Spartacus

The Ancients

History Hit

History

4.7 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

‘I’m Spartacus!’ In the field of epic film making, the 1960 historical drama ‘Spartacus’, is legendary. Directed by Stanley Kibrick, adapted from the Howard Fast novel by Red Scare blacklisted screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, and starring Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and Jean Simmons; it is a classic. But how much of the plot has emerged from the true story of a Thracian gladiator and slave who escaped his Roman captors and led an unsuccessful but impressive rebellion against their oppressors? How much of the film’s message was formed by the personalities involved in its creation, and the context in which it was made. In her own words, Dr Fiona Radford devoted years of her life to the man with the most memorable chin cleft in the world - Kirk Douglas, specifically as Spartacus. Her thesis traced the production history of this film, examining in particular the effect that the turbulent process had on the portrayal of female characters. Having taught at Macquarie University, ANU and the University of Sydney, she currently teaches history at secondary school level, and her conversation with Tristan in this episode is an eye-opener to 1950s film making as well as the legend of Spartacus.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's
0:05.8	podcast, well as it's between Christmas and New Year, the Ancients team very
0:10.6	much deserve a break. But fortunately on the Ancients we've already recorded
0:15.2	more than 250 episodes and today we are delving deep into the archive from a
0:22.9	couple of years ago and we're bringing back to the fall one of our earlier
0:27.5	episodes so much younger, much earlier Tristan, one of our earlier episodes that
0:33.0	really deserves to be shown again because it was such a great episode. We have
0:38.4	picked one that I think you will very much enjoy because it's all about
0:42.6	Spartacus. We are talking to Dr Fiona Radford. She is one of the hosts of the
0:49.1	renowned ancient history podcast, The Partial Historians. I chatted with her more
0:54.1	than two years ago now. She diled in from Sydney in Australia but Fiona, she's
0:59.5	such good fun. She's a wonderful speaker and she also knows so much about
1:03.8	Spartacus, the legacy of Spartacus because in this episode we talk about
1:08.8	Spartacus's portrayal. We focus in on the person that he was in ancient
1:14.4	history but we do focus more on how he's been portrayed in film in the 20th
1:19.9	century particularly the thawed and sound-alapic featuring Kirk Douglas in the
1:25.0	early 1960s. Fiona is an absolute star when it comes to revealing all about this
1:31.8	particular depiction of Spartacus with Kirk Douglas Stanley Kubrick and so on
1:37.2	and so forth. This was a great chat. We are reviving it from the depths of our
1:41.9	archive and I think you absolutely love this one. So have a great inter-Christmas
1:46.3	New Year, break, rest, enjoy it, enjoy the end of 2022 and I will see you a
1:53.0	fresh at the start of 2023 but in the meantime to talk all about the legacy,
	...

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