What the Death of Honor Looks Like: Part 1

 What do a 20th century Yale historian, a 2000’s Josh Whedon whirlpool of sex and violence, “the father of history,” and the book of Judges have in common? Two things: 1) They are all favorites of mine in one category or another, and 2) They all work in tandem to teach a fundamental lesson about honor, a lesson that America would do well to remember today. I’m going to take ridiculous length to articulate that lesson through these four different lenses, in what I have come to realize will have to be several separate posts for the length I plan on indulging myself at. At the end, though, I hope I will have at least given you pause for thought on how the decline of honor in the American soul is poisoning this republic. A good starting point for that, I think is to review Whedon’s excellent TV portrayal of what a similar decline meant for the original Republic—the Roman Republic

Exhibit A: The Moral Decline of Rome—Spartacus

I am referring, of course, to the absolute masterpiece that is the four-season epic Spartacus (Be warned of spoilers ahead). If you have seen the show, my describing it as a masterpiece might raise your eyebrows. In fact, there is a not insignificant chance that, if you are a normal human being, and particularly if you do not have a Y chromosome, you got bored and disgusted about halfway through the first episode. If you tend towards film snobbery, there are good odds that you were enraged by the godawful special effects of season one and couldn’t think about anything else. And if, like me, you are a Christian, or even merely someone of strong moral character, you may have concluded, upon seeing the sheer levels of disgusting perversion on naked display in the Romans’ sexual exploitation of their slaves, coupled with the ubiquitous brutality of the violence occurring every other second, that the show was merely an excuse to indulge libidinous adrenaline junkies and that no one of any moral discipline could justifiably watch it. To any of those viewers I just described, I reply, “pooh!” I cannot substantiate that pooh vis-a-vis the truly indefensible special effects on display before Starz managed to beef up its budget except by voicing my logic-devoid outrage, but to the other complaints there is a very clear answer, though one you have to have seen the entire show to understand: Spartacus is fundamentally a story about the moral decline of Rome, and it is only the pernicious violence and death coupled with the vomit-inducing levels of debauchery that lets you feel the full effect of that decline. The story of the death of Roman honor Whedon gave us in 2010 is very prescient in 2025, so bear with me as I expound on the moral instruction of the mind that brought us Firefly (Be warned of spoilers).

The skeleton of what we know of the actual history of the Third Servile War is, as far as I can tell from my very limited knowledge of it, loosely followed by the story, but that is really tangential to the actual point of the series, which is a parable about the takeover of a law-based, honor-bound Roman Republic by a regime of cynicism and chaos, not so much a history. The liberal modifications to the skeleton, I would argue, in fact make that story more effective. I should add the disclaimer, however, that, though I know more about Rome than the average blogger, I am not a historian, so please forgive any mistakes I make in recounting the actual historical record. As I say, it is not terribly important to the tale.

In the first and best chapter of the epic, the revolt’s origins (season 1 and the prequel season), the show answers one question anyone who has thought about the reality of training gladiators has probably asked: how was it tenable? The Romans would rip young men from their homes in wars of conquest, make slaves of them, condemn them to a short life of constant pain and poverty and an early death for Romans’ entertainment, in short, give them every reason to hate Rome after taking everything they had to lose and forcing a total resignation to their own deaths on them, and simultaneously they spent every waking moment of every day training these same men into unstoppable warriors with no reason to live except the joy of battle and of killing. How could this have possibly ever ended well for the Romans? Whedon’s answer may or may not be accurate—I’m not enough of a historian to know—but it strikes me as quite possible that it could be. He says they did it by forging a moral regime among the gladiators themselves and between them and their lannista, a regime of warriors’ pride and honor in which they all fought to honor the walls of their ludus, so that the sands of the arena took on a special meaning, and the joy of battle and killing were more than just animal urges that they could turn against anyone. Of course, that immediately runs into the question of how the Romans could dupe them so thoroughly, but Whedon has a ready answer for that too: there was no con. The moral regime was forged originally, says the show, by Romans who actually believed in such a regime themselves, represented by the father of the current lannista of Spartacus’s ludus, a man who, as lannista, was content with his social station as a Roman and himself interested only in bringing honor and dignity to his house through the warriors he bred and the men he forged out of them. This is not to say that he is the picture of righteousness; he is after all a slaver who has sent hundreds of men to their deaths in a sickening blood sport that has long been viewed as a blemish on the ancient Roman soul (something the show makes no bones about in its portrayal of the crowd at the games). What is important, however, is that he truly sees himself to be building up men of fides, and perpetuating a house of honor and virtue by so doing. The slaves drank the kool aid of the old lannista’s regime because he himself drank it. One is reminded, in fact, of Cyrus’s father in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, who answers the inquiry of his future tyrant of a son as to how best to appear just to the people by telling to simply, “be just.” Anyone who has both watched the show and read that book will, I think, find a delicious parallel between the way in which Cyrus corrupts the Persia described at the start of the book and the way the new lannista erodes his father’s work.

