Projecting the Past

Ancient Rome, Cinema and History

Maria Wyke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317796060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

Brought vividly to life on screen, the myth of ancient Rome resonates through modern popular culture. Projecting the Past examines how the cinematic traditions of Hollywood and Italy have resurrected ancient Rome to address the concerns of the present. The book engages contemporary debates about the nature of the classical tradition, definitions of history, and the place of the past in historical film.

3

Spartacus: Testing the Strength of the Body Politic

A Hero of Liberty

In 1914, George Kleine distributed throughout the United States an Italian film that portrayed the gladiator Spartacus leading a rebellion against the armies of Rome. The promotional material produced to market Spartaco boasted of the ethical and aesthetic value of the historical film. Above a letter of endorsement from a teacher at Ohio University, who described his pupils’ rapturous reception of the film, Kleine’s publicity declares:

The eyes of the greatest men in history have been fixed on the splendid character of this hero of liberty who was the first to dare cry out against the tyrannical force of Rome, the Mistress of the World. Pictures and statues represent the valiant gladiator in the historical moments of his adventurous life, always in the struggle against the power of tyrants and in favor of the weak and oppressed. Such a source has inspired the finest works of art; the French theatre employed the genius of two writers in two powerful tragedies in which the gigantic hero is represented in his dream of love and freedom. Taking our inspiration from the sublime verses of Bernard Joseph Sauria [sic] and of M. H. Marget, we have constructed the plot of this kinematographic tragedy which abounds in profoundly emotional situations, and which is splendidly loyal to the reconstruction of Roman grandeur. We are sure that we have composed a true work of art and we do not hesitate to affirm that “SPARTACUS” is one of the most splendid jewels of the screen.

In the ancient tradition that concerns the slave insurrection led by the Thracian gladiator Spartacus, however, little trace survives of the rebels’ aims and ambitions. The sources for the slave revolt that lasted over two years from 73 B.C. to 71 B.C. and appeared at one point even to threaten the safety of the city of Rome are relatively late and do not give voice to the servile perspective.¹ The summary of the rebellion which appears (some one hundred years after the event) in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives is largely incidental to a biography of the Roman victor Marcus Licinius Crassus and is incorporated into a narrative that, through the representation of the Roman general’s career, seeks to demonstrate to Plutarch’s readers the dangers of political ambition. Reference to the revolt in the survey of Roman history provided by Florus in the second century A.D. is even briefer and more partisan, designed to illustrate the ignominy that for Romans was attendant on a war against gladiators:

One can tolerate, indeed, even the disgrace of a war against slaves; for although, by force of circumstances, they are liable to any kind of treatment, yet they form as it were a class (though an inferior class) of human beings and can be admitted to the blessings of liberty which we enjoy. But I know not what name to give to the war which was stirred up at the instigation of Spartacus; for the common soldiers being slaves and their leaders being gladiators—the former men of the humblest, the latter men of the worse, class— added insult to the injury which they inflicted upon Rome.²

For the ancient epitomist Florus, the insurrection led by Spartacus is not a glorious “struggle against the power of tyrants” but draws Rome into a disgraceful “war against slaves”; liberty is a blessed condition to be bestowed by the Roman elite not seized upon by its inferiors; and Spartacus himself is not a “splendid character” but a Thracian mercenary, a deserter, a highwayman, and finally, and worst of all, a vengeful gladiator.

Little material is available from antiquity on the slave war led by Spartacus because the Roman elite, as the producers or consumers of ancient historiography, did not find slave rebellion a worthy subject for historical discourse. Furthermore, although many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians of the rebellion found in Spartacus a champion of the oppressed in Roman society, a revolutionary hero of the class struggle, several more recent analyses of the ancient evidence have concluded that Spartacus was not a revolutionary, that he did not proffer systematic opposition to the power and the rule of Rome nor plan to remodel Roman society, but probably had as his limited design the restoration of the largely foreign slaves to their respective homelands.³ The contrast between the fragmentary ancient sources on Spartacus and the narrative image of the Italian film with which Kleine sought to attract his American audience could not be sharper.

