Spartacus (3 page)

Did you want it to be genteel? That's their work. My manciple crucified eight hundred of them. They're not nice; they're tough and hard and murderous.
¹⁷

Like Fast, Arthur Koestler in
The Gladiators
(1939) looks at Rome as well as at the slave camp, and produces a novel of interplay in a way which Mitchell simply is not interested in doing. Koestler's Rome is a city of intrigue and strife and plotting, a city where interesting and often clever Romans intrigue for mixed motives, sharing a common humanity with a casual disregard for the welfare of their fellows, slave and free. Koestler produces (in William K. Malcolm's words) a novel ‘more exacting in its psychological and economic analysis of the historical situation',
¹⁸
but the epic qualities of the story are sacrificed to that complexity.

This is a key to Mitchell's success. Through savage concentration on the slave camp, with perhaps a moment's eavesdropping or one glimpse of a sunny city from a distant hillside, he suggests the world of Rome without seriously attempting to penetrate it. Mitchell's interest is in the rebellion, in the possibilities of rebellion to remedy society's injustices. He would have shared Karl Marx's admiration for Spartacus since he would have shared the grounds on which that admiration was accorded:

Spartacus is revealed as the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history. Great general (no Garibaldi), noble character, real representation of the ancient proletariat.

Pompeius, reiner Scheisskerl: got his undeserved fame by snatching the credit . . .
¹⁹

In the leader of a great rebellion, Marx finds his great historical figure; history will work out its processes, for ‘he who composes a programme for the future is a reactionary'
²⁰
and Spartacus comes at the historical moment to exploit a weakness in the system. Mitchell admired Marx and his writings, and he also possessed, closer to home, an analysis of the world of classical antiquity which doubtless hammered home to him the importance of the right struggle at the right historical moment:

The existence of household slaves, generally war-captives, such as we meet in Homer, was an innocent institution which would never have had serious results; but the new organised slave-system which began in the seventh century BC was destined to prove one of the most fatal causes of disease and decay to the states of Greece . . .

The second half of the seventh century is marked in many parts of Greece by struggle between the classes; and the wiser and better of the nobles began themselves to see the necessity of extending political privileges to their fellow-citizens.
²¹

This analysis in J. B. Bury's
History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great
(1912) – a book from the Cairo Forces' library which found its way into Mitchell's private library
²²
– aptly sums up the processes by which Roman society inherited the pent-up pressures of the injustice of slavery. As Diffusionist, as humanitarian, as Marxist egalitarian, as human being, Mitchell rejected the circumstances of 73 BC with disgust. To give concentration to his disgust, he chose the selective treatment described here, and triumphantly drew his readers into the mayhem with the involvement of a horrified and unwillingly fascinated witness.

Greek and Roman societies alike provided Mitchell with an example of the kind of imposed slavery which he thought he saw in a more abstract form in his own society in the 1930s. Slavery of the mind is something which obviously angered him in his late teens, working in the poorer areas of Glasgow: in
Scottish Scene
in 1934 the anger he felt at the enslavement of a generation to poverty and despair is barely in control, giving ‘Glasgow' more power than most of his polemics. For Spartacus and his band slavery has been of the body, but not of the spirit; the attack on a morally rotten Roman (or Greek) society is the coming of the historical moment where the free spirit allows the slaves to fight.

It is notable that
Spartacus
is about that moment of confrontation, the moment when a society loses control; it does not suggest a perfect or guaranteed moment of successful confrontation, the historically correct moment, for of course the rebellion – splendid in conception and gloriously described as it is by Mitchell – is a failure. The last paragraphs of the book suggest that history's moment has not come; perhaps a few generations off, a rebellion of a different kind may work. The recreation of the events of 73 BC is one of splendidly caught excitement and confrontation followed by an ambiguous final authorial statement (a technique Mitchell used to end
Grey Granite).
Like
Grey Granite, Spartacus
leaves the reader with unanswered questions rather than with a programme for historical or social reform; the author's deepest interest was obviously with the engagement itself, and he accepts Spartacus' defeat as historical fact. That the struggle took place, and would continue in some form, is as far as Mitchell's involvement goes. The real involvement is with the reader in the events of the moment.

Reader involvement

Two main techniques give Mitchell's account an air of the spontaneity of rebellion and revolt. One is the character of the central protagonist, war-wounded, remote, inhumanly controlled, a leader who is not understood by the followers who are prepared to go to their deaths for him. Spartacus may fascinate, but he also puzzles. By his own admission he ceases to be a statesman (S 161) in anger, he turns from Rome when he has it in his sights, he shows human feeling when it is least expected and inhuman fierceness of purpose when it is needed. Initially Kleon's puppet (or so it seems), Spartacus develops a character of his own, one which commands respect from the other figures in the story and consistent attention from the reader. By keeping the reader at a distance from the central character, Mitchell gives the activity of the book a sense of historical unexpectedness.

The other technique is already familiar, that of the narrowing of narrative perspective. By deliberately depriving the reader of extensive areas of alternative information – Roman strategy, psychological insight into character, flashback or forward – Mitchell keeps the reader on edge for the information of the moment, which is all the reader possesses.

Both techniques serve a common end. The novel was, after all, written in haste at a period of Mitchell's life when he had limited time for research and writing, and by narrowing the canvas of his historical description he contains the necessary material and gives immediacy and focus to the progress of the rebellion. It has also been suggested that, by filtering out the normal emotions of sympathy and disgust through the hardening effect of war and repeated suffering, the novelist induces in the reader a mood in which the described emotions of the historical protagonists can be felt and understood, even if not accepted.

