The Value of the Thing in the Pit

In "The Thing in the Pit", Spartacus contends with one of the dark underbellies produced by societies in which human life possesses no inherent value. The only running value on life shakes out to be something like this:

The lives of the people killed by other denizens of the pit are worth the least. Those who are capable of and willing to kill are moderately more valuable. The lives of those who can afford to pay gladiators to kill on their bhealf hold the most value -- but only so far as their coin extends.

The proliferation of such places is a side-effect of a politics that forgets the true value of citizenry. The true value of citizenry is not the value of the money they possess, or the value of their obedience to the state.

Rather, the true value of the citizen is what they can contribute to the community, given the opportunity, and the value of their life. This notion is deeply engrained within the codes of rights that are a feature of the most advanced of modern societies.

In Ancient Rome, no modern notion of citizenship truly existed. The notion of citizenship that existed in Ancient Rome was both antiquated and tyrannical.

There are places in modern society where such notions prevail today. Wherever a dog fight is staged, wherever a young woman is enslaved for the purposes of prostitution, wherever a sleazebag pays two homeless people to fight for their entertainment, we see the moral hazard of a monetized notion of the worth of life creep into the modern psyche.

It's something that all people must work together to prevent, or the dark pits that populate modern society could become all the more brazen.