Jason Arday Apparently Plagiarized His Memoir Title and Origin Story From the TV Show 'Spartacus'

Jason Arday, the apparent serial fabulist who resigned from Cambridge University last week amid credible accusations of academic plagiarism, shares the title of his upcoming memoir, Great and Difficult Things, and a key element of the origin story he recounts in its prologue, with the 2010 television show Spartacus: Blood and Sand.

The news about Arday apparently plagiarizing from a TV show came to my attention thanks to the remarks below in the comment section of an article about Mr. Arday in The Daily Telegraph. This commenter appears to have gleaned these remarkable insights from a report on Thursday in Just the News.

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Season 1, Episode 7, of Spartacus is entitled “Great and Unfortunate Things.”

From Spartacus’ first episode comes dialogue that overlaps with not one but two prophesies about his destiny uttered in the prologue of Mr. Arday’s book. In the TV scene, Spartacus’ wife, Sura, utters a prophesy:

SURA: The gods came to me last night, in my sleep.

SPARTACUS: What did they show you?

SURA: My husband on his knees, bowing before a great red serpent, the life draining from his veins.

SPARTACUS: What meaning did you take from it?

SURA: A warning. If you go to war you are destined for great and unfortunate things.

SPARTACUS: The Geti worship the mountain wolf. They place no faith in snakes. It was just a dream.

SURA: And if it isn’t?

(Also check out the film clip I obtained of Mr. Arday lying on TV to gain major prizes. See below.)

Spartacus was part of the memoir’s own origin story. Daniel Engber reported in The Atlantic, the following about the contents of Arday’s original book proposal, which Mr. Engber obtained:

Then there is the prophecy—the revelation Arday was given in Brazil, that he would suffer greatly and also do great things. According to the proposal, this occurred in 2005, not 2006, and the message came not from a local aid worker in her 30s but from “an elder in the small town where I had been assigned, who was well-known in the area for predicting people’s futures.” (Later in the proposal, he calls this person a “shaman woman.”) “Do you know the story of Spartacus, the escaped slave who led a rebellion against the Romans?” this town elder asks, before telling him his fate in minute detail. “Every event she described,” Arday writes in the proposal, “has since come to pass.”

Below is how the prophesies about Mr. Arday appear in the prologue of his book, per the final UK edition, typeset in June. Instead of citing Spartacus explicitly, the characters in the book merely appear to effect dialogue from the show.

First there is the scene of Mr. Arday’s birth in 1985, in which the midwife pronounces to his mother, called Giff: “This boy is destined for great things.”

Then comes the scene in Brazil, where Mr. Arday claims he went to aid in providing fresh water to children. There, a local prophet says to him in Portuguese through a translator: “I can tell you’re destined to do great things. But I also believe you’re destined for very sad and difficult things as well.”