Abstract
Spartacus probably evokes neither political nor musical nor historical events or texts but an image. Archaic masculinity refers back to the strongmen appearing at fairgrounds, in vaudeville theater, and in early cinema. Physical performance and the staged representation of the body in the media turns the hero into a star. The studios endorsed the motto Bigger is Better to respond to the crisis of the cinema in the face of growing competition from television in the United States. This chapter presents remarks that are couched in general terms because the Spartacus films are no exception in this respect whether auteur cinema or B-movie, they always stage the muscular male hero - more or less aesthetized, eroticized, and endowed with moral values for the media and physical experience of the monumental. Keywords:ancient hero; archaic masculinity; spartacus; twentieth- century cinema
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