Spartacus

Spartacus

Introduction

The report is based on the subsection of Supernatural Aid in Campbell's book. I have choosen the movie, Spartacus. The report starts with the general introduction of the movie later the section discusses how the Howard Fast get the supernatural aid to fulfill all the dreams and to fulfill the aims that he was decided to do.

Spartacus is a movie there is historical truth behind it. The story is about a slave who was trained to become a gladiator along with other slaves. Unfortunately for the Romans, he had become too good of a fighter. He was one of the best fighters amongst the gladiators. Soon enough he becomes the leader figure of the gladiators and leads them through a rebellion where the whole course of the movie shifts. The slaves had escaped and are heading for the sea so they can return home, on their way they gather any other slaves that would like to get out of Roman control. For the first time power had been in the hands of the roman slaves, and this frightened the rulers. During their journey they have Roman legion encounters.

The power of Spartacus stems, in part, from Howard Fast's consummate skill in telling a great story; but it comes much more fundamentally, at its points of real strength, from insights into history which are the fruits of Marxist science. Absolutely inexcusable! It is a betrayal of the cause for which Spartacus fought and died. And the fact that it is a woman - the widow of Spartacus - who is made the agent of the betrayal compounds the wrong. It is tragic that Fast should mar this generally powerful and realistic novel with such sentimental and impossible tripe.

Reprinted on the jacket of Spartacus is the laudatory comment of Angus Cameron that "one can come away from the reading of this story hating Gracchus and Crassus and the rest for what they stand for and yet seeing the universal possibilities of good in each of them . . . you have told about life as it really is." One can understand this point of view in a liberal editor, but not in a class-conscious novelist for the revolutionary proletariat.

The final chapter of Spartacus is superfluous and anti-climactic. It tells the story of Varinia's trip to freedom and summarizes her life and that of her children among the Gaulish peasants in the foot-hills of the Alps - all of which had better been left to the reader's imagination.

Despite its weaknesses, Spartacus is a very fine novel which merits the widest distribution. It ends with the prophecy: "And so long as men labored, and other men took and used the fruit of those who labored, the name of Spartacus would be remembered, whispered sometimes and shouted loud and dear at other times." For American readers Howard Fast has done much to make that prophecy meaningful in our day.

He is a man in the heroic ...