The Broken Promises of Empire

Spartacus: Blood and Sand re-tells the classic story of Spartacus.

The story is one of the Roman Empire at one of its apexes of its glory and decadence, yet brought to the edge of economic ruin by a drought.

At its height, the Roman Empire was perhaps the most total empire in the history of its world. It commanded the fealty of leagues of territory, and scores of people. In Roman Catholicism, it was able to impose its cultural values as far as its territory expanded.

Today, a form of imperialism exists which rivals the Roman Empire in its scope and influence. Described by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire, it's a form of cultural imperialism, that has used the tools of globalization -- network communication -- to impose a core of western cultural values on the rest of the world.

"The Red Serpent" demonstrates the most destructive notion of Imperialism: empire nonchalantly breaks its promises.

Spartacus and his Thracians were promised that their obligation would end with victory against the Visigoths, and that Rome would protect their village. But the Romans kept neither promise.

Not only does Gaius Claudius Glaber attempt to press gang the Thracians into another campaign to be waged solely for his own personal glorification, but when Spartacus returns to his village he finds his wife under attack, and the village itself in flames. He rescues his wife from her assailants only to wake the following morning to be taken prisoner by Glaber. Spartacus will face death for humiliating Glaber. His wife will be enslaved.

Similarly, readers of Negri and Hardt will recognize that the modern version of cultural imperialism also casually breaks its promises. Cultural imperialism promises that concepts such as human rights will bring human security to the world.

Yet when atrocities begin to take place in countries like Rwanda and in the Sudan, powerful countries often simply decline to intervene. Human rights violations unfold in gristly horror, and foreign leaders choose to look away.

Even a kinder, gentler form of imperialism, one that insists it's more respectful of individual rights than outdated forms of imperialism, falls to the same kind of folly.

Human rights have their place, and have their value. But imposing it uopon societies in the world that do not share beliefs in this concept requires a will that the modern incarnation of empire lacks the will to do, though it may well have the power.

The Roman Empire at least had the will to attempt to impose itself thoroughly -- even if, in time, it proved to lack the power.