The tradition on which George Kleine drew to launch an Italian film about Spartacus on the American market stems from the mid-eighteenth century, when Spartacus began to be elevated in Western European literature, historiography, political rhetoric, and visual art into an idealized champion of both the oppressed and the enslaved.⁴ From this period, representations of the ancient slave rebellion and the gladiator Spartacus were profoundly driven by the political concerns of the present. If, according to Walter Benjamin, all history is informed by “the presence of the now,” it was the appropriation of Roman republican history by the French Revolution which Benjamin cites as a prime example of history’s presentist rhetorical strategies. As Benjamin observes, “the French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate,” and Paris became steeped in the political rhetoric and iconography of republican Rome.⁵ The eagles which had adorned the standards of the Roman legions were introduced as the regimental insignia of the French army and the Roman fasces—symbol of the authority of the republican magistrates—were painted on the walls of the revolutionary government’s seat of power when the National Assembly moved to the Tuilleries in 1793. The revolutionary cult of republican antiquity found popular expression in the renaming of streets, towns, and individuals, and in the diffuse display of the “liberty cap”—modeled on that worn in ancient Rome by liberated slaves.⁶

The French theater of the late eighteenth century, to which George Kleine’s promotional material draws attention as a source for the Italian cinematic representation of Spartacus, was radicalized by the French Revolution. Plays concerning figures from the period of the Roman republic were performed and consumed as commentaries on current political events. Thus, when Voltaire’s tragedy Brutus was revived in 1790, the audience at its first performance hailed Mirabeau, one of the early moderate constitutionalists of the revolution, as the “Brutus of France.”⁷ Similarly, Bernard Joseph Saurin’s tragedy Spartacus, to which the American film distributor refers, although first performed in 1760, was revived in the libertarian atmosphere of Paris in 1792. When Kleine treats the cinematic Spartacus as politically exemplary for opposition to tyranny and support of the oppressed, he echoes the sentiments of the French dramatist Saurin. In an early nineteenth-century edition of his plays, Saurin justifies giving a voice to the Thracian gladiator on the grounds that until now historians and poets have done much harm to the human race by representing too often the lives of conquerors and the ambitious. He continues:

How many young princes, seduced by the glamour of a false heroism, have caused desolation and havoc in order to march in the footsteps of Alexander or Caesar? … [Instead, historians and poets] should make them know true glory and make them nobly ambitious for the good of men.⁸

The profoundly presentist interest in the history of the slave rebellion led by Spartacus received further impetus from the turn of the nineteenth century, at a time when the slave rebellion led by Toussaint l’Ouverture in the French colony of St. Domingue was the first to match in scale the ancient revolt, and when slavery and its possible abolition became a burning political and social issue in Britain, America, and France.⁹ Between 1807 and 1820, the slave trade was prohibited by the governments of first Denmark, then Britain, America, France, Spain, and Portugal, while slavery was formally abolished by the British government in 1833, the French in 1848, and the American in 1865. Even historical scholarship on ancient slavery was, in this period, inextricably enmeshed in contemporary debates and policy decisions about abolition. Most notably, when Henri Wallon published his three-volume work, Histoire de l’esclavage dans l’antiquité, in the Paris of 1847, his study of ancient slavery was preceded by an analysis of modern slavery in the French colonies. The second edition of the history, published in 1879, concluded the introduction with the text of the final act of abolition of 1848, which Wallon in the interim had himself helped to compose.¹⁰ It was during this period of intense and ultimately successful campaigning for slave emancipation that, in 1830, a statue of Spartacus was positioned in the Tuilleries, and, in 1831, Edwin Forrest first played the role of Spartacus in the American melodrama The Gladiator.

