Spartacus: The Leader of the Roman Slaves. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1962
The name and fame of Spartacus have survived the centuries in a manner reserved for no other revolutionary leader of pre-capitalist times. Alone amongst the long sequence of Utopian leaders of the pre-scientific age, the name of Spartacus still stands for a vital revolutionary tradition. As such, in modern times, it has had many imitators and namesakes, some hardly less famous than their illustrious Roman original.
The revival of classical studies in the early centuries of the modern era again drew attention to the exploits of the Thracian gladiator, the formidable leader of the disinherited in ancient times. In particular, the forerunners of the French Revolution, those intrepid rebels against the dead hand of feudalism, and themselves steeped in classical traditions, rescued the name of the servile leader from the mists of the past.
I have already cited the laudatory reference of Voltaire, which I have placed on the title page of this book. About the same time as Voltaire (1760), BJ Saurin contributed his tragedy on this subject, not, to be sure, a work of any literary genius, but of interest as showing the revival in modern literature of preoccupation with the classical revolutionary tradition.
In the field of revolutionary action, the name and example of Spartacus likewise continued to influence a spiritual progeny in modern times. One of the most formidable and internationally known revolutionaries of the stormy era of the French Revolution, the German ex-Jesuit Adam Weishaupt, wrote under the nom-de-plume of ‘Spartacus’. And Weishaupt was the founder of the famous secret Masonic society of the Illuminati (the enlightened ones), who played a leading role in the international conspiratorial movements of the era, and became a name of terror to their contemporary ruling classes of the old feudal regime.
In the French Revolution itself, the Illuminati, the nineteenth-century Spartacists, played a most active role, and, it is alleged, had no less a person than Robespierre, the formidable revolutionary tribune of the Terror and the Jacobin Club, amongst their secret membership. In the reaction that followed the fall of Napoleon, the secret police of Metternich and of the Holy Alliance had all their work cut out to detect and to prevent the revolutionary activities of these disciples of Weishaupt-Spartacus.
It has, however, been reserved for our own age to witness the most glorious revival of the name and revolutionary role of Spartacus. I refer to that ever-memorable band of German revolutionaries, first and foremost amongst whom were the world-famous leaders and teachers of the revolutionary working class and of international socialism, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and Karl Liebknecht. The German Spartacist movement, the extreme left wing of the German Social-Democratic Party, made their immortal stand for world revolution at a time when, above all, Germany was the key to the success or failure of international socialism to supplant capitalism on the world scale.
The Spartacus League vigorously opposed both the German government’s prosecution of the war and the pro-war attitude of the official leadership of the Social-Democratic Party. This policy of the League was then only shared by Lenin in Russia and by the Russian Bolsheviks. After the German Revolution in November 1918, which abolished the German monarchy and exiled the Kaiser, the Spartacists led a social revolution, primarily in Berlin, with the objective of transforming the political revolution against the Kaiser into a socialist revolution upon the Russian model.
Heavy fighting took place in Berlin in January 1919. The official Social-Democratic leaders, now in power in the Reichstag, supported by the old officer’s corps in the Kaiser’s army, suppressed the Spartacist rising. Its leaders, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, were captured and brutally murdered by members of the officer’s corps, with the full approval, apparently, of that modern Judas Iscariot – the Social-Democratic Minister of War, Noske.
The heroic courage and evergreen martyrdom of the Spartacists in 1919, went far to redeem the tarnished honour of the European working class corrupted by imperialist propaganda and by social-chauvinistic treachery.
It is now evident in retrospect that the failure of the Spartacists was the primary cause that led up to the victory in subsequent years of the Hitler counter-revolution, and, therefore, ultimately, to a fresh world butchery. It may be said definitely that the revolutionary victory of the Spartacists in 1919 would have saved humanity from the immense slaughter of the Second World War, as well as from the humiliating recurrence of European barbarism under the Nazi Reich.
The glorious names of the revolutionary fighters and martyrs Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are, indeed, worthy to rank beside that of Spartacus himself in the long annals of the revolutionary struggles of the disinherited and of the oppressed. Let us hope that in the unparalleled age of revolutions amid which our lot is cast we shall find new successors in the glorious tradition which both Spartacus and Luxemburg sealed with their blood, successors, who, more fortunate in their times, will carry forward the emancipation of humanity from class rule to its final and victorious conclusion.