“Spartacus,” by Howard Fast, 1951
This is one of the greatest
revolutionary novels ever written. It is
a historical tale of the massive slave revolt led by Spartacus against the Roman empire. At
the same time, it never lets you forget that the conditions of the past
continue into the present. It is about
our capitalist world too. It especially resonated with the Jim Crow era in the U.S. and the former U.S. slave system. Then and now, a new empire continues. Slavery in its
various forms continue. Military power
and war continue. The class system
continues. Dispossession continues. Fast wrote this as an inspiration to the
present that even revolutionaries like Che Guevara and Rosa Luxembourg appreciated.
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| Beware the Arming of Slaves |
Conditions for gladiators,
peasants, tribesmen, miners, perfume workers and slaves that lived under Roman
rule were horrendous. The Roman patrician class had tied the empire together
with roads. Which might make someone
recall the Interstate Highway
system created in the U.S.
in the 1950s. The patricians and the new
money nouveau riche dispossessed Italian peasants and took their land, and created
massive latifundia farms tilled by slaves.
Former peasants were forced into the cities like Rome to barely live by crime or the dole, forming
the plebian class. The new money rich
built tall and crumbling tenements to house the most profitable amount of
people in the smallest space – the forerunners of our modern gentrifiers and apartment builders. Tax collectors and
religious collectors took their cuts, sending the wealth to Rome. The
empire was essentially a huge slave state, with a history of a bit more
democratic “Republic” in its past. It
was held together by centralized organization and construction projects and a
half a million men under arms.
The book takes the form of
remembrances by various characters on the rebellion and Spartacus himself – the
gladiator trainer Batiatus of Capua, where the revolt started. The Roman general Crassus, who finally
defeated Spartacus and the freedman armies.
Spartacus’ Germanic fictional wife Varinia, who was a former slave. The fictional political power of Rome, Lentelus Gracchus,
who controlled many city wards. The
crucified gladiator David, a Judean (Jewish) knife fighter close to
Spartacus. The book weaves these and
other characters together to create a picture of the terror with which the
gladiator and slave rebellion inspired in Rome,
ending with 6,000 rebels crucified along the Appian Way.
The cross was borrowed by the Romans from their destruction of Hannibal’s
Carthage. I guess that was ‘cultural appropriation’ in
its day.
There were many slave
revolts before and after Spartacus, but his 3rd Servile War was the closest to toppling the
empire. Spartacus and his tens of
thousands of rebels (120,000 at one point) destroyed 5 Roman armies in battles
in the south of Italy,
with former slave women sometimes fighting alongside their men. The slaves fought for their freedom,
something that confounded the Roman patricians, who did not consider them human. The Roman ruling class thought the world was
a meritocracy, with some born to rule and others to be ruled. To them slaves, women, peasants, gladiators,
plebians were just meat – just commodities.
In this book, the slaves want a world of equality, where everyone shares
the goods of the world. Their forces
were an international army made up of Thracians, Gauls, Germans, Africans,
Egyptians, Judeans, Greeks – all those dominated by the empire. God has disappeared in this world for both
gladiators like Spartacus and the Roman ruling class, though the latter would
not admit it in public. Religion still
had its uses.
One giant Gaul, Crixus,
wanted to march on Rome or continue raids on the
latifundia, while Spartacus wanted to leave Italy completely. This split in the army was fatal to the
rebellion, though that is not clear in the book. Crixus took part of the army
and was destroyed in battle. The book
ends with a somewhat odd episode of Crassus and Gracchus being obsessed with Spartacus’
wife, the Germanic slave Varinia, who was captured after the last battle. This is their way of somehow conquering
Spartacus again, by controlling his wife.
Oddly Gracchus, one of the richest and most powerful political figures
in Rome, buys Varinia’s freedom and secretly
sends her north to the Alps, then commits
suicide. This book assumes some
individuals in the ruling class will desert their role, and turn on their own
system. It is a strange coda to the
book.
This dramatic book is
written in grand literary cadences that borrow something from the style of the Bible.
The book became the inspiration for a 1960 movie starring top actors like
Kirk Douglas, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, Tony Curtis and Jean Simmons,
directed by one of the best directors in the U.S., Stanley Kubrick. Others followed.
Fast is one of a legion of forgotten
proletarian and leftist writers of the early to middle 20th
century. Fast wrote many books, including “Citizen Tom Paine,” about the revolutionary
role of Paine in the American Revolution; “Freedom
Road”, about the black struggle after the Civil War and “The Unvanquished;” a detailed story
about the first battles of that Revolution.
A few years after World War
II, leftist writers in the U.S. were intimidated into silence or oblivion during the McCarthyite
purges of the 1950s. A new, more
acceptable middle-class form of fiction was encouraged by the bourgeois cultural
establishment. Enter John Updike and
company - no Spartacus for him! Updike
and company became the suburban reflection of the temporary high-point of
managed American capitalism – a period that some people yearn for but will
never return. The U.S. is
actually running backwards towards the prior period of robber barons, nativism
and the direct rule of Wall Street. Literature
itself will have to change to reflect this - the Howard Fast’s will be back!
And I bought it at Chapman
Street Books!
Ely,
MN, USA
Red Frog
September 5, 2018
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