Garibaldian Romanticism

Despite Kleine’s attempt to construct from the theater of revolutionary France a narrative image for the American distribution of “the jewel of the screen,” at least two of the surviving Italian film versions of the slave rebellion, Spartaco or Il gladiatore della Tracia (Giovanni Enrico Vidali, Pasquali, 1913) and Spartaco (Riccardo Freda, Consorzio Spartacus, 1952) are equally, if not more, indebted to a more immediate and enduring appropriation of Spartacus for the articulation of Italian political struggles. In 1874, Raffaello Giovagnoli published his historical novel Spartaco. Like Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Wiseman’s Fabiola (1854), Wallace’s Ben-Hur (1880), and Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? (1895), the novel was widely disseminated throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and contributed to a novelistic typology and repertory of dramatic situations on which the historical films of the early 1900s would draw for the emplotment of their cinematic narratives of antiquity.¹¹

Like those other historical novels, Giovagnoli’s Spartaco is written in the tradition of Walter Scott. It authenticates its fictive history of slave rebellion by incorporating substantial quotations from the ancient sources within the body of the text and by interspersing the narrative with a liberal deployment of Latin tags and antiquarian footnotes that explain Roman customs and cite further ancient sources to support the author’s explanations.¹² The novel also humanizes the history of the rebellion by embodying in a personal confrontation between Julius Caesar and Spartacus the opposing principles of despotism and liberty, and by partially domesticating events within a melodramatic narration of romance and vendetta. Spartacus falls in love with a patrician matron, Valeria, whom he must tragically abandon when the opportune moment arises to pursue his holy cause of liberty for the oppressed. He cannot accept the Romans’ offer of marriage to Valeria nor her own later pleas to surrender to Crassus and live with her in a Tuscan hideaway when the terms would necessitate the betrayal of his followers. In the latter part of the novel, Spartacus’ military campaign against the Roman commanders is constantly thwarted by the vengeful machinations of a Greek courtesan, Eutibide, whose passionate advances he had earlier declined. The novel closes with Valeria weeping over the ashes of her lover in the company of her daughter by Spartacus. Secretly, the Roman noblewoman has had his body removed from the battlefield where, finally and courageously, he had fallen.

Giovagnoli’s Spartaco is like other source novels for the cinematic representation of ancient Rome in its style and romantic emplotment but, unlike most of those other novels, it does not have its origins in a nineteenth-century opposition to contemporary religious scepticism. Not only is the novel unconcerned with the triumph of early Christianity over a decadent Roman empire but its tone is also decidedly anti-clerical. For example, when describing the priest of a temple dedicated to Hercules, Giovagnoli observes in passing that

the priest of those days, like the priest today, like the priest of all ages, of all religions, of all peoples, minister of hypocrisy and superstition, used to judge the religious fervour of the idiotic, brutish and gullible masses, by the quantity and quality of the gifts brought to the temple, gifts which, in the name of the supposed God, fattened the insatiable belly of the ministers of the cult. (672)¹³

The narrative strategies of Spartaco locate it squarely within the anticlerical and nationalistic agenda of many works of fiction produced in Italy around the time of unification. For example, when, in the novel, Spartacus encounters Julius Caesar just before the initiation of the gladiators’ revolt and discloses his objectives in an impassioned speech, his political rhetoric parallels both that of the French revolutionaries and of the leaders of the risorgimento:

“I hope,” replied the gladiator, with eyes flashing and in an outburst of uncontrollable passion, “to smash this corrupt Roman world, and from its ruins to see rise up the independence of the people. … I seek liberty, I desire liberty, I hope for and invoke liberty, liberty for individuals as for the nation, for the great as for the small, for the powerful as the wretched, and, with liberty, peace, prosperity, justice and all that greater happiness that the immortal gods have granted man to be able to enjoy on this earth.” (271)¹⁴

Not only were national independence, liberty, and equality key political concepts for the risorgimento propagandists, but those concepts were also frequently incorporated into a classicism b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History
• 2 Projecting Ancient Rome
• 3 Spartacus: Testing the Strength of the Body Politic
• 4 Cleopatra: Spectacles of Seduction and Conquest
• 5 Nero: Spectacles of Persecution and Excess
• 6 Pompeii: Purging the Sins of the City
• 7 A Farewell to Antiquity
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index