In much the same way as the old Persia and the old ludus, Rome as a polity and an empire was able to prosper in the early republic because, despite the mafia-like nature of its expansion and interactions with its Italian vassals, their foreign policy was governed by a strict moral code born of their domestic patronage regime: “Pacta servanda sunt” (“Compacts must be preserved.” And yes, erudite historians, I know it was a Christian of the 14th century who actually first described it with that phrase—shut up). Every one of Rome’s Italian allies (And their allies elsewhere, but it was their corps of Italian men and resources that made the armies of Rome so uniquely powerful and resilient during the Republic’s tenure) knew that regime to be iron clad and so, largely, bought into it themselves over time, holding to it even under the immense pressure of the Second Punic War; even when the Carthaginians had crippled Rome at the Battle of Cannae and seemed on the verge of total victory, even when every “realist” foreign policy principle told the Italian vassals to betray these Latin upstarts, a sufficient majority of the Italians continued to back them that they were able to continue the war for 15 years and finally win.

That was the Rome which the slaves of the prequel season knew, the Rome of the old lannista. For that reason, they fought for his house with genuine zeal, and the lannista himself took pride in the gallons of blood they spilt and the violent deaths they suffered for their own sake, for what they represented about the men he had made, not for their utility as a ladder to external rewards. It was not, however, the Rome which Spartacus (who arrives in season one) knew. His first experience with the Romans is to be betrayed, as a Thracian auxiliary to a Roman army, by the Roman legate who sees political opportunity in abandoning the war for which the Thracians had bound themselves to him to go seek battle against Mithridates (the Greek king of Pontus in Anatolia). Whedon places this in stark relief to Spartacus, who is shown from the beginning as a man of true warrior’s honor who considers loyalty sacred. Everything he sees of the Romans after arriving in Italy as a slave—first the unrestrained debauchery and sexual perversion on display at a party of Roman patricians where he and his fellow prisoners are initially displayed, and thereafter the new lannista’s regime—serves to deepen this initial impression the legate gives him.

That season one begins with this betrayal by Rome is very deliberate. The early res publica (“public matter”) of the Rome which overthrew their Etruscan tyrants in the 6th century B.C. was a regime truly oriented towards the input of all political forces into the life of the polity, through both democratic and aristocratic means, to which the sanctity of the patron-client relationship was foundational. The late Republic which the historical Spartacus inhabited, however, was one in which increased wealth disparity, corruption at the highest levels, and imperial expansion to which the political structure of a small city in the woods of central Italy was never suited, were eroding the old patron-client res publica. Shortly prior to the time period of the show, Rome had been wracked by the civil wars of Marius and Sulla, wars of violent oligarchs seeking complete control of the res. The old obligations of patron to client had begun to break down, and the old aristocratic structures that governed political power were beginning to give way to the chaos of power controlled by money, demagoguery, and crime (Marius famously was not born to nobility). The new generations of Romans, personified in the show by the new lannista, had come to be driven by desire for wealth and status—things now attainable by any man of cunning, it seeemed—rather than the old notions of honor, contributing to a culture of cynicism, crime, and corruption bearing more resemblance to the Etruscan tyranny that saw the rape of Lucretia than the res publica the upstart Roman nobles of 510 B.C. envisioned. The new lannista and his wife serve to demonstrate this devolution to the slaves of the ludus in undeniable spectacle, both before and after the arrival of Spartacus. 

