SLAVERY has been a subject of films since the early days of cinema. In 1913 the Italian Ernesto Pasquali celebrated the Roman gladiator Spartacus, and two years later D.W. Griffiths electrified American movie-goers and international directors with the Birth of a Nation, his film on Civil War and Reconstruction. From the beginning, films expressed a range of attitudes toward slaves similar to that found in the historical writing of the day. In Pasquali’s film, Spartacus was a heroic figure as he inspired his fellow slaves to revolt; likewise W.E.B. Du Bois, in a pioneering 1896 book on the African slave trade, found heroic qualities in the leaders of slave revolts in the American South in the eighteenth century. In Griffiths’s film, black people were laughing and happy when slaves, trusting and supportive of their masters; once freed, they were violent, deceptive, and sexually predatory. They appeared this way in history books written by Woodrow Wilson, who had been Griffiths’s major source for the film and later arranged a showing at the White House.1
After World War II, another parallel emerged between film and historical scholarship: a fresh interest in resistance to slavery by slaves themselves. In 1953 a new Spartacus was made in Italy, followed by two more Italian films on the same subject in the next decade.2 In 1954 Kenji Mizoguchi, one of Japan’s greatest directors, brought out Sancho the Bailiff, a beautiful film drawn from a medieval legend about a well-born brother and sister who are sold into slavery; through courage and sacrifice, they bring freedom to their fellows. “It has been retold by the people for centuries,” Mizoguchi says in his opening, “and is treasured today as one of the epic folk tales of our history.” As the next decade opened, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus began playing to huge audiences, bringing a comfortable margin of profit to Hollywood’s Universal Studios. A few years later it was the turn of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn! (Queimada), a narrative of anticolonial and antislavery revolts on the mythical Caribbean island Queimada. And there were still more slave films to come in the next decades.
In historical writing, studies of slave resistance, both ancient and modern, had been published before World War II, though they were usually limited to specialist readers. Then books with wider resonance began to appear about Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. Black Jacobins, published in 1938 by the Trinidadian polymath C.L.R. James, connected the 1791 revolution on Saint-Domingue/Haiti to events in France and the new United States. During the war, Herbert Aptheker published his Columbia University doctoral thesis, American Negro Slave Revolts, which considered various forms of resistance, from theft to rebellion. He argued that slave revolts and fear of their recurrence had consequences for policy, political thought, the abolition movement, and class alliance among the poor. In particular, he stressed the attitude of the slaves themselves:
This study has attempted to meet the need … of depicting in realistic terms the response of the American Negro to his bondage. The data herein presented make necessary the revision of the generally accepted notion that his response was one of passivity and docility … On the contrary … discontent and rebelliousness were not only exceedingly common, but, indeed, characteristic of American Negro slaves.3
Aptheker’s American Negroes bore little resemblance to the people serving the white folks in Gone with the Wind, a film that opened while he did his research.
After the war, studies on slavery multiplied, and, increasingly, they were comparative and interdisciplinary. In 1960, the same year as Kubrick’s Spartacus, M. I. Finley brought out a collection of essays, Slavery in Classical Antiquity, where he and other scholars revealed the vast extent of slave labor outside the small family farm or workshop: Greece and Rome could be called “slave societies.” In 1966 David Brion Davis’s Problem of Slavery in Western Culture appeared, a remarkable examination, over many centuries and countries, in which he asked why antislavery—the belief that slavery was an unacceptable human relation—took so long to emerge as a widely held view. In 1969, the same year as Pontecorvo’s Burn!, Laura Foner and Eugene Genovese published a volume of essays, Slavery in the New World, about the significance of slavery and racism in different economies of the Americas. A few years later, readers were absorbed in Genovese’s splendid study of the slaves themselves, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Here he portrayed the ways of life of African Americans on Southern plantations, including their reactions to masters: accommodation, self-assertion, running away, and revolt.4
This parallel in subject matter between film producers and historians was in part coincidental. A slave uprising could be just what was needed for a film industry that continued to flourish worldwide on epic and warfare. Similarly, slave revolts and other forms of slave resistance satisfied social historians who were turning their attention to the actions and initiative of the lower orders and the poor—whether slave, free, peasant, farmer, artisan, or factory worker. Working people were not mere victims of oppression, but also shapers of their world, and sometimes they resisted its conditions. Political events and moral questions after World War II turned filmmakers and historians alike to thinking about forms of resistance: the legacy of horror and massive death from the war, anticolonial movements throughout the world, Cold War issues, civil rights agitation in the United States, the apartheid regime in South Africa, and persistent or new forms of totalitarian government.
