Most people, when they think of Spartacus, think of a certain leading man with a dimple in his chin. Kirk Douglas' portrayal is legendary — and above, you can reacquaint yourself with the most well known scene in Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film. (Besides, of course all of Tony Curtis' lines — Antoninus clearly got to Rome by way of the Bronx.)

Today, we're talking to Barry Strauss about his book The Spartacus War, which takes the legend of Spartacus and makes it flesh. When asked why he wrote about such a well beloved figure — of whom much has already been written — he answered by exploring how much each generation has, in its own way, identified with the character.

I wanted to write a book that made us think differently about a man whose image was still preserved in the amber of outdated twentieth-century concerns. Our Spartacus was shaped by the ideas of communists and their opponents, men like the blacklisted Hollywood writer Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay for the movie Spartacus and Howard Fast, who wrote the book on which the movie was based. Both Trumbo and Fast were communists who did jail time in the McCarthy era. Spartacus was shaped too by the ideas of anti-Communists like U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who invoked Spartacus as a hero of freedom, and Arthur Koestler, a disillusioned ex-Communist who wrote a novel in which Spartacus is a revolutionary who is corrupted by power, like Lenin or Stalin.

Tags: Barry Strauss, Kubrick, Spartacus