacus traced the fortunes of a group of gladiators, led by Spartacus and a small subset of generals, as they fought against Roman tyranny. After killing their masters at the end of the first season, Spartacus and his followers embark on a full-scale rebellion, determined to free as many of their fellow slaves as possible. Overwhelmingly successful, their defeat of a notable Roman general incites fear among Roman’s ruling elite, who enlist the aid of the fabulously wealthy politician Crassus. In the final season, however, Spartacus must finally face the full wrath of Rome, personified in Crassus, who will stop at nothing to ensure that this threat to the might and unassailable power of Rome. Indeed, by the end of the series the Roman genera’s grand ambitions have been realized, with Spartacus’ rebellion crushed, most of his generals dead, and the few survivors fleeing out of Italy for the frail promise of safety beyond the Alps.

Like its cinematic forbears in the epic genre, Spartacus relies on numerous excesses to bring its ancient world to life. Borrowing its visual aesthetic from such cinematic forbears as the film 300 (which itself borrowed many of its aesthetic choices from the graphic novel upon which it was based), Spartacus frequently features digitized violence, usually rendered through slow motion. While on one level, the use of such violence clearly partakes of a visual aesthetic of action and adventure cinema, it also reveals a great deal about how this series tries to articulate and encourage the viewer to experience the world of antiquity. Spartacus seeks to erase the gap that separates antiquity from modernity, to appeal to the viewer at the level of the body so that the vast temporal gap separating us from the past ceases to exist.

In making this claim, I draw upon the work of historian Robert Rosenstone, who has suggested that the historical drama film (and I am extending his argument here to television), operates on a number of levels that render it qualitatively different in the types of historical understanding that it can generate in its spectators. These experiences, he suggests “are unsettling because they escape the confines of words and provide elements — visual, aural, emotional, subconscious — that we don’t know how to admit into our knowledge” (235). He later goes on to say that “film forces us to live in a most uncomfortable sort of world — a world in which we cannot control or contain our past with words; cannot tame its full meanings within the discipline of a discourse because the meanings themselves — encoded as images as well as words — ultimately elude words” (236). Thus, texts that appeal to viewers at the level of the touch on that which eludes the ability of language to fully contain it, and as such provide contemporary spectators the possibility of experiencing the radical alterity of the ancient world.

Part of the series’ appeal, I suggest, is that rather than relying upon the disciplining norms of either traditional history or even the more straight-laced historical dramas, it wants us to experience something different than that type of distanciation enabled by these other types of historical understanding. The slow motion spectacle of violence suggests that we as modern spectators can gain a tantalizing glimpse of not only the dissolution of the human body (and also vicariously experience that dissolution), but that that dissolution is a crucial part of the social and political fabric of Roman life and society. That vicarious experience allows us, if only temporarily, to touch the ancient world, to know what it was like (or at least what Spartacus would like us to believe it was like), to be in that dangerous world.

The space of the ludus, the gladiatorial training school, emerges throughout the series as a microcosm of that larger Roman world. Here, men are pared down to nothing more than their baser selves; there is no room for tenderness, softness, or any of the other attributes that would mitigate the bleak brutality of their lives as gladiators. As both the first season and the prequel make abundantly clear, the motivation for almost all of the gladiators is the opportunity to die a glorious death on the sands of the arena; like Achilles of The Iliad, many of them would rather live a brief life of extraordinary glory and fame than live out their lives in the ignominy of life as mere drudge slaves. Violence and death are the only things that grant them a measure of control of their destinies.

This is, ultimately, a world wherein even the bravest of warriors can end up dead, either through the betrayal of his master or on the terrifying brutality of the battlefield. In the first season, for example, the gladiator Barca — certainly one of the harshest and most brutally efficient of the gladiators of the first season and a half — ultimately meets his death precisely because he shows a moment of weakness as a result of his desire to prove the existence of a softer side to his lover Pietros. The fact that even the most powerful and ruthless of the gladiators housed in the ludus can fall victim to the unrelenting violence and betrayal that is part of this world reinforces the sense that life, even male life, exists in a constant state of precarity.

It is also telling that, in the final episode of the series, only one of Spartacus’ generals remains alive, and even he bears the terrible scars of crucifixion. The brutality with which the leaders of the Spartacus rebellion meet their deaths serve the contradictory function long associated with male death on screen. On the one hand, the brutal physical trials of both the arena and the battlefield provide the means through which men can prove themselves as men. Their bodies become the means through which they make sense of their world and through which they seek to effect various types of change on that world. As the spectator is encouraged to identify with the band of rebels and their desire to create a better world for themselves and their families, it becomes almost second nature for them to utilize violence as the best means of effecting social change.

And yet, paradoxically, it is also precisely this type of fleshly engagement with the world that also proves to be their undoing. The rebel leaders, including Spartacus, find themselves caught up in the vicious cycle of violence that is central to the moral and social fabric of this world. Violence constitutes the ways in which men relate to one another in this world in all social classes, and it thus also circumscribes most of the affective relationships they might develop with one another. Even the closest of male friendships, such as that between Spartacus and his enemy/friend/ally Crixus, remain haunted by the specter of violence. The viewer comes to experience this world in terms of its physical precarity and its vital, visceral intensity, as violence remains one of the principal organizing principles around which these men base their lives. While they are often the most (brutally) effective fighters, the viewer remains haunted by the possibility that they could meet their deaths at any moment.