Ancient Greek Virtrues and Modern Film

The relevance of ancient Greece to contemporary Western culture--especially popular culture such as films--may seem tenuous at best. The polytheistic paganism of ancient Greece, the fact that Greek civilization was so soundly eclipsed by Great Rome, the difficult and dense poetic and discursive philosophical texts, and the archaeological evidence of the primitive features of daily experience in the ancient world establishes less a linkage than a disconnect between that world and today's technology-driven environment of convenience. Yet of course Greece does retain its fascination for modern sensibility because it was the seat of the culture of the West that survives today. And it is a fascination with the familiar. Protagoras, who lived in the fifth century BC, is credited with the declaration that man is the measure of all things (976). For him, the declaration was an exercise in ontology and the legitimation of human reason; the whole of his statement reads thus: Man is the measure of all things, of being th

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his friend. Undoubtedly, such a narrative would have been alien to Greek or Roman society in the ancient period, since these were slave states and since slaves do not seem to have been perceived as human. That does not prevent Kubrick from projecting humanity onto the slave persona, however, and in that projection is contained the Greek idea that reason is part and parcel of the human condition and that it can be used to good effect. The attempts of Spartacus and Varinia to establish a more or less normal and moderately lived civilized domestic life in the context of desperate flight and battle against Rome therefore assume a degree of poignancy. The same dynamic is at work in Antoninus's determination not to see Spartacus crucified, for such a spectacle would surely demoralize and devalue everything that the slaves have been trying to construct for themselves. Indeed, at his limited leisure, Spartacus finds time to ruminate with Varinia on the idea of a god. Reason, speculation, life lived moderately--those are the values that the rebellious slaves embrace, and they are to be likened to the proper cosmic order of things. Equally, they are to be contrasted with the punishing Roman response to the revolt. Kubrick's penultimate f
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Approximate Word count = 6010
Approximate Pages = 24 (250 words per page)