Book Review: Spartacus

Keeping Up with the RomansSpartacusby Aldo Schiavonetranslated from the Italian by Jeremy CardenHarvard University Press, 2013 Aldo Schiavone's enthusiastic, intensely readable 2011 work Spartaco is now given new life as part of Harvard's ongoing “Revealing Antiquity” series in a totally assured translation by Jeremy Carden. Schiavone states right at the outset that his book is not about the legend of Spartacus, that it's rather an attempt at a close historical reconstruction of the remarkable chain of events that led a Thracian gladiator to organize a successful slave rebellion in 70 BC that originated at a gladiator-school near Capua, moved to the flanks of Mount Vesuvius, and eventually embroiled entire Roman legions before it was put down.Recounting this story is a familiar task, and not a particularly ambitious one. There's every reason to believe the Romans were deeply embarrassed by the unlikely years-long success of the Spartacus rebellion; certainly in a society so thoroughly dependent on slave labor it represented the ultimate cautionary tale. Ancient sources are correspondingly reticent – only about four thousand words total deal with the rebellion (“in all,” Schiavone tells us, “they do not even amount to ten pages in length”), and they are often frustratingly vague. This vagueness has proved an irresistible lure to fictionizers, of course; there's been a little legion of novels about the man, some very good and others very bad, and there've been TV shows and movies and stage plays. Schiavone's implication – that the straight-up history of the event can get lost in the fantasy – is well taken.And the unambitious narrowness of the Spartacus revolt itself is broadened beautifully by our author, whose little book (well under 200 pages, and as small as a dime-store paperback) stands not only as the perfect factual summary of events for the history-curious newcomer who's never heard of Wikipedia but also as a stylish, engaging guided tour of that summary. Schiavone has a good ear for dramatics and a wonderful way with scene-setting (the latter a very handy skill here, since any book on this subject – even one as slim as this one – must perforce contain a good deal of scene-setting). He takes care to situate us vividly at our starting point:

Like all the most important places in Roman Italy, perhaps even more so, Capua was also a city of slaves. They arrived both from the capital, and, undoubtedly (again through Puteoli), from Delos, the most important slave market in the Mediterranean, where, it was said, up to ten thousand prisoners might be sold in a single day. It is difficult to give an accurate figure for Capua itself and the area immediately around it – there was no census of slaves, because they were not part of the community, they were excluded from civil society. But in the years of our story it must have run into many thousands: probably not less than a third of the whole population …

And although Schiavone reserves his sharpest thinking, fittingly enough, for the subject of slavery in the ancient world, he's very skilled at filling readers in on all aspects of the ancient Roman world – and the outsized characters like Crassus and Pompey who were eventually tasked with the responsibility of bringing the Spartacus rebellion to a speedy end. The books end notes are full of Cicero, Sallust, and Plutarch, all expertly sifted and marshalled.But even so, the book – all such books – obviously is about the legend of Spartacus. How can it be otherwise? Slave rebellions were depressingly common in the Roman Republic (indeed, Theresa Urbainczyck wrote an excellent 2008 book on the subject, which you should on no account allow yourself to miss), and we have very little actual hard data about this one – clearly an unsatisfactory state of affairs for a writer as imaginative and passionate as Schiavone. He can't bring himself to resist painting characters where we barely have caricatures. “Spartacus unquestionably had a charismatic power,” he tells us, “by virtue of culture, military and perhaps even oratorical talents, and capacity of vision – superior to that of the others, which would have given him an indubitable preeminence.” And if that weren't thick enough, Schiavone occasionally expounds on what he calls “the political-pedagogical aspect of Spartacus's conduct”:

He did not simply want to raise an army to fight Rome and to leave a swathe of destruction in his wake. He wanted to give his troops instruction in a severe and rigorous discipline capable, in his judgment, not only of binding them together more effectively and honing their combat spirit, but also of sending a political signal.

(This is once or twice linked with some disappointingly reductive hand-wringing about the poor old decrepit Roman Republic, tottering in place, just waiting for the first stiff breeze of dictatorship to come along and flatten it; we're told about “the virtual collapse of the republican form of government,” and how “hopelessly outsized” it was, an “ungovernable system” hamstrung by “its own opulence and the task of managing a suddenly worldwide power” … for all the world as though Marius, Sulla, and Julius Caesar hadn't broken any laws to get the dictatorial powers that really did destroy the Republic; Erich Gruen's The Last Generation of the Roman Republic isn't listed among Schiavone's sources or “Suggested Reading,” but it clearly should be)Needless to say, we can't know much about the charismatic power the Spartacus had, and we can know nothing at all about what, if any, political signals he wanted to send (beyond his mere survival, which may have ended up being the sharpest political signal of them all). But it hardly matters: what we do know has seldom been presented in so spry and enjoyable a monograph as this one. Readers should dispense with the novels and take up this book – no less gripping – instead.