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The Depiction of Slavery in Ancient World Television Drama: Politics, Culture and Society

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The Depiction of Slavery in Ancient World Television Drama: Politics, Culture and Society Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs The Depiction of Slavery in Ancient World Television Drama: Politics, Culture and Society. Thesis How to cite: Greenhalgh, Claire Elizabeth (2020). The Depiction of Slavery in Ancient World Television Drama: Politics, Culture and Society. PhD thesis The Open University. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 2019 The Author https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Version: Redacted Version of Record Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21954/ou.ro.000111e7 Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk The Depiction of Slavery in Ancient World Television Drama: Politics, Culture and Society Claire Elizabeth Greenhalgh Thesis submitted to The Open University in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) The Open University March 2020 (Some of the content has been removed/redacted for copyright reasons, primarily images taken from the film and TV texts cited in this thesis). 1 Declaration I declare that this thesis represents my own work, except where due acknowledgement is made, and that is has not been previously submitted to the Open University or to any other institution for a degree, diploma or other qualification. 2 Abstract This thesis examines the reception of Roman slavery in recent ancient world television drama through one primary text, Starz’s Spartacus (2010-13) and what it reveals about the way we conceptualise ancient slavery in this under-researched medium. Applying a key tenet of reception theory, namely that fictional works set in the past potentially yield insight into the concerns of the present, it explores how the series’ representation of slavery reflects contemporary issues around gender, sexuality, race, identity, status and power. My comparative methodology comprises an in-depth character and thematic analysis of the series and other recent onscreen slave narratives. It shows that the series is subject to a range of influences, from modern popular culture to aspects of the classical sources. However, commercial imperatives still drive the selection and appropriation of material. This explains the ubiquity of certain tropes generic to the cable industry, namely graphic sexual content and violence, and enslaved women in particular are portrayed almost exclusively through the lens of sexual slavery. Since the series is about a slave rebellion, it privileges the most brutal aspects of slavery and portrays the institution as inherently dehumanising, violent and disempowering. This study also shows that the series can be situated within a wider tradition of representing slavery onscreen, while the moral ambivalence of servile characters, behaviour and attitudes not only reflects more complex modern TV narratives, but also indicates a desire to differentiate the series culturally and politically from the legacy of the famous 1960 film. Finally, by using slavery to explore themes such as the abuse of power, the importance of liberty and 3 resistance, and the implications of denying bodily and sexual agency and rights, it encourages audiences to reflect upon injustices in their own societies. 4 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisors Dr Joanna Paul, Dr Trevor Fear and Dr Tony Keen for their support, advice and guidance over the five years that it has taken me to complete this study. Secondly, the CHASE DTP consortium which generously funded the final eighteen months, thereby easing the financial struggles which characterised the early period of my studies. And finally, the wonderful staff on the Open University Document Delivery team who sourced so many of the essential books and articles which made this thesis project possible. 5 Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction…………………………………………………………………8 Chapter Two: The Modern Slave Narrative and the Problematisation of Resistance……..35 Chapter Three: The Uses and Abuses of Slave Sexuality……………….………………….72 Chapter Four: The Slave Body: Shaming, Naming and Maiming…………………………119 Chapter Five: The Problematisation of Servile Violence in Spartacus……………………154 Chapter Six: Slavery and Race in Spartacus: The Complication of a Tradition………….184 Chapter Seven: Slavery: The Roman Perspective……………………………..……………..230 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..277 6 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………284 Appendix: List of Spartacus Episodes and Main Characters………………..361 7 Chapter One Introduction Among my earliest memories of engagement with antiquity are watching the heroic Judah suffering the dehumanising indignity and pain of unjust servitude in Ben-Hur (1959), or the romanticised relationship between the lovely slave Eunice and her master Petronius in Quo Vadis (1951) on television in the late 1970s. Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), with its stirring tale of slavery and rebellion, was also an eagerly watched Sunday afternoon tradition in that now distant era of three channel television. It is from these experiences, later supplemented by the more recent TV adaptations which comprise the primary case studies for this thesis, that my interest in the onscreen depiction of slavery in the ancient world first began. However, I was also dimly aware that they were not representations of real Roman servitude, but, rather, constructed to make me either sympathetic to these victims of Roman persecution and brutality, or to side with characters who treated slaves humanely. While studying for my MA in Classics, I began to realise how far the Hollywood version of the past, and its depiction of slavery, deviated from the known facts as they have been transmitted to us from antiquity and I was keen to understand more fully the various political, social and cultural agendas shaping these dramatic re-configurations of the ancient world. I was particularly intrigued by what these screen texts had emphasised, excluded, adapted, misappropriated or simply re- written to appeal, and make their stories relevant, to a contemporary film or television audience. Consequently, I have long been interested in the way we receive 8 history in a society where visual media increasingly play such a prominent role in shaping and entrenching popular assumptions about the past. The idea that fictional historical works set in the past provide a lens through which contemporary concerns, anxieties and agendas can be explored, problematised and discussed is widely acknowledged,1 and television is no exception. This thesis investigates how recent television drama uses Roman slavery as a conduit for illuminating various issues important to the receiving culture. My central research questions are: what are the main contemporary social, cultural, political, industrial, and historical influences, agendas and priorities shaping which version of Roman slavery appears on screen? And in what ways does the theme of Roman slavery ‘speak’ to modern TV audiences, and at this particular juncture in time? Ancient slavery has been explored in several film and TV dramas set in antiquity in recent years, for instance Gladiator (2000), Boudicca (2003), Spartacus (2004), Empire (2005), Rome (2005-7), Agora (2008), The Eagle (2011), Spartacus (2010-13), Pompeii (2014), and Ben-Hur (2016). These examples all incorporate slave narratives to an extent, but I use as my primary case study the Starz TV series Spartacus (2010-13), not only because it features an unprecedented cast of slave characters, but it is also the most ambitious version of the Spartacus story (where, for most audiences, classical slavery arguably begins and ends) to appear onscreen. It has been claimed that television is now the world’s foremost democratic medium for both visual entertainment and the transmission of popular culture in the modern 1 Wyke, 1997; Joshel, Malamud and McGuire, 2001: 2. For television, see Landsberg, 2012: 22-23. 9 age.2 For many, television drama may represent their only contact with history in an accessible and enjoyable way. The long-form serial television format also boasts numerous advantages, particularly over its sister medium, film. As Andrew Elliott argues: The greater space afforded to individual character development, the interconnecting storylines which reflect the complexities of historical events…all afford the television series more space than cinema to reflect a heightened form of realism and authenticity in depicting human interactions.3 The television scholar Glenn Creeber goes further, arguing that the medium is ideally suited for dramatising large-scale historical narratives: ‘in terms of history the broad sweep of the television serial offers a narrative potential that the feature film and the single play can never quite achieve’.4 Arguably no better sign that contemporary TV drama has ‘arrived’ is the wildly successful series Game of Thrones being written about in the hallowed London Review of Books as a serious piece of social and political commentary on the modern age.5 Yet, despite the medium’s structural advantages (namely more intense and complex depiction of human emotions, experience and relationships than is permitted by shorter-form film), influence, popularity and global reach, ancient world television drama remains under-studied within the sub-discipline of classical
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