Spartacus: The Leader of the Roman Slaves. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1962
It has now become a truism to state that our current century is, pre-eminently, a century of revolution. Everything vital in our contemporary society strives against the outmoded social structure bequeathed to us by the ‘dead hand’ of the past. Moreover, the contemporary revolutionary movements entertain, despite temporary reverses, the brightest hope of ultimate success. They repeat to themselves that profound saying of Karl Marx, that mankind never seriously undertakes problems which he is incapable of solving in the given era; in other words, that history tends to be on the side of those who are on the side of history. The basis of our contemporary life is dynamic, thanks to the Machine Age and to the scientific permanent revolution that it engenders, and, sooner or later, the superstructure of society must come into line.
In earlier ages, however, this was not so. In the long era before the industrial revolution transformed the basis of social existence, the scales were heavily, probably hopelessly, weighted against revolutionary change. Thus, the social revolutions of earlier ages were doomed to failure by the very nature of the social order in which they operated. The long tragedy of social man lies precisely in the fact that his dreams of an ideal society, of a heaven on earth, have continually come up against and been frustrated by his social immaturity and inadequate economic technique.
As LD Trotsky has profoundly observed, the greatest literary masterpiece of antiquity, the tragic drama of classical Greece, derived its terrific intensity precisely from the glaring social tension between the powerful intellectual grasp of its creators, the most gifted race in antiquity, and the inadequate social technique which they shared with their epoch. ‘Fate is the voice of technical limitation and immobility; the voice of blood, of sickness, of death, of all that limits man and prevents him from becoming arrogant’, wrote Trotsky in his Literature and Revolution. [1]
The history of social revolution throughout all the ages prior to the capitalist era is the history of the frustration of ideals by social inadequacy. Again and again men rose in revolt against the harsh fate that doomed them to lifelong slavery and to endless enforced toil. But all their efforts, despite much heroism and the inherent ‘justice’ of their claims, failed and failed bloodily and completely. And they failed precisely because inequality and slavery lay in the nature of the times; because ‘justice cannot be in advance of economic conditions’, because, ultimately, in a pre-machine age, human servitude is a slavery not to man but to Nature, imposed by the hopeless inadequacy of man’s social means to ensure the social well-being of all.
Must we then suppose that because social revolution was virtually hopeless throughout the long pre-industrial era, therefore, it must be condemned and dismissed as mere quixotic romanticism? By no means! Mankind thrives ultimately by virtue of his failures as much as by his successes. In fact, one could reasonably defend the paradox that failure is as necessary as success to social evolution. It is not only in matters of religion that ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’. Oscar Wilde expressed a permanent social truth when he wrote that it is a sorry map of the world which contains no island of Utopia! The story of human revolution, of ‘moral man’ against ‘immoral society’, is a permanent incentive to human effort, a permanent memorial to the moral grandeur which constitutes man as truly human, as distinct from ‘the beasts that perish’.
In the scientific history of a socialist future, which is, we hope, not indefinitely remote, the great revolutionary heroes and martyrs of the long pre-capitalist era will rank among the greatest in the immortal pantheon sacred to the benefactors of the race. All mankind is an army, united across the ages by the solid links of a common humanity. Its past is embodied in its present: its present stretches forward into the future. The failures of yesterday lead to the partial successes of today, and these last, in their turn, presage the decisive victories of tomorrow!
In the long revolutionary sequence that constitutes man’s permanent protest against the hell on earth which has, thus far, been the unvarying lot of the masses in all ‘civilised’ societies based on class rule and the enforced exploitation of human labour, the name and fame of Spartacus stands out as the pre-eminent symbol of human revolt against the ‘exploitation of man by man’. What the outstanding names of Marx and Lenin signify in our contemporary era, that the name of Spartacus signifies for earlier epochs.
