AN AMERICAN SPARTACUS: ROBERT MONTGOMERY BIRD’S THE GLADIATOR (1831) AND THE APPROPRIATION OF ANCIENT ROME
AN AMERICAN SPARTACUS: ROBERT MONTGOMERY BIRD’S THE GLADIATOR (1831) AND THE APPROPRIATION OF ANCIENT ROME

Summary/Abstract: This article explores Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1831 play The Gladiator—a retelling of the Third Servile War, an ancient slave uprising led by the Thracian gladiator Spartacus— from the perspective of cultural memory studies and imagology. I analyze the way in which the play employs the memory of Rome and constructs a Roman image, which it puts forward for identification. Furthermore, I look at the logic of adapting and domesticating the Spartacan memory site for a 19th century American audience, while tracing the memorial context in which the play was produced (and here I explore both Spartacus’ Enlightenment revival and the Early American’s Republic fascination with Rome). The main question I try to answer is how historical identification works in the absence of a national selfimage. By 1831, Spartacus had become a known property and a new memory site had emerged around the Thracian slave and gladiator. Stressing his virtuous character and status as a rebel against absolutist tyranny, the plays, novels, statues and mentions that comprised the Spartacan memory site helped form an understanding of Spartacus that still survives to this day. Jacksonian America was a period of antielitist sentiment, growing democratization and burgeoning Romanticism—a propitious time for the American appropriation of Spartacus and his employment in an ideological discourse that emphasized social struggle and the toppling of established elites. But for this to work, Bird had to first make Spartacus palatable to American audiences—to domesticate him—and to achieve this he employs a number of linguistic, thematic and generic conventions, which I analyze in this article.

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