Of course, the ludus’s honor regime does not break the second the son takes over as lannista; as with all such corruption, it is a process. He still pays lip service to all the warrior’s honor which motivates his gladiators, perhaps even believes himself that he believes it. Yet all the tradition which motivated his father holds no meaning for him, as is clear to all his men very quickly, though some, the doctor (trainer) in particular, remain in denial right up to the moment of revolt. He takes a wife far below his social station, a wife who seeks only their social and material elevation once married, caring so little for the history of his house that she, in the end, murders the old lannista to stop his restraint on his son’s baser urges. He quickly proceeds, on becoming lannista, to bribe, murder, and politic his way up the ladder of his city’s social strata, running roughshod over the warriors’ traditions that his men held dear in the process. He begins by forcing his doctor to welcome men to the brotherhood of gladiators who have not passed the lethal tests the old gladiators went through, and he commands this in order to reward those slaves for aiding in violently settling petty rivalries of his. He shortly thereafter prostitutes all of his gladiators in disgusting orgies held under his own roof to gain the attention and favor of Capua’s nobles through this gratification of their libidos. He enlists the help of the gladiators in murdering officials and other men who stand in his way (even having a gladiator slaughter a child at one point). And, in the end, shortly before the slaves revolt, he blackmails a legate into granting him patronage he would never have otherwise received. All of this is punctuated by a debauched, unrestrained existence on the part of both the lannista and his wife; there is a particularly poignant scene in which the father walks in on them engaged in a drunken threesome with an old friend of the wife’s and greets it with horror and disgust at the idea of his house being so demeaned, even though, from the son’s perspective up to that point, it has been his father who has demeaned their house by preventing its social and political ascension through his traditionalism and restraint.

Much of the above occurs in season one, after Spartacus’s arrival, but a significant portion, and certainly the most obscene of the new lannista’s activities, occurs before the slaves have ever heard the name Spartacus. The prequel season may be the most sex-infused of all four seasons, but there is a very good reason for that: it demonstrates the utter emptiness of the son’s moral character, and explains how the foundation of the honor regime had been so softened by the spectacle of the new lannista’s behavior before his men and his treatment of them and their traditions before Spartacus ever arrived that it took only one Thracian who had never sipped the kool aid to rally all the slaves to his side and bring the entire structure crashing down. There is, of course, more to this first chapter, most of it built around Spartacus’s personal journey, which contains many parallels to the journeys of the slaves as a whole and adds several layers of depth to the story. However, I have already spent too much time on that chapter, and, in a real sense, I think the recognition that Spartacus is almost incidental to the origins of the revolt (The revolt of the show; again, please don’t jump down my throat if the historical revolt was different) helps you to see him in a new light as an almost Luther-like figure. Yes, his personal journey to the 95 theses moment is fascinating and informative, but the real story of the Reformation is the irreverence towards Rome arising from centuries of papal corruption, coupled with centuries of dissenting theologians building to someone like Luther, that allowed him to succeed. That is the true genius of this first chapter of the show, that it is the changed political setting of the ludus that matters most, not Spartacus himself. This is the change that allows him, at the end of season one, to stand amid a bloodbath of Roman corpses, many women, nearly all unarmed, and, to the other gladiators, proclaim, “I have done this thing because it is just!” to thunderous cheers. The prequel season very poignantly brings this point home in its last seconds of footage. Standing with his wife after a season’s worth of murder, rape, debauchery, and dishonor that has raised him as high as any other lannista in Capua, he tells her, “one day we shall see proper reward for all we have done,” only to have the camera suddenly cut to their corpses with Spartacus’s voice proclaiming the justice of their deaths over them.

Then there is chapter two. There is, I think, a slight divergence here in Whedon’s perspective and mine. For him, I think that this chapter was primarily about the slave army trying to deliver on Spartacus’s promise at the end of the first season to “see Rome tremble” and only secondarily about the Romans, but I actually find that I care very little about the storylines from within Spartacus’s camp. They are good TV and mostly decently written and executed, with some real depth at times, but they are, for me, largely superfluous to the real story, though I do not think that was his intent. The first chapter was about how the moral decay of the Republic led to its power being challenged. The second chapter is about how the impious, upstart men of the empire—the “chaos is a ladder” men—take advantage of the blood and chaos of the challenge to climb their way to the top of the crisis, standing, at the end, as unstoppable oligarchs atop the bloodied remains of the aristocracy of the Republic.