Irrespective of their present-day origins, what do films about slavery tell us of the past?5 The five films examined in this book (and listed only by their directors here) span almost forty years in their making: Kubrick’s Spartacus and Pontecorvo’s Burn! from the 1960s, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s The Last Supper from the 1970s, and Steven Spielberg’s Amistad and Jonathan Demme’s Beloved from the 1990s. Directly or indirectly, they have a bearing on several of the questions about slave resistance that historians have been asking over the decades.
At the time Spartacus was made, historians were debating whether a characteristic personality had been shaped by the conditions of slavery in different settings. Were slaves all docile? rebellious? or a bit of both?6 Soon attention shifted to a more significant matter—the character of slave revolts. Were they frequent and did they take place in distinctive localities? Who joined and led them? What set them off and what traditions or beliefs legitimated them? Revolts are not an everyday affair, after all, and leaders have to be convincing. What did revolts accomplish? Did they change anything for better or for worse in social relations and attitudes, or did life return to its usual train?
Finally, historical inquiry widened its view of slave resistance beyond uprisings to less violent forms of protest. Slaves might develop magic, religions, naming patterns, and songs of their own. They might defend their own family life, or steal time and goods from the master and mistress, before they ever decided to run away.
As exemplary stories, the five films considered here address some of these questions and not others, and the answers they offer to viewers vary in historical significance. But their pictures of how slavery was lived, resisted, fought, and remembered are sometimes insightful and novel, engaging spectators in fresh dialogue with the past.
In 1957 the actor and producer Kirk Douglas read Howard Fast’s novel Spartacus and decided it would make “a terrific film.”
Spartacus was a real man, but if you look him up in history books, you find only a short paragraph about him. Rome was ashamed; this man had almost destroyed them. They wanted to bury him. I was intrigued with the story of Spartacus the slave, dreaming of the death of slavery, driving into the armor of Rome the wedge that would eventually destroy her.
Douglas might have been awed by the extent of Rome’s empire, but, pondering its ruins, he saw “thousand of slaves carrying rocks, beaten, starved, crushed, dying. I identify with them. As it says in the Torah: ‘Slaves were we unto Egypt.’ I come from a race of slaves. That would have been my family, me.”7
The historical appeal of Spartacus to Howard Fast had been different. In prison in 1950 for contempt of Congress (he had refused to answer questions before the Un-American Activities Committee), he meditated on the slave as he “began more deeply than ever before to comprehend the full agony and hopelessness of the underclass.” He wondered, too, why Rosa Luxemburg had chosen the name “Spartacists” for her revolutionary party in Berlin in 1918. Once released, he read about ancient Rome in classical encyclopedias and old volumes on slavery so that his story “could at least approximate the truth.” It was a rapid education: he left Mill Point Federal Prison in September 1950 and completed the manuscript by June 1951.8 When no commercial publisher would risk taking on a book by Fast, he printed it himself. Spartacus was an immediate success.
