Spartacus

Introduction

The story of Spartacus and his army of slave warriors is one of the great epics of history. Early in the First Century B.C., a quickly organized force of 70,000 runaway slaves (some sources say 90,000, others 100,000 ), led by Spartacus and his heroic band of escaped gladiators, held the military might of Rome at bay for almost four years, routing its best legions, establishing control over most of southern Italy, ant threatening the "Eternal City" itself.

They were finally destroyed by the state power of a slave system which, although in process of decay, was still a strong and stable society. Their revolutionary struggle for freedom - which historians euphemistically call "The Servile War" and "The Gladiatorial War" - forecast the day, some four centuries hence, when the maturing revolution of the slaves would pave the way for the "Barbarian invasions" and destruction of the Roman Empire - and along with it the slave mode of production upon which it rested.

Spartacus

The Book, “Spartacus” revolt long ago attracted the attention of revolutionary leaders of the modern proletariat. Karl Marx wrote Frederick Engels in 1861: "As a relaxation in the evenings I have been reading Appian on the Roman Civil Wars.... Spartacus is revealed as the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history. Great general (no Garibaldi), noble character, real representative of the ancient proletariat." More recently, Soviet historiography found the Spartacus revolt an important event in its analysis of "The Transition from the Ancient World to the Middle Ages" (as in Voprossy Istorii, July, 1949).

But the story of Spartacus is little known in our day and country. Only from fragmentary and scattered accounts of a few contemporaries can it be pieced together at all. It is hardly mentioned in the history books of our schools and colleges. Only three sentences are devoted to the Spartacus revolt in the Encyclopedia Britannica's tedious, 100,000-word treatise on "Rome" and its long succession of rulers. Moreover, even the rare and brief accounts of Spartacus which do appear in our literature seek to deprecate this revolutionary movement as an incidental uprising of "desperate savages," "outlaws," "brigands," and "impoverished peasants." (Howard, 21)

In Howard Fast's novel, the Roman general whose legions finally defeated Spartacus recounts to associates visiting at the aristocratic Villa Salaria how, on orders of the Senate, he also destroyed two magnificent monuments carved by the revolutionary slaves out of volcanic stone on the slope of Vesuvius: "We destroyed the images most thoroughly and ground them into rubble - so that no trace of it remains. So did we destroy Spartacus and his army. So will we in time - and necessarily destroy the very memory of what he did and how he did it."

This prediction of the wealthy Roman praetor, M. Licinius Crassus, was almost fully realized. We are greatly indebted to Howard Fast for resurrecting and interpreting the significance of this heroic slave war for liberation, a war which came close to accomplishing what could be fully consummated only on the ...