Living and Dying in the Roman Republic: The Series Spartacus and its Cinematic Examination of Freedom, Violence and Identity 3658388692, 9783658388690

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Living and Dying in the Roman Republic The series Spartacus and its cinematic examination of freedom, violence and identity Thomas Wilke

Living and Dying in the Roman Republic

Thomas Wilke

Living and Dying in the Roman Republic The series Spartacus and its Cinematic Examination of Freedom, Violence and Identity

Thomas Wilke Pädagogischen Hochschule Ludwigsburg Ludwigsburg, Germany

ISBN 978-3-658-38869-0    ISBN 978-3-658-38870-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 This book is a translation of the original German edition „Leben und Sterben in der Römischen Republik “ by Wilke, Thomas, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

No one is more a slave than he who thinks himself free without being so. (J.W. v. Goethe, Elective Affinities, 1809, vol. 2, ch. 5) …Since histories must be in the past, then the more past the better, it would seem, for them in their character as histories, and for him, the teller of them, rounding wizard of times gone by. […] Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more immediately before the present it falls? (Th. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 1924, p. 9f.) Chance rules that all available beams crackle. Life is interesting, that is the only good hair in the soup that we have the honor to spoon out. […] Because there are many possibilities, and only one of them can become fact, the improbable realizes itself. Reason goes into exile. The confused state and the perplexed man remain behind. (E. Kästner, The Walk to the Dogs, 1931 (2013), p. 238)

Contents

1 Introduction ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  1 2 The Historical Spartacus and the Media Spartacus �����������������������������  5 3 The Spartacus Series�������������������������������������������������������������������������������  11 3.1 Plot Overview of the Series�������������������������������������������������������������  13 4 Entertainment in the Roman Republic and in the Series��������������������� 17 5 Identity,  Persona and Issues of Recognition������������������������������������������� 29 5.1 Processual and Invariant Identity Dimensions in the Series������������� 30 5.2 Individual Identity Dimensions in Spartacus����������������������������������� 34 5.3 Collective Identity Dimensions of the Gladiators����������������������������� 41 5.4 Recognition��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 48 6 Body Staging and Corporeality��������������������������������������������������������������� 53 7 Everyday Use of Violence and Experience of Violence������������������������� 65 8 Composed Copulation Scenes: Sex, Eroticism and Love��������������������� 77 9 Understanding Freedom and Freedom as Conflict������������������������������� 91 10 “Fuck the Gods”: Morality, Religion, and Religiosity �������������������������103 11 Experience  and Experiential Extremism�������������������������������������������  109 11.1 Law and Justice���������������������������������������������������������������������������  112 11.2 Loss, Grief and Farewell�������������������������������������������������������������  113 11.3 Family Relations�������������������������������������������������������������������������  117

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12 The Myth and Spartacus: The Myth of Spartacus�������������������������������121 13 Media and History�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������127 14 Concluding Remarks�������������������������������������������������������������������������������133 References�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������139

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Introduction

Since the turn of the millennium, history has played an increasingly important role as a (film) subject on television, not only as a media offering, but also in academic discourse.1 In addition, historical themes are refracted in a variety of ways in filmic realizations: As virtual history, as alternate history or counterfactual history, in mixed forms from docutainment, re-enacted authenticity to pure fiction. Increasingly, historical framings and historically powerful themes are used to produce, above all, multi-part series and series that leave recent and recent contemporary history behind. This happens in most cases because the production companies and providers – from public broadcasters in Germany and the UK to commercial streaming providers – consider the chances of success with audiences to be very high. Indeed, at present it seems that at first glance historical television films and series are becoming a universal cinematic genre in which everything ‘human and all-too-human’ (F. Nietzsche) can be accommodated. The charm of historical material lies, among other things, in the fact that in their cinematic realisation they can be thought of from their end, be it historiographical, potential or fictional. In this way, overdramatisation is possible without a series ‘playing itself to death’ in the sense of the word. For more than 150 years, the historical Spartacus has offered sufficient material for fiction, alternative narration and dramatization due to a thin and contradictory historiographical factual situation. The following essay deals with the 2010–2013

 Currently the issues of the journal SPIEL 2/2016 and 1/2017 with the thematic focus “History and the Media: the Past as TV-Serial/Fernsehen und Geschichte oder: Geschichte als Serie” as well Fischer, Th., Schuhbauer, Th. (2016): History in Film and Television. Theory – practice – professional fields. Tübingen: Attempto. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_1

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television series Spartacus2 and analytically approaches selected aspects of identity, recognition and violence in the guise of a historical narrative. The starting point here is the consideration and question of what constitutes the fascination and connectivity of this material for the present day. Is it a pure ‘action’ spectacle that is serially blown up, or are themes dealt with that go beyond a pure historical representation and seem relevant for today? In general, the fictional historical film and the television series, in their function as a narratively conceived audiovisual medium, evoke a spatially and temporally limited coherent idea about a past or an event that has not been experienced by the viewer (cf. Stiglegger 2015: 5). In the following, it will be necessary to show how here, through an audiovisual access, stories become the transmitter of a cultural narrative that emerges in the telling through “affective modes of communication” (McGuigan 2005: 435) behind the historiographical account.3 The key historical data is echoed in Spartacus, but often serves as a support for entirely different narratives and generalizable conflicts: The ideal of romantic love, fidelity, loyalty, courage, sacrifice, self-determination, freedom, the struggle of good against evil, the uprising of the upright, but also the complications of family relationships, for example, beyond a ‘messed-up’ father-­ son relationship, revenge in all its dazzling colours, projections of fame and ambition, but also power, violence, masculinity, and collective and individual identity processes. It seems reasonable to assume that (trivial) literature has always operated with such narrative schemes, especially when it has been successful. Accordingly, it would have to be considered whether this is then merely an audiovisual update, which has a different quality due to its mediality, or whether other aspects are observable beyond this. Initial Considerations Two starting theses are central to the following remarks: First, the persuasive power and dramatic density of historical television series is fed by a known or predictable ending or the straightforward narrative with a view to the known ending. Thus, it is precisely for this reason that the focus is on the potential conflicts and the tendentially epic telling of them within the series. These conflicts are eventful, they are  The spelling here distinguishes between Spartacus (the historical person) and Spartacus (the television series). Some arguments of this paper can also be found in: Wilke 2017. 3  In his discussion of the HBO series Rome, Christoph Ernst (2015: 249) describes a university podcast in which it becomes clear that students’ approach to ancient history is also strongly influenced by television series and films, and takes up an apt phrase as a motto for the relationship between academia and popular culture: “Don’t go with the details, go with the ‘spirit’”. This is also true of Spartacus. The ‘Spirit’ shows a play with historical possibilities without dissolving the separation between science and popular culture. 2

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inevitably person-bound, and they can be related narratively and affectively quite centrally to the narrative dimensions listed above. From the very first second of the series, narrative purposefulness becomes the contingency annihilator of an extra-­ medial reality in the film’s own medial logic. That is to say, coincidences, their causalities and consequences are cinematically conceived and these only exist with regard to the narrative and dramaturgical inherent logic of the film. This can certainly be generalized for the fictional realm, but in the case of historical material it takes on yet another relevance. For in the cinematic realization a narrative framework is created that is coherent and unambiguous and tries to avoid irritation. This builds up the effect of a coherence that blanks out the media construction of history and its problems of transmission. The digital post-production of image and sound enables a further effect orientation of the series: actions, events and thus history are atmospherically aestheticized and at the same time exaggerated. In addition, if the series does not want to appear flat and distanced, it is necessary to guarantee certain identificatory access to the story and the people involved: one way of doing this is by depicting identity processes through which the people involved can be perceived as complex characters. Secondly, historical television series are particularly suitable as projection surfaces for current discourses, since they link connectable options for action to historical facts. Through the staging, these allow for a causality between process and result and can (!) thus mutually plausibilize process and result historically. Luhmann’s (1996: 9) statement that our knowledge of the world is fed by the mass media still guides our understanding of this, or rather more than ever.4 The mediatized access to the world cannot only exclusively mean the present, but encompasses all that we subsume under the past in its handed-down, narrated and narratable form. In a mediatized world, the difficulty arises at the same time of keeping the trust that arises from everyday mediatized communication in a balance between critical distance and affirmation towards media artifacts.

 Without contouring the contribution in terms of systems theory and addressing Luhmann’s averse basic attitude towards culture, the ‘reality of the mass media’ is at the same time a factual cultural articulation, which is reflected in ‘culture as program’ (S. J. Schmidt) and in the experience of coping with contingency: “What we know of society and its world, we know almost exclusively through the mass media. At the same time, however, we suspect that this knowledge is manipulated. At least it comes about in an extremely manipulative way, controlled, for example, by a few factors that determine the news value of information or make entertainment programmes seem attractive. But this counter-knowledge has no effect.” From this comes the suspicion of ideology strongly made in Karl Marx, which, modified, resulted in the sentence: ‘They know what they are doing, but they do it anyway.’ 4

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Perspectives and Approaches This volume is intended as a contribution that addresses a changing approach to memory and history in its audiovisual narrativity, alternative presentability, representation and aestheticization. The aim is not to examine the series for its historical correctness. Such an approach would be tedious and would by no means correspond to the intentions of the producers, who are also concerned with entertainment, spectacle, emotions and effects. Producer Rob Tapert himself speaks of the “revival of a myth from the perspective of a gladiator”.5 Nevertheless, I assume that the series has a claim to validity in that it updates the fragmentary knowledge about the historical Spartacus and the historical ‘setting’ of the Roman Republic of the first century B.C. in a specific form. This actualization is further accompanied by knowledge of fiction and the construction of historical knowledge. Thus, it is to be understood as a game, a game with a more or less known subject and the subsequent possibilities of audio-visual elaboration, dramatization and emotionalization. In this respect, analytical considerations focus on other questions than a historiographical comparison; they problematize much more strongly the thematic and conceptual connections in the form of morality, justice, experience, violence, sex and love. For this reason, historical and philological sources are repeatedly used as contextualization, but not in the mode of a comparison of true/non-true. Rather, the focus is on the question of what becomes recognizable from the media representation and exploitation of the historical person Spartacus in the television series Spartacus, when the series transfers history into the present. In doing so, we are not thinking of a mechanistic transfer process in the sense of ‘This is so …’, but rather of a dynamic interweaving of present history and historical present. Such an approach is grounded in media cultural studies, which integrates neighbouring disciplines. It places the connection between media and culture in the foreground and includes in the analysis the aesthetics, the technology, the institutional character and the social function of individual media, their context and the relationships between individual media, also in their historical dimension, and the relationship between the media and communication (cf. Hickethier 2003: 455). In addition, the focus expands in a conceptual orientation, in that social functions of media are not only included quasi self-referentially in media representation, but relational levels of conceptual concepts such as power, violence, experience, etc., are taken into account in an interdisciplinary manner.

 Spartacus, Season 1 Blood and Sand, Extras: Behind the Scenes.

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The Historical Spartacus and the Media Spartacus

The historical Spartacus occupied many historians and classical scholars in the twentieth century, especially in the period before 1989, when, for example, the question of class struggle and the classification of the uprising in a Marxist tradition of argumentation were central aspects of the dispute (cf. Mischulin 1952; Stampacchia 1976; Guarino 1980; Raith 1981; currently Kühne 2012).1 This stemmed, among other things, from the emphatic attribution of Karl Marx, who considered him “the most famos guy [that] the whole antiquity had to show” (cited in Guarino 1980: 9), so that Spartacus subsequently became an anti-bourgeois synonym for the struggle against oppression and servitude, up to the founding of the Spartacus League in March 1915 by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.2 Recently, research has focused more on contextualizing the slave revolt of 73 BC in the context of previous quite successful uprisings and their goals (cf. Raith 1981; Strauss 2009; Brodersen 2010; Eigler 2013). Historians were often concerned with the question of whether this was a war, an uprising, or a revolt:

 For a detailed and annotated compilation on a wide variety of research aspects, especially in the Anglo-French area, see Strauss 2009. 2  Cf. the location of Spartacus in the literary debate since Lessing in detail in Raith 1981: pp. 9–17, as well as within the academic discourse of the last 500 years of research on the slave revolts until the beginning of the 1990s: Zeev Rubinsohn: 1993. The group of radical pacifists around Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg initially still called themselves “Gruppe Internationale” and signed their newsletters “Mit Parteigruß Spartakus”. Cf. William A. Pelz (1988): The Spartakusbund and the German working class movement 1914– 1919, Lewiston. 1

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2  The Historical Spartacus and the Media Spartacus The Spartacus War is also a story about the complexity of slave revolts. We do not know if Spartacus wanted to abolish slavery, but if so, he aimed low. He and his men freed only gladiators, farmers, and shepherds. They avoided urban slaves, a softer and more elite group than rural workers. They rallied slaves to the cry not only of freedom but also the themes of nationalism, religion, revenge, and riches. Another paradox: they might have been liberators but the rebels brought ruin. They devasted southern Italy in search of food and trouble. (Strauss 2009: 7)

The quotation refers to a source-critical discussion in which, above all, it becomes visible what we do not know about Spartacus and the uprising. Even if individual motifs in particular remain unclear, the thematic field of ‘Spartacus’ is suitable as a phenomenon for making, for example, a myth, an urge for revenge, a striving for freedom connectable narratively. In addition to the thematic concentration on Spartacus, in literary and philological overviews of the ancient Roman world Spartacus and the associated rebellion can only be found as a brief relativizing episode, for example in the comprehensive current account by Mary Beard (2016: 265): Modern depictions have often wanted to make Spartacus (sic!) an ideological hero and even imply that he fought against slavery as such. This is almost impossible. Many slaves wanted freedom for themselves, but all the evidence from ancient Rome suggests that slavery as an institution was taken for granted, even by slaves. […] One thing is certain, however: they managed to fight back against Roman troops for an embarrassingly long time.

It is striking here that conceptual terms such as ‘freedom’ are used, which are used as a set but are not further clarified, because the representation is more oriented towards a political, military or economic character. Nevertheless, already in the course of the Enlightenment, specifically since the writings of Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, an ahistorical understanding of Spartacus asserts itself, according to which Spartacus, together with other slave wars, “increasingly became paradigms of the freedom movements of the present”.3 The number of historical sources, not always free from contradiction in themselves, is essentially limited to the following: Some fragments of the Historiae of C.  Sallustius Crispus, passages from the life of Marcus Crassus by Plutarch of Chaironeia, passages from the first book on the civil wars of Appian from Alexandria, and parts of the second book of the Epitome from Titus Livius, written by L. Annaeus Florus. Only Sallust reports contemporary, though his detailed ac Zeev Rubinsohn (1993: 30), op. cit. Voltaire, among others: “The war of Spartacus and the slaves was the most just war in history, perhaps the only just war in history”. 3

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count has not survived except for a few fragments. All other authors write with few intervals around 100–150 years later.4 In the present source-critical discussions it becomes clear what we do not know about Spartacus. Since his motives also remain unclear due to the unclear state of tradition, Spartacus is excellently suited as a phenomenon, as a myth and subject, in order, for example, to make an urge for freedom, for justice or for revenge connectable for the present. In the nineteenth century, the fiction examination of the subject of Spartacus begins in 1874 with Raffaello Giovagnoli’s successful Italian novel Spartacus, Commander of the Slaves. However, it does not appear in German until 1951, the same year that Howard Fast publishes his novel Spartacus.5 This novel, in turn, becomes the screenplay template for Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus and instrumental in the popular cultural perception and reception of the historical figure Spartacus.6 As recently as 2004, a new film adaptation by Robert Dornhelm is essentially based on Kubrick’s film version and thus on the novel. However, this appears to be a rather sloppy update without its own accent and omits many problematizations that could be offered.7 The concentration on a justice motif is due to the fact that the film itself, at 164 min in length, is considerably longer than an average feature film, but in that time an attempt is made to tell the entire story of Spartacus. It is at this point that the advantage of serial storytelling becomes apparent, in that the protagonists and antagonists are given more room to develop a more complex character via various conflicts and the resulting experiences. Scholarly reflections on this can be found, among others, in the volume of essays on ­Spartacus  A compilation of the individual fragments and passages can be found in Guarino 1980.  Other novels include: Arthur Koestler: The gladiators. New York 1939, Engl. 1960, Wolfgang Schumann: Der Stern aus der Tiefe. A Spartacus Novel. Saale 1959, Hans Dieter Stöver: Spartacus, Slave and Rebel. Düsseldorf 1977, Herbert Friedrich: Son of Apollo. Berlin/East 1983. 6  Cf. the empirically saturated examination of the traditions of the monumental film and its detachment from the Roman-Christian narrative by Kubrick in Junkelmann 2004. Likewise, the numerous insights Junkelmann provides as an experimental archaeologist in connection with gladiators and Roman soldiers, armament, nutrition and ways of fighting. Online with many video examples at: http://junkelmann.blogspot.de/search/label/Gladiatoren. A first film version of Spartacus can be dated to 1913, directed by Giovanni Enrico Vidali. 7  For example, Spartacus is already Spartacus there, he works as a slave in the mine, is called so by name, and becomes rather conspicuous here through his pronounced (yet dialogically platitudinously staged) sense of justice by standing up against the punishment of a little girl. He shows himself altruistically responsible for others, not just himself. This sense of justice leads to his own punishment, and the film stages it as serendipity that Batiatus, of all people, is looking for new slaves for his ludus, and that he expects something from Spartacus’ rebellion. 4 5

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edited by Martin Winkler in 2007, which examines Kubrick’s film and the Spartacus story. In addition to the most important historical sources, this compilation also contains excursuses on the ideology of war, training, the creation of legends, and American ideals in film. Of note here are the remarks by Winkler (2007: 198 f.) himself, who reflects on the significance of ancient history in American cinema, showing that this goes beyond a pure or simple entertainment value. Winkler speaks of antiquity as a “cultural signifier” for American self-understanding: cultural production as an interrelationship via reference and referencing. This means that media artefacts – photos and films – already found their way into educational processes in the 1930s and, with an “educational value of Spartacus” (Winkler 2007: 213), in turn led to a higher affinity towards such topics. In addition, in recent years one can find documentaries that formally deal with gladiators through reenactment and dramatization (e.g. as a docu-drama), but rather focus on the spectacular moment of the arena fight in connection with entertainment or emphasize a connection between personality and battle. Obviously, the focus is either instinctively or almost reflexively on the well-trained, muscular body of the gladiator, as in the documentary Imperium Romanum. The Greatest Battles of the Roman Empire. (A&E Television Network 2008) or the docu-drama Colosseum. Arena of Death. (BBC Worldwide Ltd. 2006), which thus already visually win or at least claim sympathy for themselves. Individual spectacular archaeological finds were the occasion for documentations and the stories that could potentially be told with them. The marble relief from Halicarnassus, for example, shows two female gladiators after the fight, the occasion for a dramatic reenactment and fictionalization of the two fighters Achillia and Amazone as an episode within the documentary series Warrior Women (Gladiators in Rome, directed by John Wate/Sebastian Peiter, GB/ZDF 2017). The documentary Gladiators  – Fighting Machines of the Ancient World (director: Jeremy Turner 2015) was made on the occasion of the discovery of a gladiator cemetery in York with around 80 skeletons and with the help of forensic anthropology. In this documentary, six gladiators were ‘resurrected’ and their daily lives and training, their different weaponry and the way they fought were reconstructed. The focus of this ‘documentary narrative’ is on the extra-ordinary, the spectacular and the performance of scientific disciplines and their technology. A defused transformation of the gladiatorial theme that goes beyond a historical understanding or its fictional elaboration can be found in the entertainment field of television. German private television stations such as Pro7 send celebrities on a tour in a show in which they must compete first with each other as a team and then individually against each other in various competitions in order to ultimately be

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crowned “Global Gladiator”.8 Accordingly, in this “giant playground for adults” (Pro7), cooperation and empathy are first encouraged in the team, in order to then prevail in the individual battle against the previous competitors. This defused idea of competition, in which it is not a matter of life or death, but of recognition according to the rules of an entertainment industry, can be found in many scripted television formats, whose redundancy represents a systemic variation of the same principle. The conceptual attribution makes it clear: in the mode of playing without serious consequences for life beyond the game, participants become objects of entertainment for others. The exoticism of the playground and the everyday remoteness of the tasks promote the entertainment potential.

 The announcement text on the station’s website makes this clear: “From the tropical jungle to the metropolis of Bangkok to the paradisiacal beaches of the Andaman Sea: For the second season of “Global Gladiators,” ProSieben will send eight celebrities on an adventure trip to Thailand starting Thursday, August 23, at 8:15  p.m. “‘Global Gladiators’ is a huge playground for adults. I’m totally up for pushing myself to my limits,” says singer Ben. […] “For me, ‘Global Gladiators’ stands for courage, adventure and overcoming,” says action model Miriam Höller.” Online at: https://www.prosieben.de/tv/global-gladiators/gg-news (Last accessed: 01.11.2018). The principle is repeated in many variations, the limits of physical and psychological resilience are pushed to the limit with the prospect of winning, currently in international broadcast formats such as Ninja Warrior or on German TV: Hart. Harder. Hell Camp. The extreme experiment with Patrick Esume. 8

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The Spartacus Series

The series Spartacus was produced between 2009 and 2011 by the American cable channel starz and consists of three seasons and a sequel with six episodes. Each episode lasts about 50  min, season 1 (Blood and Sand) comprises 13 episodes, season 2 (Vengeance) and season 3 (War of the damned) ten episodes each. Producers are Rob Tapert and Steven S. DeKnight; the directors alternate, in the main it is Rick Jacobson, Mark Beesley and Michael Hurst, it is similar with the scriptwriters, here it is essentially Steven S. DeKnight and Brent Fletcher. The first season won the 2012 Saturn Award for Best DVD Release of a Television Series. Spartacus actor Andy Withfield died of blood cancer in 2011 after the first season,1 after which Liam McIntyre took over the role. The sequel was intended as a bridge to give Andy Whitfield time to recover. Even though the German version is rated FSK 18, explicit scenes were extensively cut and running times changed compared to the original version.2 In dramatically condensed form, the series as a kind of cinematic climax traces the path of the later Spartacus from the Roman use of Thracian auxiliaries, through the career in the arena, the slave revolt to his death.  See the documentary about Andy Withfield and the last year of his life: Be here now R.: L. Foster, 2015. 2  Professional assessments with footage of the cut versions can be found in detail at www. schnittberichte.com. For example, Imbor Ed writes about the 4th episode of the first season, which is about the cave: “A total of 94 s in 12 cuts were removed for the FSK rating ‘not rated for minors’. […] But strictly speaking, both the entire season on DVD is longer than on free TV, but so is the 4th episode itself. And that by 18 s. twentieth Century Fox lets the shortened 4th episode (and only this one) run slower than normal. So it is stretched by almost 2 min and at the end the statement “longer than on TV” is correct, although 94 s were cut. Dreamlike.” https://www.schnittberichte.com/schnittbericht.php?ID=219952 [03/03/2018]. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_3

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The appeal of re-enacting the historical figure lies in the dramaturgical approach: An upright, fearless and loyal Thracian warrior, through no fault of his own, falls into captivity with a seemingly superior Roman opponent, becomes a gladiator with the hope of reuniting with his wife, and ultimately has to accept her loss. In the ensuing struggle  – first for the sake of his own revenge, then in the general fight against the Romans – he finds himself always at a disadvantage: the Romans are superior strategically, numerically and in terms of weaponry. He displays a situational intelligence that distinguishes him as a leader, that is, he can creatively solve problems under time pressure (“You always think of something, Spartacus”) to turn a hopeless situation into a hopeful one: be it escaping the Romans, carrying out a raid, procuring weapons or food. The personalized opposition of an overpowering Rome against an unjustly enslaved individual man corresponds in its basic structure to the motif of David against Goliath. From this point on, the sympathies of the audience are already clearly set from the beginning. It is worth mentioning that the series itself inspired the comic book market, so that immediately after the release of the first season, a Spartacus comic was published, which was oriented towards the Starz series in terms of content and aesthetics. Yet in the aesthetic design of the series – looking at the extensive green screen portion of the production, the exuberant blood effects and acoustic overemphasis – a comic book aesthetic is already given by the series. Leading the charge was Adam Archer, who had already turned the television series Heroes into a comic book and collaborated on Batman and Supergirl. Similarly, Canadian computer game company Ubisoft released a console and PC game Spartacus: Blood and Sand in June 2013, though it was pulled from the market in 2015 with no further reason given. Other action games that carry the gladiator theme are negligible aesthetically, narratively, and historically-mediated. A separate wiki takes a fan-based look at the series.3 It should also be noted that in 2012, a multi-award-winning porn blockbuster was produced under the title Spartacus MMXII: The Beginning (dir.:

 Online at: http://spartacus.wikia.com/wiki/Spartacus_Wiki. The Spartacus Wiki is a collaborative database that anyone can edit and contribute to regarding the four Starz original series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, Spartacus: Vengeance, Spartacus: War of the Damned and the various Spartacus comics and novels. There have been 53,236 edits to 583 articles since February 2010. You can help out by contributing! Warning: This wiki may contain spoilers regarding characters and events. (ibid., author’s note; 03.03.2018). 3

3.1  Plot Overview of the Series

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M. London), which used the Starz production of the first season as a template.4 In 2014, there was another Belgian production, The Spartacus Legacy, which was hardly noticed internationally.5

3.1 Plot Overview of the Series The three seasons and the sequel are to be seen as a climax. The sequel does not yet deal with Spartacus, but with the rise of the gladiator master (lat.: lanista) Quintus Batiatus (John Hannah) and his ludus, gladiator fights, the arena to be built in Capua, the release of the champion Gannicus (Dustin Clare) as well as the rise of the later antagonist Crixus (Manu Bennett). It precedes the story proper in time, even though protagonists return, and was originally intended as a flashback after the first season to give Andy Whitfield time to recover. The first season ends with the gladiatorial uprising and Batiatus’ death, the second season with the death of Claudius Glaber (Craig Parker), the cinematic originator of Spartacus’ fate, and the third season finally ends with Spartacus’ death. In its historical framing, the series relies not only on personal settings but also on other historically transmitted elements, such as the gladiators’ flight up Mount Vesuvius and their escape, successful battles against Lucullus, Crixus’ move against Rome and his defeat, the decimation in Crassus’ army, or Marcus Crassus’ construction of an almost insurmountable moat. The first season shows how the future Spartacus goes from being an ally of the Romans to their prisoner. Triggered by the broken word of Claudius Glaber, the Roman commander who seeks glory, Spartacus, as a Thracian army commander in the war against the barbarian Getae, refuses to continue fighting for the Romans. Glaber, out of selfish calculation, orders the Thracians to fight with him against King Mithridates VI, which would mean the surrender of the Thracian villages. Spartacus resists, thus triggering a revolt of the Thracian soldiers against the Romans and deserts. Together with his wife Sura (Erin Cummings), he is captured by the Romans and, separated from each other, they are both taken to Italy as slaves. As punishment, Spartacus is to meet his death at the hands of four gladiators in the arena at Capua. Against all odds, however, he manages to defeat all of his

 Cf. http://www.iafd.com/title.rme/title=spartacus+mmxii%3a+the+beginning/year=2012 [Last accessed 31 Jan. 2019]. 5  Cf. https://wwwimdb.com/title/tt4586504/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm [Last accessed 31 Jan. 2019]. 4

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3 The Spartacus Series

opponents. Batiatus, who first secretly and then quite openly strives for higher social recognition, becomes aware of him through the fight and acquires Spartacus to train him in his gladiator school in Capua. After initial difficulties, Spartacus becomes the darling of the populace and overthrows the Gaul Crixus, Capua’s best gladiator to date. From now on, Spartacus fights as a gladiator in the arena, while Batiatus promises him support in the search for his missing wife Sura. However, Batiatus deceives Spartacus by having Sura killed in order to further bind him to his ludus as a gladiator. In doing so, he gives rise to the gladiatorial uprising initiated by Spartacus out of revenge. The second season begins with Spartacus and his followers living in the city’s sewers. While Spartacus strives to free all the slaves, Crixus as a rival leader is primarily driven by the search for his lost love Naevia (Lesley-Ann Brandt). Alongside this, Glaber, who has since risen to become Praetor of Rome, does everything he can to capture Spartacus as his ‘fight for freedom’ becomes an increasing burden on his political career and marriage. Crixus joins Spartacus’ ‘freedom fight’ in return for helping to free Naevia. The group seeks refuge at Mount Vesuvius and specifically begins freeing slaves and fighters to train them to fight Rome. Glaber succeeds in locating the gladiators’ lair and forces them to fight a decisive battle. The Romans are crushed, Glaber falls in a duel with Spartacus. Essential in this season is the process of group formation with a view to a common enemy and a developing self-image of freedom (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1  Naevia, Spartacus (Liam McIntyre), Crixus and Oenomaus (from left). (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Vengeance, S2E4, DVD 2012, Prod.: starz Original, Anchor Bay Entertainment)

3.1  Plot Overview of the Series

15

In the third season, Spartacus and the slave force, which has now grown into an army, live outside the city. Cold and hunger lead to corruption and ill will in their ranks. Marcus Crassus (Simon Merrells) is ordered by the Senate to provide the funds for an army of 10,000 men. He is to be given sole command of the army after a strategic victory and appointed Imperator.6 At the same time, Caesar (Todd Lasance) arrives back in Rome and is sent by Crassus as an informer to the Spartacus-­ occupied city of Sinuessa to stir up trouble and strife between Crixus and Spartacus. The situation in the city comes to a head, Crassus bribes the pirates, who then allow the Romans to enter and retake the city. Spartacus moves into the mountains with his followers. Crassus had a moat and a wall built in the hinterland, which made a further escape unthinkable for the time being. This finally succeeds with the help of a ruse, between Crixus and Spartacus there are differences about the further goals. After Spartacus has made the plan to flee over the Alps and spread out there, Crixus moves against Rome. Crixus and those who follow him, including Agron (Daniel Feuerriegel), part ways with Spartacus after both reconcile. Crixus falls in battle outside Rome, Naevia is sent to Spartacus with his head badly wounded to bring news of Crixus’ defeat. Spartacus decides to move against Crassus’ army to either kill him or die in battle himself. In the course of the battle, the rebel army is completely routed. There is a duel between Spartacus and Crassus, at the end of which Spartacus is pierced in the back by three Roman spears and seriously injured. Spartacus manages to escape into the mountains. Crassus submits his victory to Pompey, and Gannicus and all the remaining prisoners are crucified along the Appian Way from Rome to Capua. Spartacus dies a short time later and is buried in freedom by Agron, unmolested by Roman pursuers.