If Fast wrote well as a novelist, he was a disaster as a scenarist. In early 1958 Kirk Douglas and his Bryna Productions turned to the talented Dalton Trumbo, who was also blacklisted because of his defiance of the Un-American Activities Committee but was writing screenplays under a pseudonym. Trumbo transformed a book organized as fragmentary reminiscences about Spartacus, told after his death, into a chronological narrative of Spartacus’s life. If he did any further historical reading as he wrote and rewrote his screenplay, it does not show in the finished product. But he surely had social, psychological, and moral concerns that he wanted to work through in the setting of the late Roman Republic. As Cleo Trumbo said of her husband’s writing, he spent his early years “revealing the ultimate pain of the victim” and his last years “exploring the ultimate evil of the oppressor.” Spartacus seems to stand right at that transition: immediately on its completion, he began his novel Night of the Aurochs, a first-person narrative of an unrepentant German Nazi who, among other actions, imprisoned a Jewish woman with whom he had had an affair.9
Trumbo’s moral universe was not wholly polarized: “He recognized evil in everyone, including himself.” Perhaps oppressors could change. He had already written a film script about the Spanish conquest of Mexico in which Cortés wondered on his deathbed if he had not done wrong. During the making of Spartacus, Trumbo discussed moral questions with the actors playing Batiatus, the owner of the gladiator school, and the Roman senator Gracchus, both opponents of Spartacus who exhibit some humanity after the defeat of the slave rebels.10
Kirk Douglas assembled an impressive cast to perform along with him as Spartacus, all of them with experience in historical films. Laurence Olivier was to play Crassus, the wealthy patrician who would ultimately command the victorious legions against the slave army. Charles Laughton played Gracchus, a fictional figure in both the novel and the film: as Crassus’s political opponent in the Senate, he was rich, corrupt, and an eloquent defender of the Roman plebs. Peter Ustinov was cast as Batiatus, proud of the achievements of his gladiator training school, always alert to money making, ironically obsequious to his social betters. Jean Simmons was brought in to portray Spartacus’s loyal companion and lover, Varinia, while Tony Curtis was given the role of a young slave poet, Antoninus, a “singer of songs” and performer of magic tricks. By all accounts, Olivier, Laughton, and Ustinov were arguing about and changing their lines throughout the shooting. As Ustinov described it, “I rewrote all the scenes I had with Laughton, we rehearsed at his home or mine … The next day we arranged the studio furniture to conform to what we had engineered. “11
Spartacus is an excellent example of the multiple small decisions and actions that shape a film. Were any of these decisions inspired by an explicit historical concern—not merely “I don’t want to say this line” but rather “I don’t believe a Roman slave would say such a line”? Douglas said in reminiscence, “I wanted everything about Spartacus to be special and authentic.” Perhaps this criterion applied to his thoughts about performance as well as to clothing, coiffures, and props. He had even hoped to suggest the gulf between slaves and masters by having the former have American accents and the latter British accents, but this notion was thwarted when the English Jean Simmons was cast as Varinia.12
These stars were directed by a young man named Stanley Kubrick, who turned thirty-one in the course of the filming. Two years earlier he had made an outstanding black-and-white film about World War I, Paths of Glory, produced by Kirk Douglas’s firm and with Douglas in the leading role. When the director initially hired for Spartacus did not work out after a week of shooting, Douglas and Universal Studios summoned Kubrick to take over. For a year in California and, for the battle scenes, in Spain, Kubrick directed the shooting and editing of a multimillion-dollar film whose story had come to him from elsewhere. He regretted doing a film, he said later, “over which [he] did not have complete control” and about whose plot he had reservations.13 Still, Kubrick’s characteristic style and talents are expressed in the visual achievement of the film. They are important sources of its historical value.
To set a film in the past (or in the future) had intrinsic advantages for Kubrick. “The basic purpose of a film,” he thought, was “illumination … showing the viewer something he can’t see any other way.” This goal could best be achieved by leaving one’s own backyard. A film taking place in another time also “removes the environmental blinkers … and gives … a deeper and more objective perspective.” Several years after making Spartacus, Kubrick decided to make a film about Napoleon. It would speak both to the fascination of the past—to the whole career of this man who had “molded the destiny of [his] time”—and to present-day concerns about power, social revolution, and war. But it had to be accurate, “to get the feeling of what it was like to be with Napoleon,” “to capture the reality [of battle] on film.” To achieve this authenticity, Kubrick said he had gone through hundreds of books in English and French, arranged for consultation with a historian at Oxford, and put twenty people to work making designs from paintings and written descriptions of weapons, dress, and the like. Unfortunately, the film never found a producer.14
Some such beliefs and practices must have informed Kubrick’s earlier period as director of Spartacus. We know he sent off one of his own scriptwriters to Appian’s Roman History for detail on the final battle between Spartacus’s slaves and Crassus’s legions. He also urged the composer Alex North to learn what he could about Roman music; failing that—and, given the state of knowledge about Roman music at that date, failure was certain—he should seek inspiration from Prokofiev’s score for Alexander Nevsky.15 Kubrick may have had the most genuinely historical sensibility of any of the shapers of Spartacus.
What is the film story of Spartacus? Spartacus opens with an overture of North’s music, an operatic effect, and introduces its subject with an overvoice saying, “In the last century before the birth of the new faith called Christianity … the Roman republic stood at the very center of the civilized world … Yet even at the zenith of her pride and power, the republic lay fatally stricken with a disease called human slavery.” Spartacus, a slave from Thracia, is seen toiling miserably in the mines of Libya, where he is condemned to die for attacking a cruel overseer. Instead, he is purchased by Lentulus Batiatus, who seeks spirited slaves for his gladiator school.
