Is Spartacus: Blood and Sand the most class-conscious series on TV? The last, and extremely bloody, episode ‘Kill Them All’ sees class solidarity between slaves calling each other ‘brother’ and overcoming interpersonal enmity, and a brutal uprising against the masters and supposed betters who have treated their slaves as pawns in their power games throughout the series. It’s not just brothers either; as the makers of Spartacus have been even-handed in their portrayal of sexuality (little fuss is made about the presence of a homosexual gladiator – he meets a tragic end but then so do plenty of others and it in no way comes across like a punishment for his preferences) and the deployment of nudity (everyone gets their kit off), so the band of brothers standing at the end of the revolt also includes sisters who have played their part. Ok, so it’s mostly brothers who have done the fighting, but each one has done what they could given the weapons and opportunities at their disposal.
On the one hand, Spartacus’s story was all about personal revenge - he would, naturally, eventually discover that his wife’s death was ordered by his Batiatus (played with relish by John Hannah, an actor I’ve never previously enjoyed watching) and respond with force. What was interesting, though, was that the other tension in the narrative was the wait for the moment when characters who, previously blinded to the bigger picture by their loyalty to the house of Batiatus or the reality principle (this is your lot, get used to it), would realise together that they had been systematically screwed by their masters (literally, in the case of tender beast Crixus), when the individual grievances that had built up over the series would be recognised as having a common cause.
Of course, this could just be a Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves-style case of American self-identification with rebels who band together to overthrow a ruling order (for Roman read English) or perhaps it’s just a safe enough fantasy, enclosed as it is in a highly stylised, CGI-dominated world. But it has been an intriguing series (actually, there are still a couple of episodes to run on Bravo I think) which, even with some hammy acting and pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue, avoided post-modern reflexivity and took itself seriously. Also, I’m not averse to a bit of creative swearing, and “Jupiter’s cock!” will live in the memory for some time.
