Nothing to Lose But the Price of Admission

Spartacus has of course long been a Marxist hero, and with about as much justification as if Robert E. Lee were to become honorary colonel of the NAACP. Both men were fine figures, but they don’t quite fit the specifications. Howard Fast, who has a knack of telling a good tale while keeping history at arm’s length, used his novel as a dialectic wringer from which Spartacus emerged as the shining, if somewhat flattened, leader of the no-income brackets of the Roman world. Though Fast has disclaimed the parallel, I think what he really had in the back of his mind when he refurbished his hero was Ben Gold leading his fur-workers in the ultimate assault up the steps of J. P. Morgan & Co.

The Thracian who led the revolt of the gladiators in 73 B.C., the real Spartacus, was an able and courageous fighter for the freedom of himself and his friends. His revolt was personal. If he had been born in the nineteenth century he would no doubt have sided with Proudhon against Marx. He entertained no doctrinaire ideas about leading the masses of the Romintern. The slaves and proletariat of the cities did not join him. He formed his army as he went along from the oppressed and disaffected in the countryside, most of them Gauls and Thracian slaves. As a Roman auxiliary he had learned tactics; and this, combined with his innate quality of leadership, rather than any revolutionary élan, gave him his extraordinary success in chopping up the legions sent against him.

FR

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Francis Russell

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Spartacus has of course long been a Marxist hero, and with about as much justification as if Robert E. Lee were to become honorary colonel of the NAACP. Both men were fine figures, but they don’t quite fit the specifications. Howard Fast, who has a knack of telling a good tale while keeping history at arm’s length, used his novel as a dialectic wringer from which Spartacus emerged as the shining, if somewhat flattened, leader of the no-income brackets of the Roman world. Though Fast has disclaimed the parallel, I think what he really had in the back of his mind when he refurbished his hero was Ben Gold leading his fur-workers in the ultimate assault up the steps of J. P. Morgan & Co.

The Thracian who led the revolt of the gladiators in 73 B.C., the real Spartacus, was an able and courageous fighter for the freedom of himself and his friends. His revolt was personal. If he had been born in the nineteenth century he would no doubt have sided with Proudhon against Marx. He entertained no doctrinaire ideas about leading the masses of the Romintern. The slaves and proletariat of the cities did not join him. He formed his army as he went along from the oppressed and disaffected in the countryside, most of them Gauls and Thracian slaves. As a Roman auxiliary he had learned tactics; and this, combined with his innate quality of leadership, rather than any revolutionary élan, gave him his extraordinary success in chopping up the legions sent against him.