Spartacus: A Study in Revolutionary History. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1944
The social system of the ancient world differed profoundly in its details from that of modern times, but it belonged, none the less, to the same category of the class state and a class-divided society. ‘Primitive communism’ was already a thing of the distant past by the first century BC, when the great slave revolt transpired. The class state and class society, the foundations of which had already been laid by the ancient monarchies of the Orient in the river valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia, had already reached a very high level of political cohesion and of mental culture by the time of the Roman Republic, against which the slave insurrection was directed.
Much nonsense has been talked and written by the classically-trained historians in modern ruling-class circles about ‘the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome’. That both this ‘glory’ and ‘grandeur’ existed is undeniable. Then, as long after, private property and the class state were historically progressive: their present decadence still lay far in the future. Undeniably, the classical Greeks stimulated a powerful movement in art, philosophy and literary culture in general. Whilst, concurrently, the classical state, and, in particular, the Roman state, its highest expression, represented a notable advance in political assimilation and social cohesion. As a modern anthropologist has recently observed, the Roman state extended the hitherto exclusive privileges of the tribal clan on an unprecedented scale. [1]
None the less, whilst the above view is a true one as far as it goes, it is, none the less, a class view, and, therefore, a one-sided view dictated by class considerations which have nothing in common with the objective view of science. It is the viewpoint exclusively of the beneficiaries of the social system; of its privileged exploiters, and not of the broad masses upon whose legal repression and ruthless exploitation was based the whole fabric of classical civilisation, including, very particularly, the ‘glory’ and the ‘grandeur’ of ancient Greece and Rome, in which that civilisation reached, respectively, its cultural and political high water-marks.
It is a truism that the world is a different place when viewed from the pavement and the gutter: ‘The world looks so different after dinner!’ We have in large measure still surviving the literature of the old ruling classes, which reflects such a satisfied mental attitude, the viewpoint of whom is reflected by a series of great writers from Plato to Tacitus.
That of the submerged masses, who, after all, very largely outnumbered the ruling class, have not survived, except to some extent in a bowdlerised religious form in the literature of the New Testament. We only know them and their aspirations from their deeds; from the armed insurrections whereby they sought to shake off their intolerable yoke. And these last are summarised in and by the name of Spartacus: whence his unique significance for the social history of antiquity.
What, in brief, was the nature of the classical society that came to a head, so to speak, in the centuries that immediately preceded the Christian Era? Its salient characteristics were, in essence, these.
In common with every species of class society, our own included, ancient society rested on three main institutions: class inequality, class exploitation, and the class state wherewith to preserve and to extend that exploitation. In these basic respects the ancient civilisation stood on the same foundations as the modern one; as, indeed, these self-same foundations are common to all class-divided societies which have risen since the end of ‘primitive communism’, of the patriarchal aboriginal society.
When, however, we turn to its detailed workings, two profound differences can be observed between ancient and modern civilisation. The first of these was technological. Whereas our modern civilisation is based on the industrial revolution and the machine; that is, on a foundation which is in constant flux; in continual transformation due to successive changes in its scientific and mechanical basis; the civilisation of antiquity was static in its economic foundations. It was based not upon dynamic science but upon static tradition.
From its earliest beginnings in the unknown past right down to its end in the epoch of the barbarian invasions in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, ancient civilisation reposed upon a pre-industrial foundation expressed in a few elementary technical inventions, which never changed nor varied. We still have the list of mechanical appliances, as supplied by the Roman engineer Vitruvius, in the same century as witnessed the Servile War. Throughout the whole of antiquity men drove in chariots, strangling their unfortunate horses by a harness pressed against their windpipe, and used the power of the manual labour of man and beasts to harness the power of nature for the service of man. (Water-mills were only discovered at the very end of antiquity, and, even then, were always exceptional.)
We can, therefore, say that the first great difference between classical and modern society lay in its current attitude to science, to the great revolutionary force in society. Ancient society was stagnant; even at its highest level science only barely touched its fringe. As I have elsewhere expressed it: ‘When Alexandria stopped before the steam-engine, the ancient civilisation stopped with it.’ Classical society never experienced anything in the nature of an industrial revolution.