It is in the light of this analysis that Kleon the mutilated Greek emerges as a splendid narrative device, closer to the reader norm than many, yet decisively separated by the terrible injury so often mentioned by Mitchell. Even the late incident with Puculla, while serving to humanise a character too often seen as unnaturally self-contained, merely redeems rather than humanises. To some in the camp he is an object of sexual ridicule; to others such as Gershom, his harking on Plato's perfect state is mere madness. He is admired for his efficiency and his loyalty and the reader grudgingly offers identification with someone who can read and understand, within limits; while the Gauls worship the sun, ‘Kleon, Gershom, and the Ionians did not worship, knowing the sun to be but a ball of fire three leagues away.' (S34)

Kleon has specific strategies: ‘Spartacus and the slaves are one . . . for the Leader is the People'(S 81) and he even wildly considers taking command should Spartacus be killed (S 172); but with maturity Spartacus distances himself from Kleon and all advisers, and finds a life and leadership all his own, increasing the admiration of a readership who can only mourn his passing:

We come to free all slaves whatsoever . . . in the new state we'll make even the Masters will not be enslaved. We march with your Lex Servorum, but we do not march with your Plato. (S 190)

The Platonic model clearly rejected, Mitchell blends the vision of the gladiator with ‘a great Cross with a figure that was crowned with thorns', and the dying Kleon ‘saw that these Two were One, and the world yet theirs: and he went into unending night and left them that shining earth'. (S 287)

The reader is being urged, strongly, to accept an identification of Christ the freer of slaves with Spartacus a generation before – Spartacus killed before his time. The future is theirs. Their time is not now. Again, Mitchell stops short of detailed interpretation: his intention is not to make sense of history, but rather to reflect the ambiguity of randomness of the historical process seen from Mitchell's complex viewpoint.

Style

Spartacus
is told with Mitchell's characteristic verve and economy, for he was a writer who experimented through the short story to find a mature and very recognisable narrative style early in his career. There is indeed a place for good narrative style, since the novel contains very few female characters, little straightforward love interest and a great deal of unpleasant violence. To counter the violence, to distract the reader's attention from the relatively narrow spectrum of character and incident, Mitchell fortunately has at his command a flexible and arresting prose. The basic narrative medium is well-written narrative English, the language of
Stained Radiance
and
The Thirteenth Disciple.
As everywhere in Mitchell's work, the reader is drawn without preamble into the fully active plot:

When Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus and unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master's body even as his own had been mutilated; and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of
The Republic
of Plato hidden in his breast. (S 15)

The style is arresting; it raises expectations. It provides essential background unobtrusively. Above all, it intimates the general scene of violence, mutilation and death we can expect from the rebellion.

Two interesting points in Mitchell's narrative strategy are the references to the Masters by the slaves' name (rather than ‘Roman'), setting the tone for the narrative stance throughout, and the very early setting up of a stylistic device which Mitchell exploits to excellent effect throughout. Kleon is described in the first sentence as a literatus without explanation: it is soon clear from context that a literatus is one who can read, but already the reader is immersed in some variety of Roman experience, the Roman term used without gloss or explanation. Latin-derived words are used exactly: ‘the Way', ‘casqued', ‘slave-market', ‘to compute' appear early in the narrative; Kleon unwinds, does not open a book; the perverse sexual tastes of Kleon's master are hardly explained, and certainly not illuminated by references to the tales of Baalim, Ashtaroth or Ataretos. The East is the ‘Utmost Lands', the supreme deity ‘Serapis'. All this functions without delay to put the reader in the position of a reader of the time.

Mitchell is doing no more here than adapting the triumphantly successful technique of his earlier success in
Sunset Song
where he had re-shaped the narrative English to the ‘rhythms and cadences of Scots spoken speech' while adding a minimum number of Scots vocabulary items to produce a narrative medium which gives a warm impression of participation in a Scottish community.
²³
In
Spartacus
the words and cadences are not from Scots, but from Latin, and share the same comforting feature in that they operate independently of the reader's knowledge of Latin.

As the Scottish words in
Sunset Song
rapidly explain themselves by context, rendering glossary unnecessary, so the Latin (and occasionally Greek) words in
Spartacus
operate in the same way. In a description of the first century BC the reader can without difficulty decode references to the ‘half a century of cavalry' (S 122), the sacrifices ‘to the manes of dead Crixus (S 163), to the decimation of the velites (S 209) already referred to, to Lavinia's ‘himation'(S 159), to the instrument played by the ‘bucinator'(S 189).

So much for vocabulary. Rhythms and cadences are also skilfully imitated from the original Latin. Occasionally Mitchell is content to intrude a single archaism:

Then said Crixus: ‘We've come to the feast, but the meat is still uncooked.' Thereat he took a javelin in his hand, rode forward, stood high in his stirrups, and hurled the javelin . . . (S97)

Sometimes the effect is denser:

The battle was to Spartacus, as once to Pyrrhus. But of the eighteen thousand Gauls and Germans a bare three thousand survived. With these fell Castus, as has been told, who loved Spartacus, and never knew him; and Gannicus, who hated the Gladiator, and was killed in his sleep. (S 261)

This is compounded of Latin translated directly into English
(the battle was to Spartacus),
commonplace tags from Latin narrative
(as has been told),
and a conscious archaism from the Bible
(and never knew him)
covering the point of Castus' homosexual attraction to Spartacus. Carefully used, the device of direct translation from Latin into English functions powerfully to give the reader a sense of involvement:

The slave horse . . . met the circling Roman cavalry, and, armed with clubs, splintered the levelled hastae, and smote down the riders. In a moment the fortune of the battle changed. The Germans turned and the legionaries, caught between two enemies, struggled to reform in double lines. But this, in that marshy ground encumbered with dead, they could by no means achieve. (S 99)