{"id":1630,"date":"2013-04-17T18:03:38","date_gmt":"2013-04-17T13:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/?p=1630"},"modified":"2022-04-27T22:23:50","modified_gmt":"2022-04-28T02:23:50","slug":"i-blog-the-finale-of-starzs-spartacus-for-the-wall-street-journal-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/i-blog-the-finale-of-starzs-spartacus-for-the-wall-street-journal-online\/","title":{"rendered":"I Blog the Finale of Starz’s “Spartacus” for the Wall Street Journal Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did \u2018Spartacus\u2019 Get the Legend Right?<\/p>\n

Starz\u2019s \u201cSpartacus\u201d series has reached its moving end. Although it took liberties with the historical facts, the finale was loyal to Spartacus\u2019s legend and its great theme \u2013 freedom. Spartacus meets his fate but he lives on as one of history\u2019s most famous slaves and one of its greatest freedom fighters.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n
\n

Or so the myth says. The Romans remembered Spartacus differently, as a kind of terrorist. Objectively, the historical Spartacus fought for freedom \u2013 his own. He probably did not object to slavery as an institution. Very, very few people did in the ancient world. Instead, he probably complained only about his own unjust enslavement and that of his followers. He didn\u2019t try to free all slaves in Italy but only those who could fight for him. But his magnificent and doomed struggle against Roman oppression has made him a symbol of a higher cause.<\/p>\n

A long and varied list of men and women has admired Spartacus in modern times. It ranges from Voltaire to Marx and Lenin to Ronald Reagan. Voltaire and other figures of the French Enlightenment saw Spartacus as a symbol of the struggle against slavery and tyranny. Marx and Lenin conceived of Spartacus as a proto-communist. Ever since, Spartacus has been a hero of the left, giving his name both to revolutionary movements and sports clubs, but that didn\u2019t stop President Reagan from invoking him as a freedom fighter from a completely different political perspective.<\/p>\n

Spartacus is a perennial favorite of writers and composers as well as of entertainers. He has been the subject of operas and of Khachaturian\u2019s Lenin-Prize winning ballet. Novels about Spartacus by Arthur Koestler and Howard Fast, among others, enjoyed great success in the twentieth century, while a nineteenth-century novel by Raffaelo Giovagnoli won the praise of Garibaldi, the hero of Italian unification.<\/p>\n

[Spoiler alert!]<\/p>\n

The finale of Starz\u2019s \u201cSpartacus\u201d is more accurate historically than Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 1960 Hollywood movie, which incorrectly has Spartacus die on the cross. Yet both the television series and the film share the belief that the myth of Spartacus is greater than the historical facts. It pains this historian to say so, but they have a point. As a disillusioned newspaperman says in the Hollywood western, John Ford\u2019s \u201cThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valance\u201d (1962), \u201cWhen the legend becomes fact, print the legend.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry Strauss is Professor of History and Classics at Cornell and author of\u00a0<\/em>\u201cThe Spartacus War<\/a>\u201c(2009).<\/em><\/p>\n

Join our live chat with \u201cSpartacus\u201d star Liam McIntyre now!<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

[Note: The headline of this article has been modified.]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n


\nRead the full article – Did “Spartacus” Get the Legend Right?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"excerpt","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1631,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","castos_file_data":"","podmotor_file_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[392],"tags":[111,260,114,107,108,113,112],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}