Taken to the school in Capua, Spartacus is trained along with other vigorous slaves from Gaul, Africa, and elsewhere, and given a woman for company, Varinia, a slave from Britannia. Crassus visits the school with his sister and another patrician couple, and the women request two private combats to the death. Spartacus is paired with the African, Draba. Spartacus has previously told another gladiator, “I’d fight if I have to … I’d kill. I’d try to stay alive,” and now he fights hard. Draba wins the combat, but instead of finishing off Spartacus, he lunges with his trident at Crassus and his party. Crassus slices his neck, and Batiatus and his arrogant trainer Marcellus have Draba’s body hung upside down in the slaves’ quarters.
The following day at their noonday meal, the slaves revolt. They kill Marcellus and the guards, and, while Batiatus escapes, break out of the school grounds in joy and release.
For the next part of the film, the camera alternates between two different stories. One is the movement of Spartacus’s people down the Italian peninsula, their numbers swollen by thousands of slaves from the great estates and town houses—men, women, and children—who join them as they march. Among them is the young poet Antoninus, Crassus’s personal slave, who now becomes part of Spartacus’s circle. One early battle pits Spartacus’s followers against the Roman civic troops sent to put down the revolt. Underestimating the skill and daring of “mere slaves,” the troops are slaughtered in a night ambush.
On the whole, the slaves live with good community spirit, improvising what they need, training men and women for battle, and amassing treasure donated or seized along the way. Spartacus arranges with an agent of the Cilician pirates off the coast of southern Italy to pay for 500 boats to transport all the slaves back to their homes. Meanwhile, Spartacus and Varinia deepen their love, and Varinia tells Spartacus she is pregnant.
The other story is set in Rome in the Senate, where the senators hear the increasingly shocking reports of the slaves’ military successes, one of them against Julius Caesar, and their burning of estates. Gracchus and Crassus both want the revolt put down, but they maneuver against each other for power in the Senate and in the baths: the popular faction against the patrician. After Crassus wins out, he is assigned supreme command of all the legions to be used against the slaves. He is also named first consul of Rome.
Meanwhile, the mass of runaway slaves reaches the Mediterranean, only to have Spartacus discover that the Cilicians have been bribed by Crassus and that no boats are available. Turning back toward Rome, they meet the enormous army led by Crassus, with support coming in from the troops of Pompey and Lucullus. Now the slaves are defeated. Crassus seeks Spartacus among the corpses and the prisoners, but fails to find him. Batiatus decides not to help him, and the surviving male slaves all shout “I am Spartacus.” Crassus takes Varinia and her new-born son back to his estate as slaves. He orders the crucifixion of all the 6000 male prisoners along the Appian Way to Rome, leaving two suspicious ones—Antoninus and Spartacus, whom he does not recognize—to the very last.
The film then moves to Rome, where Crassus tries in vain to persuade his slave Varinia to love him. In a night scene he sets Antoninus and Spartacus—whose identity he now realizes—against each other in a last combat. Spartacus kills Antoninus rather than let him suffer the agony of crucifixion. At the same time, Gracchus has paid Batiatus to get Varinia and her son from Crassus’s house. Savoring his revenge against Crassus, Gracchus sends them on their way to Gaul with letters of manumission and safeguard. As Batiatus takes Varinia from Rome, she sees Spartacus in his last agony on the cross. She shows him his son and tells him the boy is free, just before Spartacus dies.