 Imperator: (Latin for “commander, master”) originally referred to the holder of a military power (imperium) in the Roman Republic. From the late third century BC (Scipio Africanus), the term was used specifically for a military commander whom his soldiers proclaimed emperor after a victory (acclamation). This honorary title expired when the emperor returned to Rome. Usually this happened in a triumphal procession, to which the title of emperor entitled. Many Roman generals, however, called themselves emperors in their provinces without having been proclaimed so. Octavian, the later Augustus, took Imperator as his first name in about 39/38 BC instead of his original name Gaius (praenomen imperatoris). Cf. Jacques/ Scheid 2008 44 f. 6

4

Entertainment in the Roman Republic and in the Series

Entertainment plays a central role in the series as a plot-driving element, which is not surprising at first. For a gladiator and the corresponding fights are also about a functionalization or use for public entertainment of Roman citizens in a place intended for this purpose. The material of the series not only offers entertainment in itself, but through the TV series we as viewers also become participants in the entertainment inherent in the series. These are firstly location-related, e.g. in the arena, in the villas and thus in our current understanding of the distinction between public/private, secondly they can be perceived in an occasion-related manner, e.g. in the form of rituals in honour of various deities, or thirdly they are function-­ related, e.g. when it promises a gain in pleasure, represents a transgression of boundaries or is designed to extend social influence. The various forms of entertainment will be discussed in more detail in the following. It seems important to me here to point out that such a systematization proposal is accompanied by a differentiation that is reflected in a double aesthetic of gladiator fights. The TV viewer is not only a simple spectator of the fights, which make him feel excited or repulsed, i.e. affect him, but he is also an observer of the spectators and their reactions during the various spectacles. In the series, then, the film-immanent reactions to entertainment, violence, sex, etc. also become narrative components in the broadest sense, allowing the viewer to potentially expand his own (entertainment) enjoyment. As a spectator of a historical gruesome spectacle and as an observer of the spectators in the historical setting, a double aesthetic emerges that contains a model of the voyeur. For the latter – in the form of the contemporary spectator – increases his pleasure unobserved and at the same time can exonerate himself morally, because he himself is only a second-order observer, and thus, while recognizing the moral ‘blind spots’ of the historical scenes with the gaze of the present, does not ­recognize © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_4

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his own.1 The emphasis on such a double aesthetic or the staging of reactions as narrative components of the series are indicative of changed modes of perception, observation and reception of the present. Media self-observations and making these artefacts available on video platforms or social media, sharing and commenting are part of common and self-evident media behaviour. Media self-observation thus anticipates possible reactions to which the action is directed, the actual actor subjects his action to potential reactions, speculates on recognition and tends to act affirmatively. This reinforces the voyeuristic moment of the spectator, whose attention is fought for and who is thus helped into a position of power, without this being a simple causality. It could now be suggested that the staging of reactions as narrative film components aims more at majority power of the represented: If everyone in the arena is of one mind, why shouldn’t I be too? If everyone present is enjoying the orgy, why shouldn’t I be too? It remains to be noted that in Roman antiquity, public spectacles – in addition to gladiator fights, theatrical performances and chariot races – and regular festivals in honour of deities took place and thus had a fixed place in the Roman annual calendar. Thus, they were per se political and significant for Roman citizens, as they were perceived as spectacles welcome diversions from everyday life and developed a great attraction. This has also been handed down by ancient authors, for example Pliny (61/62 AD-c. 115 AD) writes somewhat panegyrically about Trajan’s munera: Now games were offered to the showmanship! But not such as had a slackening effect, apt to weaken and break the energies of men, but games which incited to receive honorable wounds and to despise death, because one could observe even in fighting slaves and criminals the urge to glory and the desire for victory. (cited in Mann 2016: 94)

The beginning of the series introduces the viewer directly into the arena action. A visibly disoriented and disillusioned prisoner – the later Spartacus – sits chained in the catacombs of an arena and obviously waits for his imminent end: Unmistakable fighting surrounds him. But before he enters the arena, there is an extensive flashback that makes the events up to this point comprehensible. The dramaturgical trick of the parenthesis, which makes it possible to characterize the main protagonist, points to the main theme: a deadly contest between two more or less well-­ trained gladiators, fought out for the entertainment of the Roman audience present. But what actually happens there beyond the superficially dramatic individual fate? Stefan Müller (2006) has criticized the substantial foreshortening in the  For this hint I thank Reinhold Viehoff.

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r­ epresentation in the interested perception of gladiator fights (here with a view to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator from 2000), since they are already to be seen in a more complex context in the Roman Republic. Munera in Roman antiquity referred to public service, even a gift, expected of someone who held political office.2 One of the munera, in conjunction with the adjective, was the munus gladiatorium, which in imperial times “consisted of three component[s] to form an inseparable whole” (Müller 2006: 37): Animal baitings (in the morning), executions (at noon), and the actual gladiatorial fights (in the afternoon).3 The gladiatorial fights could be prolonged as climaxes, for example by holding preliminary fights with wooden swords as a prelude before resorting to real weapons. Müller now elaborates on the basis of historical sources an “original view of the audience”, in which he comes to the conclusion that “gladiator fights were seen as a heroic and dignified spectacle in which great characters portrayed great emotions” by stereotypically “rather abstract moral qualities [symbolizing]”: Munera are there (in the relevant texts of the first century B.C., T.W.) associated with symbolic values such as bravery (fortitudo), discipline (disciplina), strength of character (constantia), endurance (patientia), contempt for death (contemptus mortis), will to win (cupido victoriae), and glory-seeking (amor gloriae). (ibid.: 38 f., emphasis added)

These terms were all subordinated to the concept of virtus, meaning, among other things, military bravery in battle, one of the central value concepts of Roman nobility, so that the gladiatorial fight was assigned a representative position for these attribution processes, as Müller can impressively demonstrate.4 The gladiators’ fight conveyed a socially relevant value that was not only greeted by the audience, but acknowledged, confirmed, and reinforced in their frenetic cheers. They had “a protreptic function, accustoming a society to the sight of blood and hardening it” (ibid.: 44). If this hardening is part of a society’s self-understanding – and this is indisputable for the Roman Republic with its expansionist ambitions and domestic  In the literal translation, munera essentially denotes a task, but also an office, a gift or an obligation. The field was relatively broad. These could be civil offices, contributions to the army, military service, or the financing of festivities and public games. Cf. Botermann Helga (2005): How Gauls become Romans. Life in the Roman Empire. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart. 3  Mann (2016, 19 ff.) describes in detail the course of a munus, in its historical context, its temporal course and its variance. 4  The nobility included the ruling class of the middle and late Roman Republic, which had achieved prominence by holding public office. Cf. Ronald Syme (2003, 1939): The Roman Revolution. Power Struggles in Ancient Rome. Fundamentally revised and for the first time complete new edition. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart. 2

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power struggles up to and including civil war – then gladiatorial fights are no longer merely in an entertainment and diversionary function. This difference and “symbolic significance of gladiator fights in Roman society” blurs in a dramaturgically effect-oriented cinematic realization.5 It cannot be denied that our Western society is also accustomed to blood, but it is no longer directly experienceable but medialized and thus mediatized. In the multitude of fictional film offerings, Spartacus is not exempt from this, scenarios of violence and horror build on an aestheticization and thus remain in their mediality – cathartic or political functions in the sense of a “protreptic function” can only be applied to the respective material in a questioning manner. Less the aestheticization, but rather the mediatization of violence in the non-fictional field can be found in abundance and spread virally on video platforms. This means not only news, but increasingly also ‘self-reporting’ from crisis regions to Islamist beheading videos, which in turn become the subject of fictional media offerings.6 Furthermore, Müller can prove a substantial change with Augustus and the beginning of the imperial era, in which gladiatorial fights increasingly serve the pompous staging of rulers. Evidence for this is the introduction of numerous new artificial armaments, which are owed more to fantasy circumstances than to actual and real combat situations in which it was necessary to prevail. In addition, there are new forms of performance in which, for example, 100 gladiators fight each other, sea battles are fought in flooded arenas, and the patron of the games shows off his potency, power, and social position, and the whole thing can be understood as a “show and action event” (Müller 2006: 44). In this sense, Byung-Chul Han (2012: 13) also sums up the evaluation of the spectacle, shortened to the imperial period in connection with violence, when he writes: The munus gladiatorium is not a mere mass entertainment that would have to satisfy the aggression instinct of the masses. Rather, it has an inherent political significance. In the theatre of cruelty, the power of the sovereign is staged as the power of the sword. Thus the munus gladiatorium is an essential component of the imperial cult. The pompous staging of the power to kill manifests the power and glory of the sovereign. The rule makes use of the symbolism of blood. Brute force functions as the  Mann (2016: 9 f.) sees here a “core theme of Roman history: Anyone who wants to understand the mental dispositions of the Romans, their social ideas of order, their self-perception and images of others, cannot avoid the gladiatorial fights”. 6  For example, in the series Strike Back: Project Dawn. (D. Percival, B. Eagles et al. 2011), in which two British secret agents chase an Arab terrorist around the world. The series Over There. Command Iraq (dir.: Chr. Gerolmo 2005) focuses on the third Gulf War from the point of view of soldiers in a US infantry division and Die Zeit commented: “The fiction is closer to the truth than the embellished US news.” 5

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i­nsignia of power. Here the violence is not hidden. It is visible and manifest. It lacks all shame. It is neither mute nor naked here, but eloquent and significant. In both archaic culture and antiquity, the enactment of violence is an integral, even central, part of social communication.

Just as Han is right in his assessment of “political significance”, he must be contradicted with regard to the exclusive “power of the sovereign” and the “insignia of power” in its generality, as this represents an inadmissible reduction with regard to the republic. For as Mann (2016: 9, emphasis added) can impressively demonstrate, what was special about the gladiatorial fights was this, that after the fight it was decided whether the defeated man was to be pardoned or killed. So it was up for debate what qualities a man had to display in order to be allowed to continue living even after a defeat, and this is where the enormous symbolic significance of gladiator fights in Roman society comes from.

This debate was not the sole responsibility of ‘the sovereign’, but he ultimately carried out the collective judgment as the result of the debate. “An autonomous decision would have contradicted the basic understanding of the voting process: ‘Ideally […] in the amphitheatre one celebrated the cross-class consensus on norms by jointly passing judgment on the defeated gladiators’, which ‘enormously contribute[d] to the stabilization of rule’” (Mann 2016: 96). Audience and sovereign were thus mutually interdependent, as the decision-making process only came about through the audience, and the sovereign communicated the outcome as his verdict. This is by no means the rule in the series, rather in most cases it becomes a battle scenario designed to virtuously express the superiority of one gladiator and suspend a possible decision by the audience through the early death of a gladiator. The result could only be noted. In addition, further proxy communications can be observed that call into question a “power of the sovereign” when various organizers of games turn to the lanista, i.e. the gladiator trainer, to hire gladiators for a fight. The political “power of the sovereign” is subject – in history as in fiction – at least selectively to an economic model, when the loss of a gladiator is part of the business risk and is already taken into account in advance. Moreover, the price of a gladiator increased with the number of his past successes: Structural analogies to the current development of the entertainment industry and its star system can be seen in the ‘exploitation machinery’: in the negotiation of the price in relation to the expected spectacle and entertainment value (Cf. Mann 2016: 80 f.) This needs a place, in the series – at least in the sequel and in the first season this is paradigmatically the arena, which is introduced accordingly as the first establishing shot (Fig. 4.1).

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Fig. 4.1  First overview shot in the first episode of the first season: From the cell over the arena into Capua’s bird’s eye view. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E1, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

The arena, as a central site of action in gladiatorial combat, is a defined space for repeated and ritualized scenarios of violence, in which the aura of the battles encounters the gladiators, echoes.7 This place transports emotions, stories, fates, the euphoric frenzy of witnessing victory and defeat, the uplifting feeling of humiliation on display. Scenically and sound-technically, this becomes comprehensible in the series through an echo of earlier battle cries, exaggerated flashbacks, the clang of weapons and acoustic close-ups of tense breathing. The computer-­ generated arena becomes an outlet; it is a charged place where there is no negotiation, no compromise in combat. The power that determines and negotiates it watches from the outside, it is confirmed by the audience and takes pleasure in it. In the historical arena, it seems, only the voice of the Roman citizens is valid, to which even the senators or the organizers of the games willingly bow when it seems advantageous to them. Political decisions, promotions, majorities are visibly made in the arena, in the stands, when the public’s decision is clear. In the process, the audience in the series recurrently becomes an indifferent mass, ecstatically indulging in the pleasures, tearing off their own clothes, disinhibitedly copulating as  Cf. the architectural and political history of the development of Roman amphitheatres from the third century BC to the construction of the Colosseum in Mann (2016: 67 ff.) and Welch, K. 2007: The Roman Amphitheatre: From Its Origins to the Colosseum. Cambridge. 7

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they watch the games, in other words, historically the exact opposite of a seating arrangement that can be read off on “social hierarchies” (Mann 2016: 97).8 The differences in status were also historically evident in the allocation of seats at public games; who sat where also corresponded to their social status. There is no in-­ between for the audiovisual arena audience, either euphoric enthusiasm for what is presented to them for pleasure and entertainment, or insults and throwing trash. The ecstatic absorption in the moment shows the intensity of the participatory experience, which does not have to be experienced itself. The cathartic moment of participation is staged event-like, processes of negotiation are left out. The Quintus Batiatus in the series world offers gladiatorial entertainment in Capua already in the third generation. In contrast to his father, who was content with his social position, the young Batiatus has an idea of gladiators and their fights, which are to be characterized as spectacular, extra-ordinary, uncompromising and affect-driven, in order to ultimately be able to ignite the cheers on which he believes local politics to be dependent. Batiatus conflates social and political influence with entertainment. Unlike his father, who was exclusively committed to this field of entertainment, Batiatus tries mightily to instrumentalize the ludus for his social and political advancement. This, after all, is what constitutes the conflict between father and son. For the son everything is for sale, everything has its price and nothing has a moral, also in order to be able to act powerfully and intriguingly against his competitors. The Ludus is not an end in itself to his existence, but becomes a means to an end. In the series, this motivation is brought into a causal connection with the later uprising, in that Batiatus’ boundary-less and unscrupulous ambition leads to his own downfall. The connection is evident:9 The demonstration of physical strength, psychological superiority, agility up to elegance and technique, which is senseless from today’s point of view, remains in the context of a transfiguring entertainment and is largely defused for the TV audience and the arena audience of the film as a game. For the threat scenario of violence remains in the arena. Refusal on the part of the  This should not lead us to regard the ancient amphitheatres as places of contemplative enjoyment. In the Art of Love (verses 89–100), Ovid describes the “round theatres” as “rich hunting grounds”: “There you will find something to love and something to play with, something to touch fleetingly and something to hold. […] Thus, in their best finery, women rush to the games [… T]his place detracts from moral decorum.” 9  In an analogous perspective, the Tribute to Panem (book 2008, film 2012–2015, director: G. Ross) can currently be cited as an example here, staging life-and-death games in a fantasy world of center and periphery for the purpose of distraction and demonstration of power, which at the same time illustrate the immersive potential of entertainment and the power to entertain. 8

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gladiator was not an option for action. In Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, the unwillingness and resistance to the imposed fight becomes a gesture: Spartacus throws his sword into the gallery. In Gladiator (directed by Ridley Scott 2000), the same scene is quoted, continued here with an angry criticism by the gladiator Maximus, who asks the audience: “Don’t you like it? Am I not entertaining you? Isn’t that why you’re here!”,10 which, however, remains inconsequential. As a native Roman who opposes the established understanding of society, this would be a form of social criticism, but it goes unechoed because there is no such level of reflection in the audience. The quote is taken to the extreme visually in Spartacus, when the uprising is initiated at the end of the first season and Spartacus leaps onto the audience gallery with his sword in slow motion and backlight: resistance personified. The impact as a threat is actually experienced by the inhabitants of Capua only after Spartacus has broken out. Here again a propagandistic moment takes effect – the true goals of Spartacus cannot be conveyed to the Roman citizens, on the contrary, they can be instrumentalized for Glaber’s personal ambitions. But in the run­up, Spartacus must first learn the rules of the arena (Fig. 4.2).

Fig. 4.2  Spartacus victorious in the arena, the spectator is part of the grandstand audience. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E1, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)  In the original English, the question is “Are you not entertained?” which Maximus repeats twice before following up with, “Is this, why you are not here?” 10

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The audience in the amphitheatre, though, becomes sheer mad during the munera, where mostly only the gladiator fights are shown. On closer inspection, another ambivalence comes into play, for there is another audience in the series, thirsting for even more blood, who witness fights: the audience in the caves, where the ‘underworld’ reigns, where a human life is worth even less, where the social ‘dregs’ meet, and where visitors are ostracized by society if they are seen there. Interestingly, the series here makes a judgmental difference between ‘above’ – the arena  – and ‘below’  – the cave  – which makes the gladiatorial fights appear as something that still has something honourable in it, while in the caves it is hopeless to still have hope. The gladiator fights, but also the cave fights in the underworld and the subsequent fights of the slaves against the Romans, represent a constriction, because combative diversity and tactics can only be dramatized to a limited extent. The surrender of a gladiator, which also only allows the continuation of the games in a resource-saving way, is only possible in the series if it serves the narration. Regularities, overseen by a referee, as is also historically handed down, would soften the drama in favor of an either-or. Artistry in combat is mostly presented in a one-sided way from the perspective of Batiatus’ gladiators and plays little role unless it is to increase Batiatus’ performance and thus social status. This one-­ sidedness is reinforced by the fact that the film’s own logic also takes effect here: the duration of a munus gladiatorum does not correspond at all with the film’s intention, so that a battle, shortened to its decisive moments, drives the story forward. Today, entertainment is understood as an essential component of a social functional mechanism that creates “stock experiences” (Hügel 1993: 126) for the recipient as an eventful process. The question that immediately follows aims in a productive perspectivation at the ‘what’ of experiences and how to deal with them: We do not simply waste time and attention, as the culturally critical talk of the time killing industry claims, but adopt an attitude that lies between comprehensive concentration and complete apathy. While we are talking, we are present in mind, soul and body, we just do not expose ourselves to the pressure of having to react immediately psychologically, mentally or in action to what we experience. Entertained, we, the recipients, retain control over the scope of our response. Neither are we spellbound by great mimes of great art nor, as by a political orator, seriously captivated, urged to react, even to act; nor does what we experience entertaining leave us completely cold. (Hügel 1993: 131, emphasis added)

With this ambivalence of behaviour or – in the words of Hans Otto Hügel – the aesthetic ambiguity, one thus arrives at a view in the context of television series that does not understand entertainment as an independent communication process, but

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4  Entertainment in the Roman Republic and in the Series rather as “participation in cultural situations through entertainment”. Spartacus stages “cultural situations” in a variety of ways and thus allows the viewer to participate in them through the form of entertainment. Variationally, it would be for the reason that narrative and aesthetic moments of entertainment are serial and always repeat themselves in variation. Thus, according to Hügel (1993: 132), entertainment has always “tended towards the serial, because it allows attention to be built up as well as diminished at the same moment.” By always understanding the individual episode as a variation of the genre when we receive it, we relieve ourselves of too much attention and yet remain engaged.

This raises the question of the ‘how’ of engagement. In the series, entertainment itself is the subject of the narrative: Crixus’ highest goal, up to the existential experience of loss, is honor in the arena, the championship of Capua, in order to honor Batiatus and, up to a certain point, his wife as well. It is not until Spartacus that the seeds of doubt are planted that there must be something other than ‘the honour’ in the arena and unquestioning loyalty to the lanista. These are big themes that the series negotiates in detail in the first season alone: The hard training and the hardest test; on the ground where training takes place is just not sand, but this is ‘hallowed ground’, soaked ‘with the spilled blood and sweat of gladiators’. It is only after training that recognition is given in the arena through the victories won and the favour of the public. The hardness against oneself, the learning through pain, the endless body optimization through incessant training as well as the (temporary) subordination are functionalized, because the goal is the victory in the arena, the pleasing entertainment of the Roman citizens as a spectacle of life and death, which is accepted and approved of as fate. These are all more or less characteristics of an authoritarian character, as first described by Erich Fromm and subsequently by Theodor W. Adorno with regard to fascism in Germany:11 The striving for freedom and justice are fundamental traits, but many people are not up to this freedom. In such a case, they would orientate themselves towards power and obedience, and take refuge in a conformism that is rather hostile to a pluralistic world. This makes them susceptible to ideologies and a strong orientation towards authority. The analogous conclusion from the authoritarian character to the slaves or gladiators in Spartacus seems obvious and is also partially observable. Especially since the potential for conflict, for example between Crixus and Spartacus or Batiatus and Spartacus, is ignited by this. However, these  Fromm, E. et al. (1936): Studies on authority and the family. Research reports from the Institute for Social Research. Alcan, Paris. Adorno, T.W. et  al. (1950): The Authoritarian Personality. Harper and Brothers, New  York. Current and related to the political shifts in Germany and Europe: Heitmeyer, W. (2017): Authoritarian Temptations. Edition Suhrkamp, Berlin. 11

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are not presuppositions, but settings that become presuppositions for the narration and its dramaturgical realization. If one detaches the form of entertainment – gladiatorial combat – from its cinematic and historical context, then the consideration connects to today’s similar forms of entertainment. Since March 2016, Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) has been legal in New York, and thus in all 50 US states. Originally conceived as a form of comparative competition between different martial arts, this form of fighting developed its own momentum relatively quickly in the 1980s. In terms of sport history, the way of fighting can be traced back to the ancient Greek pankration, a mixture of boxing and wrestling, in which only biting and stabbing in the eyes were prohibited.12 The popularity of MMA can be seen, among other things, in the fact that the American television channel Fox shows the big fights of the organization Ultimate Fighting Championchip (UFC) on free TV, and worldwide have successfully formed offshoots of the UFC. An increase of the so-called cage fights is then shown in the almost ruleless Free Fight. In the documentary The Hurt Business (USA 2016, R.: V. Yurdin) the men and also women speak openly about their motivations, about fame, honor and entertainment and the importance of clear, uncompromising fighting in contemporary Western society.13 The film opens with an off-screen question about whether he ever minded hurting someone. The fighter, who is not named, responds: I broke someone’s eye socket bone, he insulted me before the fight and I smashed his face. He was less insolent after that. But they’d do the same to me if they could. I pray for my opponents before the fight. What we do professionally is rather taboo. Not everyone is brave enough to go in there and be vulnerable enough to get knocked out in front of friends, family or teachers. […] Nobody wants to be embarrassed in front of millions of viewers. So we’re training to do something that nobody wants to do. That’s what makes great fighters.

 Cf. Arvanitis, Jim (2003): Pankration. The Traditional Greek Combat Sport & Modern Martial Art. Paladin Press. 13  The film now joins a host of similar documentaries and docu-dramas, such as Takedown. The DNA of GSP (USA 2014, director: K.  Manchester) or Conor McGregor: Notorious (USA 2017, director: G. Fitzgerald). The discussion about public arena fights ignited in Germany in 2009, when the first major Ultimate Fighting event was held in Cologne and, for youth protection reasons, entry was only granted to those aged 18 and over. The then chairman of the sports committee of the Bundestag, Peter Danckert, vehemently condemned this and did not shy away from direct comparisons with gladiator fights in ancient Rome. Cf. http://www.spiegel.de/video/ultimate-fighting-streit-um-brutalo-event-in-koeln-­ video-1004990.html [Last accessed 27 February 2019]. 12

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But it also becomes clear in the documentary, beyond the personal fate of the fighters, that it is not possible in the ring or in the cage without rules and without referees, even if it is ultimately a very reduced set of rules, but that also includes the abandonment and the immediate end of the fight. Battle rap is less physical but no less martial, although here too language is the means to defeat the opponent. In battle rap, whose level ranges from the lowest gutter language to the light height of the lyrical, it is quite simply about showing how good you are and how bad your opponent is. Battle rap has been in the mainstream at least since the hip-hop film 8 Miles. Every Moment is a New Chance (USA 2002, director: C. Hanson) with Eminem. The battle is usually fought without music over several rounds, and the audience or a jury decides who wins at the end. The format, which does not require too many prerequisites, is now spread all over the globe in various organizational sizes. The dissemination and perception is also facilitated by video platforms.14

 For example, there is a format called Rap am Mittwoch in Germany, King of the Dot in Canada, Don’t Flop in the UK, FlipTop in the Philippines, the Ultimate Rap League or Grind Time in the USA, or Rap Contenders in France. But there is also a lively battle rap scene in Russia, which organizes itself in the YouTube-ready format Versus X, among others. The 2017 duel between favourite Oxxxymiron and challenger Slava KPSS went on for an hour and achieved over 39  million clicks by January 2019. Cf. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=v4rvTMBCJD0&t=965s 14

5

Identity, Persona and Issues of Recognition

Until the end of the series, the question of who this Spartacus actually is remains open, because the viewer does not learn his real name. If you fight as a viewer at Spartacus’ side until the last episode of the final third season, then a strategic confusion can be observed: Spartacus himself and his closer henchmen raid different and far-flung homesteads or settlements almost simultaneously, each time shouting “I am Spartacus” at the few survivors. The mimetic appropriation of the name and its unverifiability, here a reference to the similar scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus film, lead to the irritation of the enemy, who can no longer locate the ‘real’ Spartacus; uncertainty in the face of an apparently superior opponent is the result. If one detaches this statement as a linguistic gesture from the context of the series, a surprising contemporary reference becomes apparent, which – not only in Germany  – points to a collective identity. On 20 April 2005, following Joseph Ratzinger’s election as Pope, the Bild newspaper ran the headline: “We are Pope!”. This headline took on a life of its own relatively quickly and subsequently through many different variations (Wir sind Weltmeister, Kanzler, Deutschland, Oscar, etc.) and thus offered, also as a rhetorical device, various identification potentials for the German population. But also the collective reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks on 07 January 2015 expressed itself in such a formulation. In addition, the performative linguistic gesture of “I-am” or “we-are” as a communalizing principle of action has been found, for example, since 2008  in Anonymous or the so-called Occupy movement “We are 99%”. Although the individual appears as a component of a (self-selected) communication collective, this eludes clear addressing. Rather, the function or status comes to the fore. Within the series, status group attributions

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_5

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are used in addition to the protagonists and antagonists: the slaves, the gladiators, the Romans, etc. The individual is not addressed as a part of a (self-chosen) communication collective.

5.1 Processual and Invariant Identity Dimensions in the Series At the latest since Stuart Hall (2012: 182 f.), it has become accepted that the postmodern subject is conceived without a secure, essential or enduring identity. […] It is continually formed or changed in relation to the various ways in which we are represented or invoked in the cultural systems that surround us. This subject is defined historically, not biologically.

This produces – beyond a situationally stable identity – not exactly security and provides little orientation, since the necessary decisions as an answer to the question of who I am are always connected with each individual’s own actions, behaviour and (re)presentations. This also means, however, that any media offer provides at least partial identification potentials that can be individually transformed or interpreted, appropriated or rejected. Media function here quite centrally as specific forms of articulation and (re)presentation that make corresponding offers of identity and enable an exchange. Spartacus offers a broad tableau of different identities with an interesting pointing in the overall view: The identities of the slaves and gladiators who come to the fore are more processual in nature; in a certain sense, they have the capacity for continuous identity work, partly through self-knowledge, partly through external, not always advantageous framework conditions. Insights and the consequences that follow from them are triggered by crises, often linked in a film dramaturgical way, sometimes with a cliffhanger. They are what they are, but they do not remain so. For example, Crixus, Spartacus’ adversary and loyal gladiator of the Ludus, becomes a co-leader of the uprising and a friend of Spartacus. Naevia, the shy house slave of Batiatus’ wife Lucretia, first becomes the defenceless and abused victim before she develops into the warrior at Crixus’ side who kills fearlessly and without hesitation. Thus, the grandly staged duel against the treacherous ex-­ gladiator Ashur (S2E10) becomes her physical-emotional liberation blow. Only then can Naevia come to terms with her past as a slave.

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The invariant part of their identity, apart from character traits such as pride or loquacity, mostly refers to the origin of the gladiators: Gauls, Thracians, Teutons, Syrians. The origin of the other is used by Romans and non-Romans in a stigmatizing way to demarcate their respective identities and is thus used in the same stereotypical way: The Gauls are small, the Syrians mendacious, the Thracians stink, etc. An identity-creating recognition – as a gladiator, not as a human being – is given, for example, by Batiatus, who addresses the respective merits of the individual in the arena and establishes a brand with the label: Crixus, the undefeated Gaul; Barca, the Beast of Carthage; Spartacus, the Bringer of Rain, etc. This is associated with expectations and openly negotiated market values. Indirectly, this also expresses the fact that despite the internal differentiation of the slaves and their various positions within Roman society, they still rank below the gladiators.1 The Roman protagonists, on the other hand, both men and women, are mostly what they are and remain so: corrupt, spoiled, vain, proud, scheming, brutal, lustful, hedonistic, materialistic, ambitious, and always looking out for their own advantage. In this way, the series adopts a black-and-white hatching that clearly distributes sympathies and makes character debate seem negligible. Spread out over the seasons, it focuses on one central antagonist at a time: In the first season, Batiatus’ economic and political ambitions take center stage; in the second season, Glaber seeks revenge in light of the personal ignominy he suffered at the hands of Spartacus, which prevented his recognition in the Senate and Rome. In the third season, it is Crassus who is sent as commander-in-chief against Spartacus of Rome, promising himself further social advancement and political recognition. Demonstrated strength is rewarded, weakness, whether moral, physical or psychological, is punished. In this way, the series negotiates identity processes as negotiation processes, and does so essentially in connection with failed, missing and sought recognition (cf. Werschkull 2007: 43). This happens on an interpersonal level, i.e. within the social group of gladiators, slaves, the socio-political class of Romans in Capua, etc., as well as on the social level of the Roman Republic, related to the sharing of the same interests or motives, the attainment of political office, the struggle for freedom, revenge, justice, etc. (cf. Werschkull 2007: 43). Honneth, Lindemann and Voswinkel (2013: 45) consider recognition as a basic need, a fundamental motivation for human action, which is secured, catalyzed, negated by feedback processes. They assume,

 Cf. Florus Epit. 2, 8, 2: “Since slaves fought and gladiators commanded, those men of the lowest kind, these of the worst, they increased the mischief they brought upon Rome by scorn and derision.” 1

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5  Identity, Persona and Issues of Recognition that the self-consciousness of the individual is based on an intersubjective relationship of recognition between independent subjects, that its autonomy must be ­guaranteed by institutionalized legal relations of recognition, and that reciprocal relations of recognition owe themselves to a process of historical progress. Since people are dependent on recognition and strive for recognition, they must refer to the normative order that regulates for what recognition is assigned in a society or in certain cultural environments and for what one must reckon with disregard or invisibility. In this respect, recognition is always also a category of mediation between individual social action and the normative patterns of society. Recognition and disregard translate the normative, cultural fabric into the identity and subjectivity of individuals.

