Spartacus: A Study in Revolutionary History. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1944
The vast social upheaval in the second century prior to the Christian era led to an era of ‘storm and stress’, of endemic civil war and of ‘permanent revolution’ without parallel in the history of the classical world. Not only was the free society of this epoch torn and ravaged by plots, assassinations and faction fights, but, more fundamentally still, the very basis of that system, the system of slavery and slave production itself, was directly threatened by a whole series of slave insurrections. In sharp distinction from the ‘palace conspiracies’ and military coup d'états, which marked the political struggles of the era in question, the concurrent slave revolts deserve to be called ‘revolutionary’, since they aimed at what would later have been styled a ‘root and branch’ revolution: one that tore up society by the roots rather than by its superficial branches!
What was the generic nature of these slave risings? In general, it can be said that ancient social revolutions, and, also, the social philosophies that inspired them, were Utopian and backward-looking in character. Unlike modern social revolutions which strive to release from obsolete social fetters forces already implicit in the given social structure, their ancient counterparts looked back rather than forward for their inspiration. It was in the past, and not in the future, that they sought for their models: in an idealised patriarchal society conceived as existing in some blissful past; some vanished Golden Age.
Since ancient society was static because it was pre-industrial, it contained no forces capable of leading to a new social order in the future. When, therefore, the oppressed slaves sought for happiness and emancipation, it was only in the past that they could seek for it: in some fabled garden of Eden, ‘where none was for the Party, when all were for the State’: where a golden age of equality and social justice had actually existed on the Earth.
Such was the kind of communism preached exclusively by the revolutionary writers and thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome. The works of these men have perished and only some dubious names have survived, but there is no doubt at all of the existence of such a literature in antiquity, even if class hatred and the class state were subsequently to eradicate it so completely that no trace of it has survived to recall the passionate aspirations of millions of oppressed slaves hungry for freedom and justice which this literature embodied. (See note on ancient revolutionary literature at end of current chapter.)
The great backward-looking force in human affairs, more even than law, has always been religion. It was in the name of religion that these ancient philosophers put forward their demands for human dignity and human justice. The greatest social revolution in ancient Greece – next to that of Spartacus, the greatest in all antiquity – was led by the Kings of Sparta, the descendants of the God Hercules (third century BC)! Amongst the pagan peoples the sun, ‘which shines equally on the just and on the unjust’, was the living symbol of equality. Whilst among the monotheistic Jews the religious expectation of the Messiah, the promised Redeemer of Israel, was bound up with the conception of social justice motivated by social revolution. ‘He had put down the mighty from their seats and hath exalted them of low degree’, as an early Christian hymn unambiguously phrased it. Most of the slave revolutions in antiquity assumed an ostensibly religious form.
The Roman conquest of the Mediterranean aroused a burst of Messianic fervour amongst the peoples so ruthlessly uprooted from their immemorial homes and reduced overnight to slavery. As a modern social historian has phrased it: ‘An agitation was stirring all minds from the Capitoline Hill and the heights of Etna to the Asiatic ridges of Taurus.’ [1] As the century wore on, it witnessed a whole series of slave wars, several of which attained such formidable proportions that it required the whole strength of the Roman state to suppress.
Below I record the more important revolts in this series. It is only necessary to add that, since the slaves represented conquered nations, nationalist and social objectives mingled in their programmes. At one and the same time, they sought freedom from the imperialist yoke of Rome and social justice in the name of equalitarian religious and philosophical conceptions of a Utopian character.
I append a brief list of these slave insurrections with a note on their causes and course.
197 BC: Rising of Carthaginian slaves in Italy. Of no great importance in itself, but interesting as the first example of the application of the (originally Carthaginian) punishment of crucifixion, henceforth usually applied to slaves.
134 BC: Rising of the silver miners of Laurium in Greece. (Mining was the most cruel of all forms of slavery.) Suppressed by the Athenian ruling class, supported by Rome.
134-129 BC: The first Sicilian slave war. This was a very formidable affair. Under a Syrian slave named Eunus, who was credited with magical powers – he blew fire out of his mouth! – the Sicilian slaves practically drove the Romans out of the island. Under the title of ‘Antiochus’, Eunus set up a slave kingdom in Sicily and inflicted several defeats on the Romans, who only repressed the insurrection with great difficulty. Eunus was eventually taken prisoner and the Romans crucified the whole slave garrison after the storming of Messina.
