The seedy, greedy world of Spartacus: Blood and Sand has
produced many memorably heinous yet compelling characters. We’ve had ruthless
social-climbing Batiatus with his all-consuming ambition and monstrous temper;
his cold-hearted, viciously conniving bride Lucretia; and haughty, brutal
Glaber. Yet by the final gore-spattered frames of Spartacus: Vengeance, one
member of the show’s pantheon of evil stands out. Ashur, the slave who became a
gladiator, the gladiator who became an odd-job boy and sometime assassin, who
became the slyest, most cruelly manipulative fiend ever to walk the mean
streets of Roman Capua.
If he wasn’t so steeped in blood and treachery, you could
muster sympathy for Ashur. After all, he begins the series as much a slave as
all the other gladiators, damned to an inhumanly savage existence of relentless
training and sadistic blood-sport. He has no choice but to hone his body to
heights of chiselled perfection, only to offer it up for mutilation at the
hands of fellow slaves, for the amusement of a baying crowd. Yet unlike Crixus
or Barca, Ashur does not even have the hollow consolation of glory and celebrity
as a God of the Arena, as he is the least of the Brotherhood, his victories of
little note or tainted by underhanded ploys. Then he is crippled by Crixus and even
his forlorn dream of becoming a true gladiator is snatched from him. Truly he
is a victim of slavery, brutalised into a foul echo of the prosperous and
respected man he might have become through his natural talents had he not found
himself in Roman shackles.
Yet his catalogue of misdeeds is so creatively vile that by
the time the first season has drawn to a close, any potential sympathy for him
has evaporated like morning dew. A faithless betrayer, a gleeful rapist and a
smirking torturer, not even the actor’s hammy charms or his plucky campaign to
carve out a private empire under the noses of the snotty, arrogant Romans can
make him remotely redeemable.
In the moral world of Spartacus, violence and mayhem are a
necessary way of life and means of self-expression, even for our relatively
sympathetic rebel-heroes. There is a certain coarse honour in their open,
doomed defiance of the tyrannical Roman Republic that oppresses them. Ashur’s
self-serving deviousness, his desire to co-opt his oppressors in enabling his
own rise to power rather than fighting back against them, undermines and mocks
the bravery of Spartacus and his followers. If Ashur had been successful in his
plan to supplant the fallen House of Batiatus, who could possibly believe that
he would have become a callous, abusive slave-master even worse than Batiatus
himself, massing wealth and influence through the exploitation of the slaves
who were once his fellows?
A monster obviously shaped and moulded by the despotic
society that captured him, Ashur may have been. But he was still a monster,
nonetheless. Though his agency was limited, he still had to make choices. By
the hour of his final confrontation with the rebels, he had long since left
choices of grim necessity behind, and was walking a path of brutal, bloodthirsty
hubris.