Misconduct in the (series) ‘everyday life’ of the gladiators is not without consequences: Spartacus’ failure to acknowledge Lanista is conflictual, as is obedience through availability as an object. Punishment would thus qualify as negative recognition and be inherent in the category of mediation. This is accompanied by a hierarchical relationship of determination: who recognizes whom, or just who does not, and with what consequences. In the subordination and in the successes of the arena, in the fighting of the Romans, in the liberation of captured gladiators, recognition becomes, quite differently, a fundamental category for individual as well as for collective identity, without recognition thereby being equated with identity.2 Rather, identity results essentially from relations and processes of recognition. The inscription in normative orders, their boundaries and the problems of transgressing boundaries are repeatedly the subject of Spartacus: the subordination as auxiliaries, the incorporation into the ludus resp. as gladiator, the demand for games or the

 Honneth again: “The tension between the dependence of identity on recognition and the associated expectations of others, and critically setting aside for the respective particular identity recognition by others and its demand for the respective own identity, sets development processes in motion in the relationship between individual and community, within social groups, in their relationship to social environments and in societies as a whole. Relations of recognition are thus inherently tense and dynamic” (cf. Honneth 1994 [1992]: 30 ff.). This developmental process can be observed in Spartacus, in that his ‘journey’ focuses first on his return to his wife, then on revenge for her death and for his fate, and finally on the struggle for justice and freedom from the perspective of a gladiator. Fundamental to the connection between recognition and identity, cf. Charles Taylor (1993: 13 f.): “The thesis is that our identity is shaped in part by recognition or non-recognition, and often by misrecognition, by others, so that a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real deformation, when the environment or society reflects back a limiting, degrading, or contemptuous image of themselves.” 2

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Roman patronage as a loyalty-promoting dependency relationship.3 The difficulty of projecting such views of recognition lies in the construction of a historically differently configured time and in the transmission the inherent logic of the filmic text. Thus, recognition relations not only occur in an undercomplex manner, but are functionalized in an eventful manner. Here are two examples: The gladiator Crixus falls in love with the house slave Naevia and wants to give her a necklace, but she cannot accept it. This leads to further misunderstandings due to the impossibility of talking to each other undisturbed, so that Crixus is forced out of the situation to give the necklace to his dominatrix. Expressing his desire through a gift – which the audience can understand – and thus not only elevating Naevia, but making this clear to the outside world à la ‘My girl wears my necklace’, ignores the social conditions according to which a house slave did not own property that was not disposed of by the slave’s owner. Naevia’s effort to acknowledge the gesture without accepting the gift leads to misunderstanding, as Crixus interprets the non-­ acceptance as rejection. He can no longer hide the necklace from Lucretia, which she in turn unquestioningly interprets as a gesture of appreciation towards her as a dominatrix and solidifies her status towards the slave. By now wearing his dominatrix’s gift during sex with her slave, the dominatrix’s mere power of disposal is inverted into desire. Lucretia disposes of Crixus as a slave and now assumes, because of the mistaken gift, that he loves her. This leads to a change: pregnant by him, she decides (for herself) to remove Crixus’ object status, stands up for him and exposes him to no dangers, and becomes jealous when, for example, Illythia makes a claim on him. This desire is even directed against her husband, as she tries to save his life and ultimately begs him for her life “for the sake of their child together”. Batiatus plays a strategic board game (S1E5) with Spartacus, which he believes only Romans can play, due to the strategic thinking required and their social superiority. However, Spartacus defeats him several times, prompting Batiatus to praise him and drink wine together. It culminates in Batiatus exclaiming “I’ll make a Roman of you” before Lucretia joins in and rebukes Batiatus on how he comes to be drinking wine and playing with a slave together in the living quarters. While  In ancient Roman law, patronage was the term for the position of a lord as patron in the sense of a patron and representative towards freedmen and subjects, the so-called clientele. This resulted in a mutual relationship of loyalty and representation of interests, for example of the patron before the court. In return, the clients had to greet their patron regularly (sometimes every morning) at his house, run errands for him or support him at public appearances. If the patron aspired to public office, the clientele was obliged to vote for him in the popular assemblies (the so-called comitia). On patronage see, for an overview, Mączak, Antoni (2005): Unequal Friendship. Patronage relations from antiquity to the present. Fibre-Verlag, Osnabrück. 3

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­ atiatus is able to acknowledge a performance due to similar interests and does not B perceive a transgression of boundaries as such, Lucretia is unable to do so – on the one hand, she retreats to the formal demarcation between Dominus and slave, on the other hand, her reaction results from jealousy towards Spartacus’ preferential treatment towards Crixus.

5.2 Individual Identity Dimensions in Spartacus But what kind of image, what kind of character does the series paint of its eponymous protagonist? Not only the myth and the long narrative tradition promote a specific modern conception of the ‘hero’, but also the ancient traditions characterize him to some extent clearly. Plutarch (Crass, 8.3), in his biography of Marcus Crassus, describes him antipodeally as a “Thracian of the tribe of the Maiders, who not only possessed a proud sense and great physical strength, but was also better by intellect and goodness of heart than his rank and fortune, and more Hellenic than his birth.” So then, in the series, he’s heroically handsome, muscular, and straight; his gladiator friend Varro (Jay Courtney) says it to his head (S1E2): “You’re different.” Batiatus sizes him up to Oenomaus: “He’s passionate, and he causes that in others.” And he approvingly tells Spartacus straight: “You’re the most dangerous animal, the beast born of heart.”4 The complex and multi-layered production process of the series, and of films in general, means that nothing that is shown is to be judged as arbitrary or even random. While the manner of the identity process is susceptible to interpretation, the thematization and engagement itself is not. For – to illustrate by way of example – we are not so irritated at first when Spartacus, knowledgeable in reading and with his leadership, traces enemy manoeuvres on a map, but this knowledge is anything but self-evident for the time, especially when slaves or ‘barbarians’ are involved. The later Spartacus is fundamentally and comprehensively characterized in episode one of the first season in his identity as a Thracian. Since this takes place in the form of a flashback, it is already clear to the viewer at the beginning that a break in the biography has taken place here, which subsequently becomes comprehensible through the narrative.5 Thus, firstly, he is someone who questions the intentions of the Romans, in the person of the legate Glaber. He speaks at the meeting u­ nasked  The animal comparison is also found in Florus (Epit. 2,8,3): “As their first seat they chose Mount Vesuvius like wild animals.” On this passage cf. in detail Guarino 1980: 45 ff. 5  Dramaturgically, this can be understood as backstorywound. Cf. Krützen, Michaela (2004): Dramaturgy of film. How Hollywood tells stories. pp. 25–62. 4

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to make demands for his village, and while he experiences the recognition of the existing normative order by the village elder, at the same time he experiences the antipathy of the legate. In the immediate aftermath, he is presented as a loving and responsible husband who, after this war, wants to turn away from the sword and the battle in order to finally start a family with his wife Sura and devote himself to farming. It is to be – once again – the last battle. Sura’s emerging doubts, expressed in a religiosity6 that is difficult for him to access, he tries to dispel with phrases. He had given his word to the Romans, that is what he stands for, blood and honour are unquestionable for him. This is at the same time programmatic for the character, the later course of the series and for the understanding of decisions. The return to Sura, which neither the fight against the Dacians, nor the Romans, nor the gods could prevent him from doing, stands above all else. Fame, honour and money are not motives for action for him, not even later. The symbolic connection across space and time is in a ribbon that he ties around Sura’s thigh with the words, “Carry me by your thigh. The thought of it will keep us warm.” (S1E1) This ribbon acquires immense significance later on because of its symbolic content. The romanticized farewell scene is broken over the still ongoing music by Sura’s words, “Kill them all,” and reinforced by his affirmative response, “For you.” Her parting tear does highlight the feminine side, but his nod of assent suggests that this desire becomes programmatic and plot-driven. The emotional tendency is reinforced by extreme color grading in post-production. And so, in a third part of this introductory and interlocking characterization, we see the later Spartacus as an enemy-dominating, swiping, almost invincible and invulnerable warrior who dominates the battlefield, who turns critical situations to his advantage, does not hesitate to kill the enemy and thus does not lose the overview and thus himself.7 There is no reason for him to lower his gaze or show mercy. Thus, already in the first episode, necessary leadership qualities, the pride of a free man, an unbroken will, as well as a clear attitude are clearly emphasized. In addition, a purely external change is made: As a free man and as a soldier of the Auxiliaries, he remains the barbarian with long hair from the Roman point of  This role is also attributed to her by Plutarch (Crassus 8,4): “… and the wife of Spartacus, of the same stock, yet gifted with prophetic power, and partaker of the consecrations of Dionysus […] was then also with him, and took part in his flight.” 7  Moreover, there is still a solidifying characterization following this first episode. In the camp of the Roman auxiliary troops, the so-called Auxiliaries, he encounters the growing resentment of the non-Roman fighters involved. Bad food, poor accommodation and at the same time always the first in the fight “against the barbarians” lead to resentment. Regardless, the later Spartacus cites that he gave his word to the Romans, with it comes his body and blood. His idealism is laughed at by his opponent. 6

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view.8 After Spartacus enters the Ludus, his hair is cut as his first official act (Fig. 5.1). This also happens analogously with the Gaul Crixus after his arrival at the Ludus in the sequel. Lucretia first desired him when his hair was short, before that he was ignored. Likewise, this attribution of meaning is noticeable later in the series, when Caesar returns from Gaul and Crassus forbids him to shave his beard and have his hair cut. This is perceived by Caesar as a humiliation until he is initiated into the plan to act as an informer among the gladiators.9 Spartacus is not Spartacus from the beginning, but becomes so after his first arena fight, which was supposed to be his execution, by name attribution by Batiatus. For a long time he resists this name, in which for him the status as a slave is fixed. The only justification for this protest is provided by his wife Sura as a reference, for she had never called him by that name, which is often repeated by

Fig. 5.1  Spartacus as a Thracian and as a gladiator. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E1, S1E2, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

 The auxiliaries were the auxiliary troops in the Roman army, which was composed of non-­ citizens and thus other ethnic groups and also received less pay. Cf. Jacques/Scheid 2008: 140 f. 9  The role of the male hairstyle is valued differently in different cultures at different times, especially among indigenous peoples. In the Japan of the Samurai, short or unbraided hair was an act of dishonor of the same or the case with Ronin, i.e. masterless Samurais. Tacitus (De orig. 19,2) writes about the dishonouring of Germanic women in case of adultery: “Cases of adultery are a great rarity among so numerous a people. Its punishment is instantaneous and left to the husband. With her hair cut off, stripped, the husband pushes her out of the house in the presence of relatives, and drives her through the village with blows. For the surrender of chastity finds no indulgence: not by beauty, not by youth, not by wealth would she find a husband.” 8

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him. What she had called him, however, remains open.10 It is not pride in his own name, but his wife’s naming of him that forms the ground of the defence. Batiatus proposes a deal to Spartacus: If he would acknowledge him as Dominus and fight for him, then he, Batiatus, would seek his wife. This agreement is marked by a disappointed trust on the part of Spartacus. Why should he trust a Roman a second time, especially as a slave to his master? The risk to this step feeds on the uncompromising love for his wife Sura and the hope of reunion. The thoroughly blackmailing situation binds Spartacus to Batiatus and his ludus with this hope. Spartacus remains ambivalent in his identity: outwardly he is the gladiator who serves his master with victories in the arena, inwardly he remains the unpredictable Thracian who dreams of a life with his wife outside the walls of the ludus without having any concrete ideas of what this should look like.11 Batiatus succeeds in winning him over, for his life loses its meaning with the loss of Sura. Hope, which comes across as certainty instilled by trust, is at the same time an ignorance regarding actual circumstances. This ignorance remains identity-giving until it becomes identity-dissolving knowledge at the moment of the failed re-encounter with his wife.12 As a consequence, Spartacus is now able to detach himself outwardly from his Thracian identity, which Batiatus also demands of him in the course of a festival play he is organizing. In this festival play, the role-playing game of identity is now taken to the extreme: Spartacus, at his own request, fights alone as a Roman  The series Banshee (2013–2016, directed by David Schickler and Jonathan Trooper) and its main character Lucas Hood (Anthony Starr) or Blindspot (2015, directed by Martin Gero) play a similar game about identity, origin and the true name. Still instructive and worth reading with cultural-historical classifications in the genesis and interplay of subject and identity: Waltz, Matthias (1993): Order of Names. The Emergence of Modernity: Rousseau, Proust, Sartre. 11  In its use and connectivity, this is reminiscent of the final sequence of Braveheart (1995, directed by M. Gibson), in which the tragic main character William Wallace resists all torture with his last ounce of strength during his execution and cries out a tortured but unbroken “freedom”. Fighting for freedom for the sake of freedom itself, which cannot be curtailed by any compromise. 12  Slavoj Žižek (1991: 16 f., emphasis in original) writes with psychoanalytic reference: “The subject refers in its everyday life to the positively given objectivity of its environment; psychoanalysis brings us the disconcerting experience that this positive givenness can only exist and maintain consistency if elsewhere (in ‘another arena’) a fundamental unknowing persists – it brings us, then, the frightening experience that if we ‘know too much’ we can lose being itself.” The unknowing feeds on the intriguing background of Batiatus, which is then exposed, becoming a “knowing too much,” which eventually collapses the normative structure. 10

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c­ ommander in disguise against prisoners condemned to death who are disguised as Thracians. When the last ‘Thracian’ to be defeated is then to be executed by him, Spartacus kills the Thracian within himself, which is expressed in the film by the audience seeing the last victim precisely in disguise as Spartacus, beheaded by Spartacus. He symbolically fights against himself, not to defeat himself, but to be able to separate himself from his old Thracian identity. He detaches himself from a sovereign part of his identity in order to be able to submit and thereby becomes ‘functional’ in terms of the Roman system. Han (2012: 61), referring to Carl Schmitt’s politics of identity, writes of the stabilizing and identity-forming power of an externalizing violence against the Other. The reference to Schmitt seems particularly conclusive in this context, as Schmitt justifies dictatorship or totalitarian systems in which particular interests of individuals no longer play a role, or in which dissenting forms of political organisation carry a latent decay of the Führerprinzip. Spartacus must free himself from himself in order to be able to serve Batiatus, for only in this function and only through Batiatus can his one, most ardent wish be fulfilled. And so, in this key scene, a new self-image is constituted as he defines the free warrior within himself as an enemy, alienating himself from himself: Only in the face of the enemy does the self acquire ‘its own measure, its own limit, its own shape’. In turn, the exclusion of the clearly marked other as enemy forms the final unambiguous self-image. The clearer the image of the enemy, the more clearly my own shape is contoured. The image of the enemy and the image of the self are mutually dependent, they produce each other. The destructive energies directed against the Other thus work constructively for the formation of a firmly delineated self. Han (2012: 61, emphasis added)

In addition, this ‘firmly defined self’ for Spartacus is normatively predetermined from the outside and allows only a small room for manoeuvre. For according to this, Spartacus is a compliant gladiator who, as ‘Champion of Capua’, does his master and the ludus all honour.13 It is only when Spartacus discovers the truth by chance, that is, that Batiatus is behind the attempt on Sura’s life, that ‘all his longing, all his striving’ is directed first to revenge, then to justice, and finally to  This dynamic is shown in the preceding dream sequence (S1E11), in which Spartacus encounters his laid-out corpse and Sura asks him why he killed him; in the counter-shot, the dead Spartacus becomes the killed Varro. Here a causality is established via montage: If Spartacus had not symbolically killed himself beforehand, the deadly situation with Varro would not have occurred. It is remarkable that Sura’s question, which leads to knowledge, comes in a dream. She is thus objectified as a moral authority to be feared in relation to the unresolvable question of guilt. 13

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f­reedom again. This decision matures and is expressed in Batiatus’ question whether everything is “all right” in the training in the answer that he is “finally himself” again. It is clear, of course, that there are other characters grouped around Spartacus who, in the interplay of circumstances, not only guarantee the appropriate drama but also complement him as an individual. It would be futile to list them all in detail here, especially since the logic of the film is one of concentrated causality, meaning that other characters essentially only appear because they have a closer or more distant connection to Spartacus. Some are historical (Batiatus, Crixus, Agron), others fictional (Crassus’ son, the women in the immediate vicinity). This is not necessarily problematic, but rather a necessity that can be experienced as a culmination of meaning and attribution of significance. Romans’ desire for power and ambition are disrupted by Spartacus. They, too, the Romans, act as knots in a web of relationships that continually focus on Spartacus. Over the course of the series, a leadership team crystallizes on the side of the gladiators and freed slaves fighting the Romans: strategic conversations are held by Spartacus with Crixus, Agron and Gannicus; together with them he also undertakes individual ventures, joined by women: Naevia, Mira or Saxa, who ‘stand their ground’ in battle. There are hardly any individual undertakings independent of Spartacus; Spartacus is always present. The integrating function of women in battle is remarkable insofar as, in contrast to Roman women such as Illythia, even in their freedom they appear only complementarily at the side of a man: Naevia with Crixus, Mira with Spartacus, as well as Saxa with Gannicus. Agron lives a very open relationship with the Syrian Nasir, uncommented by the community, which strongly emphasizes the sexual component: homosexual narrowly means sexual practice. At the same time, the individual characters remain heavily overdrawn: Gannicus in his reductive interest in wine, sex and the fight, or Lucretia in her scheming quest to gain and maintain power. Crixus, as the reigning champion, looks with the appropriate mix of arrogance, snideness, and superiority upon the newly arriving gladiators who could be potential title rivals. On the one hand, this opens up a disparity with the recruits, and on the other, it strengthens his bond with the House of Batiatus. This bond is based on his merits for the ludus and on his victories in the arena. It is also affirmative because for Crixus, victory in the arena and honor through battle are the highest goals. It thus strengthens the position of Batiatus. This bond is further extended when Lucretia chooses Crixus as her pleasure slave. Sex, under the guise of secrecy and as an outlet for fulfillment is here enacted and projected as role-play. The mistress seduces the slave, from dominant to submissive, the keyboard of sexual fantasy is played from the female point of view.

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The motif of honor – seeing oneself as honorable and seeing it as an honor to fight for the Ludus – is most pronounced in Oenomaus (Peter Mensah). He was brought to the Ludus from the caves of the underworld by Batiatus’ father, and thus rescued. With his subsequent education, he thus feels a sense of obligation to the Ludus, if only out of gratitude. This sense of honor on the part of Oenomaus also comes into play in the sequel Gods of the Arena, chronologically before the first season (P,E1), when on the eve of a fight he admonishes the already quite drunk Gannicus to pull himself together, after all he would be fighting “for the honor of the Ludus” on the coming day.14 He succeeds his teacher, becomes an instructor, and, if Batiatus is politically successful, is later expected to continue the Ludus. However, Spartacus’ rebellion interferes, which he reluctantly joins because he realizes that the Ludus is changing due to Batiatus’ intrigues, but he lacks the evidence for it. Thus he does not join the uprising, but seeks self-sacrifice in the caves in a ruleless fight to the death. As an inhospitable place, these are the only place for him as a rebellious slave. Towards Spartacus, however, he justifies it with the hopelessness of the taken up fight and the loss of his honour (S2E1): “There is only one place for a dishonourable man” (“men without honour”). Interestingly, the gladiators in the series are attributed a sense of honour that makes their actions connectable as a motif. For historically, slaves were regarded as ‘animated tools’ who – especially since they came from different regions of the empire  – had no understanding of honour, and certainly not a Roman or homogeneous understanding of it. Nevertheless, a substantial concept of honour can be found in the Greco-­ Roman tradition, which was of central importance in the coexistence of the Romans and conceptually concentrated on honour and (bona) fama. Associated with this was public esteem and recognition, reflected in offices, and virtue (virtus). Thus, Batiatus’ pursuit of political office then becomes comprehensible as an action motive for the recognition of a social status.15 The Romans, as a homogeneously staged group, were united by the overriding idea of a nation or an empire, which made them link their actions to a concept of honour that is reflected in the recurring cry: “To the glory of Rome”. The gladiators’ concept of honour, which is not dis-

 Remarkably, this fight comes about because of a contest in social status between Batiatus and his rival Vettius, and the instructor tries to confront Batiatus: “A fight in the street? Where’s the honor in that?” to which Batiatus replies, “Fuck honor. This is business”. 15  Cicero (De Officiis, 44 B.C.) supplemented the term honor by honestum (as inner honor), from which dignitas, the dignity of a special position, resulted. Cf. as a historical outline of honor in the German and transcultural context: Burkhart, Dagmar (2006): A History of Honor. Darmstadt. 14

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cussed further, also embodies an attitude that has to be worked for and ultimately as something worth fighting for.

5.3 Collective Identity Dimensions of the Gladiators The gladiators training together in the series Ludus are presented as a “brotherhood”. It is tempting to speak of an – exclusively male – homogenized community of destiny, whose group-building measures consist in joint training and competitions. At the very least, this appears to be a contemporary projection of management and leadership group seminars when it comes to establishing responsibility and empathy. Furthermore, the dimension of physical closeness that integrates the narrative of ‘bromance’ is striking. Bromance is an English portmanteau word composed of Brother and Romance, which since the mid-2000s has addressed the discourse of masculinity and sexuality in the context of friendship, without including the accusation of homosexuality. This is concentrated in the competition, rivalry, joint leadership and friendship between Spartacus and Crixus (Fig. 5.2).16

Fig. 5.2  Spartacus and Crixus – from bitter rivalry to lived ‘bromance’. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand S1E1 + Spartacus. War of the Damned S3E8, DVD 2010, 2013, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)  Becker (2014: 236) states that from the 2010s onwards, a new normality took hold, especially on American television, as a development that “altered cultural constructions of masculinity and male bonding yet again and fueled the rise of the bromance discourse. In the bromance discourse, representations of male bonding no longer serve to foreground straight man’s anxieties about being misread as gay. Instead, the bromance discourse appropriates cultural codes connected to homosexual bonding as a means of acknowledging the possibilities of homosocial bonding.” Interestingly, a comprehensive “International Gay Guide” is called, of all things, Spartacus, which emphasizes the closeness to homosexuality more than homosocial bonding. 16

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Historically, the gladiatorial community developed its own rules to ensure order and hierarchy and offered inward protection; at the same time, it implied a commonality shared by all, whose first and foremost goal was individual survival and survival in battle in the arena. New recruits had to subordinate themselves until they were accepted as gladiators and unconditionally acknowledge the older ones. Jean-Luc Nancy (2016: 91, emphasis added) contributes an interesting thought on this: Being-in-common [être-en-commun] means that being is nothing that we have as a commonality, even if we are, that being is only common to us in the form of being shared. Not in such a way that a common, general substance is distributed to us, but being is only shared among existents and in existents (or among existents in general and in existents, but it is always only existence as such that is concerned with being as being).

If one follows this idea, the brotherhood and the standing up for each other as gladiators can be understood outside the arena, at the same time it marks an irreconcilable difference to the Romans. Thus, in the series world, a retreat in the sense of privacy, overnight female visits, or a chamber of one’s own is granted only as a reward for the champion and the trainer. Social life  – eating, personal hygiene, training, sleeping – takes place in the community.17 A prerequisite for acceptance into the community is an initiation rite, the historically documented sacramentum gladiatorum.18 In the series, one has to go through a three-part rite des passage by first passing a martial test against other gladiators, secondly taking the oath and thirdly having a ‘B’ branded on the inside of the right forearm. Only then are you

 There is a certain analogy to the male communities of the Spartans, the so-called syssitia, in which up to 15 men lived, trained and fought together. There also took place a substantial part of the education of the adolescents. Participation in the community-strengthening syssitia was linked to a regular payment of a fee and was part of ‘bourgeois life’. Cf. Welwei, Karl-Wilhelm: Sparta. Rise and Decline of a Great Power. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2007. 18  Then heard in full in the series (S1E2) with the following wording unique to Spartacus: “I swear I will burn, be chained, beaten, or may die by the sword in pursuit of glory in the arena. I give my flesh, my spirit, my will to the glory of this ludus and the command of my master Batiatus.” 17

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recognized and respected as an equal by the other gladiators.19 This initiation takes place on three levels: the technical perfection in the fight against other gladiators, the symbolically-performatively established loyalty through the oath, and the heroic self-affirmation in enduring the pain. Through the irreversible inscription in the body, the brand itself becomes a sign of recognition and differentiation from other gladiators and slaves. How important this brand is also for the self-attribution of the gladiators becomes clear when the Syrian Ashur (Nick E. Tarabay) receives the brand at Batiatus’ command without the examination that takes place in the ludus and the gladiators refuse to recognize him. Ashur survives the uprising, in which he takes no part, and is able to use his skills of intrigue, treachery, and espionage to gain favor with the praetor Glaber, who hunts for Spartacus. As a sign of unconditional loyalty, Glaber now demands that Ashur cut the brand from his arm, which he does, so that without the brand he cannot be attributed to either Batiatus or the gladiators. The rules of the ludus appear quite generally within the Roman world as its own, which then also cause curiosity, disgust or desire in potential visitors. Nevertheless, despite the arbitrariness, excesses and whims of their master, the implementation of the rules in the series still shows a reliability within which life is possible, especially since they represent an economic and social added value for the house of Batiatus. For the descent of gladiators into the so-called mines or caves in case of insubordination or worthlessness suggests a legitimized regularity of the ‘upper world’. The real horror lies in the rulelessness, chaos and deviance of the underworld. There, fighting is unregulated and unrestrained, bets are made, dice are thrown for fate. The decision in the fight brings only death. The deviance is shown, among other things, in the presentation of the lot results for the weapons in the form of a handless naked transsexual or the disguises of the fighters. What options does a fighter have for action outside the community? Or even more pointedly: What does an extremely hard-trained gladiator, whose entire concentration is designed for victory in the arena, have for options for action outside  With reference to pop music, but at the same time in a way that can be structurally generalized, Diedrich Diederichsen (2014: 16) writes about initiation: “Whoever talks about initiation is, after all, always dealing with two ideas; the process that helps me to understand society and to make myself understood in it, and the process that contributes to my fundamental assent to the conditions under which I seem to have no other choice to live. In the first case, initiation would be the precondition to political participation; in the second, just the opposite, apolitical submission to a status quo.” For Spartacus, the second case obviously applies, since political participation is not provided as an option for action. A brief glimmer of participation is immediately shattered and the realization of apolitical submission leads to resistance and ultimately insurrection. 19

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of the fight? The answer seems obvious: there is only the fight. And that comes across as a deliberately reflective self-image of gladiators. When Barka (Antonio Te Maioha) is killed by Batiatus through Ashur’s intrigue (S1, E6), both Ashur and Batiatus rumored to be released immediately to cover up the murder. However, this news is met with irritation rather than shared joy by the gladiators, for what was Barka to do with his life outside the ludus and the arena. Crixus responds mockingly, “Grow vegetables?” Likewise, the problem is made clear by Gannicus, who is actually given his freedom at the end of the sequel Gods of the Arena and goes wandering. Gannicus does not reappear until Crixus and Oenomaus are to be punished as rebellious slaves in the arena of Capua. He hires himself out as an arena fighter for a few coins, social recognition largely denied him for his earlier successes that contributed to the entertainment. The two examples refer in their narrowing to the action frame of the gladiators. They fight to win, they win to survive and they survive to confirm and consolidate their superiority. Regularities arise, such as the ‘Brotherhood’, which do not provide for any emotional closeness, but rather only a social responsibility of the gladiators towards each other. For the competitive relationship between the gladiators, especially between Crixus and Spartacus, always comes to the fore. Nevertheless, Crixus saves Spartacus’ life during an ambush (S1E9) because he belongs to the community and this reason is also obligatory for Crixus, despite the hatred and competition. There is also no room for reflection on killing in this sequence of events. Victory in the arena mostly means the death of the other. This self-image becomes much more apparent in the course of the battle against the Romans: “Kill them all” becomes the programmatic battle cry, and the ultimate

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goal is to kill as many Romans as possible.20 Implemented dialogue-wise, this is reminiscent of Asterix and Obelix in its parody and quantity of defeated enemies, as they look forward to a tussle with the Romans. And so the gladiators’ frame of action becomes what Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer (2011: 17) have called a “frame of reference” with regard to German Wehrmacht soldiers: Reference frames ensure economy of action: The vast majority of what happens can be placed in a known matrix. This has a relieving effect. No one has to start from scratch and answer the question again and again: What is actually going on here? The vast majority of the answers to this question are preset and retrievable – outsourced to a cultural stock of orientation and knowledge that dissolves large parts of life’s tasks into routines, habits and certainties and relieves the individual colossally.21

In the case of Spartacus, this stock of orientation and knowledge almost dissolves as a free warrior; as a gladiator, he has to start again from almost zero, but this also applies to the other slaves who become gladiators. His system of values no longer applies, his self-determination is suspended, he is deprived of his freedom and his language. He is saved by his will to live, his ability to adapt, and his inherent fighting skills, which lead to respectable success. These, however, are worth nothing in the gladiator school. With his involuntary entry into the ludus of Batiatus, who thereby hopes to gain a strategic advantage over the praetor Glaber, the previous frame of reference no longer applies and he is forced to adopt the new, octroyed one if he wants to continue living. This includes technical and physical gladiator  This begins in the very first episode of the first season, when the future Spartacus says goodbye to his wife. “Kill them all” are her parting words to him, as are the inner dialogues between the two when Sura appears as an imaginary or mirage. Also programmatic from off-screen at the beginning of the sequel Gods of the Arena: “There’s only one way. We kill them all!” In the original English, on the other hand, the prompt comes across much more strongly: “Kill them all!” This is the name given by the American rapper Passionate MC to a title that programmatically precedes a dream sequence from Spartacus (S1E4): Sura asks Spartacus how much longer the killing in the caves would go on, he’s taking it too far. He replies to her that he would still be alive after all, and that it would take exactly as long as it took. Sura then repeats her request from episode 1 of the first season, “Then kill them all!” That Spartacus runs through as a motif is evident in his comic book Soundcloud profile, among other things; in the video for WarCry (R.: Redeye Movies, 2015), he performs imaginary sword fights with a Roman sword modeled on the series. And in at least two titles, he begins by analogizing to the gladiators’ arena battle cry, “Capua – Should I begin?” – “Assassins – Should I begin?” 21  In this context, Neitzel and Welzer (2011: 18 f.) distinguish frames of reference into four different orders, which begin top-down with the socio-historical structure and are further specified down to the level of personal dispositions and the question of individual decision-­ making. 20

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training as well as subordination, humiliation and degradation. The optimized economy of action of the new frame of reference, which is a conglomeration of the old and the new, is then revealed in Spartacus as the leader of the insurrection: Strategic choices to weaken, to destroy the enemy, to survive himself. The culmination of such an everyday frame of action can be found, for example, in the connection between the wish to kill and the vow of love: Spartacus, together with Crixus and Gannicus, wants to kill the two legates Cassius and Furinius in their villa in view of the approaching Crassus, since the two army commanders have so far always escaped them (S3E1). Crixus confers with Naevia and the following dialogue ensues, amidst much kissing and sensual affection: Naevia: I’m concerned and you flatter. Crixus: I’m telling the truth. Your fire still eclipses the sun. Once the hands trembled under the weight of what was, now they are as strong as the steel they wield. Naevia: Because of you. Crixus: Because you are strong inside. And because you know what you want, as I’ve often found out. Naevia: I will not leave your side. Crixus: And I not from yours, only tonight it has to be. Stay with Agron and follow his command. Naevia: Kill many Romans. And return to my arms when her blood steams on you. Crixus: Only the dead will greet Crassus and his army.

This community of fate remains at its core after the uprising and then – as already indicated – also takes in isolated women. After the outbreak, there are no longer the external constraints of communalization, but it nevertheless remains, even if the composition changes in part in the course of the series. With the common goal of fighting the Romans, a form of voluntary community emerges, which in turn establishes trust and closeness between the predominantly male community. The gladiatorial community tends to abolish all differences between the individual members, it homogenizes according to the gladiator/non-gladiator criterion and thus stands in opposition to Roman society (Fig. 5.3).22 Equality within the community is still questioned in at least two respects at the beginning: The champion of Capua is considered the best gladiator, granted leadership as first among equals (primus inter pares) within the ludus; this comes to a  The distinction between community and society goes back to Ferdinand Tönnies and his main work of the same name from 1887. This, in turn, was criticized by Helmuth Plessner in 1924 in Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (The Limits of Community). Cf. also updating: Eßbach, Wolfgang, Fischer, Joachim, Lethen Helmut (eds.) (2002): Plessners “Grenzen der Gemeinschaft”. A debate. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. 22

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Fig. 5.3  The community fighting united by voluntary coercion in the 2nd Squadron. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Vengeance, S2E5, DVD 2012, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

head as a rivalry between Crixus and Spartacus, and remains virulent between the two even beyond the revolt. Secondly, within the involuntary community there are ethnic demarcations between Gauls, Teutons, Thracians etc., which are not (can not) be abolished ‘from outside’ either, but remain. As a community, they finally develop a morality through their common goal that is diametrically opposed to the morality of Roman society. The series draws essential moments of tension from this incompatibility of narratively laid out identity patterns and gender role models. It still needs this dichotomy until the end of the second season, as it is characterized by the more personally motivated revenge. This changes in the third season through processes of differentiation in relation to various interests. In this respect, Spartacus’ unifying and collectivizing speeches, for example shortly before the Roman attack (S2, E9), are to be understood: It lifts the heart to hear glad voices and to see that a bond unites us. Not by a brand, not by the same home, but rather by a wish (in the original English: ideal): That every man and woman should be born, live and die with the sweet taste of freedom on their lips. If we are to defeat the Romans, we must put aside our disagreements and stand together as one body.

