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learning from their mistakes; Gracchus portentously refers to Caesar as a
pupil who will become a teacher. Yet young Caesar is appalled when
Gracchus engages with pirates to allow Spartacus to escape, thereby denying
Crassus his power grab, but Gracchus is realistic: “Politics is a practical
profession. If a criminal has what you want, you do business with him.”
Gracchus is the hardheaded pragmatist, Crassus is the power-hungry
idealist, and from their examples Caesar invents a Roman leader incorporating
the most advantageous aspects of both. As in Ben-Hur, the complex
Roman figures in Spartacus offer an analogue to the debates among
liberals and conservatives in American politics, and strike a cautionary
note about the ideologies of empire and its perils.
In contrast to the intricate and dangerous web of politics at Rome, a
culture debilitated from years of civil strife and poised on the edge of the
totalitarian model, the rebel slaves enjoy a straightforward solidarity depicted
in many optimistic shots of their encampment where together they
construct a collective utopian society. Spartacus is the only ancient epic
that “artistically, realistically, and sympathetically shows common people
in a time when being common people was much worse than it is today”
(Solomon, 2001a, 53). Yet the narrative challenge was to present a positive
spin on the historical fact that the slave rebellion failed and did nothing to
change the conditions of slavery in antiquity, which the film attempts to
do by contrasting the unity of the slave brotherhood with the corrupt and
unjust system of late Republican Rome (Elley, 112). When Spartacus finds
his fellow rebels celebrating their freedom by matching captive Roman
patricians in the arena, he rebukes them, like Moses scolding the reveling
Israelites: “What, are we becoming Romans? Have we learned nothing?”
While the filmmakers wanted to show the slaves’ many historical victories
over the Roman troops to send a hopeful message about the fight
against oppression, the final print of Spartacus contains very little of the
rebels’ successes, only their crushing defeat in the last battle, with the
opposite implication: those who dare to rise up against authority will
be annihilated (Cooper, 1996b). Thus the film resists any glorification of
violent rebellion, focusing instead on a hero who becomes inexplicably
more pacifist as the film continues. Critics note the historical substance of
the film was reshaped, in particular by removing scenes of the slaves’
military victories, under pressure from anxious studio executives: “During
and after the editing process, Universal Studios deliberately censored the
film’s explosive historical content in order to keep it within the confines
of the implicitly established mass media limits of acceptable political discourse
circa 1959” (Cooper, 1996b).
116 SPARTACUS (1960)