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Rome vs. Spartacus: Blood & Sand / Gods of the Arena

Comparisons between television series are not always completely fair, because the scope of their goals and vision is always different, and never meant to go specifically where the other one takes their viewer. Sometimes, especially in the case of Rome and Spartacus, one was directly affected by the other. That said, as a viewer, it’s easier to evaluate a television series in remembrance of another, than it is to judge it in a vacuum. My reasoning for that is simple: if there were no Rome, and I judged Spartacus on its own merits, I probably wouldn’t hate it that much. In fact, I’d find it pretty benign, and simply ignore it.

I do not, however, find it benign. I find it to be a wretched criminal mugging of our sensibilities. It’s insulting and it’s ignorant gratuitous trash. I try really hard to not let art and entertainment color my opinion of people very often, anybody who does that should be shot, but when someone says they like Spartacus, I really have to question what the fuck is wrong with them in the head. Are they glib, or just deeply cynical? Because liking Spartacus is indefensible, unless you think of a television series as something to have on in the background while you read the Wall Street Journal or fondle somebody.

To elaborate the differences between each series, I’ll take a look at three areas that act as a marker of their relative failure or success.

Linguistics

One of the most brilliant things about the writing in Rome was in the linguistic play. To illustrate the differences in dialect between the classical “Ciceronian” Latin of the Patricians and the Vulgar Latin of the Plebeians (which was the ancestor of modern Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian), they had them correspond to a manufactured “upper class” British dialect, that was more Westminster, verbose, polished, and retained many Latinate archaisms (words like “vim” direct from Classical Ciceronian Latin, and some extinct French-like verb formulations such as “I am come to see Caesar”), and a lower class dialect that sounded cockney, simple and yet ancient. There was license used to paint Rome with a 21st century brush, of course, but it nearly always had a reasonable explanation for its anachronistic usages. The series was clearly written by somebody who had “Semper Ubi Sub Ubi” scratched into their primary school wooden desk. For the most part, the syntax of the Patricians reflected the “proper” French ordering of grammar (never ending with a preposition) except in relaxed and dramatic moments, while the Vulgarians spoke with a more Anglo-Saxon grammar, as the history of the English language has since the time of the Norman Conquest considered the French way to be more noble than the peasant Germanic lexicon and grammar.

By contrast, Spartacus attempted to shoot for the stars and get something both true to Latin dialogue, and Shakespearean meter, yet instead of at least hitting the moon, they just fell right the fuck back down into a thigh-sweat and syphilis-laden bawdy hall. Whatever the fuck it was those idiots were saying, it was something that was painful on the ears, and extremely pretentious, violating every rule of dialogue ever constructed, not as a means to chain artists to tradition, but for their own safety. They wanted to structure sentences to reflect Latin rules, but that raises the question: why didn’t they just have it all in Latin? The creative aim is noble, and as an armchair classicist, I can only admire it, but all the same, if you construct a building, you have to have room for people to walk around in it, and similarly there’s simply no way much of the dialog makes much sense in English.

It seems every sentence was taken to the thesaurus and revised to look more regal, which wouldn’t have been half as intolerable if it were only the regal characters speaking it, and not the illiterate peasants, whores, slaves, barbarians and gladiators. I have no idea why they thought Arabs, Africans and Germans would be represented as having the same diction as Roman nobles, in the Republican era no less, when Latin was still a language mostly restricted to Romans, Italians, merchants, diplomats and nobility. The obvious attempt was to copy some of the ‘Rome’ design, but also to pay homage to the Shakespearean tradition of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra. It didn’t work. Don’t try to re-write Shakespeare or Spenser or Marlowe or Donne or especially the Kings James Bible, because you don’t speak that language, it’s dead, and nobody is fluent anymore. Spartacus should be a profound warning for anybody except experts and professors to stay away from the idea.

History

The historical advisors for Rome aimed for a show that brought the late Republican Roman world to life, in such a way that it would be at times shocking to modern audiences, with its depiction of their social interaction between class, sex and ethnicity that was utterly foreign to us, and at other times instructively familiar in how their institutions mirrored ours. The main plot line was, in both form and content, true to the period: the narrative for Season 1 was rendered as an historical tragedy in the greek fashion, which is defined by reaching calamity specifically caused by attempts to avoid it (such as the case of Oedipus Rex); while the content also reached a respectably high degree of historical truth, in spite of almost entirely speaking on matters which history has left us no evidence, the show remained true to the spirit of the historical record.

Rome did suffer some glaring inaccuracies, however. They deleted certain figures from the narrative of the fall of the Republic who were inescapably instrumental to it, such as Portia, the wife of Brutus, and Caesar’s trusted lieutenant Labienus, who deserted him for the opposing faction. The writers created an amalgam of two women: Atia Balba (the mother of Octavian) and Fulvia (the wife of Mark Antony, who raised armies with his brother to fight Octavian). One purpose for combining them both was to illustrate a non-historical oedipal complex in Octavian, and to permit Atia’s extended life at least 12 years after her real death, in order to remain in the series. The series also ignored some key battles, and re-arranged the chronology of some events. The reasoning for all of this, however, was acceptable to me, because the errors did not display ignorance of events, but rather a dramatic arrangement of them.

