Many of the slaves I had come to like in the first couple of seasons became cruel and ugly in season four.

When Spartacus and his slave army took the city at the Valley of Sinuessa (sp?) I was struck with how different some of their personalities had become compared to when they were slaves. Naevia for example was a very different person. When she was a body slave for Lucretia she was a meek, kind, person. But by the time she reached that walled city she had transformed into something else altogether, with no remnant of her old personality. It is hard to imagine Naevia from the first season cutting a man's hand in half as he crawled on the ground toward a crust of bread as she did in season four. Her excuse for doing so was that she thought he was reaching for a sword which lay a couple of feet past the piece of bread he was reaching for, and she feared he was going to use it to stab Crixus in the back as he was walking away. That was absurd.

First, the sword was several feet away from him. Second, he was lying prone on the ground so that even if he had the sword in his hand, he could not have cut Crixus or anyone else with it. And the man whose hand she cut wasn't a belligerant sort of person. He was a meek man seeking to be able to feed his pregnant wife. It seems the writers made her a crazed woman bent on revenge against anyone who wasn't a slave, whether they were a threat or not. Crixus questioned her about it later and Naevia related some story about a cruel man who had tortured her, but acted harmless when he was with his family. The implication was that seeing a harmless man had 'triggered' her psychotic display of violence. This is so different from the Naevia of the first season; there seems to be nothing remaining of that person.

In the first three seasons the characters Crixus, Spartacus, Naevia, Oenomaus, and others were sympathetic characters. When they were violent you could understand why they acted that way. The people they killed were either people they were supposed to battle, or Roman soldiers (who treated them cruelly), or were people with low character who had wronged them or who were lying to them or something like that. But in Sinuessa, Crixus, Naevia, and some others showed a dark side. Now that they were in power they seemed to want to treat all the Roman citizens they met as badly or worse than they themselves had been treated. They weren't interested anymore in fairness or in simply living as free people. They wanted to kill all Roman citizens, regardless whether they were good people or not.

Spartacus tried to prevent such indiscriminate barbarity, but at least half of the slaves in that walled city seemed bent upon wholesale genocide. It was difficult to feel supportive of them at that point.