Spartacus

By Adam Kirsch for The Barnes & Noble Review

The reputation of Spartacus, like so much of what we know about the leading figures of the ancient world, can be compared to an upside-down pyramid: a huge structure of legend and speculation sustained by a tiny foundation of text.

There is no doubt that Spartacus really existed or that, in the years 73–71 B.C., he led a major slave rebellion in southern Italy. But everything we know about him and his military campaigns, which for a moment threatened to bring down the Roman Republic, comes from two historians, Plutarch and Appian, who lived some 200 years after Spartacus; taken together, both devote no more than 10 pages to him. Earlier historians, such as Sallust and Livy, also wrote about Spartacus, but only scraps of the relevant works survive; and there are some scattered references in other historians, including Julius Caesar.

Yet on this slender basis, Spartacus became a powerful symbol – the slave who stood up to an empire, the liberator who turned a rabble into an army. In 1918, when Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg founded a new revolutionary Communist party in Germany, they called it the Sparticist League. For Americans today, probably the most enduring image of Spartacus comes from the 1960 movie in which the slave leader was played by Kirk Douglas; not coincidentally, that movie was based on a novel by the steadfastly Communist writer Howard Fast. Indeed, it's possible that the modern world, with its dreams of equality and liberation of oppressed groups, has made more of Spartacus than any earlier period. 

In his new biography, Spartacus, the Italian historian Aldo Schiavone attempts to drill down through the sedimented legends to the bedrock of historical fact.

Because there are no sources except literary ones, this means that his short book often takes the form of hermeneutics – closely parsing the exact language of the historians to deduce what really happened, or, just as important, what those historians wanted to conceal. For the central premise of Schiavone's book is that Spartacus represented a dangerous challenge to Roman values and power, which the official Roman sources could not fully acknowledge. To understand who Spartacus was and what he wanted, Schiavone argues, it's necessary to read against the grain of the text, and to place him as far as possible in a broad historical context.

It is not possible, Schiavone writes, to enter into Spartacus's mind, the way a biographer might do with a modern subject. His world was just too different from ours, and there is too little surviving material: "Nothing of what he had in mind is known to us directly. His psychology and mental landscape are completely inaccessible; a fascinating theme, but entirely obscure. Our protagonist's intentions can only be deduced from the bare sequence of his actions." 

What we do know with some degree of confidence, on the other hand, is the kind of society Spartacus lived in.

Rome in the first century B.C. was, Schiavone shows, in the throes of transforming itself from an agrarian city-state to a world-spanning empire. Perhaps the most important element in this change – certainly the most important for understanding Spartacus – was the huge increase in the slave population of Italy. At this time, most slaves were prisoners taken in war, and the Romans had just conquered huge swaths of the eastern Mediterranean, flooding the market with new supply. 

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