Arena

     I've been watching the Spartacus TV series.  It's an unapologetic blend of sex and violence; it would be easy to dismiss if it weren't so dramatic and powerful, an epic human story of a fight for liberty against an overwhelming societal force based on conquest and slavery, of people used as household servants but also as entertainers engaged in death sport.
     Spartacus, a Thracian (modern Bulgaria), was a real man trained and performing as a gladiator in Capua, a city of the Roman Republic, in the 70s B.C.  He led a revolt against his masters, escaping into the land around Mount Vesuvius along with seventy-three other gladiators.  Around this fighting core, a following of mostly rural slaves gathered, growing with passing months to a significant force capable of numerous defeats of Roman legions, until finally, in 71, a final battle occurred defeating the runaway slaves, Spartacus dying in the fight.  I've not yet watched the show's fourth and final season, so I don't know if the program's makers have Spartacus dying on a cross, as Stanley Kubrick did in his 1960 film, Spartacus.  Crassus, the Roman top shit who delivered the final blow to Spartacus in battle, did have the surviving former slaves crucified along one of the Republic's main roads, an image lending itself well to widescreen epic cinema and thus a possible reason Kubrick chose to be ahistorical when depicting Spartacus's death.
     One biographical feature not covered in the TV show or in Kubrick's film fills in, at least partially, a gap in Spartacus's life and success as a rebel leader: the religious dimension of his appeal.
     He was closely connected to a woman, his wife possibly, living with him as a slave when he was a gladiator.  Her name is unknown, but she practiced the mysteries of Dionysos, god of wine and ecstasy, a deity known in Thrace as Zagreus.  She had a dream in which Spartacus's face was covered by a snake.  Interpreting this as her man's need to break out of confinement, the rebellion begun in Capua found divine inspiration, as Spartacus became associated with Dionysos, a god unpopular with Roman officialdom, but worshipped by the downtrodden and powerless.
     This dimension of the history of Spartacus may have been seen as too off base from where the TV show's creators wanted to go, concentrating instead on action, intrigue, and premium cable television's titillation (pun intended) factor.
     Deeply rooted feelings accompany popular movements.  Black Lives Matter has stimulated so much interest and support among African Americans because it speaks in basic and easily understood truths (if you have a heart capable of listening to victims of "justice").  The movement has even inspired a small minority of Black authorities arguing for the other side, telling the Fox News audience that police shootings of Black citizens is "rare," and that the majority of Black shooting victims are killed by Blacks.  I heard a Black man say this on Sean Hannity's Fox program earlier tonight.  Yes, the killing of Black Americans by police officers is rare, to the extent that in 2015 it happened to young Black Americans 1,134 times.
     What I see is the traditional "law and order" structure of our gun-sick racist society justifying itself by fighting against popular opinion.  Black Lives Matter has no legitimacy, supposedly, because we all must accept status quo power arrangements existing in various cooperating, and profitable, forms in the Americas since the fifteenth century.  Slavery powered this country's economic machine; wage slavery has done the same.  Military engagement in other countries helps justify a gigantic war octopus deeply entangled in the nation's economic fortunes, including in establishment news media.
     Slaves in the Roman Republic and in the Empire made that civilization function.  Spartacus, a slave, inspired disgust in the celebrated orator Cicero when that writer complained of the former gladiator staging his own games on one occasion with captured Roman prisoners.  For the formerly used to use others in the same way is repugnant to the oppressor's sense of right and wrong.  Black citizens complaining about the police and their well-documented mistreatment of them over centuries challenges the way abusers regard society.  They, the abusers, counter with "Blue Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter," the blue referring to cops.  As for "All Lives" mattering, clearly they don't believe it, otherwise, the widespread antagonism, expressed by Christians Mike Pence and Scott Walker and at least a dozen other governors, toward Syrian refugees "because terrorists may be posing as refugees," would give way to a more Christlike viewpoint.
     Roman hierarchs depicted in the TV series tend towards viciousness and guile.  They enjoy watching men die for their amusement.  Their comfort and sense of entitlement, accompanied by an utter indifference towards their slaves' considerations, reflect the eons-long habits of rich, disgusting motherfuckers--and here, Spartacus's motives may include the desire to destroy the soft-skinned ones who inflict injury and sorrow on the world's toilers.
     We live in an age of conquest and slavery.  For those who aren't slaves but still suffer from economic imbalance, we watch presidential candidates who promise a good future, but demonstrate, in Hillary Clinton's case, an evasive and wary gaze coming from a patrician visage cursed with eyes that don't match her smiles.  In Donald Trump, Roman name Trumpus Donaldus Sickus Fuckus, we're confronted with the more obvious villain, someone wearing his unprincipled black heart on his face.  Last weekend he spent the late hours of a night tweeting nastiness about a Venezuelan former Miss Universe, "who gained a lot of weight" after she was crowned twenty years ago, the first year Trump ran that contest.  He "fat-shamed" her twenty years ago, leading her to develop an eating disorder.  She became a U.S. citizen and has announced she will vote for Clinton.  She speaks out against Trump.  Sickus Fuckus responds with more sadism, sexism, revealing one of his many obsessions: he doesn't like fat people.  He's overweight, and so is a Trump advisor, Newt Gingrich, who complained that a Miss Universe shouldn't "gain sixty pounds."
     Does he want to win the election?  Is he trying his best to lose?  I'm beginning to suspect that he actually hates himself.  His real self, the one we don't see in the suit and the too-long necktie.  We see his mask, of course, and his public words are part of the mask, a persona he's crafted carefully for forty or so years.  His success with this persona is obvious: lots of people are convinced he's a successful businessman (he lost, as has been recently revealed, 916 million dollars in 1995).  Lots of people are convinced he's a prolific job creator; true, but he also has a well-documented record of not paying employees, thus, he's a deadbeat and the kind of boss someone like Spartacus would decapitate.  Lots of people think he's smart, yet, instead of focusing on policy issues in the weeks leading to the election, he makes fun of Hillary Clinton for being sick with pneumonia a few weeks ago, and attacks a Latina he's already abused in the past, because Sickus Fuckus does not forgive.
     Nor does he care about the slaves.

                                                                          Vic Neptune