Spartacus (2 page)

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Crassus, decimating the survivors, establishes firm leadership while Spartacus heads South for Lucania and the sea; bargains with pirates but is betrayed by them.

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Spartacus camps in Rhegium; Crassus walls the slaves in with dyke and ditch; dissension in slave camp.

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Crassus begins to fear Pompey's return which would steal his thunder; meanwhile Spartacus escapes with one third of his army through Crassus' wall. The slaves, internally riven and weakened by desertion, are beaten once and head for the mountains, then beaten again at Lucania; Spartacus is slaughtered while trying to reach and kill Crassus.

With additions and modifications from Appian and Sallust, this is to be the groundplan of Mitchell's plot for
Spartacus.
Sallust, for instance,
⁸
gave him a keener insight into the relevance of the Spartacist rebellion to the machinations of the Roman Senate and its internal politics; the clash between Pompey and Crassus is an important off-stage element in the historical account. Appian provided a number of striking details which obviously appealed to the novelist's imagination:

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The Mount Vesuvius details.

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The names of Oenomaus and Crixus.

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The sacrifice of Roman prisoners in memory of Crixus.

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The near-attack on Rome (not in Plutarch) inexplicably abandoned.

Appian's description of breaking out of Crassus' trap in Rhegium is full and vigorous. His description of the final battle which cost Spartacus his life is so vivid that Mitchell incorporates it in direct quotation at the climax of his own battle description:

AND SPARTACUS MADE HIS WAY TOWARDS CRASSUS HIMSELF THROUGH MANY MEN, AND INFLICTING MANY WOUNDS; BUT HE DID NOT SUCCEED IN REACHING CRASSUS, THOUGH HE ENGAGED AND KILLED TWO CENTURIONS. AND AT LAST, AFTER THOSE ABOUT HIM HAD FLED, HE KEPT HIS GROUND, AND, BEING SURROUNDED BY A GREAT NUMBER, HE FOUGHT TILL HE WAS CUT DOWN.

Flexibly but skilfully, Mitchell takes what he wants from each source, altering, tailoring; Plutarch has Spartacus kill his superb white stallion for ‘if they lost . . . he would have no need of a horse again' (S 281). The horse is there in Plutarch but not as the property of Furius. The white stallion and the superb gladiator seemed to need to be introduced earlier in the book for artistic urgency, and Mitchell simply moved them forward.

The larger context, the impact of the slave revolt of 73–71 BC on the volatile state of Roman politics, is very much present in the Latin sources, and very much absent in Mitchell's account. Mitchell's sympathies focus on the suffering slave, the human injustice, not on the cultured or sophisticated arguments of the Roman Senate. Not so the orthodox historians: the
Cambridge Ancient History,
which was published just as he was collecting his sources, saw Spartacus in quite a different light:

Like Eunus and Salvius, Spartacus is a tragic figure, but the significance of his career is small . . . the most notable legacy of the affair was its results on Pompey and Crassus.
⁹

Liddell's
History of Rome
(1858), a standard source-book Mitchell can be expected to have consulted, describes Spartacus' revolt as ‘a formidable outbreak that took place in the heart of Italy, and threatened for a time the very existence of the Republic',
¹⁰
yet finds room for scarcely two pages of description in a book of over 720 pages – much of them devoted to the wider implications of Roman politics. Likewise Frank Marsh's
A History of the Roman World,
to be published in 1935, devotes one single page out of almost 500 to a revolt which is not interesting so much for itself, as for its consequences:

Rome might have breathed freely again had it not been for the fact that there were now in Italy two generals of somewhat uncertain convictions at the head of victorious armies.
¹¹

Examples could be multiplied of the Spartacist rebellion assuming different shape according to the viewpoint of the observer. European observers can be cited discussing the effect on the larger shape of Italian politics
¹²
of the effect on the thinking of the future ‘Spartakusbund' activists, whose most famous representatives were Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
¹³
As individual hero, as leader of a significant political rebellion, as potential destabiliser of Rome, and as inspiration for future class struggle, Spartacus plainly is important.

