(Which, i can’t stress this enough, wasn’t subtle.
After much effort and trouble and panic on the Roman side of things, Spartacus’ army was finally defeated in 71 BC and the survivors were crucified and left to die (note that crucifixion was a common - and humiliating - torture method, so there’s no Christian subtext in this at all). As for Spartacus himself and what his plans were, unfortunately that remains unclear. So anyway Spartacus is about the most significant slave revolt in the ancient world (that we know of), and it’s a story that always fascinates people because a) all the what ifs, b) slavery is awful and c) a lot of guys we know were around at the time, including Caesar, Cicero and Crassus. (Which is mostly Kirk Douglas’ fault, by the way, because he got really zealoty and weird over how Christian the whole thing should be and people kept telling him ‘You do know this is set a full century before Jesus was even born, right?’ to absolutely no avail.)
Gay sex slave revolt tumblr movie#
In the case of Spartacus, that’s a great movie (it’s Kubrick, ffs) and I’d rec the hell out of it, but from a historical perspective - academically speaking, I think one might define it as ‘one giant sucky mess’. Sorry for that.īasically what happens is: one big problem we have with Hollywood vs Classics is that people want movies to be about Christianity and Christian values, which eliminates about 99% of Antiquity and leads to a huge misunderstanding of the other 1%.
Hi and thank you! And don’t worry - not a dummy, it’s a complex subject! I had the great luck of following a semester on ‘cinema and the ancient world’ back in uni, so I have vivid memories of this Spartacus thing but not many online sources.