Neutering Spartacus

I've gradually watched my way through Spartacus: War of the Damned, and I feel an emptiness in my heart for the missed opportunity that is this blood-soaked and scantily-clad series.  I am uniquely qualified to complain about this particular show because I'm one of the very few people in the world who has done serious scholarly work on Spartacus and his doomed rebellion.  I feel like Spartacus is "mine" in a sense...and I'm unhappy how the Starz people have decided to re-imagine him.

I realize that the show is meant mostly as a vehicle for the displaying of naughty bits and gratuitous violence, but surely they could have included those and still had some time left over from a more generously historical portrayal of Spartacus and the rebellion linked to his name.  As it is the show spent the first season in the gladiatorial training barracks, or "ludus," of L. Batiatus (pronounced Bu-tie-a-tus, rather the annoying Bat-e-atus of the show, but that's nitpicky)...of which we have absolutely no evidence of any real depth for.  We know Batiatus was real and that authors say that Spartacus and his fellows were there...but that's it.  I can forgive that, because the show is fiction and the blank canvas of the ludus gives the writers something juicy to work with.  It's after the abandoning of the ludus where I've got problems with the show.

This is especially true of the third season, where Spartacus and company hang out in the city of Sinuessa en Valle, which was nearby the modern municipality of Mondragone.  The fact that Spartacus and his pals take a city isn't the problem, because we have attestation that they did so...the problem is that the entirely of the Spartacan War is reduced more or less to hanging out in Sinuessa, from which the show immediately jumps to the stuff about the wall and leads us towards the inevitable defeat at the hands of M. Licinius Crassus.  The writers of the show haven't even shown us the movements of the rebel army in the year 73, the first year of the war... they went a lot further south in 73, and then the following year things really got interesting.

In the course of the Spartacan War the rebels (who included free farmers and probably some men with military experience from the earlier Social War and the civil wars that followed it) marched over the length and breadth of Italy, defeating every force in their path.  These vanquished opponents included the military governor of northern Italy (Gallia Cisalpina, centered around Mediolanum, or modern-day Milan) and both of the consuls for the year 72.  Crassus came on the scene rather late, after Italy was littered with defeated Romans.  We get none of this dynamism, or any of the interesting social issues (Free men?  Non-Roman Italians? ).  We don't even get much in the way of slave victories, at least not in the way that the sources suggest.  The rebellion lasted as long as it did because it was responding to a variety of simmering social pressures, feeding off of them, using them for motive force and manpower.  It was also led by seemingly good commanders, who gave a lot more than they got for the bulk of the war.  In the Starz rendition of these events, we get lots of skin and blood and bone, but the real Spartacus, and the real people in the real rebellion he led get left in the dustbin.