Mitchell's treatment

Clearly, Mitchell chose to write about a rebellion. Already we have seen his hostility towards a conspiracy which would make of history a cosy and unchallenging account of the past, and there is nothing at all about his version of the events of 73–71 BC which is relaxing. The inspiration of the novel is the enormous impetus given to the pent-up rebellious instincts of the slave class in Italy by the towering and charismatic leader in Spartacus the historical personality.

The plot starts with rebellion, if not with its ultimate leader. The plot has little to do with the events after Spartacus' own death, except to record in its sickening detail Rome's public revenge. The emphasis in the original historical sources is simply omitted; strict concentration on the rebellion itself is clearly the artistic intention of
Spartacus.

The narrowness of Mitchell's treatment is extraordinary when the novel is finished and the reader reflects. By the invention and retention of the character of Kleon throughout the narrative – Kleon anticipates Spartacus and survives him, narrowly – Mitchell is released from any obligations to provide a wider contextual framework in order to make sense of the rebellion. Kleon makes sense, sense enough for his own narrow intentions and sense enough to interpret a savage, over-simplified society to the reader. The unimpassioned account of a mutilated former slave is the ideal narrative vehicle for the passionate and often repulsive material of the story. Not for Mitchell the unctuous Spartacus of Susannah Moodie, refusing to embrace his child with speeches such as this:

‘Never, Elia, shall my arms embrace my child, till I am free. Thou canst pierce through the dark veil of futurity; how will the morning sun shine for Spartacus? Will it gleam upon my blackening corse, or gild my victorious arms?'

We need no prophet to tell us the outcome for Spartacus, admirable though many of the sentiments with which Susannah Moodie invests him may be. Her Spartacus is unfitted for a world where, when he enters the arena,

his eye glanced round the gay assembly, with a look fraught with contempt and hatred. ‘Is it possible,' thought Spartacus, ‘that man can come, with light and joyous heart, to witness the sufferings of his fellowmen?'
¹⁴

Mitchell's hero, toughened by early hardship and unburdened by ideals plainly directed from author to audience over the character's head, accepts survival, sexual gratification, and fierce hatred and loyalty as unquestioning motives,

memories dreadful and unforgivable, memories of long treks in the slave-gangs from their native lands, memories of the naked sale, with painted feet, from the steps of windy ergastula, memories of cruelties cold-hearted and bloody, of women raped or fed to fish to amuse the Masters from their lethargy, of children sold as they came from the womb, of the breeding-kens of the north, where the slaves were mated like cattle, with the Masters standing by. (S 97)

Spartacus here is much closer to Ewan and his angry rejection of the art gallery. Ewan's anger and Mitchell's coalesce in
Grey Granite
in that art gallery visit:

Why did they never immortalize in stone a scene from the Athenian justice-courts – a slave being ritually, unnecessarily tortured before he could legally act as a witness? Or a baby exposed to die in a jar – hundreds every year in the streets of Athens, it went on all day, the little kids wailing and crying and crying as the hot sun rose and they scorched in the jars; and then their mouths dried up, they just weeked and whimpered, they generally died by dark. (SQ 406)

Out of such anger, Spartacus' narrow focus of hatred and ambition for success in the rebellion grows and achieves authenticity.

Mitchell skilfully does make some contact possible with an outside world which is beyond this immediate artistic interest. Gershom ben Sanballat comes in frustration to follow a leader whom ethnically he despises, since no better may be found. Crixus and Castus plainly follow Spartacus from a mixture of personal loyalty and sexual attraction. Even Kleon, mutilated beyond normal passion and anger, feels irrational loyalty beyond self-preservation to a barbarian he first thought he could manipulate, but finally saw he must follow to the death. Mitchell includes these outside contacts and occasionally replenishes them with new characters, but only very sparingly.

One really significant omission is the Romans – the Masters, as they are universally called here. Masters they are to the slaves, and Masters they are to the reader who never approaches them closer than the understanding of the slave army or the superior intelligence of Kleon. Glimpsed in the gathering dusk or in the distant dust-cloud, occasionally eavesdropped on in council or Senate discussion, the Romans remain in Mitchell's novel a satisfactory enigma, not understood and therefore totally hated. In isolating the reader from the Roman lifestyle, which might encourage identification (and worse still, sympathy) in the modern reader, Mitchell compels sympathy with the barbarous and alien lifestyle of the slave army.