And, despite the considerable differences between antiquity, with its usury and predominantly agrarian background, and the social atmosphere engendered by modern capitalism today, the revolutionary movements of our own age have recognised in the heroic Thracian gladiator and his fellow slaves, the recognisably similar forerunner of their own movements of social protest culminating in social revolution. Have we not, in our own day and generation, seen the greatest tragedy of our times played out in the name of ‘Spartacus’: the heroic German revolution of 1919, forever associated with the glorious names of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and their immortal band of ‘Spartacists’, the revolutionary victory of whom would have saved humanity from the orgy of slaughter and ‘total’ cultural ruin which was the Second World War by making an end of the imperialist capitalism which was its primary cause?
The following pages seek to deal with the great slave revolution of antiquity not solely by itself, but, rather, as a sequential chapter in social history and against its historic background. The study of revolutionary history is an obligatory study for all serious revolutionary students. Without the past, there is no present; without the present, there is no future. It is a sorry consequence of the grip of the ruling class upon current education that the entire history of social revolution has been consistently distorted, and, more often than not, ignored. Truly, a giant stride forward will have been accomplished in human enlightenment when the names and deeds of the great heroes and leaders of social emancipation, from Nabis, Eunus and Spartacus, to Thomas Münzer, Jan of Leyden, John Ball and Jerrard Winstanley, supersede the voluminous pages in ruling-class ‘history’ devoted exclusively to the endless crimes, slimy intrigues and sterile stupidities of the monstrous regiment of kings, of their professional sycophants, and of their infinite brood of bastards!
The servile insurrection, which goes by the name of its leader Spartacus, was the greatest of all the numerous revolts of the dispossessed which run like a crimson thread through the tangled skein of ancient society. So much can be gathered even from the nervous hints and obvious distress of the decadent and reactionary ruling-class ‘historians’ who describe its course. We must, of course, always remember that we know virtually nothing of the deeper causes and genuine character of these earlier landmarks in the ‘evolution of revolution’, for their ‘historians’ have been usually their deadly enemies.
Even if that were not so, all the classical literature that has survived cannot be said to have done so on its merits, but as the result of a highly selective process. To survive at all, it had to run the gauntlet not only of the barbarian invasions that eventually submerged the classical civilisation, and of the obvious accidents to which the incidence of wind and weather exposed an exclusively hand-written literature, but every document that recorded social revolution had to face the tireless scrutiny of a thousand years of medieval bigotry, and several centuries of modern class censorship, upon both of which, successively, the survival of all ancient literature depended.
The ‘subversive’ document that could survive all this must, indeed, be subtle! For that matter, even in our own age, so vastly superior in all resources for the technical diffusion and preservation of knowledge, how much would we know of such great revolutionary upheavals as the Paris ‘Commune’, or the Russian Revolution, if we had only the prejudiced scribes of the Carlton Club, or our (ubiquitous!) ‘correspondent in Riga’, to depend on, without any independent sources wherewith to check their prejudiced narrative and hopelessly biased sources?
Yet such are our main literary sources for all the slave risings of antiquity, including that of Spartacus, the greatest of them all. If any sympathetic account existed of those ancient ‘enemies of society’, the revolting slaves, it has not survived either those ruthless monastic mice which nibbled up so many classical manuscripts during the Middle Ages, or the still more ruthless ‘moral’ censorship, the age-long ‘law against dangerous thoughts’, which interdicts all searching social criticism of the basis of every class society which has, by its very nature, a vested interest in the maintenance of exploitation.
This being so, the detailed reconstruction of the Spartacus insurrection must be very largely a matter of conjecture and even of imaginative reconstruction since we have virtually no data beyond a barren (and sometimes conflicting) list of names of places, battles and personalities. And even these last are far from impeccable. It is the considered opinion of an erudite modern military historian that, for example, the details of the military operations in the Servile War, as recorded by such ancient ‘authorities’ as Plutarch and Annaeus Florus, are completely worthless. Not only are the ancient authors who dealt with the Spartacus rising hopelessly prejudiced, as is obvious in every line, but they are also unreliable as sources, being separated by centuries from the events they describe. Both Plutarch and Annaeus Florus, our two chief sources, belong to the second century AD and are entirely without that critical scientific spirit, which was all but unknown throughout antiquity, and is, to be sure, none too common even in modern times.
