Something for the weekend. The intro to the movie Spartacus (1960), one of the best film intros, with a superb melding of the music and “Roman” statuary. I saw this film initially in 1967 when it was first broadcast on television and it awakened a lifelong love of ancient history in me.
The film is full of historical howlers, par for the course for Hollywood. Crassus, the richest man in Rome, was not a proto-Fascist dictator. Spartacus, who is a shadowy figure because the source material is sparse (only Plutarch’s Life of Crassus and a brief section in Appian’s Civil Wars), did not simply march to the sea to escape Italy with his liberated slaves, but marauded throughout Italy, defeating several Roman consular armies in the process. There was no Senator called Gracchus, magnificently portrayed in the film by Charles Laughton, who led the opposition to Crassus, and Crassus wasn’t interested in personal dictatorship in any event during the time he put down Spartacus and his slave army. The list of substantial factual errors in the film could go on for considerable length.
However, all that is beside the point. The film is a magnificent work of art, and it gets the atmosphere of the late Roman Republic right: old Roman morality being forgotten, a growth of decadence fueled by ever more wealth from foreign conquests, endless amounts of slaves flooding into Italy from the same foreign conquests, factions in the Senate engaging in what amounted to a cold civil war between bouts of hot civil war, the Roman Republican government teetering on the brink of military dictatorship, the movie presents all of these elements more clearly than any classroom lecture could.
At the time the film attracted attention because it, rightly, broke the Black List against Communists in Hollywood by listing Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter. The movie was loosely based on the novel of the same name by former Hollywood Communist Howard Fast. (Fast quit the Communist Party in disgust after the Soviets crushed the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.) The leftist politics are fairly easily to discern with Crassus as a proto-Fascist dictator, howlingly anachronistic, and Spartacus and his slave followers as the revolting proletariat. It is a tribute to the quality of the film that this ham-fisted attempt at agit-prop fails to destroy the film.
Here is a first rate fan made trailer of the film:
Of course it wouldn’t be a post on Spartacus the film without a clip of this immortal scene which has been endlessly parodied over the years, but which almost had me in tears when I first saw it as a boy.
Anyone who hasn’t seen this masterpiece really needs to watch it as soon as possible.
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
Crassus may not have aimed at one-man power, but he certainly was at the core of the unconstitutional conspiracy called the First Triumvirate, sharing out the state between two other men – Caesar and Pompey – both of whom definitely did. The least you can say for him is that republican legality was not the first of his considerations.
Quite right Fabio. Crassus was the money man, Pompey the military man and Caesar the brains. Pompey of course was a more conventional figure than Caesar. I think he viewed himself as a less bloody Sulla. The problem was that outside of the military sphere Pompey had fairly meagre political skills and no core beliefs. Caesar I suspect from early in his career dreamed of one man rule. Crassus wanted military glory. Spartacus whetted his apetite for it. Against the Parthians he learned the difference between battling against outnumbered slaves and fighting against horse archers that the legions were ill-equipped to fight. Caesar was lucky in both Pompey and Crassus. Without them I suspect that his enemies would have checkmated his career and possibly murdered him before he ever became consul.