History books serve up the past but sometimes it takes other media to put flesh on the bones. Here are some novels, films, television series, documentaries and music that offer other perspectives on the subjects of my books.

The Spartacus War
The best novel in English about the revolt is Howard Fast’s famous 1951 Spartacus, republished in 1996 with a brief introductory essay by Fast about his experiences as an American Communist in the McCarthy era. The novel is only loosely based on history. Fast offers a Marxist-lite interpretation of Spartacus but you don’t have to be on the left to enjoy this marvelous piece of popularization.

Arthur Koestler’s 1939 novel, The Gladiators, comes to the Spartacus story from the opposite political direction. Koestler was a disillusioned ex-communist who saw in Spartacus’s revolt the excesses of revolution. The book has long been out of print, but copies are available on a site such as Abebooks. As entertainment it is no match for Fast but this novel of ideas reads well, even so.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Spartacus, originally published in 1933, is in print in a new edition.

Many of us were introduced to Spartacus by Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 sword-and-sandal film. Loosely based on Fast’s novel, the film shares its historical inaccuracies, but its big-screen appeal more than makes up for that. Spartacus is available in DVD, in several versions, including a fully restored 1991 release. Alex North’s lovely soundtrack of the film is also available separately.

A lesser and often-forgotten Italian film about Spartacus is worth seeing: the combination of camp and historical insight outweighs an often-murky print. Ricardo Fredda’s 1952 black-and-white Spartaco is available, under the lurid name Sins of Rome, in a DVD called Sword and Sandal: Double Feature – Giants of Thessaly/Sins of Rome.

A 2004 television version, “Spartacus – The Complete TV Miniseries,” is also available on DVD. If not compelling drama, it is not half bad, and is more accurate historically than is the 1960 film.

Khatchaturian’s great ballet Spartacus deserves to be better known by the Western public. If no Roman legion ever moved as lithely as these dancers, the dance of Spartacus and his woman (here, called Phrygia), recalls the passion that some of the rebels brought to their cause. A version with choreography by Yuri Grigorovich and performed by the Bolshoi Ballet, is available on DVD. The 1990 Arthaus DVD version, one of two starring Irek Mukhamedov as Spartacus, is probably the best.

A complete sound recording of the ballet’s music is available,
as well as various recordings of the composer’s abridged “Spartacus Suite.”

It’s not about Spartacus but Ridley Scott’s 2000 film Gladiator tells a Spartacus-like story of a Roman soldier condemned to the arena. Although wildly inaccurate about the details of gladiatorial combat, the film may well capture the mood of the crowd.

The Trojan War

The 2004 Hollywood film, Troy, disappointed most movie buffs but it has its moments. I like the battle of the beach, in which the film imagines how the Trojans might have resisted the Greeks’ landing. Peter O’Toole makes a grand Priam. Avalable in video.

Few subjects have inspired more literary works than the Trojan War. There are many good ones, but I am too much of a teacher to send you anywhere except back to the source – Homer. Among recent translations into English, I like the formal renderings of Richmond Lattimore’s Iliad and Robert Fagles’ Odyssey. My favorite translation, however, are Stanley Lombardo’s rendition of Homer into less formal language in the Iliad, and the Odyssey.

Battle of Salamis
It doesn’t cover Salamis, but it is set in the year of the battle, 480 B.C., and Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire is the best novel on ancient Greek warfare that I know of. “Gates” refers to Thermopylae, literally, “Hot Gates,” the pass where the famous battle was fought. The battle of Thermopylae set the stage for the battle of Salamis, which took place about a month later. Pressfield’s portrait of ancient Sparta is one part Marine and one part poet. Athens gets less attention in the novel, as is only natural in a book about Thermopylae.

A great novel about Athens and Salamis has yet to be written, although how any novelist could resist Themistocles is beyond me – unless Plutarch and Herodotus have said it all. But jump ahead in history 50 years and you will find a splendid novel about Athens during the Peloponnesian War, Mary Renault’s Last of the Wine.

Gore Vidal paints a very entertaining picture of the Persian Empire and its conflict with Greece in his novel, Creation.

The film “300,” like the graphic novel by Frank Miller on which it is based, is filled with historical inaccuracies and will win no awards for fairness to ancient Persia. Yet this rollicking entertainment about the battle of Thermopylae rouses the blood. Video formats.

Rowing Against the Current
It’s slim pickings when it comes to rowing in the movies but if you are game, you can read reviews at such sites as row2K.com, rowing.org and rowingnz.com.

Fiction, however, offers a brighter picture. There are some tips at rowinglibrarian.blogspot.com.

It would be hard to beat the wit and wisdom about “messing about in boats” in Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, which is available in many different versions.

Handel’s famous Water Music premiered on the water – on the Thames in London, for King George I in 1717. Although the event was timed to avoid noisy oars – the boats moved with a favorable tide – it is hard not to hear the rhythm of rowing in this splendid work.

And then there is Miklos Rozsa’s music for the rowing scene of in the 1959 Hollywood film, Ben-Hur, which he later adapted as the third movement of a choral suite.