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5.4 Recognition A central theme of the series unfolds through the protagonists in different ways: recognition. Recognition, as already outlined above, is observable in intersubjective encounters and actions and is understood in the following, following Hegel and Honneth (2010: 29), as a social means “through which the desire for the experienceability of one’s own reality-changing activity receives satisfaction”. Furthermore, Honneth (2010: 110 f.), keeping the research situation in mind, starts from four premises as a “categorial determination” in order to characterize recognition as a “moral act” at the same time: First, he understands by it the “affirmation of positive qualities”; second, he emphasizes the “action character of recognition”. Thirdly, he assumes that, following on from the second, “such acts of recognition constitute a distinct phenomenon in the social world” and, fourthly, he sees recognition as a “generic concept that encompasses various subtypes”. These premises lead to a “semi-clarified use of the term”, which leads to the actual problem of two alternative conceptual models, namely whether recognition is an attributive or receptive act, respectively whether it is a productive or reproductive performance. (Cf. ibid. 112) Thus, recognition as a mere intentional content of a desire or a need recedes into the background and becomes more multilayered in terms of its preconditions, the strategies employed and corresponding outcomes. Honneth (2010: 30) writes here with reference to Hegel’s justification of self-consciousness, which undergoes a process of transformation from annihilating desire to recognition: In the encounter between two subjects, a new sphere of action opens up insofar as both are mutually compelled to perform an act of restriction of their ‘selfish’ desire as soon as they have become aware of the other. In contrast to the form of action of need satisfaction, in which living reality ultimately remained unchanged, in interaction a change of state spontaneously takes place in both participants in the action event: ego and alter ego react to each other by each limiting or negating their own egocentric desire in such a way that they can encounter each other without the intention of mere consumption.

The restriction of desires in mutual coexistence theoretically demanded here sets reason as a formative variable in a relationship of recognition. It does not necessarily presuppose it; it can certainly also be the result. However, this is not so easy in a relationship of dependence between dominus and slave. Thus, processes of recognition are in conflict with each other, if they are part of the encounter between subjects who are in a relationship of dependence to each other. By staging Spartacus as the rational and morally upright part, recognition becomes a normative demand towards him, the non-fulfilment of which leads to conflict and increases Spartacus’

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‘moral capital’. This also becomes clear in Spartacus’s pervasive distancing himself from parties, orgies and excesses. He does not get drunk, does not indulge in women, maintains control and overview, does not indulge in the intoxication of others. On the other hand, the general form of recognition that Batiatus gives to his gladiators is equivalent to understanding it as an “intention of mere consumption.” The “act of limiting their ‘selfish’ desire” would be tantamount to an eye-to-eye encounter, which cannot be intended precisely because it would diminish the narrative and dramaturgical potential. This refusal on a structural level is symptomatic, since an “intention of mere consumption” goes hand in hand with an objectification of and a distancing from the Other. Only this distancing and objectification enables enrichment, which can be socially, culturally, economically or politically based (Fig. 5.4). The view of Spartacus offered by the series shows us a straightforward, value-­ conscious man, who is, however, willing to fight and kill for his convictions. This applies to confrontations with his peers as well as with others, e.g. Romans. In his struggle, which he did not start, he continuously appears to us as a subject and individual who is understandable to us, even the status of slave cannot change this. Even in the most desperate situation he discovers scope for decision – “There is always a choice!” – or has them at his disposal and is prepared to bear the not always foreseeable consequences of his own actions.23 Without forcing a more extensive discussion of the concept of the subject here, in the sense of a coherent argumentation, reference is again made to Honneth (2010: 104, emphasis added), who

Fig. 5.4  Crixus enjoying the cheers in the arena and pathetic collective farewell ritual of Crixus led by Spartacus. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E3 + Spartacus. War of the Damned, S3E9, DVD 2010, 2013, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)  When he is forced to kill his friend Varro, he is willing to sacrifice himself in battle against the Romans just to avoid having to kill his friend. He sees this as a situational choice, the decision of which Varro preempts by taking up the sword and dealing himself the death blow. 23

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dealt with the subject conceptually in connection with Althusser’s concept of ideology and the meaning of subjectivation: ‘Subjects’ in the sense of an awareness of their own responsibilities and rights become human individuals only to the extent that they are subjected to a system of practical rules and attributions which gives them social identity. Now, if in this determination the act of submission is conceived according to the pattern of public affirmation, what we can call recognition suddenly loses all positive connotations and becomes the central mechanism of every ideology. To acknowledge someone is to cause him, by virtue of repeated, ritually perpetuated injunctions, to have exactly the self-­ image that fits into the established system of behavioral expectations.

This is shown to be connectable in the series insofar as the gladiators, but also Batiatus, Glaber and Crassus, behave in conformity with the system and thus in a way that confirms the system in order to obtain the desired gratifications through their (strategic) behaviour. The initial basic conflict between Spartacus and Crixus is precisely this dilemma between conformity and gratification and resistance or nonconformity. Crixus sees Spartacus as an attack on his status within the existing system of the ludus and the community of gladiators. He finds recognition as a gladiator in victory in the arena. Thus, operational decisions for him are only ever conceivable in the mode of conformity and gratification. Crixus needs the Dominus as the one who gives him personal honor, he needs victory in the arena as this is a clear outcome. He cannot deal with personal freedom and a potential variety of actions. Spartacus, on the other hand, does not stick to operational decisions based on his experiences, but begins to act tactically when it comes to his escape and later the uprising. This predestines him to be the leader and, until Crixus is freed from the arena, intensifies the competitive relationship between the two. Especially in the third season, Spartacus’ tactical decisions become strategic, as he goes beyond situational analysis and developing alternatives to make orienting decisions that are prospective and supra-individual in nature. This applies, for example, to the conquest of the city of Sinuessa in order to be able to winter with food, or at the end the open battle with Crassus as a distraction to allow the many non-combatants to escape. Batiatus ultimately fails in his quest for political office as a magistrate, precisely because he does not fit into the “established system of behavioral expectations,” as he is clearly made to understand by various opponents. Since he is also unable to develop any other scope of action, he resorts to intrigue, violence and murder. This shows the low permeability of social advancement in the provinces; Praetor Glaber must experience the same in his struggle for a senate seat, but in the center of power, in Rome.

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A very strong narrative strand develops by the end of the second season, between Glaber and Spartacus. They develop a mutual motive for revenge, seeking satisfaction, humiliation and subjugation. For Glaber blames Spartacus for his military, political, and social failure in the campaign and the subsequent dislocations. Spartacus survives his first involuntary appearance in the arena as a condemned deserter, so Batiatus agrees to take Spartacus in – he is not destined to live long anyway. Satisfaction comes to Glaber as he cannot realize the latter’s death as Spartacus kneels before him. However, the act of submission as an act of recognition remains an interpretation, since the first time Spartacus kneels before him chained in a cell to take Sura’s ribbon and the second time only on the command of his dominus (Fig. 5.5). Another exemplary dimension of recognition, is found outside these direct spheres of action between the opponents, when Marcus Crassus in the third season sees in Spartacus someone who seems above the conceit of the Romans and their privileges. In this, his son Tiberius takes a Roman condescending stance towards a slave, whereas his father is at pains to impress upon him the necessity of gladiatorial training in order to be able to face Spartacus as an equal and without doubt (S3E1): Tiberius: Crassus: Tiberius:

There’s still so much to do when we go against Spartacus. A lot of. But you are wasting our time in hours of training with an ordinary slave.

Fig. 5.5  Spartacus on the eve of the decisive battle with Crassus, agreeing that there is no justice in this world. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. War of the Damned, S3E10, DVD 2013, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

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5  Identity, Persona and Issues of Recognition Crassus: Wasn’t Spartacus also considered an ordinary slave? Would you just dismiss him as easily? Tiberius: No. But for all his victories, Spartacus is still a slave. Crassus: He is a man. No better or worse than those with titles. Tiberius: For you he is equal to a Roman? Crassus: Even superior in some respects, as he proved. Tiberius: Pff … Crassus: You mean rank and wealth make you superior to those below you? Tiberius: In everything we are far above a slave, whatever his name may be. Crassus: Then combine words with deeds and check your faith. You were taught well how to fight as a Roman. With a slave you will surely finish.

The quite obvious ignorance of the necessary training and the arrogance of a higher social status is shown in the subsequent exhibition fight. The fact that his son finally loses strengthens Crassus in his assumption and judgment. The social status of a gladiator is not only measured in the arena and not only in the fight between Romans and gladiators sensu freed slaves. A dialogue scene illustrates the presumptuous self-conceit of the Romans. After Naevia’s liberation, Glaber’s soldiers pursue Spartacus through the forest (S2E4). Skirmishes ensue in which the Romans, as pursuers, are repeatedly shaken off, and soldiers and individual gladiators die. Ashur, who accompanies the Romans, knows about the strength of the gladiators and tries to mediate by suggesting not to face Spartacus in open combat. The commander of the troops, who is addressed as a tribune, harshly rejects Ashur: “Roman soldiers know death. Do not measure their worth against the common slave.” The arrogance, vividly rendered, feeds on the mingling of experience and pride of station, and is accordingly rewarded with death. For what is the use of the knowledge of death, which in each case becomes a one-time affair, if for the apparently “common slave” only the death of the other becomes his own guarantee of survival and he is trained solely in it. Moreover, one’s own life is the only thing for the slave to defend, as opposed to pay as motivation for the soldier.24 As the development in the pursuit proves Ashur right, ultimately the tribune, injured by Spartacus, also dies at the hands of Ashur as he tries to call for more troops.

 The question of the emerging army clientele, the politics of patronage, the financing of the army and the mutual dependencies do not play a role in this series, but are, for example, much more strongly addressed in the series Rome, also because the time frame up to Augustus is different. For an overview of the army, see Jacques/Scheid 2008: 139–173. 24

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The series emphasizes an extremely strong physical presence, especially in the gladiators, and later also in the female fighters, who are almost continuously staged only scantily clad. This creates a specifically cinematic perception of the male and female body, which is made permanent through the series and its montage.1 Be it in training, fighting, everyday life, sex, hygiene or the different seasons – the pleasurable emphasis on the physical staging plays a large part in the visual design of the series. This is also due to the fact that gladiators are a gender-specific, predominantly male bodily experience and thus, as explained above, also has a corresponding effect on the identity formation of men as well as women.2 Nevertheless, women later fight alongside the male gladiators on an equal footing and without restraint. In a certain way, this also shapes the spectator’s view of body perception, when women face the training in the same way, develop an equally demanding

 Stiglegger (2006: 108) emphasizes, with regard to film and his seduction theory, that the dominance of body representation in film “is not an authentic body [but] rather the idealized version of one, tightly bound into rituals of seduction and the staged play and montage of the film. As a consequence, the play of the film actor is just as fragmented as the film technical apparatus visually disassembles and reassembles his body: It is in the montage that the filmic representation of a human body emerges, which can be perceived as such by the audience at all. […] It seems, then, not only that the cinematic representation constructs the human being ever anew as a physical simulacrum for the audience, but that moreover […] the formerly authentically sensual bodily reference of this audience is transformed in the reception of this simulation.” Kleiner (2012: 185 f.) applies a similar argument to the staging of the body in the music video. 2  It should be noted once again that there were also female gladiators in the later Roman imperial period, although they were in the minority. Cf. Wate/Peiter 2017. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_6

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habitus and act self-determined in their physicality without losing their moral integrity (Fig. 6.1). In its staging, the body becomes the venue for discourses of power, be it during training, during the fights in the arena, in the forest and in the battles, be it during sex or during punishments: the central addressee is the body and in most cases that of the gladiators. In the series, these aspects correspond to forms of representation with masculine connotations, which corresponds to the producers’ contemporary conception of times past, as projection and in the mode of an entertaining connectivity. In this context, Marcus S.  Kleiner (2012: 184) speaks of the body as “a speechless narrative medium that enables a loss of distance between viewer and object through the visual-narrative addressing as well as (potential) activation of fantasy and appropriation scenarios.” Thus, it is not the body of the individual per se that is significant, but rather “the constantly repeated performative staging of gender as the result of practices and a permanent process of construction” (Kleiner 2010, 149). Cinematically, this is realized in the way that, for example, in the sequel Gods of the Arena, in the first episode after Gannicus’ first successful fight, there is a parallel montage showing Gannicus having sex with two women while

Fig. 6.1  Full-bodied battle against the Romans and stereotypically staged: The Germanic Saxa. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Vengeance, S2E5, DVD 2012, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

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the other gladiators are training next door at the Ludus. This drags on into the evening hours in the simultaneous gathering and stretching of moments: sex and training end simultaneously, a reciprocal reference to the endurance, situational control and self-induced enjoyment of one’s actions. This prototypical staging of masculinity demonstrates the dominance of the male – in the parallelism of training and sex, in the intertwining of training as sex and sex as training. And this transported image of potent masculinity is quite suitable as a projection surface for the viewer and for the self-image of the gladiators in the film: ‘We just bring it!’ As a visible scheme of action, this then flows equally into the identity construction of the individual and the group. This can certainly be synchronized with the ‘body mania’ of the present, in that self-staging mechanisms address the body as sculptural optimization, whether through fitness, targeted diets, body-induced modes of observation, or as a potential tattoo surface. The subject’s body becomes a design object and a design project. The implementation of role models goes beyond “the Promethean shame” (Günther Anders) and focuses on recognition through disciplining, dramaturgising and capitalising.3 Since this not only affects the male body in the series, but also the female body, the so-called “male gaze” (Laura Mulvey) as an unquestioned gender difference at least tends to dissolve in the pleasure of looking: strong and desirable men meet strong and desirable women, who then also mutually strengthen and desire each other.4 Spartacus is significant not as a Thracian but as a gladiator, a bringer of rain to Batiatus; his origins are irrelevant, as are those of the others. Crixus is significant not as a Gaul but as a champion of Capua, and in that position as Lucretia’s lover. The gender concept underlying these remarks essentially follows the work of Judith Butler (2009), so that in the following it will be assumed that gender – and thus body identity and corporeality  – also appears in the series as a structure-­ forming category: firstly, for individual and collective identity formation (Romans,  By “Promethean shame” Günther Anders meant in 1954 that man begins to feel ashamed of the tendency towards perfect, aesthetic machines that he manufactures and develops compensatory strategies such as fashion, make-up, fitness, etc. with regard to the resulting disparity. Cf. also Kleiner (2012: 186 f.), who speaks of the “disciplined and dramaturgical body” and the “body as capital”. Behind this, the ‘body-reference theories’ of Michel Foucault, Erving Goffmann and Pierre Bourdieu are action-guiding: “The studies of Foucault, Goffman and Bourdieu have in common that they address the social constitution and (re)production of the body. […] Through body work, moreover, one can work on one’s own identity; body and identity capital are constitutively linked in Bourdieu, as are body and identity dramaturgy in Goffman or body and identity disciplining in Foucault.” 4  Possible intersections between Queer Film Theory and A/Sexual Film Theory with a view to discourse currently discussed Dannenberg 2017. 3

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slaves, freemen, gladiators, etc.) in Roman society; secondly, as a cultural action; and thirdly, as a production of meaning. This category works as a social construction as well as a connection of norms, realities of life and experiences. Only in this way does the series, in its concentration on affect-oriented and emotionally charged elements as well as in its complexity-reducing staging, become connectable for today’s recipients. The production of a social body like that of the gladiator is inevitably based on the interaction of power, discourses and norms, but for slaves and gladiators it is precisely not voluntary. One exception is the Roman Varro, who voluntarily hired himself out as a gladiator because of gambling debts. Such cases are also historically documented. The most obvious reference to body staging is nudity, the naked body: both men and women are shown lightly clothed to naked. Nudity seems to be an overt, everyday practice, especially in the context of orgies to be celebrated, in combat and beyond. It may seem excessive when the insurgents wear the same outfit in winter as they do in summer, and a thin blanket seems to suffice against freezing frost. Hardship is only marginally addressed. One can take offence at this, but in the situation it promotes more strongly the myth of resisting the Romans with all one’s might, of insisting on the status one has achieved, of the harshness of one’s training in the ludus. There is a reversal when desire is placed above basic needs and the abstraction of hunger, need, immediate danger makes the bodies desirable to ‘the Other’ in the film but also to the audience. Moreover, such a shift in perspective suggests a ‘manipulative’ strategy of audience engagement that, in terms of film language, serves a voyeurism with pornographic leanings rather than problematizing the social situation. Spartacus and the gladiators reproduce in the series an archaic moment that at first sight can be found today in special situations, namely in those of sport and martial arts. The gladiators subject themselves to an extreme situation through continuous training that knows no limits, and thus adapt to it in order to subsequently be able to adapt any situation to their abilities. The extreme or exceptional situation becomes a normal situation. The strategy to be acquired by the gladiators is of a thoroughly physical nature. It is not better weapons or more technology that decide victory (this is what the Romans do in the comparable war situation with their tactics, discipline, quantity of legions, catapults or ranged spears), but courage, fighting will and technique, fitness and endurance as well as uncompromisingness until the final decision are the decisive factors. This is not only possible with intrinsic motivation, in the basic configuration of the Dominus-Gladiator relationship there is only the instructor Oenomäus, who usually concludes Batiatus’ announcements with “Your will, my hands”. The instructor is given the responsibility of training in terms of content; he is the trainer who rewards and punishes. The speech

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shapes the attitude, Oenomaus fires everyone’s motivation and the gladiators’ will to persevere (S1E3): Forget all you have learned outside the walls. For this is the world of men. We are more! We are gladiators! (approving roar). Learn. Train. Bleed. And one day your name will be legend, whispered in fear and awe. As the city speaks of Crixus, the Champion of Capua! (Agreeing roar) But his legend was not born in the arena. It was born here, in this ludus. Beneath the sting of my whip! Attack! (Fig. 6.2)

Oenomaus increases vocally in his speech, finally he uses the whip. He is the ‘fitness trainer’ who animates, who drives, who demands maximum performance and does not accept weakness. This in turn makes Batiatus dependent on him, since the latter has the power but not that knowledge, hence the formula: ‘Your will, my hands’. If it is now a question of optimizing the existing, to which consequences such as victory or defeat are attached, then with the army of communication and all other trainers a bridge is found to the present: You can want what you want, you should want what you have to want – you should be able to want and you are capable of this, provided there is someone by your side who wants you to want. […] My coach is the one who wants me to want – he embodies the voice that may tell me: you must change your life. (Sloterdijk 2009: 91)

Fig. 6.2  Oenomaus as a gladiator trainer with a whip in action. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S2E5, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

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This voice may even threaten sanctions – food or sleep deprivation up to sending them to the mines in case of disobedience or uselessness. The framework of action is in the logic of the system, the system of training, the lack of self-­determined room for manoeuvre, the dependence as a slave to the master. The everyday life of gladiators consists in the universalization of extreme situations: Defeating and killing the other in order to survive oneself. The training produces the gladiator and the gladiator becomes the normative basis of the applied training. This then also means training without regenerative breaks, food and sleep deprivation with a seriousness that laughingly spits in the face of the expected danger. Especially since the double-edged nature of the community is rooted in potential competition: Training together may mean fighting each other. Identity and body politics interlock and provide a perfect model of neoliberalism: in the arena of a free market, the imperative of self-optimization is enthroned and everyone fights against everyone else, ultimately for their (good) life.5 Solidarity lasts only until one’s own advantage becomes tangible. This, of course, is suspected of ideology, and so Spartacus as an ideologically charged media offering becomes anything but innocuous (Fig. 6.3).

Fig. 6.3  ‘Meat inspection’ and gain of distinction for the dominus; Spartacus, Varro and other gladiators as ‘display material’ in the villa. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E6, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)  Advertising can be cited as a paradigm, here a slogan of the Deutsche Bank subsidiary Postbank from 2008–2014: “Unterm Strich zähl ich”. 5

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In the first season and in the sequel, the gladiators are presented as well-trained, muscular all-rounders who ‘stand their ground’ in and out of the arena. They appear as the product of an investment as well as training and thus stand in an economic functional context. They also represent the power of the Romans, who decide over life and death and act rationally with regard to the amortization of the investment. The intended training goal of the gladiators is perfection, anticipating attack and surprise, and signaling steady readiness when calm. In opposition to this, dramaturgically for the course of the series (and in this case also historically), they are underestimated by the opponent. In the process, the series experiences a doubling in the staging of physicality: the media representation of the constant sweat-soaked extreme use of the body was preceded by a “gladiator camp” for the actors before filming, which lasted three months for all protagonists. Under instruction, all participants trained their fitness, stamina, especially hand-to-hand combat and Roman swordplay. This is not only thematized and reflected in the making-of as outstanding for the series (there is also footage material on this as a bonus), but is also observable in the movement patterns, fights and in the body staging. The fights don’t degenerate into a danced choreography, corresponding (pre-)experiences through training show the viewer a certain toughness in dealing and taking during the fights. The physicality goes beyond a mere show value and experiences a staging value, paired with an aesthetic appreciation. The show value alone would be limited to convincing in the action through the physical presence, the staging value, on the other hand, relies more on an identification of the actor with the fight. The concept of the authentic would be misleading here, as it remains a staging that does not rely on making historical battles comprehensible as a reenactment. In the series, the body itself becomes a social carrier of meaning, so that the physicality of the gladiators on display experiences a specific attribution of meaning, solely through the gaze or the perspective of the gaze: the one looking and the one being looked at. The gladiators’ gazes are punished, they reveal a limit when they are connoted with desire and discovered. The gladiator is presented in his masculinity and in his corporeality when, for example, the bored patrician women of Rome meet in the ludus to have a gladiator presented to them for entertainment, who then has to expose himself in order to be looked at and felt; the complete availability of the object and of desire. From today’s perspective, the incredulous chuckling of women at the hardness of the muscles, the masculinity or the well-proportioned equipment of the gladiator is paradoxically humiliating and elevating at the same time: humiliating in relation to the dignity and self-respect of the man, elevating because the Roman man

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o­ bviously cannot keep up and a reversal of the conditions takes place.6 The woman’s desire is articulated bluntly, thus becoming pornographic, the power relations are reversed during sex. Thus the body of the gladiator becomes a bearer of social meaning by revealing a difference between the social functionary, the Roman citizen, and the non-functionary, the slave. The latter arouses the desire of the owner, or rather a structure of desire is already inscribed in him through his status and the physical availability associated with it. This is taken to extremes on two levels: In the acting out of Roman desire and in the displayed copulation of slaves in the context of festivities in Batiatus’ house, as, for example, Varro, the Roman who voluntarily posed as a gladiator, must do, but also Gannicus, Crixus and Spartacus. It should be emphasized that here function is decoupled from desire; the gladiators must ‘stand their ground’ in the sense of the word, regardless of whether they want to or can.7 This is expressed, for example, (S1E3) when Glaber’s wife Lucretia touches Varro during the looming climax (Fig. 6.4), her witnessing is not lost in voyeuristic gazing, and she asks in an enthusiastic, quivering voice if she may experience this again, indeed demands that Varro do so once more. The act itself and its actors become the object of looking, the power of the lookers dominates the act and its availability. A self-determined control of the act according to one’s own desire is only possible for the Romans, but not for those who are commanded to perform the act. Especially since the Romans’ power does not translate into desire, for then the commanded act would be no more than foreplay or stimulating live porn.8 That the desire of the beholders is disciplined points to a set of rules whose observance reinforces the power of the beholders. Desire itself, from a Roman perspective, is interpreted one-sidedly in  A further consideration of such constellations in a US series would inevitably have to include the question of inscribed American relations with regard to slavery, racism, sexuality, black and white, etc. would have to include: “In the time of the transatlantic slave trade […] power indeed maintained not only an object-oriented but also an erotic relation to the commodity, with pleasure in this context representing the equivalent of absolute immorality, while power was understood as everything that was preferably embodied in a practice of transgression  – albeit in a practice that at the same time understood itself as aesthetics.” Mbembe 2016: 220. 7  As an expression of an extreme situation in which power-specific conditional relations of ability, control, resistance, and self-sacrifice in the climax determine perception and action, a similar situation is found in the manga and later adapted television series Kozure Ōkami (English Lone Wolfe & Cub, 1973–1976) by Kazuo Koike and Gōseki Kojima. 8  This is explicitly demonstrated on another social level: The brothel owner capitulates to Cupid. Pleasure-walking through the chambers of his fully active house with a jug of wine in his hand, he allows himself to be infected by the lust of his clientele and aroused by the excessive action. 6

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Fig. 6.4  Varro performing the commanded act, during which he asks his wife for forgiveness. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E4, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

the series: Crixus is not allowed to desire himself; he is not allowed to reciprocate Illythia’s desire. Even his forced reciprocation to his mistress Lucretia does not abolish his status as a slave; he remains a slave, albeit a protected one. Nevertheless, he is supposed to desire as a man in order to reciprocate and confirm Lucretia’s desire, the hierarchy remains, even in the act itself it is not abolished (Fig. 6.5). The acting out of desire can be differentiated once again. Lucretia ‘takes’ Crixus, the “champion of Capua” and falls in love with him, which is not reciprocated and is dismissed by Batiatus himself at a later point almost indifferently as a “gimmick”. The self-empowerment remains one-sided and weightless without consequence for her, which argues for formal equality. For historically the Pater Familias sanctioned adultery, the extent of punishment was incumbent on his ideas

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Fig. 6.5  Illythia desires Crixus, in the presence of his domina Lucretia, Naevia, and other slaves. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E5, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

and covered by existing law.9 In the film, acting out desire also becomes a strategic moment, as Batiatus and Lucretia openly make their gladiators and slave girls available to the guests. They hope to gain influence, favours and dependencies, respectively, when the discretion of the house leads to the satisfaction of needs that

 The Pater Familias (genitive form of classical Latin) was a social rank reserved for Roman citizens and referred to the eldest male head of the family, who not only represented the family to the outside world, but since the Twelve Tables Laws was also endowed with the so-­ called vitae necisque potestas, the power over death and life over the members of the family. He could thus punish the wife for adultery, even kill her, marry off the children. His word was absolute and incontrovertible. Giorgio Agamben sees in the vitae necisque potestas the state of exception, hence the foundation of political power. For while in the Roman Empire the principle of the twelve-table law applied, according to which no citizen could be killed without a verdict (indemnatus), the vitae necisque potestas gave the father the unrestricted right to judge his relatives without jurisdiction, and in this reflects the state of exception, which today is understood as the suspension of law by the state. Cf. Agamben 2004: 68 f. Agamben – as also Christoph Menke 20183 – deals with Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin in the context of law and violence and thus arrives at the concept of “suspension”. 9

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is not possible elsewhere.10 Somewhat abbreviated, one could say that the slaves are misused as economic capital in order to generate social and political capital for Batiatus and his wife. Batiatus’ father also recognizes this, condemns it and tries to oppose his son’s aspirations for advancement. The voyeurism on display in the series is doubled in the reception process: we see a form of entertainment through a pleasurably detail-oriented, detached camera, which, as entertainment, does not satisfy a need in the audience, but is rather intended to arouse a desire.11 This applies not only to erotically charged or sexually explicit scenes, but also to violent scenes, of which there are many. This results in a field of tension between the pragmatic claim to a respective historical truth – to which the film refers – and an actor-oriented entertainment. The latter addresses itself diegetically to the film world and non-diegetically to the audience. Entertainment thus becomes an essential component of a social functional mechanism, but whether it creates “experiences in store” as an eventful process becomes questionable when the nature of these “experiences” is brought into view. If we thus make experiences in stock in conversation, or better in entertaining, we are not oppressed by the conversation, because we neither currently use (implement) them pragmatically nor immediately draw intellectual or psychological consequences from what we have experienced. […] At the same time, however, we are not apathetic when we entertain ourselves. […] Entertained, we, the recipients, retain control over the scope of our response. (Hügel 1993: 131)

Hügel’s later restriction to “aesthetic experience” also neglects the transformation of experience in media representation as an entertaining element. If, moreover, one understands affector-oriented entertainment as a desire, one could conclude that experiences not made are made accessible and/or comprehensible medially as quasi-emotionally experienceable. The series’ backdrops of violence and copulation in no way lead to an examination of history or even to an understanding in the

 This is where the distinction between centre and periphery comes into play: orgies and the like also existed in Rome, but in order not to make its social position in the centre vulnerable to attack, it needed closed spaces in the periphery. Furthermore, the rape of a slave was, in case of doubt, no more than a depreciation in value that could be compensated financially. 11  Entertainment as a need that can be satisfied would imply that it could be put to an end by reaching a ‘degree of saturation’. However, this is difficult to determine, especially in the case of entertainment, since the supply of entertainment can be described as unbounded and the need is exposed to incentives that turn into desire. This would be an attempt at an explanation that goes beyond the dramaturgical cliffhanger effect in series and looks at binge-­ watching as a mode of reception. When a duty takes effect, desire is temporarily suppressed. 10

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sense of historical comprehension, but rather to a reinforcing effect of existing stereotyping, as was also observed in the feuilletonistic perception: Fans of the sandal movie should make tally sheets for their déjà vu. There’s the snow in Thrace, which quickly turns red as in “Gladiator.” There are unclothed mermaids in the palace, reminiscent of the “Caligula” adaptations at the train station cinema. The sex scenes would have passed for veritable soft porn just a few years ago. Rome, those were orgies of sex and violence, blood and semen. No wonder “Spartacus” was given an 18+ release in the U.S. and comes to this country with cuts. (Seewald 2012: o. p.)

In the process, there are various intersubjective bodily enactments that clash militantly, socially, and bodily-intimately, relate to one another, rub against one another, mutually exhaust one another, merge into one another, perish together. Thus it is respectively and reciprocally Spartacus and Glaber, Batiatus, Crixus as well as Marcus Crassus; Spartacus and his female relations with Sura, Mira and Laeta, the Roman woman from Sinuessa. There are homoerotic relationships between men such as Agron and Nasir, or between women such as Lucretitia, Gaja and Illythia, but also the father-son relationships between Batiatus and his father, and Crassus and his son Tiberius. The staging of the body is thus not only concentrated on sexual desire. For it is not only the attractive bodies that take on enormous significance in Spartacus: The staged distorted image of unbridled and immoral desire reveals its diversity and seductiveness in the uninhibited acting out of base urges in Roman brothels. Attractiveness plays no role there, the venality of desire is oriented on price. Training in the ludus steeled the bodies of gladiators, later those of runaway slaves, who underwent a metamorphosis into fearless warriors. Wounds received in battle are dismissed as scratches and ignored or closed with a glowing sword. Bodies are tortured, flayed, abused, mutilated, abused. Arms and legs are lightly severed, throats slit, heads cut off or split. Dead bodies pave the arena, pile up in the storage rooms and on the battlefields, dying men breathe their last with missing limbs: Echoing the screaming torsos.

