Spartacus: War of the Damned - Page 36

IMPORTANT EDIT: This post was made while heavily under the influence of alcohol, but the writer of this post maintains his opinions no matter his level of intoxication.

The endless litany of praise for this show is forcing me to speak up: it's not just the loyal denizens of tl.net, it is sites that I expected to be more critical such as /tv/. I can't understand this, because I was a loyal fan of this show for the first two and a bit seasons and watched every episode since.

Spartacus was a terrible show. Blood and Sand was fanstastic for what it was, as was Gods of the Arena which stuck to a winning formula. Vengeance was the beginning of a moralising and historically insulting soap opera led by an actor that, while decent in the end, was not the man we grew to love. However, through a combination of lazy writing and incompetent research we ended up with the show that ended just recently, entertaining as it was in a sense.

The writers of this show moralised from a very early point, and while there is no evidence of Spartacus giving a single fuck about the plight of slaves in the Republic, it is just anachronistic, lazy and irrelevant work for the overpaid writers of this overrated show to suggest that slavery was this terrible evil when nobody in the day of Spartacus, even Spartacus himself, seemed to really care about the institution of slavery. This is not so much the fault of the show as the fault of terrible modern 'history' that shoves modern moralistic subjectivity down the throats of men and women that lived thousands of years ago, but it as painful as it is disappointing.

However: it is most important for me to point out how grossly irrelevant the events of this overacted series were to reality, and I will list the most frustrating:

-Crassus was not a gladiator-brawling, chivalrous 'leader by example': while courageous, Crassus became the lead man against Spartacus through a combination of cash up the sleeve to pay new legions and willingness to risk defeat against an enemy of such low repute as slaves: Rome certainly never feared they would lose their global influence to Spartacus and his slaves, and even their fear that Rome would be ravaged by Spartacus proved typical Roman paranoiae: to be frank, Spartacus had less chance to conquer Rome than did Alexander the Great.
-Tiberius did not exist, Crassus had two real children and neither of them were named Tiberius nor did they bear any historical similarity to this fictional character
-Caesar Dictator was too busy serving under Lucullus against Mithridates in the East to give a single fuck about Crassus' little war against slaves, and not only shared not a single character trait with the Caesar in the show but also did not share a single piece of historical similarity
-Spartacus was never a crusader for the freedom of all slaves, modern historians with their liberal sensibilities have forced their own beliefs in regards to slavery into the mouth of Spartacus, who was a bad motherfucker but more of a bandit than an idealist, according to the sources.
-MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL: Roman legions were not useless organisations that could not combat gladiators. Legions were the best fighting forces on earth before, during and after the 3rd Servile War. Legionaries made better soldiers than gladiators (this is not even arguable), they possessed superior discipline and therefore fighting power which is evident in their conduct in situations such as those faced by Caesar Dictator, where Roman legionaries were capable of executing complex manoeuvres in contact under any circumstances and against barbarian soldiers or other Roman soldiers. Nobody but Romans could do this, and examples are provided in Caesar's The Gallic Wars, where for example Caesar has a file of soldiers ambushed by Gauls and orders them to turn to battle, while his other files continue to march out of contact to reform and fight once they reach the flank of the enemy. If that sounds like gibberish it doesn't matter: these were tactical military manoevures that only Roman legionaries were capable of. Basically, Roman soldiers were not bad soldiers, but in fact they were the best soldiers on earth.
-Man for man Roman legionaries, if not experienced killers above and beyond that of gladiators such as the soldiers of Pompey and other Roman governors in troublesome provinces, were certainly trained to a very similar standard as gladiators. Oh and gladiators rarely fought to the death in the Republic.
-Legionaries did not fight with big spiky retarded spears that look like something straight out of 300: if you look up 'pilum', you'll notice that Roman infantrymen used spears in not only a completely dissimilar manner to that of 'spearmen' or 'hoplites', but also pilum were absolutely dissimilar to the sort of fictional spears depicted in Spartacus.
-Watch the first minute or so of the first episode of HBO's Rome for an idea of how Roman soldiers actually fought, and why even excellent individual combatants like Spartacus' gladiators or German tribesman had no chance at all against a decently organised Roman army.

Goddamn I am not going to pretend I was not smashed and angry about my life when I made this post, but for the love of god the historical accuracy of this show in these areas (and a million other ways I probably forgot) is an incredible sore point I may never forget and I cannot ignore when people say this show was the best show ever.