Their climb is, to be sure, quite ahistorical in parts, but the deviations from the history really serve to highlight the moral lesson at play in a very satisfyingly Straussian fashion. Fans of the show will forgive me if I mostly skip the story of season two, because I think it distracts from the Romans too much by focusing on the satisfying of the slaves’ personal vendettas and wrapping up story lines from season one—perfectly consistent with what Whedon wanted to do, but incidental to my interest in the show. Season two does, however serve one useful purpose, which is to make the metaphor and symbolism of the previous seasons explicit via the politicking of the Romans as they scramble to quash the revolt. It shows the viewers that the violence, cruelty, selfishness, unrestrained self-indulgence, and general amorality on display in the previous seasons were not merely the actions of a couple of self-obsessed crooks in Capua or a legate far from the shores of Italy doing what he thought he could get away with, but actually what politics in the Republic had become, and that demonstration sets up nicely for the war of season three.

The main character of the final season is, I would argue, not Spartacus, but Marcus Crassus. This richest of Romans did indeed come from modest noble stock, but his prestige within the Republic was based primarily on his immense wealth, gained through unbearably mundane, peasantish means. For this reason, Whedon has the other Roman patricians simultaneously envy his wealth and treat him as an upstart, insufferable piece of undeserved political power and turn to him to destroy Spartacus only after all significant armies remaining in Italy have been defeated by the slaves, and he remains the only Roman not engaged in foreign wars with sufficient wealth to raise and equip a new army. This does, in fact, track closely with an important aspect of how the old Republic’s regimes had broken by this point: In its early days, Roman armies were raised by conscription and filled with citizen-soldiers from all classes, but, by the late Republic, this had given way to pseudo-professional armies of soldiers paid and equipped from their generals’ personal wealth. This was one of a myriad of developments that served to make wealth a store of political power in a way it never had been before, and the way in which Rome is forced to turn to new money for salvation at the season’s start, rather than some Cincinnatus-esque figure, is a very neat way to show, up front, just now broken the Republic’s political structure had become.

Yet, despite how Whedon portrays the other Romans as seeing him, Crassus is actually shown, from the start, to be an imminently impressive man in ways no Romans shown up to this point have been. He does not treat the war with the casual arrogance the other generals had at the idea of quashing an army of slaves, going so far as to buy a gladiator to train him in how to face such men in combat. He even gives his son a harsh, democratic lecture on how the slaves they face are as much men as the Romans themselves and the men of the house of Crassus itself. He approaches the war with ironclad discipline and appropriate humility (At one point exiling his son from his camp to live with the slaves after forcing him to punish his men by decimation for an avoidable defeat suffered under his leadership). Moreover, his slaves (his mistress in particular) and his children are all shown as treating him with awe and respect that Whedon clearly meant as genuine. He is in sharp contrast to all the easily despicable Romans (apart from the old lannista) Whedon has given his viewers up to that point.

Yet, from the start, there are also cracks in Crassus’s moral character. He is closer to his slave-mistress than his wife; he never makes any appeal to the gods, by word or sacrifice, as all the show’s Romans up to then have; and, it gradually becomes clear, he is no more above using wicked means to elevate his house than the new lannista was. He quickly, after the Senate has first appealed to him, arranges for Spartacus to gain intelligence sufficient to assassinate the two other Roman generals still in the field, leaving him as imperator and sole hope for Rome’s salvation, and, after retaking a city from Spartacus, he covertly trades a surviving noble Roman woman into slavery in order to clear the way for him to claim the entire city for himself, having eliminated the only survivor of any political note who might have driven the Senate to oppose him in his claim. Yet it is a story line involving his son that is the most revealing. His son, in wake of the decimation incident referenced above, rapes the mistress by way of revenge against his father. She, unwilling to inflict the pain of the knowledge on her lover, joins Spartacus and eventually kills the son. She eventually rejoins Crassus, who forgives her for the desertion and the murder after learning of the rape from a third party and accepts her back as his lover, but, in the end, he crucifies her along with everyone else who had aided Spartacus, for worry of how it might hinder him politically to continue sleeping with a woman who had so betrayed him. In his treatment of his wife, the Roman woman, and his mistress, as well as his betrayal of the other generals, the viewers are led to the realization that Crassus is a fundamentally selfish man who, underneath all the impressive trappings, believes imminently in Littlefinger’s assertion that those who cling to “the realm, or the gods, or love” are fools; “Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is” (See the Game of Thrones clip linked earlier if you’re not getting this reference). This is brought home explicitly in his one conversation with Spartacus shortly before the final battle, when he agrees with the slave’s saying, “There is no justice, not in this world.” Of course, Spartacus has been forced to that belief by unbelievable pain and loss and has responded to it by attempting to rectify the world’s injustice with his slave army, whereas Crassus has believed it his whole life, in the midst of incredible prosperity, and has responded by embracing the fact instead of fighting it.

