SPARTACUS BLOOD AND SAND SERIES FROM STARZ

Spartacus Blood And Sand Series From Starz

An epic series from Starz told the story of the the legendary gladiator who stood against the romans.Spartacus: Blood & Sand is a show that borrows liberally from other movies and TV series set in the ancient world. And while it has been criticized for its over the top violence, blood, sex and nudity (and by some standard rightly so), I can't help but believe that this show would not have been as good without it.This is a trailer for Spartacus Blood and Sand season 1. I must say that this movie is not for the tame at heart. Thankfully, Spartacus Blood and Sand has decided to change this.

The quaint phrasing of a lot of the lines, however, apparently owes to the scriptwriters trying to emulate Latin sentence structures, which is commendable. Manu Bennett, John Hannah, Lucy Lawless.The dialogue is strikingly peculiar. Torn from his homeland and the woman he loves, Spartacus is condemned to the brutal world of the arena where blood and death are primetime entertainment.

Spartacus in ThraceSpartacus: Blood and Sand takes as its inspiration, of course, the same events as the 1960-film by Stanley Kubrick. If you haven’t seen the show yet, I suggest you skip this article for now, although I will try to avoid giving too many spoilers. And once Spartacus: Blood and Sand gets its hooks in you, there’s no stopping it.In this article, I will go through the first season and point out some of the stuff that I thought was done well, some of the historical details that I liked, and also to spend some time discussion a few of the most egregious errors. By the third or fourth episode, the series hits a comfortable groove.

And for some reason, Spartacus and his men wear pseudo-Corinthian helmets that bear more than a striking resemblance to the helmets from 300, including the strange, ahistorical extended forehead plate: Note the helmet: it seems to be taken directly from the movie 300.As far as costumes and military equipment is concerned, Spartacus doesn’t seem to be too concerned with historical reality. They’ll help the Republic in their war against Mithridates and in return the Romans will aid them in killing all the Getae. In the very first episode, “Red Serpent”, Spartacus (Andy Whitfield) is depicted as a Thracian, a member of a tribe at war with the rival Getae, who are portrayed as inhuman monsters.Spartacus and his people forge an alliance with the Romans.

It is here where the Legate, Gaius Claudius Glaber (Craig Parker), renegs on the deal he struck with the Thracians, causing Spartacus and his men to rebel and kill a large number of Roman troops. They wouldn’t be Hollywood Romans without them (even if the show was produced in New Zealand).A map shows us that the action takes place near the Propontis. Naturally, the Romans in the show also wear those silly leather forearm bracers.

Its foggy and the trees seem to lack leaves, but they nevertheless bear fruit in what I expect we are to assume as some sort of freak of nature. And Glaber, of course, is a historical character, even though the confrontations with Spartacus at this early stage are invented.We then cut to a scene in what looks like the middle of winter. However, other sources do claim that he had once fought as a member of the Roman auxiliaries.

They are both enslaved, with Sura taken away from Spartacus. Their village has been destroyed by their rivals, left unchecked by the Romans.Only a brief spell thereafter, Spartacus and Sura are found by the Romans. However, disaster befalls them at every turn. Spartacus has arrived just in time to defeat all of them and he runs away with his wife. They manage to capture her, but before anything bad can happen, a sword flies through the air and strikes down one of the foes in a stylized, over-the-top explosion of violence that is normal for this show.

Spartacus is a Thracian, who was close to the Propontis earlier in the show. Here’s a screenshot: A map used in the show.This doesn’t make much sense to me. The camera zooms out and we are treated to a map that shows Spartacus’ location: somewhere in the Adriatic.

This Etruscan link is interesting. Capua was one of the main cities in Campania. (In a third-season episode, Spartacus even says that he never saw Neapolis as he was shipped via the Adriatic, but why?) In any event, ancient sources claimed that the city had originally been founded by the Etruscans. So how come Spartacus is in the Adriatic Sea, on a ship bound for Capua? Capua is not located on the Adriatic coast, but on the other side of the Italian peninsula.Travel across the Apenines is not a trivial affair and it would make more sense for the ship to travel via the Aegean and the Straits of Sicily towards Campania.

The battle is shot in the over-the-top manner of most depictions of violence in the show, and one screenshot will suffice to show that, in this universe at least, people have several liters’ worth of blood more than us mere mortals, and their blood pressure is also several orders of magnitudes higher: Blood gushes out in a comical fashion whenever someone gets hit.Everyone had expected Spartacus to die in the arena, but to everyone’s surprise he manages to defeat all four of his opponents.During the arena sequences, we are also treated to a view of the audience, consisting of a mix of men and women. Siân Phillips’s Livia in the BBC rendition of I, Claudius).The amphitheatre in Capua itself is shown as a relatively grand structure that appears to be modelled on the theatre that was originally constructed during the reign of Augustus (see, for example, the photos in this Wikipedia article), or about six or seven decades after the events of the show: The lighting and cinematography here is clearly influenced by the movie Gladiator.In the arena, Spartacus is condemned to fight against four gladiators. In the historical sources, his prenomen is actually given as Gnaeus, but perhaps the writers thought the audience would then be confused with Gaius Glaber and so changed it to Quintus? His wife, Lucretia (played by Lucy Lawless of Xena: Warrior Princess fame), is shown to be conniving in the best traditions of Roman leading ladies (cf. Spartacus in CapuaIn any event, once in Capua, we are introduced to the man who would eventually purchase Spartacus and have him trained in his ludus (gladiator school): Quintus Lentulus Batiatus (played with gusto by John Hannah). But in reality, it seems more likely that gladiatorial contests were invented in Campania sometime before the first century BC, perhaps inspired by contests featuring single combat as once used by the Greeks (for example, the duel that is a part of the funeral games for Patroclus in the Iliad). Modern scholars have latched onto this idea, depicting the Etruscans as rather more bloodthirsty than the average ancient people.

We know from the ancient sources that gladiators could acquire rabid fans and groupies, and perhaps emotions got as out of control as what we see in the show. 1.135–162 , 163–176 ).Of course, I don’t know if female spectators, regardless of class, would bare their breasts like some of them do in these scenes. And this lasted into the early imperial period, since Ovid, in his mock-didactic work, the Ars Amatoria, written between 9 BC and AD 2, recommended chariot-races and gladiatorial performances as ideal hunting-grounds for young men to flirt with, and win the hearts of, young women (Ovid Ars am. A useful article by Jonathan Edmondson delves into this and related subjects:Men and women certainly sat together during the Republic: so, for example, the dictator Sulla openly sat next to his future wife Valeria at the gladiators (Plutarch, Sulla 35 cf.