Its failure to reach this last level, the true starting-point of modern civilisation, is to be found in the second major difference between ancient and modern society, the institution of slavery. For in the absence of machinery wherewith to harness the powers of nature, of wind and water, to the service of man, human energy was alone available for those forms of labour which could not be performed by domesticated animals. These tasks were performed by slaves: that is, by the majority of the human race legally enslaved to the ruling minority.
Throughout classical antiquity, and the more so as it approached its highest development, human enslavement was the basis of social labour. Slaves were ‘talking masks’, ‘animated instruments’, to employ the euphemistic language of ancient writers. Legal chattels, devoid until a very late period of classical civilisation of all legal protection, and, at all times, excluded from political life, the slaves were the beasts of burden, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, who bore the burden and heat of the day. From the Pyramids to the Parthenon, all the great cultural masterpieces of antiquity were the work of slaves.
In fact, it would be broadly true to say of this era of one-sided and immature development: no slaves, no culture! The tragedies of antiquity, those literary masterpieces which have moved the world to tears, are the tragedies of free men, of the ruling class. The tragedy of the slave, the tragedy of antiquity, remains unwritten. For who could have written it? ‘The ideas of every age are the ideas of its ruling class’, wrote Marx. [2] This tragedy was a tragedy not of literature but of life; of the slow agony of human immaturity. ‘Sunt lachrymae rerum’ (’such are the tears of life’), as the poet Virgil wrote. [3]
It was upon this morass of human suffering, this perpetually renewed Golgotha, that ancient society rested and created its undying masterpieces. In the main, men seem to have taken slavery for granted, like the air they breathed; as, indeed, is the common attitude of a conservative public towards its traditional institutions!
Only a few exceptionally farsighted observers, an Aristotle, a Seneca, viewed the institution in its deeper aspects against the fundamental background of society. Indeed, the inspired prediction of Aristotle that slavery would automatically cease ‘when galleys sailed without oars and lyres played without strings’, must always rank, in the light of the given circumstances, as one of the most remarkable sociological predictions in recorded literature. No wonder that no less a person than Marx himself hailed Aristotle as the ‘Marx’ of antiquity! [4]
For the rest, the institutions of classical civilisation bore a sufficient resemblance to the earlier pre-industrial forms of modern capitalism to explain that remarkable enthusiasm for the ideas and institutions of antiquity which characterised the earliest phase of modern capitalist civilisation in the era of the Renaissance. As the dominant economic form of antiquity was agriculture, the dominant section of the ruling class was represented by agrarian capital. But a powerful class of merchant capitalists existed concurrently; not to mention usury and such primitive forms of finance capital. Similarly, a class of free wage-labourers and landed peasants also existed side by side with slavery; in some parts of the Roman Empire it actually predominated, as Karl Kautsky has pointed out was the case in Palestine. [5]
What was the probable proportion of slave to free in classical society? It varied from time to time and is difficult to compute with exactitude. But it is scarcely doubtful that the slave population preponderated very considerably over the free. Indeed, in the Roman Empire which, as the most advanced form of political society in antiquity, represented its greatest ‘concentration of capital’, including its human ‘capital’, slaves, the estimate of the old Scotch writer Blair, that the proportion of slave to free stood at about three to one, is not at all improbable. [6]
A society so constituted is evidently unstable. To be sure, only the most direct and ruthless use of force by the class states of antiquity could have possibly kept such an unstable social structure in being. Classical society was a volcano constantly upon the point of eruption! That eruption was represented by the permanent possibility of slave insurrections. As Professor Farrington has recently pointed out: this background to the lofty ethics and unctuous platitudes of classical philosophers and politicians must always be kept in mind if we would appreciate their ironic limitations.
For the rest, and making allowance for the much slower pre-industrial rate of development, the classical political institutions were not so very different from our own modern ones. The successive political phenomena represented by plutocracy, oligarchy, democracy and dictatorship, are all to be found in the higher forms of ancient society after it had outstripped the immemorially stagnant theocracy of the priest-kings of the Orient. All the above political categories are to be found enumerated in the great political writers of Greece and Rome, such as Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides and Tacitus. To be sure, even such contemporary phenomena as Fascism and a military bureaucracy were anticipated to a substantial degree in the later history of the Roman Empire of the Caesars.