A German historian comments on this revolt:
However much we may or may not be disposed to accept these religious influences, it is at least undeniable that they must be regarded as a mighty lever in these as in numbers of later popular movements for redemption from human misery and degradation. Just as the religious socialism of the Anabaptists is not an isolated phenomenon, but a link in a great chain, so Eunus was not the last of his kind. The heroes of the second Sicilian slave rising (104-99 BC), which seemed to follow the lines of the earlier one down to the smallest details, appeal also to the superstition of the masses. Even the strong figure of Spartacus was haloed in the eyes of his followers by the dim light of religious superstition. [2]
104-99 BC: During the civil wars in Rome, a second Servile War broke out in Sicily under two slave leaders, Salvius and Athenion. This, also, was only put down after hard fighting, and, as we shall see when we come to deal with Spartacus, the revolutionary tradition in Sicily evidently survived the two failures and continued down to the time of the greatest of the slave revolutions.
133-129 BC: Meanwhile, at the other end of the Mediterranean, there arose what is, perhaps, the most interesting of the ancient Servile Wars, since it best displays the ideological aspect of these desperate and ill-fated attempts to turn back the course of history.
In 133 BC, Attalus, the childless king of the wealthy state of Pergamos, in Asia Minor, bequeathed his kingdom by will to the Roman people in order, it seems, to prevent an insurrection of the slaves with which Pergamos was threatened. However, Aristonicus, an illegitimate member of the royal house, headed a nationalist revolt against the Romans. Defeated by them, he withdrew into the interior of Asia Minor and founded, or intended to found, a city named, significantly, ‘Heliopolis’, ‘The City of the Sun’, the traditional title of a Greek Utopia. We are further told that Aristonicus issued a proclamation freeing all slaves who should come to this city, and that his adviser was a Stoic philosopher of equalitarian views (see note at end of chapter).
The revolt of the ‘Heliopolitans’ was suppressed and Aristonicus perished, like his predecessors. But the nature of his ‘Sun-State’ affords an interesting glimpse of the secret hopes that were current amongst the uprooted masses. Moreover, it should be noted that, despite their lack of regular arms and military training, the slaves won many victories. Evidently they must have been inspired by frenzied hopes and fought with desperate courage.
The above list constitutes a record of the chief slave risings in Rome prior to that of Spartacus. There were, also, formidable Greek social wars in antiquity a century earlier, and the great Jewish Wars (AD 64-70, 131-134) had, as noted above, a strong social aspect. The Jewish Messiah was to usher in a reign of social equality and religious well-being. But these came, respectively, too early and too late to be included in this series of the immediate predecessors of Spartacus.
It only remains to add that, after the failure both of the popular agitation of the Gracchi and of the various slave risings, the political and economic state of the Roman world went from bad to worse, culminating in the great civil war in the opening years of the first century BC, which ended in the defeat of the popular party under Marius and in the triumph of the Senatorial oligarchy of landlords and moneylenders under the Dictator Sulla. After the death of Sulla (79 BC), the ‘Pitt’ of the old oligarchic regime, Roman society, with all its evils augmented and its glaring contradictions unsolved, sank into an orgy of corruption and intrigue, in which the Republic was immediately threatened with visible disintegration. This was the historic background of the great slave insurrection inseparably associated with the name and fame of Spartacus, the last desperate attempt of the submerged slave masses to hold up the tottering structure of their decaying civilisation and to ‘remould it nearer to the heart’s desire’.
Note on Revolutionary Literature in Antiquity: Like that of the Middle Ages, the social-revolutionary literature of antiquity has completely perished, except, to some extent, in a bowdlerised religious version preserved in our New Testament. We know, however, that such a literature existed, and the names of two, at least, of its more famous productions are known to us. There is a Utopian romance in the fashion later made famous by Sir Thomas More, entitled Heliopolis (The Sun-State), by a Greek named Iambulus, who depicted his Utopia as situated in the Indian Ocean. And there is a lost work, The State by Zeno, the founder of the famous Stoic school of philosophy, whom Kropotkin has designated as ‘the first anarchist philosopher’. (The fact that the work of so famous a philosopher was ‘lost’ is very significant as to its contents!) There was, also, at least, one Utopian communist state in ancient Greece, known as ‘Ouranopolis’ or ‘Heavenly City’ (300 BC)! I may add that the Stoics held theoretically a communist point of view, and some of them took part in movements of social revolution. Also, Plato favoured a modified communism in his famous work on the state (Republic), but, in practice, was an extreme reactionary, a kind of ancient ‘Fascist'!
1. Albert Kalthoff, The Rise of Christianity (Watts, London, 1907).
2. Albert Kalthoff, The Rise of Christianity (Watts, London, 1907).