Barbarous the action certainly is. When Crassus the Lean finds his orders disobeyed, the
Cambridge Ancient History
wryly notes he found his relief in

decimating an unsteady cohort – with the most beneficent results to the morale of the remainder.
¹⁵

Mitchell's account of the episode laconically conveys not only the punishment but the complete lack of surprise or sympathy such a punishment might arouse:

When Crassus heard this, the face of the Dives went livid with anger. He commanded that the hundred men of the velites be decimated. Then the whole army stirred at the shouted orders of the tribunes and marched north on the slave-camp. (S 209)

It was the norm of life in the army. The death of one man in ten was hardly worth commenting on: ordinary army discipline. This calculated tight-lipped description of cruelty cumulatively does much to transmit the horror Mitchell obviously felt at the circumstances surrounding the rebellion, and the society which bred it. ‘Bring Cossinus' head', orders Spartacus at one point, ‘and Itul the Iberian hewed it from the trunk which his club had mangled, and brought it dripping'(S 93). No comment is required for an emotion doubtless no one felt.

The slaves implored the Gauls to free them. They were manacled one to the other, and when they were discovered with their overseer slain they would undoubtedly be crucified, as a warning to other slaves.

The Gauls listened and were moved a little. But they had no time to unmanacle the gang, and the slaves of it would encumber the scouts. So they left them, hearing their cries for long as they rode round the shoulder of the hill. (S 204–5)

Laconically, Mitchell tidies up the episode a few pages later:

They passed by the field where the ten chained slaves had watched the Gauls of Titul slay the overseer. Ten shapes lay very quiet there now: already the spot was a-caw and a-crow with ravens. Gershom glanced at it indifferently. (S 212)

In catching hardened indifference to suffering, torture and death Mitchell cleverly implants in the reader's mind the ability to see the events of the novel, people and places, with the artificiality of a narrow slave perspective. Excitement is possible, no doubt, the excitement of personal loyalty to Spartacus, excitement of winning a battle over the Masters, even the thrill of seeing Rome,

at noon, from the Campagna, from the Sabine Hills, shining below them, Mons Cispius crowned with trees and the longroofed Doric temples, Mons Oppius shelving tenement-laden into the sunrise's place, Mons Palatinus splendid with villas, fading into a sun-haze mist where the land fell . . . Aventine lay south, and north, highcrowned, the Capitoline Hill. Rome! (S194)

Yet the greater part of the book is calculatedly barren of excitement, barren of emotion, whether in the reactions of the mutilated Kleon, the enigmatic Spartacus, or the hardened slaves themselves.

The extent of Mitchell's calculatedly narrowed vision is seen easily enough in a comparison with Howard Fast's
Spartacus
of 1951 (source of Rank's 1959 film starring Kirk Douglas). Fast implants the story within the Roman society of the time, with flashback and forward through the experience of Crassus, Gracchus, Cicero and a young pleasure-seeking aristocratic Roman circle. Fast's narrative has its own harrowing moments: a vivid insight into the early years as a slave in the Egyptian mines which Spartacus was lucky to survive; a dreadful description of the crucifixion scenes on the Appian Way. Perhaps Fast's most vivid achievement is to realise, in a low-key way, the full horror of being a slave, in scenes underplayed skilfully as follows:

The litter-bearers, weary from all the miles they had come, sweating, crouched beside their burdens and shivered in the evening coolness. Now their lean bodies were animal-like in weariness, and their muscles quivered with the pain of exhaustion, even as an animal's does. No one looked at them, no one noticed them, no one attended them. The five men, the three women and the two children went into the house, and still the litter-bearers crouched by the litters, waiting. Now one of them, a lad of no more than twenty, began to sob, more and more uncontrollably; but the others paid no attention to him. They remained there at least twenty minutes before a slave came to them and led them off to the barracks where they would have food and shelter for the night.
¹⁶

To describe reality with as little emotion as this is to suggest powerfully the Romans' contempt for the slaves as human beings, and their simple indifference to them. Indifference is something Mitchell and Fast both attribute to the Romans, Fast in a splendid aside attributed to Brutus waving a hand at the slave-crosses on the Appian Way, their troops' handiwork: