Spartacus, A Thracian Jésus

SPARTACUS,

A THRACIAN JESUS

EXTERMINATION OF REBELLIOUS SLAVES

ROMAN-STYLE SOCIAL GENOCIDE

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

STANLEY KUBRICK — SPARTACUS — 1960

This film is a classic and like all classics, it has aged, and yet it remains a classic. What makes it such is the fact that slavery is shown in all its horror. Slavery appeared in the Magdalenian when agriculture and herding changed the lifestyle of Homo Sapiens. No more hunting and gathering. No more the division of labor between men, the providers, and women the guarantee the species and their communities will go on expanding and multiplying with a surviving birth rate of 3 at the age of twelve. And that meant ten to twelve pregnancies for every woman and seven to nine deaths before adult age. Women had to work as one unified child producer and raiser.

When humanity started to develop agriculture a completely different work organization was needed and the land itself was supposed to be controlled with the parallel control of the work on this land, tilling and toiling for the community to satisfy their needs. That will not increase life expectancy that will remain at 29 up to the nineteenth century CE, though that will increase differences with an elite that will be able to live longer, and the mass of people just stuck around 29. From this new work organization, slavery was born and then the empires in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, but also in Asia and similar development in the Americas and Africa produced a vast culture and economy of slavery, in local colors and characteristics in each area.

The first water mill was invented near Marseilles by the Romans something around 60 BCE, but it was never used nor generalized because they had slaves to pound the grain, the oil, and many other basic forms of work. The watermill will only be generalized starting around the 10th century CE at the initiative of the Dominicans to enable the religious reform brought up by Charlemagne that edicted that 52 Sundays had to be free of work, plus the three-week-long religious celebrations, Nativity, Passion, and Assumption. Plus, a couple of local holidays…