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Everyday Use of Violence and Experience of Violence

The last points already refer to an aspect that goes beyond the staging of the body: visual experience of violence becomes possible through the visualization of violence. It is thus of a concrete character and belongs to the world of physical things, be it the staging of corporal punishment or the identification of slaves through branding. In Spartacus, violence and the experience of violence cannot be reduced to a staged effect of the film; rather, it is double-coded in the context of an everyday experience of violence in slaveholding society. Batiatus is scheming, brutal and calculating, but in comparison with Marcus Crassus he is strategically short-­ sighted. The latter is much more capable of realizing his goals in the medium to long term because he has the means, contacts, and strategic vision to do so. In the men, this appears to be part of the genetically predisposed pattern of action; it is different in the women, as in Lucretia and Illythia. Producer Rob Tappert speaks of Roman society in general as a brutal one, as the producers of the historical series ‘Rome’ and their academic advisor have also explicitly pointed out.1 In Spartacus,  For historical discourse, this is a commonplace; for film, it is always a question of what can and will be expected of the viewer aesthetically. The discrepancy between cinematic reality, historical Rome and the closeness to life is ultimately revealed in the aesthetic realisation, which affects the viewer in the staging of violence, sex and power: “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.” (Producer Bruno Heller 2008) And it is in such an understanding then that the academic advisor to the Rome series, Jonathan Stamp, is able to characterize the essential baseline of Roman action: “For them, compassion, mercy and love were not virtues. Since they were anything but weak, in their world strength triumphs and power has the last word.” Cf. Wilke 2017. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_7

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therefore, the triad of historical understanding, attribution from the perspective of the screenplay, and the dramaturgical affirmative effect of violence come into play. The density of the violence staged leads to the question of how the violence used and experienced affects the protagonists, in the sense of how it changes the protagonists within the series. In particular, it is important to distinguish between men and women, as well as commanded, observed experienced, suffered as well as performed violence is perceived, implemented, executed or denied. Martin Zimmermann (2013: 49 f.), in his study of violence in antiquity, with reference to Joachim Bauer, takes as a basis a “neurobiological architecture of violence” in which “aggression always arises when the positive effects on the motivational centre are disturbed” and finally, in the prefrontal cortex, the possible consequences of aggression for oneself or others are examined: The moment a person decides to react aggressively, the prefrontal cortex is shut down, and thus the consequences of violence become irrelevant to subjective perception. The sheer action is unstoppable.

A mere statement of violence or the mere assertion of an excess would be trivial and fall short of a characterization of violence in the series and its understanding. At the same time, it is somewhat astonishing for our contemporary Western society to singularize, sublimate, and transform causal and physical experiences of violence: Successes of a civilizing process. This suggests a distancing from and moral condemnation of violence, especially in what has been a long period of peace for the Western hemisphere. If one follows this conclusion, then the question arises as to where this distance comes from, if one does not attribute it exclusively to the temporal aspect. One consideration would be a twofold form of the culturalization process: violence is transcended from the cultural hemisphere and mediatized. Because of this, it can no longer be attributed to the realm of primary experience. However, there are increasing signs that this process is currently coming to a standstill, as violence is establishing itself in very different forms at different levels of society as a valve against obvious and apparent social grievances (Fig. 7.1). The historical series Spartacus is an example of this, while other series set in the present, such as Banshee (2013–2016, Jonathan Tropper, David Schickler) or Braquo (2009–2016, Olivier Marchal), allow similar conclusions to be drawn. Violence, even with regard to its cinematic use, can neither be considered free of intentions nor detached from contexts. In Spartacus, but also in many other series, violence is always an option for action, which can be seen in opposition to the extra-­ medial basic facts of social conditions. The comprehensible change in

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Fig. 7.1  The post-production blood spurts: Spartacus’ first appearance in the arena. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E1, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

r­ esearch on violence and peace is proof of this; it is not only multifaceted and extensive, but increasingly interdisciplinary.2 Here I essentially follow an established sociological understanding of violence, which assumes a triad of direct, structural and symbolic violence. Direct physical violence as a central moment occurs in a staggered manner as the power to injure (Popitz 1992, 48 f.), in that it reaches the limit with the act of killing, from simple bodily harm to torture, and thus cannot be increased indefinitely. Accordingly, Popitz characterizes the act of killing as “absolute violence”, which he at the same time delimits as a syndrome, since links to the glorification of exercised violence, an indifference to the suffering of the victims and a mechanization of the execution of violence arise here (Popitz 1992, cited in Imbusch 2005: 21). Exactly these connections can be found manifold and varied in Spartacus, both on the side of the gladiators and on the side of the Romans: violence is (almost) always an option for action. Neidhardt (1986: 134) sees direct physical violence as a “means of coercion [… that is a] social tool of control and instrument of power superior to all others in an emergency.” The concept of ‘structural violence’, coined by Johan Galtung in the context of critical peace research, ignores an identifiable individual perpetrator and immediate consequences for the physical body. According to Galtung (1971: 1978), unequal distribution of resources, unequal decision-making structures and power relations are responsible.3 Symbolic violence as a third category is  Leaving aside the discourse with its strongly reductive focus on violence and media, cf. among others from a social science perspective with the connection between violence and modernity Imbusch 2005, philosophically Žižek 2011 and Han 2012, phenomenologically Staudigl 2015 and with reference to antiquity Zimmermann 2013. Likewise taking a look at the connection between law and violence: Agamben 2004 and Menke 20183. 3  On the critical debate through a potential levelling of different forms and relations of violence, cf. Imbusch with reference to Jürgen Habermas 2005. 2

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d­ ifferentiated again by Imbusch (2005: 24 f.) into three contexts, all of which can be observed in different forms in the series. The first context is language – in addressing, getting a word in edgewise, being allowed to speak, intimidation and belittling, insults and so-called hate-speech, etc. – as an instrument of communication that determines the integrity of the individual in the respective communication situation. This can be observed in the series not only in the recurring determination of relationships between gladiators and Romans and then later rebels and nonrebels; these relationships are presented as sacrosanct, especially from the Roman perspective. Even within the group of Romans, with their multitude of entanglements, conspiracies and compromising intrigues, this is observable time and time again. Be it the constant swearing, which almost always uses fecal language in connection with deities, be it the blackmailing, the ingratiating and wooing when it comes to personal advantage. As a second context of symbolic violence, Imbusch (ibid.) sees violence-­ accepting ‘substitute actions’ as a targeted form of aggression dissipation, especially in sport: “One is not allowed to exercise violence oneself, but at least watches when others exercise violence in a regulated form in competition”. Exactly this could be stated – at least at first glance – for Spartacus, at least with regard to the spectator in the arena and in front of the television, when it comes to the training in the Ludus, the fights in the arena or their intensification in the caves of the underworld. Nevertheless, the rule-governed may be questioned, if there is only one offensively and the history ignoring represented rule, namely that only one of the fighters survives, it is immediately a matter of life or death. According to Imbusch (2005: 25), only the third context addresses the actual coinage of the concept of cultural violence by Galtung by including “those aspects of culture that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence” and that aim to conceal unacknowledged relations of domination.4 Bringing together the three contexts of cultural violence in conjunction with structural and physical violence leads to a thoroughly more complex understanding of Roman society in the first century BC, even if from today’s perspective it quickly becomes clear that the ruling social

 Sensibly, Imbusch (2005, 25) here adds Bourdieu’s notion of ‘symbolic violence’ to the understanding of cultural violence, as “gentle, invisible violence, misrecognized as such, equally chosen and suffered violence of trust, obligation, personal fidelity, hospitality, gift, debt, gratitude, piety, in a word, the violence of all the virtues to which the morality of honor adheres, as the most parsimonious mode of domination because most appropriate to the economy of the system.” Director Guy Ritchie gets to the heart of this in his historical epic “King Arthur” (2017, 01:57:00), when Arthur ends negotiations with the Vikings with his maxim for action: “Why make enemies when you can have friends.” 4

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o­ rder included violence as a constitutive element via its fundamental character of understanding and organization. The connection between executive and judicial power qua office and violence still takes effect. Batiatus, with his gladiators as providers of entertainment within Capua (and historically as far as Rome), certainly has social influence, which increases through private celebrations and orgies. His ambitious political goal, however, is first patronage by Glaber, then election to political office.5 Similarly, Glaber attempts social advancement through a place in the Roman Senate, which again seems only feasible through the intercession of his father-in-law; his own social status is not enough.6 A third example of this is Marcus Crassus, who was historically considered the richest citizen during Sulla’s dictatorship and subsequent proscriptions, without this being associated with the desired political influence. This at this level only the consulship or a triumphal procession could guarantee. In his topology of violence, Byung-Chul Han (2012: 88), among other things, relates power and violence to each other: While power forms a continuum of hierarchical relations, violence causes fissures and ruptures. The hiatus as a constant structural feature of violence is different from the hierarchy that is constitutive of power. Hierarchy is a difference, a gradient within a continuum that, unlike the hiatus, is referring and connecting. Power is always organized around a power-structure. The structure of violence, on the other hand, is a contradiction, because violence tears the structure apart. Fitting and disposing characterize power. Breaking and crime, on the other hand, determine violence. Both power and violence make use of a bending technique. Power bends age until it bows, until it submits. Violence bends age so that it breaks.

 In ancient Roman law, patronage was the term for the position of a lord as patron in the sense of a patron and representative towards freedmen and subjects, the so-called clientele. This resulted in a mutual relationship of loyalty and representation of the patron’s interests, for example before the court. In return, the clients had to greet their patron regularly (sometimes every morning) at his house, run errands for him or support him at public appearances. If the patron aspired to public office, the clientele was obliged to vote for him in the popular assemblies (the so-called comitia). On patronage see, for an overview, Mączak, Antoni (2005): Unequal Friendship. Patronage relations from antiquity to the present. Fibre-Verlag, Osnabrück. 6  At this point, a certain laxity of the series in dealing with historical accuracy becomes apparent, for it aims on the one hand at relationships and influence in social advancement and on the other hand at the existing possibilities of advancement through unscrupulous self-­ empowerment. The prescribed routes to the Senate via previously held political office play no role. 5

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Batiatus has the power, in what seems to be a hopeless situation for Spartacus, to offer him help. He would help him find his wife again. To this, Spartacus submits and trusts Batiatus, even though he secretly thinks of escape when he realizes that his status within Roman society is fixed as a gladiator. This complying turns into serving and a relationship of recognition through which Batiatus benefits, Spartacus believes he benefits. It is only when the deception is exposed and the loss of Sura becomes addressable that the influence of power shifts. Spartacus now experiences this influence of Batiatus as violence, which becomes a motive for him to revolt. Without question, Spartacus stands out for its violence. This is not to be grasped merely as a transgression of what passes for good taste, and would fall short. The location of the subject itself allows violence to appear as a substantial component of the narrative and the self-image of the acting actors. Violence appears in gradations in pretty much all the areas of life depicted and includes physical, structural as well as cultural components. Far from the ideologically overformed depiction of repression against slaves or their ‘heroic’ struggle for liberation, it is important to distinguish in the analytical view between a projection from today’s point of view and a historical factuality of ‘so-it-was’ that has coagulated into film. Despite existing social functional contexts of the Roman Republic, which were supposed to guarantee its continuity, there were relentless struggles for survival, especially during the time of the civil wars, which were also fought out violently among the Romans. The linguistic violence in the series refers to uninhibited swearing at the gods in conjunction with fecal language. Interestingly, in this context, the series experiences an equalizing tendency, as Romans and slaves swear similarly, despite all offensively emphasized cultural differences. As a manifest expression of hierarchy between dominus and slaves, commanders and those in command in the military, in the struggle for survival, in entertainment, in revenge, and in the maintenance of power-violence occurs in varying degrees throughout, with a tendency toward extreme portrayal. But even the Romans do not act without violence when it comes to achieving their own goals; they differ only in their choice of means. The use of violence as a means is part of the repertoire, even if it apparently often or dramaturgically deliberately ‘gets out of hand’. The constant oscillation between law-setting and law-preserving violence, especially with regard to proportionality, is already aptly analysed by Walter Benjamin (2011: 342) in the “Critique of Violence”: The natural-law thesis of violence as a natural given is diametrically opposed to the positive-law thesis of violence as a historical fact. If natural law can judge every ­existing right only in the critique of its ends, positive law can judge every becoming

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right only in the critique of its means. If justice is the criterion of ends, legality is that of means. Notwithstanding this opposition, however, both schools meet in the common fundamental dogma: just ends can be attained by just means, just means can be turned to just ends. Natural law seeks to ‘justify’ means by the justice of ends, positive law to ‘guarantee’ the justice of ends by the justification of means.

The difficulty here is to differentiate to what extent violence is necessary in the series’ own logic as a means of positive law (of the Romans), is dramaturgically exaggerated or aestheticized, and where violence as a necessary means (of the gladiators) of asserting a natural right not to be enslaved asserts itself as a delimited normal state. It is different with the aesthetic radicalization of the former slave women Mira, Naevia, Saxa, who act in freedom. Here, violence towards Romans becomes the sole and obviously alternative-less means to defend the terrain they have fought for, namely their own freedom, and to find a way to deal with freedom. There are no scruples, since the enemy is involved, nor is there any discursive confrontation, which would have presupposed some form of equality. Violence stands – from the point of view of the gladiators and fighting slaves as well as the Romans opposing them – as the legitimate and only possible option. Since there is not and was not equality between Romans and slaves, all inevitably fight to the end. It is interesting to look at how the understanding of violence and the related willingness to act builds up: Mira becomes a companion with no previous negative experience and learns archery, that is, how to kill at a distance; Saxa is freed as a Gaul and goes straight into the enemy with two knives, jumping on him and slashing him (Fig. 6.1). Naevia has the heaviest package to carry: through Ashur’s accusations she is given away, rape and minecraft are the result, and so after her liberation from Crixus she learns swordplay so as not to be defenceless in a similar situation. Her initiation, her test of maturity as an equal fighter, occurs on the edge of Mount Vesuvius, when she ends up cutting off the head of the traitor Ashur in a duel for revenge. It is only after this that she is able to shake off the mental wounds of the past and engage with Crixus anew. The beheading does not result in any psychological injuries and is often used in the following to show the superiority of the female fighters and to make clear that there can be no mercy and that the Romans are militarily inferior (Fig. 7.2). Today, violence is punished as trust-destroying and norm-violating and tends to be socially ostracized.7 Spartacus exemplifies this as a part of the whole: violence in the series is a phenomenon that can be considered neither detached from inten Cf. on this the thematic issue “Violence” APuZ, 67th Jg., Issue 4/2017 with corresponding research overview of violence research and various interdisciplinary explanatory approaches. 7

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Fig. 7.2  Head off with one blow – Naevia confidently dominates the duel against the Roman legionary. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Vengeance, S2E1, DVD 2012, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

tions nor from contexts and can always be seen in connection with power, without always being masculine per se. For Spartacus, once he has renounced his Thracian identity, the use of violence in the arena becomes problematic and useless, as it only serves to entertain. Fighting the Romans, on the other hand, serves a purpose, serves a higher goal, and is thus unproblematic and legitimate. Even the killing of opponents, who are perceived not as human beings but as oppressors, is perceived as a matter of ‘good’. There are thus two converging moments that can be observed in the series: On the one hand, the use of violence as an option for action and, on the other hand, the confrontation with violence as an (everyday) experience. Zimmermann (2013: 51) states that in the “confrontation with violent scenarios, men (react) with a significantly stronger activation of the fear centre than women and, with the build-up of testosterone, at the same time reduce bonding hormones such as oxytocin”. On a societal level, violence is thus “not an indicator of an aggressive human nature […], but rather an indication of the degree of advanced community formation”, if one, like Zimmermann, in view of anthropological and neurological findings, attributes the success of humans in their developmental history to cooperation and empathy. Now this may sound somewhat misleading in view of the violence exhibited and also handed down in the series in the first century B.C. of ancient Rome. ­Nevertheless, experiences of violence develop bonding forces that have an inward

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effect within social groups; the shared experience of violence welds together, as does a threat against an external enemy. This pattern can be observed many times in the series, both in terms of the respective plot and the respective character: In the scheming actions of Batiatus and Lucretia, who do not shy away from murdering Romans and slaves, in the ludus, in the arena, during the flight of the gladiators, in the battle, and finally in the staged moments of dying. Violence in this form can be understood as an integral part of today’s entertainment and is not distanced from the audience through the mediatized form, but rather brought close to them through immediate participation; whether in the arena, on the battlefield, next to the fighters or during amusements in the context of celebrations. Two examples will illustrate this. First example: After the liberation of Naevia from the mines (S2,E3), three gladiators are captured by Glaber’s soldiers. They are taken to the Ludus, Glaber’s residence. A celebration initiated by Illythia, which is supposed to bring the different parties closer together and reconcile them, gives Praetor Glaber the reason to offer the three gladiators and their trainer Oenomaus as a sacrifice to Praetor Varinius. Varinius refuses, preferring to let all the citizens of Capua participate in this sacrifice in the arena. Thereupon a dispute arises and it is agreed to sacrifice a gladiator in the villa. The chosen sacrifice is hung in the middle of the atrium and those present draw cards to determine the order. Instructions go out to all participants not to cut so deeply “so as not to deprive anyone of pleasure” and the victim does not die too soon. Amidst great laughter, cheering, applause and finger food, the gladiator’s tongue and chest are cut out first, his body is pierced, his belly is cut open and, incidentally, marriage politics are practiced. The cut off body parts are collected on a tray. The scene also points beyond itself, since a rivalry is brewing between Illythia and the still very young sister of Seppius vis-à-vis the praetor Varinius. The young sister Seppia had already expressed to Illythia her intentions to marry Varinius and thus, without meaning to, thwarts Illythia’s ambitious plans, who wants to advance her own social status more quickly with Varinius. The young sister now admits at the sacrificial spectacle that she has not yet wielded a sword, and Varinius offers to guide her hand. As she now faces the gladiator bleeding from many wounds, he raises his head, looks at her, and girlish naïve glee turns to terrified realization of her own actions. This leads to the fatal admission of not being able to do it. With the apology, Varinius’s sympathy for her fades and Illythia is able to get into the game and, visibly pregnant, with a winning smile and without hesitation, plunges the sword into the tortured body of the gladiator (Fig.  7.3). Publicly displayed weakness, especially of a moral nature, has immediate consequences for one’s own social status and is difficult to negotiate; harshness is recognized and rewarded.

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Fig. 7.3  Illythia tortures a gladiator for the entertainment of the guests. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Vengeance, S2E3, DVD 2012, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

Example 2: The praetor Gaius Glaber is a complete idiot and a cuckolded husband (S2, E5). His wife Illythia lets her father dissolve the marriage with him in favour of the praetor Varinius, she wants to abort the common child, his father-in-­ law threatens him with the end in the senate and thus with the end of his political career, because he did not succeed in capturing respectively killing Spartacus. His weakness is rooted in his sincerity, loyalty, fidelity, and somewhat naive honesty to office, politics, and Rome as an authority to be honored; in short, his refusal to play the scheming game that everyone else is playing. With this, he has no way to prevail, because the system and the fluid game of rules are getting to him. In order to not lose everything, he doesn’t have many avenues open to him. When the arena is destroyed during the liberation of Crixus by Spartacus and his helpers, Glaber’s father-in-law is injured. He asks for help and the situation presents him with a decision. Either help or help after. Glaber chooses to help and kills his father-in-law with the beam lying over him and the words “I am not the fool your daughter and you think me”. With this, escaping the chaos, he is only able to convey to his wife the death of her father, who now fell at the hands of Spartacus rather than a simple accident. Glaber kills several birds with one stone by this lie: the marriage with Illythia can no longer be dissolved, for he becomes pater familias through the death of the father, Praetor Varinius is out of the running as a fellow competitor, his wife must submit to him, can no longer abort the child, and at the same time becomes a

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compliant ally in the united hatred of Spartacus. The loser Glaber thus becomes a winner through intrigue. This crossing of boundaries is the ticket into the game of intrigue that he now plays and shapes himself. As a result, he plays out his position, simply eliminating potential opponents or having them eliminated by the equally scheming ex-gladiator Ashur. He can order without having to get his own hands dirty, but he doesn’t miss the opportunity to stand there ‘with dirty hands’ himself from time to time. The seduction by the power of position and the habitualizing use of violence are clearly observable in Glaber; they are processes of self-­empowerment and self-exaltation, in the belief that actions alone count. A comprehensive classification of the very different dimensions of violence and the “various ways in which violent action is effective” (Menke 2018: 36) is difficult to achieve because, on the one hand, there is the historical legal background of the Roman Republic, which includes the use of violence, but this does not constitute a plot framework for the series. On the other hand, slaves and gladiators as subjects – also in Spartacus – stand outside the law, but claim justice for injustices suffered. To this extent, the boundaries here blur between the use of violence through a legal legitimation that relies on justice and the use of violence as an act of revenge in its finality and in its causality. The former relies on an already established regulatory authority, the result then being a justice from the Romans’ point of view. The latter calls for a justice that has balance and redress in view, but which only comes about through renewed injustice. Spartacus thus acts in a pre-legal mode from the point of view of the Romans and, as a gladiator, cannot leave this ‘extra-legal status’; he remains a barbarian.8

 Cf. Menke 2018: 37 f. This interrelation of justice and revenge as well as justice and law and the transformations as well as the necessary conditions for it are impressively discussed by Christoph Menke in Das Schicksal des Rechts (The Fate of Law) on the basis of Agamemnon. 8

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Composed Copulation Scenes: Sex, Eroticism and Love

Similar to the thematic complex of violence, sex, eroticism and love are central narratives in Spartacus, not only because there is a voyeuristic potential hidden in the openness of what is shown, but also because there is an obvious connection between these two themes. In addition to the undisguised and openly displayed sex among Romans and among gladiators, romantic or romantically exaggerated love is not simply on the side as another narrative option, but in the series it stands above sex as a bodily need that is pursued promiscuously, analogous to hunger or thirst. This is done with one caveat: those who love do not have a superficially physical need for sex, as demonstrated by Spartacus, Crixus, or even Agron. And this is indeed a feature of the series that makes it particularly narrative-ready for contemporary Western society. For those who are in a relationship should prove faithful and loyal, practice abandonment and be respectful. Discussions of ‘premarital sex’ point the way to this. At the same time, the supply of sex is omnipresent and digitized without compelling spatial limitations. Dating apps like Tinder focus on visible and communicative willingness of a match, which then becomes a trophy. Sex becomes an everyday consumer good that can be capitalized and no longer needs to be sought out in the dim lantern light of the station district. Contrary to this is a gender discourse that can be described as heated, encompassing a horizon from socially sensitive to hysterical, while morally condemning deviations from the mainstream. Two positions can thus be roughly hatched that suggest a shift in the sexuality dispositif: An excessive self-dramatization and self-determination in the (self-)production and perception of an offer  – casual sex based on digitalized

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_8

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c­ ommunications – is diametrically opposed to a heteronormative longing for a permanent bond in the form of the family, for loyalty and fidelity (Fig. 8.1).1 Rampant sex exists in the serial world as a reward for success in the arena for the ‘uncivilized’ gladiators. Not only the numerous historical depictions of sex in Pompeii, the graffiti on the walls that quite openly highlight special qualities of prostitutes or phalloyctic symbolism have influenced fantasies, but also popular film productions à la Quo Vadis? (R.: Mervyn LeRoy 1951) or Caligula (R.: Tinto Brass 1979) have all but cemented a certain image of the ‘licentious Romans’ and the orgies that seem to take place all the time since the 1950s. The contemporary projection onto a Roman bourgeois view is also, of course, tempting to infer the potency of increased pleasure from the availability of slaves, by extension pleasure slaves. Such a projected openness of lived sex also serves as a foil for comparison with the present day. Especially since a Christian world view is hindered by a guilty conscience, monogamy and sin, i.e. morality, law and religion, all of which the Romans did not know in this way. In this respect, a production like Spartacus also bears the patina of the freedom of a lust-determined action. Alberto Angela (2014: 70) describes the Roman man as a “violent bisexual” who is bound to bisexuality because of his political disposition:

Fig. 8.1  Touching allowed for the guests: copulation scenery in Batiatus’ villa for the entertainment of the guests. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E12, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)  Cf. currently Illouz, E. (2018): Why love ends. Berlin.

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“The Roman man, the civis Romanus, is brought up from childhood to prove his dominance at every opportunity. In war, in politics, in society, but above all in the family. […] He must dominate all. The mentality of the Roman man is that of the victor who subjects everything to his will: hostile peoples with weapons and sword, other Romans with the help of his wealth and position […] and people of lower rank also with […] his sexuality. His masculinity is an instrument of power with which he subjugates others.”

This is accompanied by only a few sexual taboos for the Roman. These, however, determine the moral ideas of the time: extramarital diversions of the man were accepted with socially lower placed persons, these could be slaves, prostitutes or freedmen. In homosexual practices, the Roman was never allowed to be the passive part, unlike homosexual oral sex, in which he was never allowed to be the active part.2 Similarly, he was not allowed to satisfy the woman orally, because otherwise he would be submissive to her and, moreover, he would give her pleasure. From the characterization of the man and the taboos in force, Angela (2014: 71 f.) concludes “that the sexual organ of a Roman man served three very different purposes: Procreation, pleasure (which he gave to others, for that was his monopoly), and domination over others.” From this normative determination, a gender perspective could be used to ask whether this has ever been otherwise, and whether other purposes can be found beyond this. The sexual form of masculine dominance behaviour between Romans comes into play quite strikingly in Spartacus, when the son of Marcus Crassus rapes his father’s mistress, the slave Core, as an act of revenge (S3, E6) and when the young Caesar then tries to expose this to Crassus, he too is raped by Crassus in the presence of two soldiers (S3, E8). Caesar’s subsequent blackmail is based precisely on the knowledge of the existing taboos, according to which in same-sex sex the Roman man was not allowed to take the passive part and certainly not to feel pleasure in doing so, all the more so in the presence of witnesses and as an office holder. Marcus Crassus himself is portrayed as a rather typical Roman in his married life: Married and united in extramarital pleasure with his slave Core, with whom, moreover, he falls in love. The relationship is known to his wife and is also tacitly accepted by her.  In direct comparison with the present day, the social construction of sex, gender and sex is clearly evident. Thus Elke Hartmann (1998, 703ff.) writes in her article on homosexuality in antiquity: “The term H[omosexuality] to designate physical love directed towards partners of the same sex is not ancient. It misses the typical features of ant[ical] sexual life in so far as an individual characteristic is fixed in it. In the Ant[ike], however, a person’s sexual behavior was determined less by his individual inclinations than by his social position as a free or unfree person, as a young or old person, as a man or woman. To the Ant[ike] the idea that sexuality refers to a single sex was largely alien.” 2

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The series as a whole offers an interesting tableau of various relationship constellations on the part of the Romans as well as on the part of the gladiators, which in different intensities makes clear the intertwined dimensions of sex, eroticism and love. As a relationship matrix, they represent, as it were, an interweaving of everyday life, politics, entertainment, excess, romance, desire, power, and enactment. For example, sex as a reward for success in the arena is as ‘normal’ for gladiators as is the openly displayed potency in the form of composed copulatory scenes during the many celebrations in the house of Batiatus. The offer to and the offer by women exists and is taken up quite everyday. Analogously, money earned monthly in the arena for the gladiators is converted into prostitutes, or there are disinhibited collective orgies in the part of the ludus closed off for the gladiators. Likewise, later victories of the freed slaves are celebrated with wine and excessive orgies, as if the released adrenaline had to be processed in intoxication. Pursuing other motives and remaining mostly abstinent, Batiatus, Crassus, Oenomaus and also Spartacus, for example, can accompany the events mostly uninvolved and are thus perceived by the spectator as morally upright and disciplined; attributions of leadership that do not get lost in intoxication. This could also be understood as a counter-position: The knowledge of and acceptance of excess need a balancing counterpoint in order to maintain a structure of order and the ability to act. This is clearly demonstrated by the figure of Gannicus: all he longs for is fighting, wine and women; he vehemently resists the responsibility offered to him in the slave army. In terms of content, this reveals plot structures in detail that can be understood as generalizing principles. This means that the series here stages patterns of behaviour that lead the viewer to assume a continuity from antiquity to the present. In terms of film aesthetics, the orgies can be understood more as staged voyeurism that stereotypically projects desirable ideas with male connotations for the purpose of a quota. Another example: the copulation scenes with masks of the gods and open lovemaking in the villa of Batiatus and his wife Lucretia appear as incidental entertainment for the guests present. At the same time, they serve as stimuli for their own desires, without Batiatus and Lucretia being affected by them.3 Soberly, but with great gesture, Batiatus invites those present to take what one thirsts for, all would  Klossowski (1979, 85) aptly comments: “This is the unexpected revenge of the Asiatic deities on the ‘Olympian’ deities; the scenic games that the latter had established in Rome finally led to a double liberation: simultaneously with that of erotic enjoyment, the liberation from their cultic function takes place. The Olympian gods, with their definitive identity, having become ‘mature’ enough to challenge the universal order again through their play, appear on the theatre only in the infinite randomness of their amorous adventures. The scenic plays celebrate their purposelessness and the apotheosis of ‘useless’ voluptuousness.” 3

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be free to do so. Not only the reduction of the slaves and gladiators present to their object status and availability, but also the strategic staging of pleasure in order to achieve their own political goals are evident. But it does not stop there: the needs lead from the centre to the periphery, from Rome to Capua. Lucretia offers the gladiators for love services, strategically arranged pimping for her own social advancement. The masked love game (S1E9, Fig. 8.2), Illythia’s desire to be able to dispose of Crixus, leads to an unmasking and fatally ending intrigue: Licinia, the niece of Craussus from Rome, witnesses a game of mistaken identity between Illythia and her mortal enemy Spartacus orchestrated by Lucretia, which she must brutally pay for with her life. Both are united in sex without knowing who is hiding behind the mask. Masks are a tried and tested means of anonymity and disinhibition, not only in orgies: the consent to participate is given non-verbally through individual presence, the event remains in its eventfulness without the persons involved appearing in this context with their social rank. These thoroughly complex interrelationships of fictional and existing norms are motivated in the series by their functionalization: How can decision-makers be positively influenced by their (base) desires, at the risk of the house of Batiatus degenerating into an address of frivolously granted pleasures. This does not only concern Illythia, whose husband Glaber is to grant a patronage, or Licinia, the

Fig. 8.2  Spartacus and Illythia in masked lovemaking. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E9, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

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relative of Crassus, from whom Batiatus promises himself a senate seat and the like. Naturally, word of the sensual offer of sexual dissolution spreads quickly and has an amplifying effect: the name Batiatus is suddenly known in Rome not only for its gladiators, and there is a pressing desire to be offered expectant hospitality and to be able to take advantage of it. This mutual desire is exploited mercilessly – the influential dignitaries from Rome gladly accept the offer of lust, with the promise of social advancement, which, however, always remains vague and from which in no way a binding claim arises. The marriage of Batiatus and his wife Lucretia is – at least in the sequel and in season one – in the foreground, since the main action takes place in the Ludus and Batiatus is one of the main characters. The marriage is a love match, contrary to contemporary practice, and is thus disapproved of by the father; moreover, Lucretia has yet to have children – the blame for which was classically placed on the wife in ancient Rome. Since the father is willing to annul the marriage, which was his legal right as pater familias, Lucretia poisoned her father-in-law without her husband’s knowledge. She demands a form of equality equal to our modern understanding of marriage by making him understand that his debts were also her debts, that she had as much an interest in social advancement and social influence as he did, and that she was in no way inferior to him in intrigue. This is also evident in her relationship with Illythia, who is entirely dependent on her after her murder of Licinia. The marital relationship is finally enhanced by Lucretia’s pregnancy. This, however, is on Crixus’ account, which does not stop the latter from trying to kill Lucretia in the course of the revolt. The intrigues she supports, which harbor mesalliances in order to eliminate opponents even within Roman society, quite openly show the moral depravity of the house of Batiatus, which ultimately even induce the instructor Oenomaus, whose loyalty can hardly be changed, to join the uprising. Lucretia is made aware by her friend Illythia that as a dominatrix she can also dispose of her gladiators as pleasure slaves (S1E8). This was not previously anchored in her world of imagination, but here a trait of social self-empowerment comes to bear: I take what I think I am entitled to on the basis of my social status and the existing power relations. From today’s perspective, this would be seen as a transgression of the boundaries of the ‘faithful’ wife, who at the same time does everything for her husband’s social advancement and also considers herself – even against her husband’s resistance – an equal wife. Batiatus, however, later resolves this affair by admitting that he knew and dismissed it as a gimmick and ‘pastime’. In the end, the only potential lover for Lucretia is the reigning champion Crixus, who initially struggles in this role, as this level of action is beyond his comprehension. Because of the outstanding heir, however, Lucretia is put on the spot vis-à-vis

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her father-in-law, for it is within the patriarchal self-understanding that the fault lies with her and not with Batiatus. In this respect, the sudden and eagerly awaited pregnancy is then a stroke of luck for Batiatus as a justification for his relationship with Lucretia. Yet this interplay of marriage and function, hierarchy and dependence, self-determination and obligation appears reductive in its causality. Pierre Klossowski wrote as early as 1979 in his treatise on the cultic and mythic origins of certain customs of Roman ladies that by the considerable distance which we have at our disposal and which allows us to judge these phenomena […] we [have] the advantage of a perspective from which we believe we can more or less clearly discern the basis of certain different structures of life, origin and influence. (1979: 9f.)

