Spartacus Lives

Book Review

Title: Spartacus

Author: Aldo Schiavone, translated from the Italian by Jeremy Carden

Published by:  Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2013.

Price: $19.95

Spartacus Lives

Real people who become legendary do end up living forever. Spartacus, who led a revolt of gladiators and slaves against the might of Rome in the first century BCE, is one such. Several movies have been made on him over the years. And most recently, a rip-roaring sword and sandals TV series that ran into three highly popular seasons. And this latter, though highly commercialised, did cover the historical ground quite diligently, as this book by Aldo Schiavone reveals.  

Spartacus by Aldo Schiavone, a noted Italian historian, places the man and the slave revolt he led in the context of the economy and political thinking of the early Roman Empire. It was an economy, largely agrarian, skewed to serve a patrician elite, and some Roman plebians, that would not have been sustainable without slave labour.  

The free- men, the Romans, patricians and plebians alike, had to be mainly soldiers, invested with the duty to conquer, expand, consolidate and sustain the Roman Empire. They were few, the slaves were many, hence the need for an iron fist.

And so, the revolts, not just of Spartacus and his followers, but several other eruptions unconnected with his, were a threat to the very existence of Rome. 

But fortunately for the Romans, almost all the revolts had no game plan beyond the first flush of rebellion. In Spartacus’s case, he had some experience of governance as he was once a  Thracian mercenary and then a Roman soldier before being sold into slavery and becoming a gladiator at Capua.

Because of his Roman military training and his natural gifts as a strategist and tactician, Spartacus managed to keep his variegated flock together and focussed for much longer than usual. But his followers, even those with gladiatorial experience, were not much good for essential unity or administration. 

They were also disparate in origin, with differing personal aspirations on what to do with their hard won freedom.

Nevertheless, Spartacus and his band of rebels won a number of military victories in the early stages when Rome did not take his insurrection very seriously.

But eventually, Rome sent its richest man Crassus, with fifty thousand battle hardened Roman soldiers after them. The Roman Senate also directed Pompey, returning from a victorious campaign in Etruria, to help Crassus. The end of the slave revolt thereafter, was inevitable.

The Romans were disciplined, organised and motivated to defend their republic and way of life. This along with an attitude and belief in arch-militarism as the route to power, glory and riches, animated their world view.

So conquest, plunder and dominion was an economic necessity. But consolidation and viability thereafter necessitated the acquisition of defeated peoples as slaves. Slaves,  to be put to work for the sustenance of Rome.

Today it may seem that Spartacus and others of his ilk were early martyrs to the ideal of democracy, equality, liberty, natural justice and so forth, but in imperialist Roman times, revolting slaves were subversives to be captured and killed. 

But the slaves who revolted were themselves not very clear as to what they wanted to do with their freedom. They had no ideology or bigger purpose. They did not want to form their own independent country.This divisiveness amongst slaves always worked to the benefit of the enslaving order.

The slave- labour based economic  model, not just in Rome, but throughout the various European empires that followed it, and even in slave- keeping America, believed that the dominant entity were many times more entitled than their slaves who were merely their property.

And slaves were property much more than they were human beings, which was an incidental in that entire scheme of things.

And the fact that as an “unfair” way to organise society, it persisted for so many centuries under diverse stewardship, only goes to show how times have changed. The major difference today is of course the effect of an industrial age that ended up empowering labour of both genders.

And the technological revolution, the mechanisation that grew alongside, democratised and gave a modicum of dignity to the labouring classes.

Back in the lifetime of Spartacus though, he walked along the fault lines of both the individual aspiration cruelly supressed, and the tensions caused by an expansionist military empire. The last element of that evolutionary system was the limitations of a republic. As it was constructed then, it was ideal for a city state, where the people could all assemble in the city square, but not an empire stretching over vast geographies and peoples.

The attempt to run things better as the time went on, took the shape of a dictatorial triumvirate soon after Spartacus’s death; then a Caesar all powerful; and later, a far flung autocracy.

And this shared imperial power, under an Emperor, a Caesar, with his largely advisory Senate, did keep the Roman Empire going for centuries.  When it ended in the West at Rome, it lived on in the East from Constantinople for several centuries more before finally giving way to the Ottomans.

(836 words)

May 11^th, 2013

Gautam Mukherjee