Though slaves are the main interest in this book, how is political life among the senators represented in Spartacus? The writings of Cicero, Julius Caesar, Sallust, and later historians record that the senators had much on their minds in the years before and after 73–71 BCE. During the slave revolt itself, a civil war between Roman leaders and armies in Spain was just coming to an end; troops had to be sent to Asia Minor against Mithridates, who was challenging Roman control in the East, and against his allies, the Cretan pirates; and factional struggles in the Senate were intense. The general features of that political culture are suggested in the film: the importance of high birth, riches, and family alliance to a role in the Senate; the existence of cliques or parties (called “friendship” by those who formed them and “faction” by their enemies); the bestowal of bribes (called “gifts” by those who gave them); and the use of personal armies, loyal to the generals who recruited and rewarded them, for political advancement. Conflict in the late republic was organized around a “popular” party and a party of the “best” or the “aristocrats,” and the danger of tyranny was often proclaimed in political speeches. We see or hear these factions in a general way in the film.16
The trouble with Spartacus is that it assigns these properties of political life too rigorously to one side or the other. It personifies them misleadingly through leaders who were not even present. The great days of the Gracchi brothers as tribunes of the people, with their actions for agrarian reform, had ended with the death of the younger Gracchus back in 121. There was no Gracchus consul in Spartacus’s time. Howard Fast, and later Dalton Trumbo, simply chose a name that viewers might recognize in the hope that it would give the “popular” party the luster of the earlier period. Also wholly invented for the film was the military role of Julius Caesar; at least Caesar was alive during the events, for he had the office of tribune of the soldiers in 71 BCE. In the film, only Gracchus is accused publicly of corruption; in fact, gifts and bribes were passed by all the factions, as everyone knew. The aristocratic Crassus is accused of seeking dictatorship; in fact, intrigue to take control of the state was embarked on by both parties, and each reproached the other, with good reason, for seeking tyranny.17 What can be said for the film is that the contrived characters are well acted: Laughton’s “warm, fleshy integrity” built the person of the sensuous, popular Gracchus; Olivier’s “knifelike … linear performance” created a “glacial patrician,” a Crassus full of ambition.18
Although scholars know a lot about slavery in Rome, they have little information about the revolt led by Spartacus from 73 to 71 BCE. The slave population of Italy had increased in the second century BCE, fed mostly by prisoners of war or piracy, and to some extent by condemned criminals and the children of slave women.19 Roman slavery was primarily agricultural. In the central part of the peninsula the great farms, or latifundia, were worked mostly by slaves, while the female slaves did the household tasks. The southernmost part of the peninsula and Sicily were cattle-raising country, and here the male slaves were herders. As they roamed the land with their animals, they often had to live off free peasants and earned a reputation as bandits. Where there were mines, as in the silver mines of Roman Spain, thousands of men worked in chains in appalling conditions. Town slaves, in contrast, lived in their masters’ houses, and might be involved in trade and crafts.
Of this extensive world of labor, the film Spartacus depicts two extremes—miners and gladiators—and then only by giving Spartacus an alternative past. He began, according to the historical sources we have, not as a slave’s son working in the mines but as a free Thracian fighting as a Roman soldier. After he was taken prisoner, he was sold by his captives to be a gladiator.20 If this information is true, it provides background for his later military success.
The film also shows us the omnipresent world of domestic slavery, especially the sexual uses of slaves. Batiatus’s guards leeringly spy on the gladiators’ relations with the women sent to their cells. Batiatus’s guest casually lifts Varinia’s skirt for a look as she passes, and teases his sister about her fondness for her tall litter-bearers. Gracchus revels affectionately in his access to all his house slaves. Crassus tries to entice both Varinia and his man-servant Antoninus (the latter scene was cut from the American version), and by Roman custom he would have had the right simply to make them do his bidding. In Roman thought about slavery, writes the classicist Keith Bradley, “it is taken without question that slaves can and do become objects of sexual gratification for both the men and women who own them.”21
Spartacus extends the erotic desire into the realm of violence. The patrician women who select Spartacus and Draba for combat are aroused by the event. The killing of Spartacus and the possession of Varinia become equivalent triumphs for Crassus. Such a representation fits with the interest of both Trumbo and Kubrick in the eroticism of power, and sexual excitement may well have been one of the elements in the Roman attachment to blood sports. Later, during the imperial period, both literature and gossip refer to patrician women who were attracted by gladiators.