Coupled with Crassus is the character of Caesar, whom Crassus recruits as his military Tribune in return for aiding in eliminating his considerable debts in order to maximize the political power the House of Crassus gains from the War by sharing it with the famed general of the powerful, divinely descended Julian clan, gaining an ally who has the aristocratic power his name lacks. Historically, of course, Caesar was not even in Italy at the time of the War, but the reason for inserting him into the show is easy to see. The outcome of all the chaos and decline of the late Republic was the ascension of the First Triumverate, and, since this is meant to be a complete parable about the Republic’s decline, it is very fitting that the creation of this alliance between the three most powerful oligarchs in the Republic should be the final end of this crisis that was started by the corruption of the new generation of Romans. All that remained to govern and protect the Republic after the regime of 509 B.C. had broken down was the strength of Nietzschean strong men such as those of the Triumverate, so, for the parable to work, it is key that the final scene featuring any Romans should be the formation of this alliance. Pompey, in fact, did play a small part in ending the war when returning from Hispania with his armies at its tail end, so it is relatively easy for Whedon to write him in by simply having Crassus agree to share credit with him. Caesar, however, had nothing to do with the War, making it a necessity that Crassus should  recruit him. In him we see the other side of the aristocracy’s breakdown. Crassus is a middle-aged man of new money seeking to gain the prestige and intangible stature in the Roman mind which the houses of the established power possess. To that end, he disassociates himself from his material wealth, the primary source of his power, to as great a degree as possible in favor of associating his name with martial might and the name of a divine clan. By contrast, Caesar is a young man of old power who possesses already, through his clan’s name and his victories in Gaul, the intangibles Crassus seeks, but he lacks the material power necessary, at this point in the republic, for any man of power to endure as such. Unlike Crassus, he is a true Roman soldier who does seem to believe in virtue as an end of itself, but this is not the primary end of his soul; that is his ego. Maintenance of his image as a virile figure of power overshadows all other ends, so that he has no issue with allying himself with a man like Crassus, as, in keeping with Shakespeare’s portrayal, ambition overshadows all else in his character, so that, qualms born of aristocratic sensibility notwithstanding, he too, uses chaos as a ladder.

What is the lesson of the parable, then? Simple, when a regime’s honor dies, so does its justice. And when its justice dies, so does its strength. And when its strength dies, chaos returns, and “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” Pre-imperial Rome may not have been a republic as we think of it today—many of the notions of honor here described born of its martial, pagan aristocracy would, after all, strike a democratic, Christianized man of today as absurd. Yet it was a regime born of moral outrage at the Etruscan injustices which held ancient virtue and honor as sacred. That outrage translated to a regime permeated throughout by ironclad notions of honor, which, in turn, yielded men who, oriented as their souls were towards those notions, lived lives just to a degree that, in the ancient world, was rare indeed. This translated directly into Rome’s unparalleled martial might and internal stability and security. But as their children’s souls came to be oriented instead towards false notions of honor that were, in reality, the absolute basest of men’s desires, their lives, as the lives of the young Persians whom Cyrus led, became unjust and obscene, until finally Rome came to resemble the world of Judges 17:6. Extraordinary weakness soon followed, so that an army of rebel slaves could do what all Hannibal’s armies never could—“see Rome tremble.” The only way left for survival was to turn to vicious, selfish men, and give them all the power, for with a regime of basest desires, must come a regime of basest strength.