This can certainly be understood as a plea for the understanding of today’s producer and today’s audience, because despite this distance and despite digital post-­ production, it is “hardly possible for us to transport ourselves back into the atmosphere of vanished realities”. (ibid.) Nevertheless, it is precisely this distance that produces the space for contemporary projections of masculinity and corporeality: the man is a slave, but is so desired that the woman submits to him in her lust (Fig. 8.3). What is special about the relationship between Lucretia and Crixus is her self-­ forgetful devotion to him, whom she begins to love and whom she hates after his rejection, without really being able to give him up. No sooner does Batiatus leave the house than she sends for him. She gives herself to him on various occasions wearing a red wig or sitting on him in a red dress, all signs of a prostitute in ancient

Fig. 8.3  Lucretia seated on her slave Crixus and kneeling before him. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E8 + 9, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

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Rome and at the same time indicative of the Roman woman’s self-determination in role-playing outside her role as wife, especially with regard to sex.4 Most matrons […] set out to discover the world of love and lived out their sensuality with all passion. In bed they literally turned into courtesans and found their pleasure in dominating the man. […] So for a woman in this male-dominated society, who was used to always coming second and obeying the man, adultery was not only an excursion into the passions of love, but also an opportunity to finally throw off her chains and submit to the man.5 (Angela 2014: 248)

This is also evident in Illythia’s desire to own a gladiator or have sex with a gladiator. This desire is situational and thereby immediately redeemable. It is legitimated by the existing customs and traditions, whose legitimation is reproduced again and again through practice and thus seemingly inescapably consolidated and strengthened. The sore point here, however, is desire itself: What can I desire if I am allowed to do anything and, as dominus/domina, to flout any moral or ethical barrier? What am I allowed to do as a Roman citizen without experiencing an offensive reaction, ultimately: what is normal or is considered normal and thus not a transgression of boundaries? What is and remains private (in today’s understanding), what becomes the subject of public debate or rumour? Answers to such central questions can be found in the series as a state of permanent border crossings. Beyond this, and not yet on the level of the orgy, we find the staging of erotic eyewitnessing, which is tantamount to voyeurism, observable only among the Romans: Illythia happens to be an eye and ear witness to a lovemaking act between Batiatus and his wife, who immediately and unashamedly stimulates her to

 Interestingly, the scheming girlfriend Gaja is also introduced with a red wig in the sequel Gods of the Arena (E1) and her appearance in Capua due to the death of her husband is judged differently by the Romans present, but they agree on the attractiveness. 5  In countering adultery as the demure consummation of the marital act, the wife “was not allowed to know the pleasures of sexuality. While making love to her husband, she must neither move nor moan. No sensual embrace, no movement to facilitate the union: Both would result in tragedy. Since she came to marriage as a virgin, the woman has learned everything she knows about sex from her husband. If she does anything else, however, it is unmistakable evidence that she has been in bed with someone else.” (Angela 2014: 246) On the face of it, this seems perfectly coherent, but becomes porous in the overall argument if one assumes that the man brings extramarital experiences to sex, which the woman can subsequently actively mirror and extend as experience. 4

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­masturbation.6 The couple does not witness it, Illythia’s voyeuristic gaze becomes the gaze of the spectator: what else follows from the hidden witnessing, which is not designed for participation. At the same time, masturbation in antiquity does have positive connotations. About the lived sexual openness precisely in (private) spaces intended for it, such as the cubicularium in villas, the back rooms of the taberna or the brothel (lupanar or lustrum) or even the baths and public toilets lead to a different self-understanding of voyeurism despite a strict morality in public space: The figure of the slave allowed for further erotic-exhibitionist games. The master or mistress could of course also dispose of them sexually at any time. […] And so many a highly erotic moment certainly arose, for on the one hand the slave could contemplate the object of his unrealizable dreams at any time in the intimacy of his nakedness. On the other hand, master and mistress also knew that they were triggering a certain arousal in the slave, which was officially ignored, but which became a kick to one’s libido, especially if one had just had sex with another partner. (Varone, quoted in Angela 2014: 283) (Fig. 8.4)

On the other hand, it is quite different on the level of slaves and gladiators: Spartacus is introduced at the beginning as a loyal husband, without any specifics of a Thracian marriage alliance being brought up. The alliance becomes an expression of a romantically exaggerated love marriage, as Sura is the one who tames the later Spartacus (S1E7): ‘After me you will love no other woman’. This seems all the more emotional because their separation leads the later Spartacus into the arena and makes him a gladiator. For seeing her again becomes the motivation for Spartacus to make a deal with Batiatus, to trust him, to ultimately do anything for the ‘reunion’. In this characterization, it contrasts with the purely rational, pragmatic understanding of Roman marriage, which can be seen as a business contract in which, at best, something like love still occurs later. The death of Sura and her loss now leaves a void that cannot be filled by any other woman – an analogy, incidentally, to the loss of Melitta (Marisa Ramirez) for Oenomaus – even if it is then attempted by Myra. The latter becomes his companion, though her significance is only determined in her loss (S2E9). A third woman manages to gain emotional and physical access to Spartacus: Laeta, the wife of the Roman governor of Sinuessa  According to Werner Faulstich, this is one of the typical basic patterns within pornographic narratives. For other narrative forms, see Faulstich, Werner (1994): Pornography. Small introduction to history, media, aesthetics, market and meaning. Fundamental to the current discourse is the English-language journal Porn Studies, edited by Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith, which has been published since 2014. 6

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Fig. 8.4  Batiatus and Lucretia having sex in the presence of their slaves. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E2, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

Fig. 8.5  The three wives of Spartacus: Sura, Mira and Laeta. (Screenshots from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E1, Vengeance S2E2, War of the Damned S3E3, DVD 2010, 2012, 2013, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

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(Fig.  8.5). The gladiators and their followers, who have by now grown into an army, take the city to spend the winter; Laeta is sold to the pirates by Marcus Crassus, branded a slave, but freed by Spartacus, whom she subsequently joins. From these three constellations, a remarkable overall picture emerges: with Sura, Spartacus was bound by a marriage alliance in freedom, which they had chosen themselves; Myra, despite all her attempts and her loyalty to him, cannot win Spartacus’s heart, even though they have sex together and nothing speaks against the alliance she wanted and the others already recognized. She also explicitly expresses to Spartacus her desire to be able to take at least some of the space that Sura obviously occupies. But that doesn’t happen, in part because she dies shortly thereafter. In turn, Spartacus is able to connect with Laeta because, as a Roman citizen, she experiences injustice and humiliation at the hands of Romans, she becomes unfree as a free woman, and she is subsequently freed. This makes her an equal in the eyes of Spartacus. Ultimately, she is the only one who can share Spartacus’ inner and outer experiences. The difficulty for Spartacus is not simply to make his honourable moral motivation understandable to others, but above all to make it comprehensible, in order to find comrades-in-arms for the ideal – comprehensible to the audience – of this romantic and monogamous love. The ‘Clash of Culture’ ignites between the seemingly uncivilized barbarians from Thrace and the thoroughly strategic world of the Romans. But not only there, but also opposite Crixus. The Gaul Crixus is characterized as inexperienced in matters of love and women. However, he is repeatedly ordered to love services and the pleasure of Lucretia, the Domina. The faithful wife discovers not the breaking of taboos but the pleasures of sovereign rule in her home. The obedience of the slaves – here now Crixus, who moreover impregnates her to ensure the progeny of the house – is not limited to performing assigned tasks and services, but also includes showing obedience to the desire of the lady of the house. This is not questioned by Crixus either, until he falls in love with Naevia. Naevia, as Lucretia’s main slave, is also her confidante, who also watches over her virginity. Here, the limits of what is possible within the slave community are tested in order to be able to mark the crossing of boundaries narratively and dramaturgically. In a dramatic culmination, the love affair between Crixus and Naevia is discovered and Naevia is given away, a circumstance that infuriates Crixus and ultimately leads him to participate in Spartacus’ rebellion and escape. Thus, one of the main plot threads after the breakout is then the search for Naevia, who is found and freed in one of the mines. Even Crixus can’t heal the mental wounds of the past, the only opening in their love is to turn Naevia into a warrior who can defend herself and switch into attack mode. In order to be seen on equal footing with Crixus and be perceived as an equal – especially from Naevia’s point of view – she must prove herself as a warrior.

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A special perspective arises with Gannicus, whose life-affirming motives lie in physical pleasure, wine and fighting. He thus embodies the complete opposite of Spartacus in his attitude, taking everything lightly. He is content and enjoys himself with all women, mainly prostitutes with no desire for a permanent commitment. It is only with Saxa, the liberated Germanic woman, that it becomes a lasting sexual relationship in which physical pleasure is acted out at all times and in perpetuity, completely unimpressed by external battle events and spectacle. Into this relationship pushes the tender plant of pure love in the form of Marcia (Delaney Tabron), coupled with an early form of Christian religiosity, not without reason the naming reminds of Mary. The purely physical-excessive contrast with Saxa no longer reaches this form of disembodied, pure love based on gratitude. The relationship becomes meaningful for Gannicus through transcending the excessive bodily experience, in the sense that there is more to it than just rampant sex. But that doesn’t happen until the third season with the occupation of the city of Sinuessa. The indifferent, hedonistic pursuit of pleasure via a bodily focus on one person transforms into a transcendence of sex through an asexual surrender. Gannicus, as one of the main protagonists of the sequel Gods of the Arena, does not reappear until the second season as a burned-down gladiator-for-hire, joining the band of gladiators. However, after the destruction of the arena and the loss of his rudi, he appears to be completely out of place with Spartacus and the escaped gladiators, as this was not his fight.7 Nonetheless, Spartacus makes an effort to find Gannicus and they go hunting together. In the process, Spartacus explains himself to Gannicus, who, as a former successful gladiator, cannot really grasp the uprising, the fight against the Romans, and Spartacus’ motives. Spartacus invokes a past freedom and hope for a family that was first taken from him and his wife by Glaber, and then irreparably destroyed by Batiatus through the ordered death of Sura. While Gannicus emphasizes the restored balance after Batiatus’s death, Spartacus insists on taking revenge on Glaber while he still breathes. Neither of them know each other yet, and so the question intrudes on Gannicus’ mind in wonder, “And that’s why you provoke the Romans? Out of memory of your wife?” to which Spartacus replies, “Out of love.” To be followed up with a meaningful pause and Gannicus approaching, “The greatest reason of all.” To which Gannicus comments distantly-reflectively, “Something that has destroyed many men.” Besides these exclusively heterosexual relationships, the series also shows homosexuality quite unproblematically, as a same-sex relationship as well as a practice. However, this applies restrictively only among the gladiators or in the fl ­ irtation  Rudis (Latin ‘stirring spoon’) was a wooden staff or sword given to a freed gladiator as a symbol of his release. 7

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between Nasir and the pirate, and not among the Romans. One gladiator – Barcas – lives in a chamber with his lover Pietros (Eka Darville). However, it also becomes clear that acceptance for homosexuality is not equally distributed and male heteronormativity prevails. After Barca’s death, which is a result of Ashur’s scheming actions, Pietros also kills himself as another gladiator subsequently abuses and rapes him due to the lack of protection. Another major same-sex relationship that is made permanent is that between Agron and Nasir. Agron becomes one of Spartacus’ most important confidants and temporary representative after the outbreak. The overt portrayal of homosexuality represents an acceptance of the Romans who take note of it, but whose sexual practices tend to be brought into the picture as exclusively heterosexual. This draws a fine line of separation in that the Romans’ sex and their respective orgies seem somehow cleaner than that of the gladiators and slaves.

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Gannicus: One day we (Oenomaus and he, TW) face each other in the sand and then the real decision comes. Melitta: What would really happen? If you were to face each other sine missione, without mercy? Gannicus: I would give your husband an honorable death. Melitta: The day will come and yet you jest. Gannicus: You two are a perfect match. Both always worrying what tomorrow will bring. We are slaves. The burden of choice and conscience are lifted from us. We are truly free when we fight, or when we fuck, and that’s what I intend to do now. (P,E2)

What Gannicus expresses here in a joking tone and friendly gesture connects to Oenomaus’ honorific view that the quest as a gladiator can only be fulfilled in an honorable death. This one does not seek, but is ready for it when it happens. Furthermore, the dialogue brings to light another interesting aspect: Gannicus is aware of his status as a gladiator, as a slave, and accepts this as fate. In return, he is largely free of choices and of any conscience whatsoever. He feels truly free in battle and in sex. This is to be understood as a parallelism: Sex is struggle and struggle is sex, the tertium comparationis then being the pleasure gained thereby. The term ‘pleasure’ is deliberately chosen here, even if it is “a difficult word” (Nancy 2016: 19, emphasis added). For in this freedom, a subject determination takes place vis-à-vis the object of pleasure to be appropriated, which even slave status cannot ‘prevent’. This determination stands here in contrast as a difference to the ‘pleasure of the Romans’. Nancy provides a remarkable explanatory approach to pleasure, especially sexual pleasure: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_9

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9  Understanding Freedom and Freedom as Conflict On the one hand, the person who feels pleasure has a possessive relation to what he enjoys, which is driven to destruction. She literally enjoys the risk of a yawning abyss opening up in place of what she enjoys, but on the other hand, this relation of destruction falls back on the person experiencing pleasure herself, and she may go to almost her own death for it. (Ibid: 30)

The challenge now is to think lust and freedom together in the context of the series: whose freedom and whose lust? The existential moment is shown in lust and in the capacity for lust, which cannot be taken away from the slave or the gladiator – at least not in the world of the series, because the women also feel lust, have it at their disposal, are capable of enjoyment and in this context are largely self-determined. This further alludes to a conceptual duality of freedom, namely freedom from something and freedom for or to something. The framework conditions set give Gannicus and the other slaves room for manoeuvre, which they are initially able to fill frugally, but then occupy and shape themselves. Freedom is mentioned everywhere in the series in different contexts, but for everyone it is something different. In the narrative logic of the series, the later Spartacus understandably wants to free himself and his wife Sura from the captivity of the Romans, or rather, after his deal with Batiatus, hopes for an at least semi-­ free and yet self-determined life in the Ludus. His friend Varro and the instructor Oenomaus make the hopelessness clear to him by explaining the status of a slave in no uncertain terms. The conversation with Varro then leads to the escape plan, which, however, cannot be carried out due to Sura’s death. But Pietros, the young lover of the gladiator Barcas, also speaks of freedom while confessing that “to his lips these words tasted strange.” Barcas intended to ransom them both with the sum won at the games, with no concrete plan for ‘afterwards’. If we look at the Roman side, they do not really act free of constraints either, be they political, economic, social or religious. This can be observed with Batiatus and his wife as well as with Glaber and his wife or Crassus and his son. In addition to concrete desirable goals, the concept of freedom often remains undefined, which is unproblematic insofar as the talk of freedom always includes a counter-talk to unfreedom, which can be filled with meaning by the counterpart himself. In this respect, this connects to a long, as well as diverse discourse of the idea and topoi of freedom: “About no idea is it so generally known that it is indeterminate, ambiguous, and capable of the greatest misunderstandings, and therefore really subject to them, as the idea of freedom, and none is familiar with so little consciousness” (Hegel, Encyclopaedia: § 482). And Theodor Adorno (1966, 211 f.) states in his Negative Dialectics that since the seventeenth century in philosophy freedom

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“determin[ed] the most peculiar interest; under the explicit mandate of the bourgeois class”: It goes against the old oppression and promotes the new one, which is in the rational principle itself. A common formula is sought for freedom and oppression: the latter is ceded to rationality, which restricts it, and removed from empiricism, in which one does not want to see it realized at all. […] But that freedom becomes obsolete without being realized is not to be accepted as a fatality; resistance must explain it.

The Western European view of freedom is thus to be seen as specifically overformed, at the latest since the French Revolution and the subsequent theoretical and practical disputes, and cannot simply be projected onto the Roman Republic. But even when discourse-historical recourse to antiquity is made, the interpretive sovereignty remains predominantly with the “bourgeois class”. What is remarkable is the recourse to (irrational) resistance, which only reveals ‘real freedom’. The concept of freedom in Spartacus develops from the former self-image of a free man. Since this remains largely open through the course of the series, it remains well connectable for today’s understanding of freedom. For he thereby more or less aims at a free, rational, pragmatic will. This leads to situations of narrative conflict, for example between Batiatus and Spartacus, when the latter refuses to fight in the arena as a Roman in disguise against Thracians. He can resist the Roman power within the framework of the circumstances to a limited extent. For the latter exhibits narrow limits and, coupled with violence, ultimately knows itself in the moral evidence of the necessity of the lanista to secure and enforce its rights and to substantially curtail those of Spartacus. The social status of a gladiator within Roman society is made clear by the fate of Gannicus (S2E7). After the collapse of the Colosseum in Capua, penniless, he seeks the help of a magistrate, who, however, fobs him off with a few coins, referring to his earlier merits in the arena. The situation is hopeless for Gannicus; although he has his freedom, secured by the wooden sword known as the rudis, he can ultimately only offer his services as a gladiator. In conversation with a prostitute, he utters, “No man is ever truly free.” This leads to the somewhat disparate perception, as in the conversation he cites external existential factors of freedom, but at the same time he is living out his sexual freedom. The fate of Gannicus shows what Crixus meant in his reaction to Barca’s apparent release, in that he could not imagine a gladiator who knew nothing but the arena now herding sheep and pulling vegetables. Just as the role of the gladiator remains socially fixed and the granted freedom does not lead to independence, Gannicus’ return to the gladiatorial community is ultimately a sign of the inability to use freedom as freedom for something and as a

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self-determined beginning. To have freedom is to be able to possess it, but it does not thereby necessarily empower one to do anything. The remarkable thing about the historically handed down fact of ‘conferred freedom’ is that gladiators could be ‘released’ from their ‘service’ on the basis of their merits. What they were then to do, however, was always left open if it left their own field of activity. Freedom, from the perspective of the gladiators and the slaves, means first and foremost freedom from something, namely from the bondage of slavery. This is posited as something preceding existence, in the sense that true existence only begins with freedom from slavery. As a normative setting and thus a weighty argument in the Marxist tradition, however, this leads to a hopelessness or to a struggle that becomes an end in itself. Thus the underlying understanding of freedom becomes problematic and leads in evaluation into the discourse speculation around the character of the historical Spartacus uprising. For the idea of a freedom of the gladiators, which seems heterogeneous in itself and difficult to fill, does not at all coincide with the idea of freedom of the Roman citizens. The freedom of the one becomes the system-preserving (power) struggle of the other: One’s freedoms must be preserved. Jean-Luc Nancy (2016: 13), in Experience of Freedom, was about no longer about conquering or defending man’s freedom – or man’s rights to freedom – as a good that could be possessed or appropriated and which, by its very nature, would give man the possibility of being, what he is (as if man and freedom referred to each other in a circular way within the framework of a mere immanence), but rather to offer man a freedom of being, to present man’s humanity (‘his being’) to a freedom as being through which existence is absolutely and decisively transcended, that is, ex-ist

This understanding of freedom realizes freedom in its existence, in its being-­there, a freedom that is free from itself and does not belong to itself. As something that tends to be unfinishable, it is not the end, but the beginning of and for something, and indeed as a possibility that remains undetermined for the time being. Freedom is not grasped as something external, but grasps itself in actu and is not transcended. There is thus not freedom as a single freedom, but in its profligate forms only as an escape from givens (cf. Nancy 2016: 77). Metaphorically, this fits as the “materiality of the present” (Jules Vuillemin, cited in Nancy ibid.) to the outbreak of Spartacus and his comrades from the ludus: ‘Liberty’ here necessarily combines, in a unity based only on its own liberality, the meanings of urge, chance, luck, the unforeseen, the decisive, play, discovery, conclusion, perplexity, syncope, courage, deliberation, rupture, terror, suturation, surrender, hope, whim, austerity, caprice. And also: the laughter, the tears, the cry, the word, the rapture, the emotion, the shock, the energy, the gentleness … Freedom is in it also the

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wild freedom, the equanimity, the freedom of choice, the availability, the free play, the informality, the frankness, the freedom of love or that of a leisure in which time begins anew. It liberates all these possibilities, all these notions of freedom, as as many freedoms of freedom – and makes itself free of them. (Nancy ibid.: 76f.)

This range of conceptions of freedom, which simply takes place in heterogeneous situations, implies a diversity that is temporary and selective and is thus intended to evoke satisfaction. Fundamental freedom(s) in a hierarchical understanding are excluded for the time being. What remains open is the freedom that makes itself free. In the hierarchical society of the Roman Republic, the question remains virulent for us whether the freedom of the Romans in their self-understanding necessarily includes the unfreedom of the gladiators. To accept the change in the ‘freedom status’ of gladiators in general is to touch substantially on the Romans’ understanding of freedom, for it shows the limits of the tolerance of the capacity for freedom with which civil rights were associated.1 In the series, it is ‘merely’ Gannicus who is, however, also clearly shown the limits of his freedom and which ultimately lead him to join the group of insurgents. The breakout from the Ludus is preceded by a massacre of almost everyone present, only Illythia is able to escape with her servants, Lucretia and Ashur survive unnoticed, the signal for this is Spartacus’ jump onto the balcony (Fig.  9.1). Spartacus declares this bloodbath as just because of the injustice he has suffered and leads the group (gladiators along with everyone else from the ludus) into an uncertain future. Freedom from something is related to justice for him. However: the freedom to leave is not compatible with the freedom to live freely. The familiar space is abandoned in favor of an unfamiliar space of freedom. And so the emerging triumph of the self-liberated ignores the order of law, since their freedom in situ derives from an order of the factual: All the Romans are dead, the gates are open, we can go. Neither is there a group ideal of freedom to be pursued, nor a regulative. It is pure factuality that represents a beginning. From this point of view, the final image of the first season is also coherent, in which all the liberated people run through the open gate from the Ludus into the camera, without the camera following them and revealing a horizon. The subsequent problems besides the fight against the Romans – food, security, shelter, group formation and rank rivalry – are due to the circumstance of self-empowerment, which stems precisely not from a maturation process for freedom, but only from the moment of liberation, the  This moment has taken on a special significance since 2015 in Western Europe and especially in Germany with the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, as on a higher level the questions of responsibility, modes of access and recognition, neediness and willingness to help are on the political agenda. 1

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Fig. 9.1  Signal to revolt in slow motion: Spartacus jumps onto the balcony. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E13, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

c­ onsummation in the situation. According to Kant, there can never be such a process of maturity, for if this were a prerequisite for freedom, then “freedom will never occur; for one cannot mature into it if one has not first been set free (one must be free in order to be able to use one’s powers expediently in freedom)”.2 Another example of freedom on an intersubjective level shows the problems associated with it: Naevia and Crixus are together for the first time in freedom after her release from the mines and his release from the arena (S2E6), and they try to reconnect with their relationship before the events when their love was freshly blossomed. But significantly, they both talk about visible and invisible scars. They cannot seamlessly connect to that inspiring love in the shadow of their slave existence. The wounds they suffered stand between them, unable to be directly addressed and thus removed. And so Crixus, delighting in his current state, dismisses the physical wounds as scratches that will soon be a thing of the past, while Naevia generalizes hoping that all scars will simply disappear. The impossibility of inferring the wounds of the past from the unseen scars and articulating this results in a rather perplexed smile on both sides. How was Naevia supposed to confess to Crixus, in the first moment of being together, that she had been brutally abused and  Kant, Immanuel: Religion within the Limits of its Mere Reason, B 292, note cited by Nancy 2016: 100. 2

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raped, after the long deprived time and almost hopeless hope for a reunion, without destroying the moment itself? How was Crixus to explain to Naevia that he had ruthlessly murdered for her, for their reunion, that he was incapable of understanding her pain? To the first face-to-face encounter in freedom, the mutual speechlessness is potentiated, as there are no words, or few, in any case ‘the right’ words, for what has happened, what has been experienced, and one’s own actions that led to this situation. And it is only in this way that Naevia, in the complete relativization of herself as an independent and thus desirable person, can then say to Crixus in a trembling voice with tears of realization, “You risked everything for the shadow of a once beloved woman.” To which Crixus replies, “Then let us use it to kindle the sun and beat back the darkness with its warmth.” In a real sense, the response is more of a rejection of coming to terms with what has happened and its attendant psychological consequences, rather than a sympathetic, reassuring taking up of and simultaneous pushing aside of the complexly non-articulated problematic situation to make way for physical desire. The production picks up on this through warm lighting, a restrained-spherical sound, and the camera’s careful-fumbling following. While Crixus is able to fully engage with the situation and Naevia, i.e. a displacement mechanism takes effect here, the physical touches only awaken memories in her of dominant ‘dominants’ that cannot be clearly assigned, which disturb/ destroy the romantic mood as fragments of images mingling in the scene until Naevia shouts “Stop!”. Thus, while Crixus sees himself physically and psychologically in complete agreement with his yearning, which is heightened to the point of madness, Naevia cannot abstract from past experiences, but experiences physical closeness only by analogy with the negative experience of the past. As the only clue to this interruption, which Crixus cannot comprehend, she can only cite, “You took everything from me. Even your touch.” to leave him immediately afterwards. Crixus cannot understand this physical rejection at all and therefore perceives it as a break. And so it comes to incomprehension rather than understanding, which finally resolves itself into Naevia demanding lessons from Crixus so as not to find herself once again in a defenseless situation where men do something to her that she does not want. Here she is already in the consciousness of autonomous decision-­making that allows her to be in charge of herself and her body and not be available to a master or mistress. This deep-seated, invisible hurt only becomes articulate at the end of the second season, when the throng of slaves has fled to Mount Vesuvius and Ashur appears as Glaber’s messenger. It is on him that she takes her revenge, as it was with him that the long period of violence suffered began, in that he demanded it in return for his services and Batiatus granted it to him lightheartedly. His death emancipates Naevia. She comments on his death to Crixus that it is not so easy to cut someone’s

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head off, but this is later observed quite routinely, and not just by her.3 In her last exchange with Ashur, Naevia distances herself from the victim role attributed to her, saying that she is far from that and that even if the wounds of the past cannot be erased, this is already a start (Fig. 9.2). Obviously Spartacus sees a future for himself and his companions (S2, E5), because when they arrive at the foot of Vesuvius, he wants to seek shelter, rest and think about the future. What that future will be, however, remains unsaid. Nonetheless, it is here that Spartacus begins to take responsibility for the freed slaves, wanting past mistakes to be seen as overcome, caring for the wounded (Nasir, for example), and beginning to make plans. As a turning point in his thoughts and actions, these point beyond a situational decision and take on an independent character. To Agron, who still has doubts because of their numerical inferiority, he expresses (S2, E5): The executions (of Crixus and the others in the arena, TW) are a message that Rome will smother any flame that turns against Rome and attacks Rome’s rule. I send my own message. One that will ignite the hearts of the enslaved.

Fig. 9.2  Naevia defeats her former tormentor Ashur and fights her way free. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Vengeance, S2E10, DVD 2012, Prod.: starz Original, twenieth Century Fox)  In the German version, this sequence is cut so that the ‘laborious business’ of the first beheading is not seen. 3

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The change in thinking takes place in Spartacus from his own freedom to the freedom of all enslaved people, from revenge on the injustice suffered himself by the Romans to a general revenge on a general social injustice. This message ultimately consists not only in the – for the audience – spectacular liberation of the gladiators from the arena, but also in the destruction of the arena. In its symbolism, the destruction can be understood as a direct attack on the culture of entertainment and amusement, directed against an inhuman instrumentalization of the gladiators. This one-sided and polarizing perspective reinforces the audience-oriented perception of Spartacus as a fighter for the just. However, before the destruction, a speech occurs that highlights Spartacus’ leadership qualities, as he knows how to assess the situation, bears concern for those who remain in the event of his death, and clearly articulates the intentions and consequences of the impending action: You have heard rumors of our endeavor. I trump soft voices with bold words. We leave for the arena in Capua. (Return question: “And if you do not return?”) Lucius Caelius knows this land. If we are too long absent, he will show you safe path. Far from Glaber and his soldiers. We have been wounded, some have died. We have been divided. Yet we are free. A thing priceless. A thing to be relived by our scattered brothers. And as we do, we show all oppressed slaves that even the mightiest Republic bleeds when attacked.

Spartacus formulates freedom as a desirable value to be shared and experienced. This connects very roughly to a contemporary understanding of freedom, even if it is becoming increasingly complex.4 In this dichotomy, freedom becomes an ideology in that it is formulated as a desirable goal, as something to be experienced and something available, and as a non-defeatable good that one person has and another does not. In view of slave biographies in the film, such as that of Naevia, who was already born a slave and has virtually never been able to perceive anything like freedom in this sense as an option for action, this may seem rather disconcerting, especially since Spartacus here speaks in general terms of ‘brothers distributed in the countryside’ and of ‘all oppressed slaves’; a differentiation between house slaves and field slaves, cattle breeders and wet nurses etc. is omitted in favour of affirmation. The massive growth of the ‘slave army’ in particular, shown in the third season, poses many practical and everyday problems: fighting training and  Helmut Willke (2019: 7) criticizes from a sociological perspective the talk of freedom in “archaic, despotic, theocratic or charismatically led societies”, since “freedom in the Kantian sense as self-responsible maturity […] presupposes democracy as the social context for freedom”. This critique refers to the projection of contemporary film productions that deal with historical material and in which a contemporary understanding of terms and concepts is brought to bear, precisely in order to be connectable and comprehensible to the audience. 4

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experience, self-organisation, medical care, news flows, hygiene, food and shelter. At the beginning of season 3, Spartacus generalizes his claim to freeing all slaves to Gannicus. This subsequently leads to an ethical view of freedom in addition to a combative one, which a small example will illustrate: The escaped slave Diotimos (Kelson Henderson) talks to Spartacus (S3E1) without knowing that his counterpart is Spartacus. After this clears up, Diotimus immediately falls back into his slavish pattern of behavior, expecting punishment for speaking without being asked. But Spartacus responds appropriately, “You may lack food and warm clothing at times, but as long as I live, you have the freedom to speak openly (i. O. English: “freedom to speak your heart”), even against the big guy on the hill.” Within the logic of the series, it remains coherent for the audience when slaves regard the promised freedom as a desirable good that is activated to motivate action against the master or even against Spartacus himself. Nothing else would ‘the enlightened Western European’ claim for himself. Nevertheless, the egalitarian-­ receptive mode evaporates on closer examination if the understanding of freedom is not inherent in the slave – born in slavery. Furthermore, there is a modification of the understanding of freedom in Spartacus himself, who no longer aims at his personal freedom, but sees himself as responsible towards the freed slaves, who cannot take care of themselves in the same way as he does and who cannot classify or relativize his own actions in the same way. Exemplary of this is a dialogue between Crixus and Spartacus in the third season, one of the last they have: Crixus: How many Romans have we sent to the afterlife? The Republic trembles at the name of Spartacus and before his army of slaves. Spartacus: We bit the beast’s ankle. To bare our teeth at his throat…. I now fear the retribution … Crixus: The Bringer of Rain? The conqueror of the shadow of death? Is afraid? Spartacus: Not for me! My concerns go far beyond me! Crixus: I am tired of running away … Spartacus: You want to march to your death! Crixus: I want us free! Truly free. Do you really believe Crassus will stop if you climb the mountains? That the Republic will let us slip away quietly? We have shown that she is vulnerable. We have shown that a trembling hand can become a fist. We question that a slave has to know his position and accept rod and whip because that’s how he learned it. We built their mighty republic, with our hands, with our blood. And in the same way, we can bring them down. You have opened my eyes to this. Don’t ask me to close them now.