Thus any modern account of the Spartacus episode can only adequately deal with its subject by the method of reconstruction, and it is by this method that we shall seek to present the great slave revolution of antiquity.
First, we shall sketch the historic background both of ancient society and of the sequence of social revolutions which sought to overthrow that society. Secondly, we shall briefly reconstruct what can be known with certainty of the course of the revolution itself. And finally, we shall endeavour to strip this ancient ‘Bolshevism’ of the mists of prejudice and legend which have for so long veiled what was a major event in determining the final evolution of classical civilisation and of the Roman Empire which was its ultimate custodian; and thus we shall reveal what were its permanent effects upon the subsequent course of social history. We believe that those effects were profound in both the political and the religious spheres.
Nor, in this last connection, can we avoid a glance at the honoured place which, in more modern times, the name and fame of Spartacus has enjoyed in movements of a revolutionary character. This ‘Spartacist’ tradition will, also, engage our attention: what Lenin, more fortunate in the time of his historic appearance, has been to the modern social revolution, that was Spartacus in the revolutionary tradition of pre-capitalist times. Indeed, alone amongst the leaders of the older revolutionary tradition, his name and fame have come down to us from the mists of the past.
It is an ironic commentary on the way that ‘history’ is written in a class society when we find that the name of the greatest revolutionary leader in antiquity, the leader of a movement that evidently shook classical civilisation to its foundations, was until recently commemorated in the greatest library of which capitalist civilisation can boast by precisely two entries. Under the heading ‘Spartacus’, in the Library of the British Museum, we find mentioned only Spartacus: A Roman Tale by Susannah Strickland (1822), [2] and an untranslated (and absolutely unreadable!) French eighteenth-century tragedy, by a long-forgotten author, BJ Saurin! [3]
To make some literary reparation for this age-long neglect, two fine novels on the Spartacus rising have appeared in recent years: Spartacus by J Leslie Mitchell, [4] and The Gladiators by Arthur Koestler. [5] The first is a dramatically powerful narrative of imaginative reconstruction; the second, a less poignant but admirably detailed reconstruction of the rising against its contemporary background. Of serious history, precisely nothing! Such, no doubt, would be the fate of modern socialist leaders if a millennium of reaction supervened! Only revolutions perpetuate revolutionary traditions!
To the novels of Mitchell and Koestler must now be added the better known but, in my opinion, much inferior novel of Howard Fast, entitled Spartacus. [6] The modern cinema industry has produced a lavishly spectacular film based on the Fast novel, [7] but like it, the film is very inaccurate in its account of the origin and background of Spartacus. To add to the irony of this production, Spartacus, in which appear Sir Laurence Olivier and many other stars of stage and screen, was introduced to the public by a performance at which HRH Princess Margaret was present. Surely the Greek Clio, the ironic muse of history, would have appreciated this! Incidentally, there is absolutely no ground for the statement in the film’s opening scene that Spartacus was ever a slave in an African gold mine in Libya.
We hope in this modest publication to do something to tear away the veil, to break ‘the conspiracy of silence’ which has so long obscured one of the greatest of revolutions and of revolutionaries.
1. LD Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (International Publishers, New York, 1925), Chapter V .
2. Susannah Strickland, Spartacus: A Roman Tale (Newman, London, 1822).
3. Bernard-Joseph Saurin’s tragedy Spartacus was first staged in the Comédie-Française theatre in Paris in 1760. It appeared in print as Spartacus: tragédie en cinq actes et en vers (Didot, Paris, 1778) – MIA.
4. James Leslie Mitchell, Spartacus (Jarrolds, London, 1933) [Mitchell usually wrote under the pen-name Lewis Grassic Gibbon – MIA].
5. Arthur Koestler, The Gladiators (Jonathan Cape, London, 1939).
6. Howard Fast, Spartacus (Crown Publishers, New York, 1951).
7. Stanley Kubrick (director), Spartacus (Bryna Productions, 1960).