Being night and day with the eternal city of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, which aimed for the almost Fascist aesthetic of the “Rome of the imagination”, in the HBO series Rome the world was colored by the grime, inefficiency, destitution, corruption, violence and filth that we know from history. Prior depictions in glossy Biblical spear and sandal movies from golden age Hollywood were trying to emphasize at once the earthly conceit of Roman luxury while basking in its glory as an antecedent to the modern West.

Where Rome couches itself in a fictionalized history, Spartacus fictionalizes the couch. Similar to Rome, the plot reflects plenty of realities from history, and fills in the gaps where our historical knowledge fails, but however much it tries to build authenticity in lieu of history, the events and motivations could just as easily belong in a Star Wars movie. The misplacement of the Amphitheatrum Flavium (named so for its dedication during the Flavian Emperors of the AD 60s to 90s) 150 years before it was built could be forgivable, if not for the dull motivation for such low effect as trying to make the setting more sexy. Furthermore, such an error makes one wonder if they got their history from the History Channel, which surely would have told them Hitler built it with the help of time-traveling aliens. The gladiatorial arena depicted briefly in Rome was more common for the period (Spartacus taking place only a few decades prior to the events of Rome): a small wooden galleried amphitheater where the combatants could easily reach their exclusively rich spectators with weapons. The Rome of the late Republic was a city of wood, which Octavian famously claimed to have transformed into a city of marble.

Needless to say, the characters found and events that unfold in Spartacus bear some resemblance to history, and the reasoning for their inclusion makes some sense, but the deviation and cartoonish depiction turns it all into little more than an anime visualization of history. I hesitate to say I’m opposed to that, but I also hesitate to give a fuck about this show.

Artistry

From a diverse field of great attributes, the strongest item in Rome’s inventory has to be its acting. James Purefoy and Polly Walker provide two of the greatest performances these eyes have ever seen. Nobody will ever match his Mark Antony so long as we don’t have time machines to seize the man himself, Bill and Ted style. Max Pirkis creates an Octavian distinctive but also attributable to most other versions – he has all the airs of noble arrogance and self-righteous vengeance from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, but also the soulful alpha-ness of Brian Blessed’s more oafish Augustus in I, Claudius. And the kid wasn’t old enough to drink yet! The two main characters required less flamboyance, but more darkness and brooding. However, their casting was genius: Kevin McKidd and Ray Stevensen, two reliable action-movie supports who, through the course of the series, trade places to act as alternating foils to one another, and bring to life the brotherly chemistry we see in another HBO show, Entourage, but with far more dignitas than Turtle and Drama whining about hookers and weed.

As mentioned before, the narrative for the first season impeccably reflects that of a Greek Tragedy, and the second season, for which the writing suffered on account of a business decision to cut the series short, still manages to carry out an epilogue that completes the tragedy. Who remembers Oedipus at Colonus? Forget who likes it more than Oedipus the King. The visual structure was not always very interesting, and usually a pedestrian and classical, static glance at events. There were moments of pure genius, however: the adventure of Vorenus’ young daughter through the streets of Rome during martial law, Pullo in combat with his chestplate acting as the scene curtain, the pagan ritualistic splashing of blood, Caesar’s epileptic episode edited into the nude dance, the pageantry of the two Triumphs, the appearance of eagles at turning points in the story, the condescending third person scan from behind Octavian as he seizes de facto control over the Senate – all of these strum a lyre in one’s heart. My main complaint is the repetitive use of certain scores and narrative devices in the second season, lifting from the first. The use of sets at Cinecetta studios, conveniently made before it burnt to the ground, I found to be striking similar to the real ruins you can walk in today. No green-screens necessary.

Spartacus … has very few redeemable aspects as far as its artistry is concerned. The backgrounds make it into a glorified and extended video game cut-scene. It tries desperately to copy from the film 300, in its aesthetic and its method of filming, disregarding the notion that 300 was originating in a cheesy comic book, not the lofty Shakespearean pretense of Spartacus’ dialogue. As if to overcompensate for the rottenness of its meat, it lathers it with saucy eye candy: gratuitous violence that strikes an awful similarity to half-serious Asian martial arts and horror B movies, and rather than using their more libertine sexuality as a way of introducing us to their Pagan society, it’s mostly just present to titillate, to which I ask: isn’t there enough porno in the world so that we aren’t stimulated by half-assing it in 5 second clips on skinemax? Seriously, give me a fucking break.

Few of the actors really come from anything worthwhile. There’s Xena the Warrior Princess, and that Scottish guy who’s in everything and yet nothing. But no performance stands above the failure that I detail above. If I had to be guessing what was going through the heads of the people who visualized Spartacus, I’d have to say they were first and foremost looking at 300 and Gladiator, but also steampunk stuff like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and industrial movies like  The Machinist and Alien 3. It paints a picture of Rome as if viewed through a second-rate glass darkly manufactured in Tankograd for Ivan Drago. The Rome of Spartacus doesn’t look much like Rome, but a Sci-Fi comic book, I guess is the point.

Conclusion

To put it bluntly, you should only waste your time with Spartacus if you’re truly starved for entertainment, and don’t mind watching something that is at its core both incomprehensible and ridiculous. Rome, on the other hand, is a gem, and we’re probably worse off for not having been treated to at least a third season.

Rome: (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0384766/)

Spartacus: ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1442449/ / http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1758429/ )