But gladiator games between humans had other functions as well.22 They were initially a funeral rite celebrated publicly by the great families of Rome. As such, they draw from the tradition of agonistic games to pacify the gods at the time of death and to glorify the memory of the deceased—an extreme form of lavish display. By the second century BCE, gladiator training schools had sprung up centered at Capua. In Spartacus’s day, prominent families demonstrated their power, as well as their desire to make a gift (munus) to the Roman plebs, by sponsoring the games at funerals and other public events. These occasions were an important step in political advancement: only a few years after Spartacus’s revolt, Caesar sponsored a magnificent show of 320 pairs, fighting to commemorate his father’s death years before.23
The gladiators themselves in this period were slaves and criminals of low birth whose offense was not serious enough to warrant immediate execution. (Some free men became gladiators during the late republic, and under the empire a few women entered the arena.) They were, as the film portrays, extensively trained with distinctive weapons and specially clad for combat. The winning gladiators were both looked down upon as dishonorable slaves and admired. They were crowned at victory, and their names and scores were scratched on the walls at Pompeii and elsewhere.24
This cluster of attitudes and ambivalences is missing from Spartacus, partly because the film shows no formal public games (a cliché, to be sure, in the usual epic film on Rome) but only private ones. Instead, the film invites viewers to imagine the gladiator’s predicament, as he is forced to fight and kill a person against whom he has no grievance and whom he might even like. “Gladiators don’t make friends,” Draba says the first day Spartacus arrives, but the African’s example in the arena teaches Spartacus and the other gladiators of the possibility of brotherhood. Later, Spartacus puts a stop to a vindictive combat that his somewhat drunken fellows have organized between two slave owners seized along the march: “I swore that if I ever got out of [the gladiator school], I’d die before I’d watch two men fight to the death again … What are we becoming? Romans?”
Evidence from the Roman world supports the film’s identification of the gladiator’s predicament, but not all its proposed solutions. On the one hand, gladiators did sometimes work themselves up to a killing mood by shouting abuse at each other before the match, and inscriptions bear witness to long-term feuds between them and calls for vengeance. But friendships also sprang up among them, with gladiators choosing to spare a victim at the moment of choice in hopes that they would be spared in the same circumstances. (And, indeed, sponsors of combats sometimes let this happen.) They also paid for each other’s tombs and memorial inscriptions.25 Thus, Draba’s initial advice not to have friends and his subsequent change of heart in the film are both plausible.
On the other hand, a revulsion against blood sports was unusual in the Romanized world of Spartacus’s day, except among small communities such as the Jews of Rome. Could the historical Spartacus have had such views? The combat of the slave owners, though perhaps possible, is an invented episode in the film and can serve only to pose a question about Spartacus and his fellows. The real Spartacus had no fundamental objection to excessive vindictive bloodshed. When the gladiator Crixus, Spartacus’s second in command, was killed in battle, Appian reports that “[Spartacus] sacrificed three hundred Roman prisoners of war in honour of Crixus.”26
Whatever the precise triggering events, the gladiators at Batiatus’s school were determined to get away. Plutarch says that Batiatus was “unjust,” that two hundred gladiators planned an escape, and that, although their plot was uncovered, more than seventy managed to get out, armed with kitchen axes and skewers. Then, instead of dispersing in the countryside and trying to live as free men, as most runaway slaves would do, the gladiators stayed together, chose Spartacus as their leader along with two others, seized arms, and set up camp on Mount Vesuvius.27 How did these men legitimate their actions to themselves? And what made them believe in Spartacus as their leader?
The film answers the first of these questions in universalistic terms. In his final speech to the men and women in his camp, Spartacus simply says:
I’d rather be here a free man among brothers, facing a long march and a hard fight, than to be the richest citizen of Rome, fat with food he didn’t work for and surrounded by slaves … As long as we live, we must stay true to ourselves. I do know that we’re brothers, and I know that we’re free.
He does not use glaringly anachronistic phrases of the eighteenth century—the natural rights language of the Enlightenment—but neither does he counter the justifications of slavery so widely held in the first century BCE—the belief in the natural inferiority of “barbarian” peoples compared with Greeks and Romans. The latter view was opposed by a few ancient voices, who said no one was born a slave by nature.28 Trumbo may have wanted no phrases that would impede the spectators of his own day from identifying with Spartacus’s struggle and from seeing its continuing resonance for America and the world in the late 1950s. Kubrick, never a fan of extensive dialogue when it was not necessary, may have wanted to keep things as simple as possible: a good shot of companionate behavior among the masses of disparate slaves could undermine the claims about “barbarians” just as well. Whatever the case, Spartacus’s language ends up thin in its timelessness.
Similarly with Spartacus’s charisma, as treated in the film. He is shown as a splendid fighter, brave, straight-spoken, encouraging, and handsome. Spartacus may well have had these qualities—Plutarch says of him, “he not only possessed great courage and bodily strength, but was more intelligent and nobler than his fate as a slave would allow”29—but they are also general and familiar traits, with no surprise or specificity from the late Roman Republic.