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The remarkable thing in this scene is the reversal of the circumstances, in that Crixus demands that Spartacus, on the common path of knowledge, not fall back again. The dilemma here is the resolution of the conflict of freedom from something and freedom to something. Spartacus may be able to open the eyes of Crixus and other companions with regard to the present state of affairs, but they cannot think and act in the same visionary or responsible manner that he begins to claim for himself. For most people, what has been achieved is already a utopian status quo, which is accepted with all its sacrifices and is not understood as a temporary status.

“Fuck the Gods”: Morality, Religion, and Religiosity

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Generally speaking, one can ask whether the series Spartacus has a moral. It obviously works with moral concepts, but what are they? Are the Roman moral concepts compatible with our contemporary Western ones, are they merely staged in a way that makes them connectable, or are they historically shifted in such a way that they only represent a small intersection with our contemporary ones and the ones dealt with in the series are ultimately only projections of our contemporary view? Does the series develop a free space in which current moral values are thematized or negotiated in a way that can be connected? From a classical philological perspective, this set of questions does not hold water, since we are obviously dealing with two different forms of society. Nevertheless, the comparison between the Roman Empire and the USA or Europe, or the metaphor of the fall of the Roman Empire, has been used several times to characterize current social developments.1 Moral integrity is not required of gladiators because of their social status vis-à-­ vis the Romans per se, rather unquestioning loyalty to the ludus and the lanista. For Batiatus, this is a business of investment, not morality; certainly not in a mutual exchange. As soon as a gladiator fails to live up to his ascribed value, he is sold on, ends up in the caves, or dies. Thus a human life, especially a non-Roman one, is seen as a value only in terms of investment and amortization, something that is seen as problematic in the present Western world, but negated or outsourced to ­low-­wage

 For example, David Engels concedes that Europe has an identity crisis because the strength of its identity “lies in the cohesion and value of a political community”, which it lacks. He uses the fall of the Roman Empire as a comparison. Engels, David (2014): On the road to empire. Europa Verlag. Likewise the recent study by Boltanski/Esquerre: Enrichment. A critique of the commodity. Berlin 2018. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_10

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countries in times of unleashed turbo-capitalism. Investment is the reason why Spartacus also survives several situations at the beginning, as he had “cost Batiatus too many coins” and he is counting on getting them back. However, since Spartacus has ended up in the ludus against his will and conviction, he shows a resistance based on his values that differ from the Romans. Moral dilemmas are more prevalent in the series in the first season and sequel to better introduce the protagonists’ understanding of their actions and character inconsistencies. The second and third seasons have little room for this due to the many fights, chases, and purposeful decisions. In the sequel, Gannicus and Oenomaus are introduced as friends. Gannicus appreciates and respects Melitta, Oenomaus’ wife and Lucretia’s house slave. In order to place his gladiators at the opening of the new arena in the Primus, the most important games, Batiatus plots against Vettius (Gareth Williams). This leads to Gannicus being ordered to perform sex with Melitta in front of an audience as a random demonstration act. The act itself is a dilemma for Gannicus and Melitta, of which Batiatus is also aware, but since it is what the guest wants, he is willing to subordinate his scruples to the goal. The dilemma is further heightened when she begins to feel lust for and with Gannicus during the act, which puts the act itself on another level. For they can only refuse the commanded act in itself on moral grounds with open resistance due to their status. On the other hand, to feel pleasure during sex with the man’s friend changes the state of affairs and consequently the relationship, since this cannot be revealed. Spartacus objects to the unfair treatment of Pietros on moral grounds in the first season. In the episode, after Barcas supposedly buys his way out and Pietros is left defenseless in the Ludus, Retarius Gnaeus (Raicho Vasilev) brutalizes him. Pietros then takes his own life and Spartacus starts a brawl which, after some snide remarks from Gnaeus, ends in Spartacus throwing him off the cliff. The ensuing discussion with Batiatus is, at its core, about the value of a human being. Years of training would have made Gnaeus valuable as an investment piece, whereas Pietros would have no value as an errand boy. Spartacus’ rebuttal that he is human after all is waved away by Batiatus with a sneer. Interestingly, there is another dialogue immediately following with Crixus, still resting in his sickbed, reproaching him for the death of Gnaeus. Spartacus would not have had the right, for with the oath to the brotherhood, every gladiator would be reserved for an honorable death in the arena. This would be above such a contest, for otherwise one would be too weak for the place. Two aspects come into play in this context: first, it is the definition of man, and specifically as the objectification of the subject as an investment made. In the culmination, Batiatus is the one who invests in the future gladiators and thus decides not only who is worth living in the end. Only those who are talented

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enough, and thus represent a promise of return on invested capital, are given the chance of an education at the end of which fame, glory, and money will come. This is an economic pragmatic view. Secondly, Crixus emphasizes the importance of the gladiator and the brotherhood, because this is something like a social cohesion that is established by the oath. Crixus does not ask Spartacus about the what, the how, and the why; it is not about right or wrong, morality or protection. Rather, the act stands as an event that leads Crixus to increasingly consider it a disgrace to have fought alongside Spartacus. Here, the focus is on a seemingly unresolvable competitive relationship that, from Crixus’ perspective, is about honor in the arena, which Spartacus does not care about at all. Especially since he decided in the arena (S1, E5) that Spartacus’ blood would not be spilled, so he could be above his ambition at the moment of personal defeat and help Spartacus defeat Theokoles by blinding him. Spartacus takes a strong moral stance towards the Roman gladiator Varro, with whom he is friends. Spartacus feels responsible to him, since he still has his wife and family and can see them, and arranges through Mira to reunite with Varro’s wife Aurelia. In the aftermath, Varro expresses hope that he will soon be able to settle his debts and begin a future with his wife in Sicily. He even invites Spartacus to visit! The moral dilemma arises once again because of intrigue (S1E10): On the occasion of the initiation of the magistrate’s son Numerius to manhood (virilia togis) and the feast therefore held at Batiatus’, Spartacus and Varro are to compete against each other in a comparative sporting contest. Illythia had whispered this in advance as a wish to the magistrate’s son2 and when Spartacus finally defeats Varro, the boy surprisingly lowers his thumb and demands Varro’s death. What is seen as a brave decision by his father and bystanders now puts first Batiatus – an exhibition match had been arranged, he loses a gladiator without need – and then Spartacus – for pleasure I must kill my friend – in a predicament. Batiatus weighs the decision financially, Spartacus morally (Fig.  10.1). For the financial loss, the magistrate would pay. For friendship, Spartacus is willing to fight anyone present at a moment’s notice, just to avoid having to kill Varro. He whispers to him “There is always a choice”, but Varro makes the choice against his friend’s intention. The guards are already standing there with swords drawn, the execution of the decision is immediately demanded and Varro takes the decision from his friend to the extent

 Illythia had watched Spartacus and Varro train in the lead-up to the event (S1E10) and, observing them both, mused to Lucretia about the value of friendship: “But the value of friendship is not expressed in fine words. Blood and flesh keep the world alive.” In the line of sight and the impending music that begins, intrigue is already clearly signaled. 2

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Fig. 10.1  Show fight with unexpected outcome – Spartacus is forced to kill Varro. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E10, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

that he rams Spartacus’ sword into his own body. This leads to severe self-­ recrimination on Spartacus’ part, which becomes a motive for revenge. For the Romans, the gods are always present, and so everyday life cannot be thought of without religion. Even humanly constructed, all conceivable areas of human life are in their power: birth and death, sowing and harvest, war and peace, jurisdiction and politics. The relationship of God to human beings can be compared in principle to the relationship between the head of the family and the members of the family. Thus religious structures are to be found everywhere, without giving the word to a piety, as Christianity claims for itself. Rather, it can be understood as a form of peaceful coexistence, in which wishes, expectations, hopes, disappointments are projected onto the variously addressable deities. Thus, after their first battle together in the arena, Spartacus speaks to Varro (S1E10), “You fought well today.” to which Varro replies, “The gods gave me you as an ally.” The restraint of self-effort over happy collaboration shows that it is not the lone fighter who wins, but the common pursuit of a goal. In this context, the invocation of deities and the legitimation, sanctioning, and co-optation of one’s own or other people’s actions through them is based on an understanding of religion that, due to its polytheistic approach, is far removed from the Christian monotheistic understanding of the world. Giorgio Agamben (2005:

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71 f.) traces the ancient understanding of religion etymologically back to relegere, “which refers to the conscientiousness and attentiveness to be exercised in one’s relations with the gods, and to the anxious hesitation (the rereading  – relegere) before the forms – and formulas – to which one must adhere”, in order to make clear that religion is precisely not about a connecting element between gods and humans, but much more about something that separates them and the duty of care to be exercised in order to avoid negligence. In order to be able to make the transition from the sacred to the profane clear, he introduces the game with reference to Émile Benvéniste not only coming from the sphere of the sacred but at the same time as an inversion: The power of the sacred act […] lies in the connection between the myth that tells the story and the rite that reproduces and performs the story. Play breaks this unity: as ludus, or acting play, it drops the myth and preserves the rite; as iocus, or word play, it erases the rite and allows the myth to survive. (Agamben 2005, 72f. from the original).

In this differentiation this seems plausible, but for Spartacus there is a further intensification. Interestingly enough, the gladiator school is called Ludus,3 which allows an analogy to be made in that the rules of entertainment for the arena are trained there in a kind of game, and equipment such as wooden beams are put to a new use for training. The seriousness of the training is not questioned; on the contrary, the training is the preparation for the seriousness of the arena entertainment. And so all newcomers are welcomed with an initiating speech (S1E2): Oenomäus: What is beneath your feet? Crixus: Holy ground, Doctore! Watered with tears of blood! Oenomäus: Your tears. Your blood. Your pathetic lives molded into something of value. Listen. Learn. And, perhaps, live. As gladiators. [...] A gladiator does not fear death. He embraces it. Caresses him. Fucks him. Every time he enters the arena, he puts his cock in the mouth of the beast. And prays he pierces it before the jaws snap shut. None of you stray dogs would survive a moment.

In the ensuing exhibition fight, Spartacus experiences his first humiliation at the hands of Crixus, and later it is Spartacus himself who demonstrates the qualities of a champion, dialoguing with Oenomaus in place of Crixus to the newcomers.  When asked (S1E2) what this place is, Spartacus gets an ironic, condescending reply from Crixus that he is now an honored guest of Batiatus, the master of the greatest ludus in Capua, and the inquiry, “Ludus?” leads to Crixus’ proudly delivered reply, “A school of learning, where men are forged into gods, blood is their ambrosia, the arena their mountaintop.” 3

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The games themselves were introduced in honour of various gods, historical events or as sacrificial rituals. Thus, due to the persistent drought in Capua, an arena fight seemed necessary to appease the gods. Spartacus’ victory and the simultaneous onset of rain not only earned him the nickname ‘rain bringer’, but also Batiatus the hoped-for social elevation. The Romans’ staged religiosity vacillates between emphasis and pragmatism. Lucretia cannot give Batiatus an offspring and the blame for this lands on her. As a result, her friend Illythia initiates a ritual fertility cult (Fig. 10.2), which actually leads to her pregnancy, though it is Crixus who had to take the blame. When it came to the patronage by Glaber, Lucretia wanted to sacrifice an animal and on her suggestion to take a bull, Batiatus replied that this was too expensive, she should take something smaller, preferably a sheep. While Oenomaus lives his religiosity and has built a small altar in his chamber before which he prays, the other gladiators remain largely religiously indifferent. There is a general acceptance behaviour towards deities and religion, but which ones these are in detail often remains open. Only Spartacus allows himself a certain and explicit scepticism in his claim that the gods do not exist or that he does not believe in them. This scepticism is fed by his experiential knowledge, which amounts to a thoroughly enlightened scepticism: if God/gods existed, why does he/ they allow the unjust/evil? Nevertheless, there is a doubt about the doubt, which is expressed again and again in the farewell saying: “See you in the afterlife”.4

Fig. 10.2  Lucretia with a candle phallus, Oenomaus before his altar in his chamber. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E4 + 11, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)  In the original English it says: “See you in the Afterlife”. The German dubbing also speaks of the ‘afterlife’. The difference in the history of ideas between the German concept of the term ‘Jenseits’ and the ‘Afterlife’, which tends to be kept open, is obvious. 4

Experience and Experiential Extremism

11

All the discussions so far are essentially based on an understanding of experience, because they have been experienced and made narratable in their representation. Violence, sex, religiosity are also socially anchored in the series world of their structure. There are regulations, institutionalized ways of acting, laws, which establish a scope of action and thus also a space of perception and experience. Perceiving something and experiencing something are two different things: an experience is based on a sensual perception; at the same time, not every sensual perception becomes an articulable experience. It is subjective and refers to something closed. As far as it is articulable, it reflects something closed. The difficulty now arises with the observation of experience without this necessarily and instantaneously being categorized as second-order experience. In the following, I would like to make experience extremism strong as a term, since in the fictional area of film, realistic connections are initiated, but exaggerations are always used and the protagonists are expected to overcome unreasonable challenges. From the possibility of politics to a politics of possibilities: For the world must be saved, an offense avenged, a plot uncovered, or justice (re)established. This inevitably does not go hand in hand with a regular daily routine or mood swings and thus corresponds to the inherent media logic of films and series. Life becomes a story that has to be told, proceeds dramatically and comes to an end of some kind. The extra-ordinary becomes everyday in the fictional and the everyday of the fictional becomes a fact and thereby extra-ordinary. The cinematic facts coagulate into facticity, at the latest when the event is perceived and experienced as an event. The extra-ordinary nature of the cinematic generally results in a projection surface

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_11

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for the viewer that can be understood as an audiovisual scenery of desire. Thus the ‘job’ of the gladiator becomes a test for a perception of masculinity that already for the Romans appears as something abstract, no longer tangible. Only in this way can it be understood that the soldiers stand almost without a chance against the gladiators and the slaves they have trained, and that murdering and pillaging are perceived and experienced as something necessary in the struggle for any kind of justice. The concept of justice is already manifoldly occupied in political theory alone (cf. Ladwig 2011), the concept of experience relies more on social and perceptual psychological as well as philosophical framings and, in this context, on their cinematic implementation. Despite the different terms, both result in action-specific overlaps that are oriented towards the metaphor of the boundary and the crossing of boundaries: The limits of justice are measured by the injustice that this already carries in the concept, the limits of experience are always measured by the new, the not yet experienced. Thinking along with the limits within the conceptual concepts also means thinking along with the overcoming of the limits, otherwise they would not exist as limits. In cinematic translation, this means that the fiction of the series is not a dystopia in this way, since it certainly ties in with an extra-filmic reality. However, it refuses to accept the idea that reality is a rationality continuum down to the bottom and thus corresponds to a pre-stabilized harmony that needs to be broken. The question of experience, of experience-related knowledge and memory from an individual perspective can only be concretized as a fact over the course of Spartacus in individual cases and classified accordingly. Experience always refers to an object, in which sense a subject can also become the object of an experience, without this necessarily rendering experience objectifiable. George Bataille (2017: 22) goes even further in that, after a conceptual differentiation of experience, he ascribes to it the potential to merge object and subject: Experience finally achieves the fusion of object and subject, being as subject non-­ knowledge, as object the unknown. It can, on the other hand, foment the excitement of intelligence: repeated failures serve it no less than the finite docility to which one can aspire.

The series story of Spartacus is developed linearly, the audience accompanies him on a journey where initially there is a desire to return, but this cannot be realised. Circumstances force him to face realities that he would not have encountered had it not been for the ‘adversity of contingency’. The script does act as a kind of metastrategist directing, but external events and related experiences, visible to the audience, lead to changes in Spartacus and his entourage. Bataille (ibid.) sees the “site of communication, of the fusion of subject and object” in “oneself.” ­Experience is

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thus fundamentally action-related, it can be conceived as a process-result and is thus, in a broader understanding, event-related (cf. Žižek 2014). The interesting question then arises more generally with regard to the film or series, how experience is made experiential and not just aesthetically realized. Referring to Michel Foucault’s aesthetics of the art of living and the framing by Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Blanchot, and George Bataille, Byung-Chul Han (2014: 104, emphasis added) notes that In contrast to experience […] experience is based on discontinuity. Experience means transformation. […] Being a subject means being subjected. Experience tears it out of its subjection. It is opposed to the neoliberal psychopolitics of experience or emotion, which entangles the subject even more deeply in its being subject.

The focus is on experiences that, in the narrative reduction of complexity, point beyond a mere routine confirmation of everyday life. The series is first of all such a communicative event that interrupts everyday life. Within the world of the series, everyday life itself consists of sub-narratives that are narrated eventfully in order to be able to deliver the appropriate drama. Something is constantly happening that is not inconsequential: The desertion of Spartacus at the beginning, the capture, the condemnation, the survival in the arena, the career as a gladiator, the experience of truth, the uprising and the fight against the Romans, etc. In addition, there is the psychological constitution of the individual protagonists, located in the cinematic present, which in their actions refers to the past as discontinuities that generate experience. Only through the flashback or the clarifying remark in a conversation does the present action become understandable, does it not simply flatten the character. Categorical areas of experience such as loss or pain come to the fore in the film (Fig. 11.1). Narratively and dramaturgically, they can be traced back to external influencing factors and internal attitudes, contextualize them, and are thereby more closely related to bodily experience and intensity. For as an experience they mark not only a caesura or an interruption, but also a crossing of boundaries in the ­staging of the impossible, the unspeakable or the unimaginable, which is thus in the world as a fact.1  The first two sentences from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1993: 11) apply here as a setting: “The world is everything that is the case.” as well as “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” Things alone do not make the world that is ours, but only the facts that have to be named as such. This approach is also taken by Markus Gabriel (2015: 94, emphasis added) when he claims, in the sense of a speculative realism: “Everything that exists appears in fields of meaning. Existence is the property of sense fields that something appears in them. I maintain that existence is not a property of objects in the world or in sense-fields, but a property of sense-fields, namely, the property that something appears in them.” 1

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Fig. 11.1  “Embrace the pain”  – The whipping  – here of Crixus  – in the divided public sphere as an experience of border transgressions. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E12, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

11.1 Law and Justice Law and justice stabilize social order structures, provide support, define leeway and boundaries, and make it possible to live according to predefined patterns. In the series world, we encounter different views of law, applications of law and interpretations of law. Talking about justice always involves talking about injustice. Being right and enforcing justice are two different things. If an individual claims a right for himself and demands general consent, then this is a reference to a collectively binding regulation that must at least be acceptable to all addressees in order to be able to claim some form of general validity. Thus justice, as the result of an authority enforcing the law, becomes a “basic norm of the political” (Ladwig 2011: 109). At the same time, a consensus on what is actually just is difficult to establish. The basic problem of justice refers to the objectifiable initial conditions, perspective and available means. Plato already formally defines justice in Book IV of his Politeia: suum cuique – to each his own. In addition to a certain distributive justice, he also referred to the ability of each individual to act accordingly, to subordinate himself to the law and, in this self-submission, to act in consensus with the social view.

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Aristotle’s formal expansion in the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics to include appropriateness with regard to punishment and the exchange value of a good brings to light the problem of the lack of a yardstick. This question also pervades the entire series: What is the appropriate standard for a just revenge, for the assertion of one’s own interests, be they of an economic, emotional or politically ambitious nature, for the assertion of the interests of the common good or the preservation of traditions? Does Spartacus’ loss of his wife and the conditions in the ludus entitle him to revolt against Batiatus and murder the Romans? It is a matter of perspective. In Spartacus, both binding frameworks of action in a functioning society and its limits are constantly questioned. Each of the protagonists and antagonists has divergent frames of action and devises different objectives, different strategies of enforcement. Each also has very different moral, financial, material and immaterial resources. An underlying equality of justice in the discourse of philosophy is repeatedly thwarted in the series by the actors. For there can be no equality, since a legal dispute would require that there be a common legal framework, that an impartial third party could negotiate between, say, Glaber and Spartacus, and that a verdict could be rendered. This is not provided for in the historical setting, nor in the setting of the series, and this is what makes the narrative and dramaturgical tension. Spartacus and the gladiators are structurally disadvantaged in the Roman world; how they deal with this permanent disadvantage ultimately constitutes the narrative and entertainment value. Justice implies talk of the good when the pursuit of justice means avoiding, balancing, atoning/punishing for injustice at very different levels. “All will be well” implies talk of redemption, transcends the present. That which is is not necessarily and of itself good, but that which is to come seems better in nature, worth persevering for, worth fighting for, worth striving for of itself as the good. Thus the good becomes circularly an advocate of the just and political. This is also precisely the character framing of Spartacus in the series, even if he ultimately fails.

11.2 Loss, Grief and Farewell One of the basic themes of the series is loss and the mourning associated with it, especially in the case of personal-emotional losses. This develops as a thoroughly contemporary transformation and observable strategy of coping in the mode of entertainment: What is a loss, what space does it occupy and how is it dealt with dramaturgically, narratively and film-aesthetically? Already the beginning of the series is characterized by losses of different amounts – as far as such losses can be scaled at all.

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Crixus, Lucretia’s lover, is designated by her as the father of the child growing inside her. Not only can he not accept being the child’s father as a social humiliation. Out of love for Naevia, who was cast out of the house and given away by the Domina after the relationship was discovered out of envy and jealousy, one could also say base motives, Crixus stabs Lucretia to death in the course of the first uproar, the overthrow of the house of Batiatus. However, she does not die as it appears, but survives thanks to Ashur’s help. The death of her unborn child, the death of her husband and her survival give her a special position. She is revered as a saint whose blessing is desired and demanded by the people in Capua. The loss turns into an advantage. Glaber recognizes this early on and knows how to instrumentalize it for his personal goals, whereas his wife Illythia, is much more strongly influenced by the events of the past, and her quest is to erase an unwelcome witness. Lucretia is saved by her partial and temporary loss of memory. Crixus’ temporary loss of Naevia culminates in the farewell granted by Oenomaus and the promise born therein to seek her out. This is motivation enough to join Spartacus. Spartacus’ loss, as already described, is comprehensive, for it is not only an external loss, but consists in the loss of his freedom and his wife Sura (Fig. 11.2). He is quite willing to bear the burden of slavery as a sacrifice if nothing happens to his wife. Batiatus takes advantage of this to the best of his ability for the sake of his own gain. The loss, however, can neither be compensated nor processed, for it leads Spartacus back again and again to the ‘messed up’ original situation: the unsuccessful escape from Glaber and the separation from Sura. The experience of loss increases as the series progresses. The strength of the bond with Sura and the associated motivation for action is clarified via flashback. He takes note of her prophecies and her belief in her gods – the distancing that occurs in this form is remarkable – lovingly and smilingly, but by no means seriously, until these words of hers are the only thing left to him besides the physical memories. He accepts the

Fig. 11.2  Sura dies in Spartacus’ arms; staged as a ritual and performed diegetically without comment: Sura’s farewell, the gladiators form a guard. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E6, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

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loss of freedom as long as he can at the same time persuade Batiatus, seemingly on an equal footing, to help him find his wife. He largely ignores the status of the slave. We find several dimensions of loss experience that are constitutive of Spartacus and his identity. The first is the loss of freedom when he is imprisoned for allegedly betraying Praetor Glaber, representing the Roman Republic. Associated with this loss, is the negation of previous self-determination as well as the separation from his wife. Reflexively, therefore, he takes all the blame upon himself in order to ‘at least’ save her from the uncertain fate, a narrative topos in the hero’s dramatic fall. Added to this in this context is Spartacus’ ignorance of how Glaber acts pars pro totum for Rome when it comes to asserting, legitimizing and maintaining its claim to power. Another dimension of the experience of loss after the loss of freedom is the death of Sura, which can be described as a breakdown for Spartacus. In the plot time of the series, Sura can only ever appear retrospectively, except for the brief moment of meeting her, which is also her dying moment, and can be idealized in a solidifying way via the few recurring fragments of memory. Since she is meaningful to his actions, everything else after her death becomes meaningless. Only when Spartacus uncovers the intrigue does the revenge motif become virulent. A third dimension of the experience of loss is related to the friendship with Varro. This friendship is characterized by respect and esteem as well as the recognition of the other as a subject, beyond civil rights and demarcation. In the moment of doubt, Spartacus stands by Varro by making clear and pointing out to him – especially after Sura’s death – what he has, namely a wife and child. Through Myra, he even initiates Varro to see his wife again after they fight together. Spartacus helps Varro out with money, as he begins to lose his money in the dice game again – in the boredom of free time and frustration of personal rejection. Spartacus proves to be the stronger one here, resisting temptation, achieving distance, and actually grieving and gaining strength and courage to live via reflection on loss. Friendship is also not reduced to the fellowship of gladiators who might clash in battle, but stands out because of the self-chosen standing up for each other. The latter produces jealousy and becomes the starting point for the intrigue of Illythia, Glaber’s wife. As a consequence, Varro does not simply die, but is defeated by Spartacus in an entertaining exhibition fight. The latter has to kill him afterwards. Here is another moment of destruction: the friend must kill the friend, not out of necessity, not for reasons of well-meaning concern, but for the purpose of entertainment, because someone wanted it that way, for whom the life, the friendship of the two did not matter, because he is involved in a different system of values and norms. The question of guilt arises in Spartacus because of Varro’s failure to complete the

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split into subject and object; because they have made a self-determined decision to be friends despite the existing conditions, the loss weighs heavily on Spartacus. All the more so because it makes him question why it could not have been the other way around. The wound Varro inflicted on Spartacus in the exhibition fight becomes for him a kind of mark of Cain and the last reminder of the friend who sacrificed himself. And for this reason Spartacus refuses to tend to it, letting it fester, even when in increasing fever dreams Sura, Varro and others exhort him to tend to the wound, thus indirectly absolving him of guilt. The gladiator Crixus, the undefeated Gaul, weeps. His jealousy, caused by the scheming Ashur, coupled with his impetuous character exposed his secret relationship with Naevia in the presence of Batiatus and Glaber. This embarrassment threatens to cause the patronage by Glaber to fail and leads to punishment: Crixus is whipped, Naevia gets her hair cut off and is given away. Moreover, the humiliation: Lucretia feels mocked, humiliated as a woman, since Naevia was her body slave and knew about the relationship with Crixus. Thanks to the intervention of Oenomaus, they are both able to say goodbye and reassure each other of themselves and their love, which results in Crixus’ promise to seek and find her (Fig. 11.3). So not a reunion in the afterlife, but still in this world. In the serial dramatization of events, Naevia is finally separated from Crixus in the course of

Fig. 11.3  Crixus before being forcibly separated from Naevia and before being punished. (Screenshot from: Spartacus. Blood and Sand, S1E12, DVD 2010, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

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her rescue from the mines, left to believe that he is now dead. There is no time for goodbyes here, only grief for the loss and a sense of the worthlessness of one’s freedom. The underlying question remains unspoken: Is my life worth so much that others will sacrifice theirs for it? The ritualized farewell of Crixus after his death is particularly noteworthy in its staging. Crixus had turned with his part of the army towards Rome in the third season and was devastatingly defeated at the gates of Rome. Killed in battle, Crassus sends the badly wounded Naevia with Crixus’ head to Spartacus as a salute. Thereupon, the gladiators initiate a ritual farewell that resembles a reversal of circumstances: the captured Romans must fight the gladiators in an arena-like theatre, while the free slaves are the audience. At the climax, the burning of the remains of Crixus and as an honourable commemoration, almost all the names of the lost ‘comrades’ who rendered service in battle are mentioned or called out.

11.3 Family Relations The family relationships of the Romans make up a not inconsiderable part of the narration, especially because, with the exception of the marriage between Oenomaus and Melitta, which is not discussed further, this does not occur in the gladiators. On the other hand, influence, power, money, patronage and office are always seen in relation to family and kinship. Especially when there are discrepancies between families, but also within the family. Between Batiatus and his father, a father-son conflict is antipodally staged, which is plot-guiding at the beginning. The father is suffering from poor health, brought on by his daughter-in-law with poisoned wine, and as a result is staying on the sea coast in Sicily. His return curtails his son’s sovereignty in the ludus and in Capua, for the father of the family is also secured in the serial world with far-­ reaching powers, for he decides on life and death in his house. The younger Batiatus aspires to political office and the social influence it brings at the magistrate level. However, his background and trade did not allow him to do so. In private, the father shows himself to be loyal to his principles, a pater familias who is by no means willing to compromise, and outwardly submissive to political office-­holders. This makes him appear ambivalent, but at the same time explains the existence of the ludus: calculated risk in the arena in the knowledge of the skill of his own gladiators and restraint as far as political intrigue is concerned. His father and his family background put the brakes on the ambitions of the young Batiatus, who meanwhile spares no scruples in order to achieve his goals – including the placement of his gladiators with the Primus. If a goal seems within reach, he is willing to instrumen-

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talize or sacrifice anything for it. Thus he abandons the deserving gladiator trainer because he is “his father’s man” and a fading shadow of the past in order to place Oenomaus, who is loyal to him, in that position. Just so, he has wood replaced with steel in an exhibition fight, only to remain in the guest’s favor as a result. This desire is by no means selective in the series, but rather shows itself as a distinct structure of desire: in the destruction of political opponents, in the organization of orgies, or as a humble display towards those who are socially higher. On a symbolic level, the conflict between father and son is finally fought out in the arena (Sequel, E5): The Gaul Crixus, as a recruit bought by Quintus, is to compete against the hoplomachus Auctus, whom the father considers his best man.2 Crixus wins spectacularly, killing Auctus and enjoying his first triumph in the arena. Credit is subsequently given to Quintus, with the father admitting that he had underestimated not only the Gaul Crixus but also his son Quintus. The father is in the mood for reason and leading the house on the right path, which means that social advancement, which Quintus aspires to, is now just not included in the plan. However, the father’s recognition of his son comes at a price: the Pater Familias stays at home because the fighting would have kindled in him a soothing and long unsensed fire: “The blood and the sand, the roar of the crowd, all these strengthen me more than any conducive climate.” What becomes clear here is the importance and ascribed significance of entertainment. It can initiate the spectacular moment through particular struggles, and this titillation is more stimulating to health than the restful introspection provided by a distant coastal climate. The father’s desire for togetherness, is countered by the son’s selfish goals. Addressing the people: the relevance of the right words is well known, in order to conform to a certain aesthetic judgment of taste, to convince the listeners and to position one’s own man verbally accordingly. This is where father and son differ: while Quintus tries to pull out all the stops there are to pull out, the father narrows down, diplomatically seeking consensus, which in turn is diametrically opposed to Quintus’ ambitions. There is no compromise on this. The conflict between the generations is also evident here in the way the father appears in public. While the father still demands humility and modesty towards the magistrate and rejects the pulvinus, the better placed seat in the arena, as not befitting his status, Quintus is hooked on power. While Batiatus’ father dies by Lucretia’s poison, the opposite is true of Marcus Crassus and his son Tiberius. Tiberius embodies a youth who is aware of his status,  A hoplomachus was a gladiator who fought with trident and net, an armament that emerged relatively late and first had to gain the necessary recognition. The enthusiasm of the gladiator in the series, who had to ‘retrain’ to net and trident, was correspondingly reserved. 2

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yet naïve, and who faces the insoluble challenge of not being able to meet the demands of his over-father in any form: neither militantly, intellectually, strategically nor modestly. And so the father-son relationship fails not because of a lack of love, but because of a lack of trust. A strong hierarchical society enables different options for action than a society that organizes itself through flat hierarchies or anchors them in broad areas. For hierarchies give rise to areas of responsibility and positions whose action-­ theoretical scope, effects, and potentials are already outlined, pre-structured, and legitimized in advance. This is shown by Spartacus, in that Spartacus and his ‘leadership’ also have to act hierarchically in their fight against the Romans, rather involuntarily, because the enemy does not allow it otherwise. Grassroots democratic decisions are not an option for action, to this extent the ideas of revenge, justice and freedom are also always the ideas of the ‘leadership’ that result in concrete actions. At the same time, these actions, in their structural parallelism, are directed against the existing system. In the best case, these hierarchical structures are socially established and accepted and desirable for the individual. Through this acceptance, a degree of commitment can be formulated, which in turn is secured by the hierarchy. This creates security of action and orientation for the individual and society, because the area of responsibility and decision-making does not have to be renegotiated first or each time. This results in clearly identifiable structures of desire for the individual, which can, however, shake the existing structure under certain circumstances. Nothing else happens in Spartacus.