To this historic parallelism there is, however, one notable exception; one which arose necessarily from the nature of the times and of the economic system which they engendered.
This basic distinction is trenchantly expressed in the famous aphorism of the great historian Sismondi: ‘The proletariat lived on ancient society; modern society lives on the proletariat!’ That is, the ‘proletariat’, or (free) wage-earning class, did not form the economic basis of ancient as it does of modern society. Beneath the classical proletariat were the slaves: ‘depths below depths'! And all sections of the (legally) free society of antiquity, rich and poor alike, stood solidly united against the slaves.
Hence, the class struggles of antiquity were of two kinds: (free) rich versus (free) poor – patricians versus plebeians – and the slaves versus the whole free class, which could always be relied upon to sink its common enmities in face of this common danger and to stand four-square against the slaves.
And to be sure, even in the bitterest internal civil wars of the ancient world, it was altogether exceptional for either side to arm its slaves! In modern colonial wars we have seen the same reluctance of the modern imperialists to arm their colonial slaves!
Such, in brief essentials, was the anatomy of classical society. Highly cohesive in its political framework and embracing a highly civilised ruling class, with cultural masterpieces to its credit which have never been surpassed in the annals of civilised mankind. But technically limited and thus without perspectives of potential development, and thus forced to rely for its continued existence upon the most frightful exploitation of an ‘untouchable’ slave caste, which yet formed the actual majority of the population.
And since it is a sociological ‘law’ that any society which has reached a relatively advanced phase of social culture must either ‘make or break’, get on or get out, we are entitled to say that from the moment in which classical society failed to make the ‘industrial revolution’ which it so nearly reached, the eventual decay and disappearance of that society was absolutely inevitable: that ‘the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ was implicit in its lack of technical means!
But before any complex set of human relationships finally folds up and disappears from human ken, its instinct for self-preservation, that first law of human as of animal existence, first expresses itself in fierce dying convulsions. And these last usually burst out in the lowest social strata which are least exhausted and upon which the decline presses most harshly. These dying convulsions, which were represented in late medieval history by the chain of peasant revolts that stretched from the French ‘Jacquerie’ (1358) to the German ‘Peasants’ War’ (1525) and the Anabaptists of Munster (1534-35), were represented in the decline of classical antiquity by the chain of servile insurrections which found its final consummation in that of Spartacus.
Before, however, we turn our attention to this last sequence, it may be expedient to glance at the evolution of the Roman Empire, the final political form taken by the civilisation of classical times, that self-same state against which the Servile Insurrection was directed, and which it came as near to overthrowing as was probably permitted by the nature of the times.
Note on Classical Technique: The classical definition of a machine is given by the Roman engineer Vitruvius (first century BC): ‘A machine is an articulated connection of wood, affording great advantages in lifting weights.’ Such a definition, as is well pointed out by the Russian sociologist NI Bukharin, indicates the place of science in the ancient world as on the circumference, and not in the centre, of the ancient civilisation (see NI Bukharin, Historical Materialism). [7] The Greeks, particularly in Alexandria, the scientific metropolis of the classical world, got as far as the fringe of the Industrial Revolution and of the Machine Age, but stopped at this point: they had rudimentary steam-engines but there they stopped. Hence, Aristotle’s definition of God as ‘Pure Act’ – that is, as a Being Who has no further potential life in His existence – was really an apt definition of the stagnant Mediterranean civilisation which had gone as far as it could go and could advance no further.
1. Ruth Benedict, Race and Racism (Routledge, London, 1942).
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Part I.
3. From Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid – MIA.
4. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1.
5. Karl Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity (George, Allen and Unwin, London, 1925).
6. William Blair, An Inquiry into the State of Slavery Amongst the Greeks and Romans (Thomas Clark, Edinburgh, 1833.
7. NI Bukharin, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (George, Allen and Unwin, London, 1926), Chapter V [available on the MIA at .