The historical record offers interesting possibilities here. Though slave revolts were not a frequent event over the many centuries of Roman slavery, there had been important uprisings in the century before Spartacus.30 Around 185 BCE and after, a wave of religious movements dedicated to the god Bacchus swept through parts of Italy, permitting slave and free to worship together without constraint. These gatherings were associated with “conspiracies” of slave herdsmen in the south, who took to the roads in acts of “banditry.” Then in 137—35 and 104—2, major slave rebellions occurred on the island of Sicily. In both cases the leaders were wonder-workers who received messages from the gods and foretold the future. In the first revolt, the Syrian slave Eunus was told by a Syrian goddess that he would be king and that she sanctioned the revolt; he and his rebel slaves set up a kingdom of “Syrians” on Sicily. Of the two leaders of the second slave uprising, Salvius was a diviner who had played ecstatic flute music at women’s religious festivals, while the Cilician Athenion, an estate manager for his owners, foretold the future from the stars. Both were chosen “kings” by assemblies of slaves in their region.
Some memory of these events was surely passed on among slave populations in Italy, including those in Capua, where there had been a brief uprising during the Second Slave War. Traditions of past revolts could provide legitimation for further slave uprisings in Spartacus’s time and also remind people of the signs for recognizing a great leader. Sure enough, in one of the scraps of evidence about Spartacus from Plutarch, we hear a story about the mysterious events that transpired when he was brought to Rome to be sold:
A snake appeared and wound itself round his face as he was asleep, and his wife, who came from the same tribe as Spartacus and was a prophetess and initiated into the ecstatic cult of Dionysus, stated that it signified that a great and fearful power would accompany him to a lucky conclusion. This woman was living with him at the time [of the revolt of the gladiators] and ran away with him.31
Spartacus had the divine sanction enjoyed by earlier leaders of slave resistance, here provided by his Thracian wife.
Religious sacrifice was also carried on during the slave campaigns by the women. The model for rulership among Spartacus and his followers was not kingly, as in Sicily, but republican: Spartacus took over the horse and the fasces (bundle of rods symbolizing the authority of the Roman Senate) of a defeated Roman commander, and he debated strategy with Crixus and one other leading gladiator. As for Spartacus’s goals, at one moment he definitely tried to lead the slaves out of Italy so they could return to their places of birth in Thrace, Gaul, Germany, and elsewhere (though by the northern route over the Alps, not by the Mediterranean, as in the film), but at another he seems to have sought a place to settle within Italy to establish a polity, as the Sicilian rebels had tried to do decades before.32
Spartacus the film says nothing of past slave revolts inspiring the gladiators, but gives promise only of the hopes and fears that the name of Spartacus will call forth in the future. As for religion, it is almost ignored among the slaves and is given short shrift among the senators, who in fact used ceremony and divination extensively in political life.33 “I imagine a god of slaves,” Spartacus says once to Varinia, “and I pray … for a son who will be born free.” Here again the filmmakers seem to have wanted a more “universal” and presumably more accessible Spartacus. But in omitting the snake coiled around his head and the visionary prophetess at his side, they let a more memorable and more powerful Spartacus slip away.
In weighing Spartacus next to the historical record, which has its own uncertainties, I have given a mixed report—some successes, some missed opportunities, some failures. But in four ways Spartacus has been outstanding in depicting important social processes and critical experiences of the past. They stem from myriad acts of research, interpretation, and imagination by many people involved in the film, but are finally put together by Kubrick’s camera and editing.
The first is the portrayal of the gap between high and low, between free and slave. It is seen in differences in gait, movement, and posture. It is seen in the differences in color: the bordered white togas of the senators in their severe white chamber contrast with the single-hued tunics, brown wool cloaks, and rough furs of the slaves in Spartacus’s army as they walk through leafy or snowy landscapes. It is seen in differences in oratory before the last battle, as Kubrick cuts rapidly between Crassus making grand promises to his legions and the citizens of Rome, and Spartacus addressing his people with chastened realism and firm belief in their cause, if not in their victory.
That divisive social space is shown also through the literal movement of Kubrick’s camera from high to low, a technique he had used to powerful effect in Paths of Glory, where the action shifted from the general’s chateau on a hill to the men below in the trenches.34 In the private combat ordered by Crassus, he and his elegant guests are comfortably ensconced well above the small arena in which Spartacus and Draba fight (see this page). When Draba suddenly attacks the Romans, the greatest surprise is his jump upward—a difficult leap that connects the two worlds through violence.