The Myth and Spartacus: The Myth of Spartacus

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The contradictory and fragmentary sources surrounding the historical Spartacus have, since the beginning of the controversy, also raised questions about the myth. (cf. Guarino 1980) Producer Rob Tapert himself speaks of the “revival of a myth from the perspective of a gladiator”.1 This narrowing of perspective is in line with the film’s own media logic, which, among other things, makes use of a largely coherent dramaturgy, as well as requiring characters to drive the plot forward, narrative condensations, identification potential and exciting design elements such as the music. A comprehensive integration of the historical situation in the Roman Republic in the first third of the first century B.C., e.g. the civil war only a short time ago, the dictatorship and the proscriptions of Sulla, the impoverishment of the rural population, the wars in Spain and Asia would require a complexity and multi-­ perspectivity that could only diminish the series in its dynamics, heroism, drama, violence, explicitness: Too much would have to be explained. On the contrary, by orienting the staging to media templates, the producers reinforce the myth of the slave who rises up against Rome and the ‘ruling class’ to fight for a just cause, for the freedom of the oppressed. In this sense, the escape from the Ludus at the end of the first season is a reckoning with Batiatus, a frenzied slaughter that succeeds not

 Spartacus, Season 1 Blood and Sand, Extras: Behind the Scenes.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_12

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by chance but thanks to the strategic agency of the later leader, who takes charge and proclaims the departure for freedom:2 I did it because it’s just. Blood demands blood. Too long have we lived and suffered at the whims of our masters. I couldn’t let that happen anymore. I could not stand by and watch brothers killed for no other reason than pleasure. I could not stand by and watch hearts ripped out and lives snuffed out for no reason. I know not all of you wanted this, but it is done. It is done. Your life is your own. Find your own path. Or join us, and together we can make Rome tremble.

Here, the series entertainment experiences the aforementioned doubling: By showing aesthetically and scenically what Spartacus opposes, the entertainment is not questioned, but its substance remains untouched. Series audiences are amused by what is not supposed to be the object of amusement. Viewers are still defenselessly at the mercy of affect, but on the side of the good guys, the abomination is not so bad. The fictional speech of the companions at the end of the first season after the bloodbath in the Ludus becomes a self-righteous justification and the starting shot of a vendetta: consequently, the 2nd season is called Vengeance. The end of the second season is dramaturgically and narratively similar to the first. The cause of the actual misery, Praetor Glaber, is confronted by Spartacus in a duel and is defeated. Shortly before his death, he tries his hand at humiliating Spartacus, as he has done many times in the past in hopeless situations: “You have won nothing. Rome will send legions. And one day, soon, you will meet your deserved end.” Spartacus, having brought Glaber to his knees, retorts before the deathblow that this may come to pass, but not on this day.3 Spartacus takes up Glaber’s retort in the following very brief emphatic address to the gladiators gathered around him: “Let Rome send her legions. We defy them! And all they will follow Glaber!” This is followed by equally enthusiastic approval, culminating in a mutual handshake, and turning to Crixus, Spartacus prophesies that they will now become an army, whereupon Crixus also joins in enthusiastic shouts of yes. Spartacus is not only dehistoricized in favor of a mystification due to the fragmentary and incomplete situation of tradition. The vouchsafed historical framing  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. 2

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authenticates the representation, provides a location, an orientation.4 History here essentially serves as a frame for another story, a story of human greatness, indomitability, the struggle against injustice, of love, of sacrifice and, in the broadest sense, of moral contrast, but also of racism, sexism, experience of violence, ambition, greed, intrigue and prejudice.5 Thus, beyond fiction, there emerges a memorable truth content that can be negotiated supra-individually and affectively, and which, for this reason too, age can do little or nothing to harm.6 The rebellion against one’s dominus, the uncompromisingness of one’s own position, which includes the killing of one’s opponent as an option for action that tends to be taken for granted and is by no means extreme, the loyalty towards fellow soldiers up to

 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.” 4

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friendship, the persuasive moment of freedom that makes other slaves run away from their masters, can neither be invented as history in the sense of an interplay of contingent heterogeneous factors whose outcome is open, nor as myth. This is certainly subject to modifications, as for example in the radicalized re-creation of the Spartacus League in 1919 or the instrumentalization by Stalin and the Soviet Union, up to the nominal use in the Spartakiade, but this does not change its consolidated core. On this, Hans Blumenberg (2006: 166): The basic patterns of myths are just so concise, so valid, so authoritative, so poignant in every sense, that they never fail to convince, still offer themselves as the most useful material for any search for elementary facts of human existence.

In Spartacus, a play on the motif of justice takes place, vis-à-vis the personal injustice suffered and the ‘tribalistic’ retribution associated with it. This ultimately follows an overriding notion of justice that cannot be enforced by the means of (Roman) law, but is detached from the personal level and arises as a matter of situational necessity. The decadent depravity of the Romans is contrasted with the uprightness of Spartacus and his like-minded gladiators, an analogous approach to Tacitus’ Germania. There is a semantic doubling here, for as gladiators they stand in a functional relationship to the existing society and its entertainment culture, without this necessarily implying an attitude of pathetic sincerity. At the same time, they are ascribed leadership qualities per se, which, however sympathetic, cannot be successfully enforced. This would have resulted in a social upheaval, consequently a revolution, which at this point in time would have been anything but promising in the Roman Empire. The closeness that Spartacus as a person creates to the present day in the course of the second and third seasons is at the same time staged as a mythicizing distance of the hero to his contemporaries in the acting era. At the same time, it functions connectively as a self-legitimizing principle for individual and social behavior: Spartacus evolves and detaches himself from personal revenge by showing himself responsible for the slaves who follow him. With the declared will for a mimetic staging and the simultaneously necessary connectivity for the reception process in modernity, the tendency towards dehistoricization finally emerges. History becomes myth. If this is now understood as a narrative gesture of audiovisual storytelling, the impression of the mythologization of Spartacus is reinforced in the staging of his death. The cinematically necessary final duel between him and Crassus as equals on different sides ends in a draw, as he is saved – once again – and can die in ‘freedom’. In the filmic realization, martyrdom and passion are mirrored: Spartacus kneels, pierced by a total of three spears, in front of Crassus, who is also exhausted.

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Fig. 12.1  At the end of the battle and their forces: Spartacus and Crassus kneel before each other; resolution in the passion story: Spartacus dies. (Screenshots from: Spartacus. War of the Damned S3E10, DVD, 2013, Prod.: starz Original, twentieth Century Fox)

The last moments of Spartacus’ life are accompanied by light rain, which, however, evaporates with death. Redemption is symbolized – in the conventional Christian narrative tradition – by the rising rays of the sun. But this is also implemented in the concrete image arrangement, the pietas, the musical accompaniment as well as in the cinematic expansion of the moment, in order to ultimately do justice to the attributed meaning and the end – of the series and the character (Fig. 12.1).

Media and History

13

It seems somewhat absurd to get a vivid idea of the history of the late Roman Republic at the end of the first century B.C. solely on the basis of architectural evidence or a visit to Rome. The visualization of Roman history in this temporally circumscribed area can be grasped, on the one hand, through comprehensive scholarly discourse (e.g., Mehl, Andreas 2001; Syme 2003; Jacques/Scheid 2008; Weeber 2011), and, on the other hand, through diverse popular media, such as nineteenth-century history painting, historical novels, or cinematic subjects of events, persons, or monumental narratives, in which the perception of the negotiated object is figured abundantly. This results in a field of tension between a pragmatic claim to truth and an affect-oriented claim to entertainment. In addition to the unfinished scientific discourse, media take on a specific function in such a context, one that does not necessarily aim at a claim to truth: Media, through their reporting, highlight from the contingency of events some, image and label them, set them to music and place them in public discourse. The media thus create a narrative structure for events and their histories by incorporating the linearity of contingent events, which are ‘meaningless’ in themselves, into historical narratives.

What Reinhold Viehoff (2005: 96 f.) claims here for news, among other things, can be transferred to the audiovisual medialization of historical material. Media present history and stories and give them meaning. Thus Aleida Assmann (2007: 150) distinguishes between three representation methods in the presentation of history, “which at the same time are also based on three different structures of order: telling, exhibiting and staging”. And so the former is “not only an arrangement of events in temporal order”, but also a humanly intended or factually justified “causal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_13

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linkage”: “It is never the temporal sequence alone, but only its overwriting with a narrative semantics that gives meaning, weight and direction to the narrated events.” (ibid.) Looking at the interdisciplinary discussion of history and its mediality (Crivellari et al. 2004; Lersch/Viehoff 2007; Lersch/Viehoff 2016/2017), it becomes clear that historical fact and fiction are in an interrelation in the respective forms of representation: “Staging is the key concept of a constructivist understanding of the world, according to which reality does not exist in a prefabricated way, but is produced performatively.” (Assmann 2007: 162) In such a sense, reality is not only produced, but also handed down, and in this opening perspective, the wildly proliferating field of so-called alternative history, which deals with alternative explanations for historical patterns of interpretation, comes into play. With reference to Thomas Späth (2010), Christoph Ernst (2015: 253 f., emphasis added) speaks of a clash or a rapprochement between historiography and popular culture, in that the mode of “observation of historical reality is switched to the observation of historical possibility”. For both discover “in history the contingency of factual courses of history and the contingency of the possibilities of describing these courses of history in the discourses of historiography”. Ernst (ibid.) is able to show in this perspectivization, with its corresponding focus on populism, “that the game of possibilities in Rome is an addressing of the premises of what may be considered conceivable and justifiable as possible political action in contemporary U.S. political discourses.” This perspective, set on a structural level, connects with the potentials of the film-aesthetic level, which Aleida Assmann (2007: 163) problematizes more strongly through the affect orientation of the film: Through the gaze fused with the lens of the camera, the film forges an affective bond with the subject, suggesting intimate proximity to a distant past, while potentially shortchanging cognitive aspects and open-ended questions prompted via irritation and distancing. […] The danger of this media dispositif is that the audience imagines itself a witness, when it is only a spectator.

With the “politics of possibilities” and the cinematic potential on the basis of existing models (from literature, painting, architecture, sculpture, etc.), new configurations of history emerge that do not aim at historical truth, but create connectable systems of statements via the existing mechanisms of the transmission of knowledge orders. In their connectivity, these systems of statements negotiate questions of morality, trust, courage, personal and social recognition, as well as questions of interpersonal relationships and even dimensions and questions of identity formation, violence and sex. Especially the latter aspects play an essential role in relation to Spartacus. An originally free Thracian gets involuntarily into captivity and slavery by breaking his word. He is able to assert himself by his u­ nwillingness to

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compromise and fights against the prevailing social order for a superior idea. The external circumstances literally force him to question his previous and the changed respectively changing identity. As should become clear in the course of the explanations, it seems only logical here to follow Hermann Lübbe (1979: 280): Identity is not a result of action. It is the result of a history, that is, of the self-­ preservation and development of a subject under conditions that happen to relate to the raison d’être of its respective will. For this very reason, in relation to the history through which it has its identity, the subject is also not its subject of action, but merely the referent subject of the narrative of that history.

In the randomness of events, of the interlocking of various factors, of working against or also with one another, of building new alliances, all this is not normative but contingent in the narrative reconfiguration of the series. In the process, the contingency of the real is set aside in favor of the seemingly contingent in the series’ own logic, and thus suspended. For history as a self-perpetuating process, subject to various conditions of success, in which minimal shifts become heterogeneous settings that bring to light completely unforeseeable results, becomes in the series a causality conceived from the end. With the mimetic staging and the simultaneously necessary connectivity for the present reception process, a tendency towards dehistoricization emerges. What does this mean? The term ‘dehistoricization’ already pervaded sociology, history and literary studies in the 1970s, and in terms of the history of science was more concerned with phenomena of demarcation.1 In the context of Spartacus, dehistoricization means that the historical framing of fictional material does not per se lead to an understanding of the historical. Nonetheless, the impression of “this is/was so” is created due to audiovisual strategies of overpowering. This can certainly be generalized. In the critical consideration of historical television series, it is always necessary to take into account and the resulting relativization of what ‘might be missing out’: the “irritation and distancing” (ibid.) necessary for an epistemological approach is contrary to an immersive, affective and entertaining cinematic experience. In its recourse to ancient historiography, film finds itself in an ambivalent situation, since this itself is not without gaps and ancient authors already refer to older sources. That is to say, although the traditions of the time are comprehensive, they do not correspond to a historiography that differentiates, weighs, orders, system Cf. exemplarily Kessler, Michael (1979): Dehistoricizing the Historical. On Difficulties in Dealing with Classics and the Problem of the Epistemological and Literary Theoretical Use of the Theorem of Reflection. In: Deutsche Vierteljahreszeitschrift für Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte. Vol. 53, H. 4, pp. 580–616. 1

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atizes, compares, and is designed for social memory. However, film does not problematize this at all, since in its mediality as an existing “system of statements” (Michel Foucault) it develops its own film language criteria such as continuity editing. Film thus exists as a function of the archive in that it dominates the appearance of statements as single events, thus defining the system of propositionality as well as the mode of actuality of statements as a thing. This leads to another point: films generate access to historical realities on the basis of historical sources, but without being archives for a historically objective reality. Nevertheless, in their functionality they become archives with regard to the strategies of their staging, contextualization and connectivity in the respective time, that is, with regard to what can be said and expressed cinematically at a certain time.2 Due to their mediality, worldwide reception and potential availability, films can make a claim to validity that undergoes a process of meaning attribution and grants them a status as (historical) sources over time.3 In the course of the argumentation so far, they thus become a source in a double sense: on the one hand, as an alignment for a historical reality, and on the other hand, due to the materiality of film in the context of time, as a discursive formation that can be determined in time. Marcus Stiglegger (2015: 5 f.) sees such a debate as a “critical[n] impulse to deal with the archival function of audiovisual media” when he assumes “that the archive of film, as a threshold between cultural and communicative memory, ultimately only exists in its inventory through the critical reflection of viewers and their discourse on (old and new) films and series”. By extension, this also means that this Spartacus and the series can be understood as a discursive formation in which statements about our present are formed. It can make clear which social “formations” are expressed in the discourse of the series, i.e. how Western society – the production country USA – asserts itself

 “Instead of seeing how in the great mythical book of history words line up one by one […], in the density of discursive practices one has systems that introduce the statements as events […] and things […]. All these systems of statements (events on the one hand and things on the other) I propose to call archives.” (Foucault 1973: 186 f.; emphasis added) Ex negativo, in the Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault does not define the archive as the sum of all the texts that a society needs as documents of its own past or as evidence of an identity to be retained, nor all the facilities necessary for preservation and registration. Cf. ibid. 3  An important starting point for this discussion in the contemporary historical context is the series Holocaust: The Story of the Weiss Family (directed by M. Chomsky, 1978). Cf. Stiglegger 2015. Likewise, the discussion is conducted within cultural studies and historiography. Cf. among others Glowatz, W. (2009): Film analysis as an extension of the historical auxiliary sciences. Eine Studie am Beispiel des Spielfilms Taking Sides – Der Fall Furtwängler (R.: I. Szabo 2001). 2

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in the militant, sexist, voyeuristic structural features of the series and overlays and thus dehistoricizes the history, which is always meager. The fictional elaboration and complex identity in Spartacus is at the same time a reactualization of the historical figure Spartacus, who is thus brought to ‘life’ and remembered. The transfer from the cultural archive into the communicative memory takes place without there being any compelling reasons for this, a reactualization takes place in the field of entertainment – there is no political necessity that shows consequences in political action, thus a necessary reactualization on a symbolic level that certainly has reference to the respective – and in this case precisely to today’s Western – society. One can watch the series and forget it. But one can also, due to the monumental overwhelming effect of the series, the multiple connectable offers of identity, and not least due to the fragmentary orientation towards history afterwards, believe to know something about Spartacus or link later knowledge with the memory of the series. According to Friedrich Jaeger (2011: 525), remembering as a methodological and non-negligible basic operation of historical cultural studies refers to to the fact that history is tangible not as an objective-immediate set of phenomena, but solely in a culturally encoded and ‘represented’ form-represented in media of cultural knowledge, cultural communication, and aesthetic sublimation; in communalized experiences, mentalities, symbols, and rituals; in political practices and public discourses.

If the “past is cast in commemorative forms” (Welzer 2011: 171), then a visualization of the past emerges that is structurally linked to recent discourses on the past. In a historical setting and its audiovisual backdrop, the actors’ scope for action is thus staged and thematized. These pose questions, for example, about the freedom of the individual and its limits in the game of fate sensu of overcoming contingency. Thus, for the postmodern subject in the reception process of the series, concrete questions about the dependency and recognition relationships of the individual in his social self-location are further integrated, which enable, catalyze or prevent identity processes, without being concerned with a positivistic commensurability of the media identity of Spartacus.

Concluding Remarks

14

After the present explanations, which have worked out essential themes by way of example, it becomes clear that Spartacus does not create such a detailed social picture of the late Roman Republic as, for example, the series Rome. Rather, it focuses – unsurprisingly – on the main protagonist and his struggle against the injustices he has personally suffered and Rome. And in this outline, combined with the familiar ending, it allows for the witnessing of an uncompromising struggle against a clearly defined opponent. It is the struggle of David against Goliath, against the sovereign, against imposed rules, against a form of desubjectification – perceived as unjust from today’s perspective. It is thus a struggle for justice, for self-­ determination, for (individual) freedom, for loyalty and a straightforwardness of character, up to a bellicose understanding that approvingly accepts victims. Despite such idealization – which lasts until the end – the struggle must ultimately fail. And not because it has already failed historically, but because it would otherwise question the system in place. The series itself doesn’t question anything, which makes Spartacus’ struggle seem all the more heroic. And so the question remains, what makes the struggle, and by extension the series, seem so remarkable? Unlike Spartacus, all of the Roman opponents have something to lose; in addition to political and social reputation, it is just as much material possessions. The fight against Spartacus is at least vested interests, if not extended and legitimizing a fight for Rome. For Spartacus, the struggle begins after he has lost everything; his rise to become an adversary of the Republic is akin to the inverted American myth of the dishwasher. For he refuses to accept the integration of the system, which is offered to him. The opposing figure is the Syrian Ashur, whose goal is system-recognizing integration and for whom he becomes a traitor. However, he remains in a social

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Wilke, Living and Dying in the Roman Republic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_14

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‘in-between’, because he does not succeed in being recognized as an equal by the Romans. In addition to uncompromising revenge, Spartacus has a sense of justice that “makes him dangerous,” as Laeta later explains to Marcus Crassus when he recaptures the city of Sinuessa. And this sense of justice eventually leads to a humanity that makes him stand up to his own people when it comes to preventing further slaughter, even as Spartacus states dying that there is “no justice in this world.” What remains unclear is the status of normality or the price of justice, especially after the many beheadings, assassinations, mutilations and bloodbaths. Yet this is precisely a discursive structural feature of the series, since the ambivalence and ambiguity of longed-for tenderness and lived brutality, rage and frenzy, is revealed in the aestheticized cruelty. On the one hand, the series negotiates identity processes as negotiation processes, and quite significantly in connection with failed, absent and sought recognition. In Romans, this is much more concerned with confirmation within socio-­ political functional mechanisms, which contain neither an Enlightenment nor sociological component of identity work. Nor is this necessary. On the other hand, it is identity processes in the case of the freed slaves and the gladiators whose preconditions are anchored at the interpersonal level, i.e. within the social group, as well as at the societal level, i.e. in the struggle for freedom, revenge, justice, etc. Thus, a changing self-image, the reflection of norms and values, as well as a changing approach to the (Roman) world can be observed. This leads in Spartacus to an autonomy, a self-legislation, which is not to be confused with sovereignty. In his regained freedom he is quite autonomous, he becomes so through external circumstances, but he and his ‘fates’ are by no means sovereign. For he cannot free himself from the permanent threat of the Romans, ignore his responsibilities to the freed slaves, or simply leave. In this respect, structural parallels for the present can be rudimentarily identified in the figure of Spartacus and his engagement with the world. In a world that is becoming more complex, the degree of sovereignty for the subject is declining; here, however, one’s own failure is not death, but ultimately the realization that one must capitulate to social conditions and their possibilities for change. The degree of individual freedom is – in the Western world – very high, but the question of the price is largely avoided. Into this freedom, a Western European hegemonic-material sense of entitlement and an associated “enrichment” (Boltanski/Esquerre 2018) continue to play a dominant role. In the current exponential growth of communication processes, the question of recognition in the context of identity work is gaining more and more weight. To impute a historical mediation gesture to the series remains no more than an empty interpretative attribution and does not change what it is: entertainment, even

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if it opens up dimensions of cultural studies, educational theory, political and social observation. Analogously, this can also be formulated for the series Rome from the statements of the producers. In 2009, the ancient historian Jonathan Stamp answered the question of how authentic “historical entertainment” should be in a conversation about the fact and fiction of the series: It’s not educational philanthropy – it’s entertainment. It’s for the entertainment business. And that’s the raison the people go back to the past because they think it’s a very rich seem to find story’s they would entertain mass audiences.1

As a context of justification, this can be found in Spartacus from the first to the last minute of the series: it is not the working off of historical facts and their reconstruction that is in the foreground, but the historical fictions that make up the ‘spirit’ of the series and its entertainment value. The “aesthetic ambiguity” is present, but the extent to which experiences are (or can be) stockpiled still seems difficult given the narrowing of the themes to violence and sex. Much more clearly, through the historical fictions, contemporary discourses or their American understanding come to bear when it comes to freedom, justice, recognition, identity processes, body enactments, the ability to relate, and religiosity. Furthermore, as a media offering, the series is integrated into the cross-media value chain: As a DVD box set, as a streaming offer, in its continuation as a computer game, as a comic, or as a communicative fan offer as an independent wiki that refers quite substantially to the series. If one takes Spartacus detached from his historical setting as a projection figure in the ‘fight for justice’, then he fits seamlessly into contemporary superhero film productions à la Marvel, which all more or less stand for ‘saving the world’. This becomes an overarching premise: The world can still be saved, justice is possible, but then only by the personnel designated to do so, who are selflessly responsible. Outside the fictional film world, the gears of the world machine are so well lubricated that the sand is washed out rather than being able to fulfil its function. In the basic form of the combative arena spectacle, references can certainly be made to today’s entertainment industry and a connection to the combative trial of strength. Be it the live and acapella performed battle rap, which uses language as a weapon and the audience acts as a judging authority, be it the so-called cage fights of Mixed Martial Arts, which through the internationally operating organization Ultimate Fighting Championchip touch much more financial interests.

 Cf. The Villa Council presents: Balancing Fact and Fiction. The Ancient World of HBO’s “Rome”. A Conversation with Jonathan Stamp and Patt Morrison, March 5, 2009, Getty Villa, Malibu. Online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch%3fv%3dH1Wu-zAdbc4 1

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A genuine continuation of the myth of Spartacus consists in the one-­dimensional representation of the struggle against him. By imputing a plan to him – be it the fight against Rome, freedom, the march across the Alps  – and by declaring the senatorial fight against him as a war, as contemporary authors already did in order to legitimize consular action2, the myth is confirmed and perpetuated in its function. This is directly linked to concrete questions about relationships of dependency and recognition of the individual in his social self-location, which, as shown, enable, catalyze or prevent identity processes. And to read this out of the series already underlines the necessary construction character, which becomes connectable for the audience. Spartacus narratively develops identity patterns and thus enables an identificatory reception. Slavery is still a topic in the present, even if it tends to be taboo or related to a historical discourse of reappraisal (cf. Mbembe 2016). Western consumer society is dependent on systems of exploitation; we may no longer have slaves ‘at home’, but the products from such a context are naturally part of the basic equipment of everyday life. These are presented to us clean, aesthetically pleasing and well-­ sorted, the dirt remains at the place of production (or it returns there) and the social conscience is soothed with an organic seal. Spartacus does address slavery and the struggle to free oneself from it, but it also shows Roman comforts and how they are taken for granted. In this respect, the series performs a confirmation mechanism of the present by offering cinematic structural parallels wrapped in a specific narrative. The acknowledgement and admission of an injustice (suffered) does not necessarily lead to its removal. Slaves had no subject status, their sense of justice was irrelevant within the Roman legal order as long as it did not go against the master. Only the creation of their own order by slaves threatened the Roman order, even if it remained subordinate to it within the Roman order as a state of emergency, so to speak. But this also explains the Roman approach, because a pluralistic society did not correspond to their understanding. It could be compared structurally with today’s western democracies, when they proselytize in their understanding of democracy and the values connected with it, ignoring the construction character of their own values. Before these values became an inner attitude, they went through a process of negotiation. This is why the lack of understanding of the resistance of the society that does not share the same values is so great, since one’s own mode of action is always in the sense of ‘the good’. This is evident in the resistance of the freed slaves around Spartacus when he convinces them with freedom as a value in itself: “We have lost many, wounded, divided, but we are free. That is priceless! Let us show Rome that  Cf. Guarino 1980.

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she bleeds when she is attacked.” With this, he simultaneously invokes a unity among ourselves that must be established and the avoidance of mistakes in order to stand against Rome. In the continuation of the myth, Spartacus develops an audiovisual iconography, namely from an escaped gladiator to a symbolic figure of resistance against the Romans, against the Roman system. The series is thus part of a tradition that makes it clear that ‘one’ does not have to endure or submit to a system and establishes resistant resources. Pretty much every American western lives from this myth in its basic structure, in which the individual cowboy as the embodiment of good has to fight against a corrupt system. Spartacus, however, is already a myth construct of the Romans, who can serve as a moral mirror for the ills of Roman society (in Sallust) or as an insult (in Cicero), but ultimately can only go as far as the limits of the existing system. The series’ resonating emphasis in the Making Off stems from the unresolvable ambivalence of the historical figure, whose potential for identification can obviously always be initiated anew: The interpretations of Spartacus range from savior to barbarian, hailed as a liberator, labeled a villain. Historically he eludes us, his name echoes through the ages and fascinates anew from generation to generation. His story is also ours because it remains humanly valid. It is the story of a struggle for something seemingly impossible, justice in an unjust world.

This appears again and again in the series as a formulated and motivating realization: “We have achieved the impossible, made it, pushed through”. In the second season in particular, this becomes a recurring moment of reflection in order to reassure oneself, to draw courage and confidence, to spur others on and ultimately to believe. In this way, the struggle takes on quasi-religious overriding traits and becomes a key to a quintessentially American attitude: to believe firmly, unshakably and without doubt in the success of the unimaginable, the impossible. This is how the change from Spartacus’ personal revenge on Batiatus and Glaber to the ‘just fight for the liberation of all the oppressed and slaves’ is to be understood, up to the final sentence that there would be no greater victory than ‘to leave the world free’. Almost every episode features a fight, a destructive action or a coup that tries to overshadow the previous events. Especially the many uncompromising and discourse-­free fights rely on an effect that can no longer necessarily be dramaturgically derived or justified, but rather functions as a violent pornographic unique selling point. Blood splatters wherever it can. And this is no longer even necessarily irritating or repulsive; our media experiences can be described as saturated with blood, for it is not only in the fictional realm that we are permanently confronted with it. Even in the non-fictional area of news or ‘self-reporting’ from crisis areas

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and the technically low-threshold possibility of viral dissemination, we come into constant media contact with (real) blood, victims of crimes and catastrophes, but also with pornography. The question of the effects of such media habituation is not easy to answer without falling into schematic patterns: Is it brutalization, does a deadening occur, can a valve function be observed? In Spartacus, the boundaries of the experiential are not explored, determined, aestheticized or made tangible, but rather questioned from the outset, consciously transgressed and thus embedded as a cinematic fact in an everydayness. The narrative, dramaturgical and aesthetic extremism of experience itself degenerates into an entertaining effect that remains unquestioned through its reflexive distance. Narrative contexts are presented coherently, discontinuity is eliminated, and this plays a critical argument into the hands of the historian, for the film tends to cover up its own construction and history thus appears as a contradiction-free, condensed and emotionally appealing entity. Even if this is at the expense of historical detail, the entertaining ‘spirit’ is substantial. Acknowledgements  Projects that are initiated seldom reveal at the beginning what their actual scope will be in the end. Thus, the present text was also subject to the everyday confusion of thematic discussion, its proliferation and bundling. At the beginning there was only a reading of the series for its current or updating content. The wide ramifications in quite different subject areas and disciplines sometimes only led back to antiquity in a roundabout way and are by no means finished. For film analyses in particular tend to be unfinished and then often leave a somewhat unsatisfactory impression, because certain dimensions and aspects may have been missed out from another point of view. Thus the conclusion, with its concentration on a few motifs, is more like a caesura, leading to further discussions, especially with regard to the connection between history, film, memory and cultural self-understanding. At this point, I would like to thank Mrs. Emig-Roller for her patience, encouragement and long-lasting support. I would also like to thank Reinhold Viehoff and Marcus S. Kleiner for the many conversations over the course of time, the productive comments and critical advice. I would also like to thank Julia Stützle for her reliable proofreading and the often small-scale formal work on the manuscript. To my family and wife, my deepest thanks, not only for their support while I worked on Spartacus, but also for putting up with repetitive adrenaline-saturated dialogue. Again and again, the reflective process of taking childlike interest in the subject seriously, while balancing engagement with the material and the overwhelming staging of the series in conversation, was enlightening. Errors in the content of the text are the sole responsibility of the author.

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