If You’re Spartacus and He’s Spartacus, Is There Any other Spartacus I Need To Know About?

The movie Spartacus is about the aptly named Spartacus, a rebellious slave who slowly became one of the most feared enemies for the Romans, leading slave rebellions and freed slaves to battle against the Roman army.

The movie starts with Spartacus being sentenced to death by starvation and then was bought as a slave by Lentulus Batiatus. After some suffering as a slave, Spartacus was forced into a fight to the death along with 3 other people. From there, he was almost killed, but was spared by his opponent when he was spared and his opponent tried to kill people in the audience. We then see Spartacus lead a rebellion by killing Marcellus and starts a fight which leads into an all-out slave rebellion. The rebellion was successful and led to Spartacus leading the newly freed slaves to the Italian countryside.

Due to his battle prowess and ability, he became the leader of the newly formed group and start their journey around Rome, taking everyone home. On the way, they start pillaging Roman estates and growing the army in the process with more slaves joining the cause. This leads to the Roman leaders noticing all of this happening and forcing them to take action against this growing army.

After a while, Spartacus and the slave army are forced to fight the Roman army and were initially able to hold off some of the forces, but were eventually beaten handily. Then as an attempt to find out the leader, the Romans try to get the army to surrender Spartacus, but all of what was left of the army didn’t give him up and all responded to the Romans by saying “I am Spartacus”. Because of this, all of them were sentenced to death. Upon being captured, Spartacus was forced to fight one his allies, Antoninus, and killed him in the end. After that, Spartacus was eventually crucified.

Reflecting on this movie, there were some topics that we learned about in class were seen in the movie. Negotiations involving transactional friendships was a highlight of one of the things we learned in class and was something that I noticed while watching the movie with friends. One other thing that I noticed in the movie was the “I am Spartacus” scene where it showed a sense of belonging to the freed slave army, which was something involved in one of the reflection assignments.