“It is No Light Thing to be Free”

“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.

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 20^th 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