A second achievement of Spartacus is the depiction of the gladiator school. The harsh trainer, Marcellus—himself once a gladiator and now free—summons the men with a whistle and puts them through their terrible paces in a brilliantly choreographed movement, against a background of harsh and choppy brass and percussion music. To show the men where to aim, to kill fast or slowly, or to maim, the trainer paints different colors on Spartacus’s chest and body. Meanwhile, Spartacus cranes his neck to try to get a look at Varinia. This whole sequence, including the conversations about friendship and killing, summons the modern spectator to imagine the pain and tension of the gladiator slave.
Kubrick dwelt on the terrors and fascination of violence in several of his films, from sadism to large battles. A third achievement of Spartacus is the representation of the final battle. Spartacus and his thousands of men and women stand with their weapons on a hill and watch Crassus’s legions fall into place over another hill across the valley. We look at the legions both close up, as Crassus watches his men, and especially from a distance, through the eyes of Spartacus and his waiting fighters. By an astonishing wide-angle shot, the legions are seen filing over the hill and forming bands, moving forward like a giant symmetrical insect, one, then another, then another and more. The camera takes its time. Here, before Spartacus’s eyes, is Rome’s power in an unending supply of ordered men, returning and returning no matter how many battles the slaves have won.
The battle itself begins dramatically as the legions move like a rolling, foaming wave and the slave army surprises them with fire weapons—recreated by Kubrick from Appian’s description. Then it becomes a chaos of fighting and close combat, which Kubrick cuts quickly to move to a silent denouement with the dead bodies of slaves spread over a vast field. Several years later, in talking of his plans for Napoleon, Kubrick said that he wanted to “communicate the essence of the battles to the viewer,” to show their “organizational beauty … their sordid reality … and their human consequences.”35 He accomplished some of these ambitions earlier in Spartacus.
The final historical achievement of the film may seem unlikely, for it grows out of the Hollywood-style romantic relation between Spartacus and Varinia and the arrival of their son. Spartacus’s actual wife was said to be a Thracian prophetess, as we have seen. She was probably quite different from the steadfast and tender Varinia of the film, whose idyllic interludes with Spartacus take place several times during the revolt. Their conversations have the same “timeless” ring already noted in Spartacus’s speeches. Whether Spartacus actually had a son, no one knows. He was reported to have died in battle, however, not to have been among the 6000 men crucified along the Appian Way, as he is in the film.
Where lies the historical value in scenes that seem concocted only to satisfy a twentieth-century sensibility? Spartacus’s son, shown to him by Varinia just before he dies on the cross, is usually interpreted as a symbol of hope for the future and for resistance in the wake of the failed uprising. Yet, somewhat by accident, the filmmakers hit on something deeply important to the slaves themselves in their own lifetime.
By Roman law, slaves had no right to marry, and a slave woman’s children belonged to her master, not to her. In fact, slaves did set up unions of their own called contubernia and cared for their children, who they hoped would take care of them when they were old and commemorate them when they died. The masters often had other plans, however; for if they tolerated and sometimes encouraged slaves’ “marriages” for the sake of the labor it would bring, they also separated husband from wife and mother from child by sale. These family ties, when they could be maintained, meant much to the slaves, as can be seen in commemorative inscriptions and in the efforts of freed persons to arrange for the manumission of enslaved relatives.36
In the film, then, the presence of children snuggling close to their parents at Spartacus’s camp is not a mere sentimental touch but the representation of a form of slave resistance. Both Spartacus and Varinia are said in the film to have been sold when they were thirteen. The survival of Spartacus’s son in his mother’s arms and the announcement that he is free—the last sight that Spartacus sees and the last words he hears in the film—are victories that would have been recognized by slaves in his own day.
Interestingly enough, Kubrick’s two children were born during the making of Spartacus. Kubrick, who rarely expressed his feelings and had little use for happy endings, said after the birth of his second daughter in 1960: “When you get right down to it, the family is the most primitive and visceral and vital unit in our society. You may stand outside your wife’s hospital room during childbirth uttering, ‘My God, what a responsibility! … What am I doing here?’ and then you go in and look down at the face of your child and—zap!—that ancient programming takes over and your response is one of wonder and joy and pride.”37