Spartacus (5 page)

Notes

1
MS Edinburgh University Library. To C. M. Grieve, 28 November 1960.

2
MS Edinburgh University Library. To C. M. Grieve, 17 February 1937.

3
Ian Campbell, ‘Gibbon and MacDiarmid at Play: The Evolution
of Scottish Scene', The Bibliotheck
13 (2), 1986, p. 52.

AN INTRODUCTORY BIBLIOGRAPHY TO J. L. MITCHELL

For lives of Grassic Gibbon see I. S. Munro,
Leslie Mitchell: Lewis Grassic Gibbon
(Edinburgh and London, 1966); Munro also edited
A Scots Hairst
(London, 1967) with reprints of biographical and autobiographical material from
Scottish Scene
(1934). Further important biographical and critical material is found in Douglas F. Young,
Beyond the Sunset
(Aberdeen, 1973) and W. K. Malcolm,
A Blasphemer and Reformer
(Aberdeen, 1984). There is a trenchant chapter in Douglas Gifford,
Neil M. Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon
(Edinburgh, 1983). Substantial sections appear in Alan Bold,
Modern Scottish Literature
(London, 1983), F. R. Hart,
The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey
(London, 1977), I. Murray and Bob Tait,
Ten Modern Scottish Novels
(Aberdeen, 1984) and R. Watson,
The Literature of Scotland
(London, 1984). Full bibliographies have appeared in a series of articles in
The Bibliotheck,
themselves listed in and complemented by Ian Campbell, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon Correspondence: A Background and Checklist',
The Bibliotheck
12, 1 (1984), 46–57. An authoritative overall guide is W. R. Aitken,
Scottish Literature in English and Scots,
vol. 37 of
American Literature, English Literature and World Literatures in English
(Detroit, 1982). Malcolm's 1984 bibliography is up-todate and lists most fully the Grassic Gibbon and Mitchell publications. D. M. Budge has a good paperback anthology of short stories and essays in
Smeddum: Stories and Essays
(London, 1980). Mitchell died with his papers in some disarray, and the article on his correspondence cited above gives some introduction to that subject: a further treatment is in ‘A Tribute that never was: the Plan for a Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Festschrift', Studies in Scottish Literature
XX (1985), 219–30. Also among the papers was the novella which has appeared as
The Speak of the Mearns
(Edinburgh, 1982). Patricia J. Wilson has an excellent article on ‘Freedom and God: Some implications of the Key Speech in
A Scots Quair', Scottish Literary Journal
7, 2 (December, 1980), 71. A more recent, and very valuable discussion of Mitchell appears in ‘Novelists of the Renaissance' by Isobel Murray, a chapter of vol. 4 of
The History of Scottish Literature
ed. Cairns Craig (Aberdeen, 1987, 103–17). For further discussion by the present author see ‘Chris Caledonia, the Search for an Identity',
Scottish Literary Journal
1, 2 (December, 1974), 45–57; ‘James Leslie Mitchell's
Spartacus:
a Novel of Rebellion',
Scottish Literary Journal
5, 1 (May, 1978), 53–60;
Kailyard: A New Assessment
(Edinburgh, 1981) and
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
(Scottish Writers Series, 6, (Edinburgh, 1985)).

The most recent works to touch on Mitchell's writing include two books by R. C. Craig,
Out of History
(Edinburgh, 1996) and
The Modern Scottish Novel
(Edinburgh, 1999); M. Walker,
Scottish Literature Since 1707
(London 1996); and Ian Campbell, ‘The Grassic Gibbon Style' in
Studies in Scottish Fiction: Twentieth Century
(Scottish studies 10) ed. J. Schwend and H. W. Drescher (Frankfurt and Bern, Peter Lang 1990), 271–87.

Two important contributions to recent criticism from Germany are Uwe Zagratzki,
Libertäre und utopische Tendenzen im Erzählwerk James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon)
(Peter Lang, Frankfurt and New York, 1991) and Christoph Ehland,
Picaresque Perspectives – Exiled Identities
(Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg, 2003). Daniel Grader has a valuable MSc thesis (University of Edinburgh, Faculty of Arts, 2004) on
Spartacus
as a historical novel, and Mitchell's use of Latin sources. Parts of this may be published in due course.

SPARTACUS

by James Leslie Mitchell

O thou who lived for Freedom when the Night

Had hardly yet begun; when little light

Blinded the eyes of men, and dawntime seemed

So far and faint – a foolish dream half-dreamed!

Through the blind drift of days and ways forgot

Thy name, thy purpose: these have faded not!

From out the darkling heavens of misty Time

Clear is thy light, and like the Ocean's chime

Thy voice. Yea, clear as when unflinchingly

Thou ledst the hordes of helotry to die

And fell in glorious fight, nor knew the day

The creaking crosses fringed the Appian Way –

Sport of the winds, O ashes of the Strong!

But down the aeons roars the helots' song

Calling to battle. Long as on the shore

The washing tides shall crumble cliff and nore

Remembered shalt thou be who dauntless gave

Unto the world the lordship of the slave!

I. INSURRECTION

The Gathering of the Slaves

It was Springtime in Italy, a hundred years before the crucifixion of Christ

[i]

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.

He took the southwards track, not the Way, but the via terrena, hiding by day and walking swiftly by night. His face was pallid, his eyes green and weary. He had no faith in the Gods and could know no pleasure in women. Under his chin was tattooed in blue the casqued head of Athena, for he was of Athenian descent, though sold by his father in the slave-market of Corinth in time of famine.

Purchased thence, he had been for twelve years the lover of a rich merchant in Alexandria. The merchant was brown and stout and paunched, holding faith in forgotten Canaanite Gods, for he had been born in Tyre. Kleon he had taught to read and write, to compute, to play upon the lyre and to dance in obscene measures with the women of the household. Frequently, under the surveillance of the merchant, he was stripped naked and beaten with a fine wire whip, till the white flesh of his young body quivered under a thin criss-cross of fine blue weals. Watching, the merchant would quiver ecstatically in harmony, and then order the boy to be bathed and scented and fairly clad. Then, at nightfall, under the golden haze of the Alexandrine stars, he would come to Kleon.

And Kleon forgot the starings of childish wonder, and his mother's face, in tears; and the ways of little beasts and birds on the blue hills of Corinth.

In the afternoons, in the courtyard of the merchant's house, Kleon would sit at the feet of his Master and read aloud to him, unwinding and rewinding the scrolls in the manner he had been taught. He read in Greek, in Latin, and in Syriac; and for his Master's delectation he sought assiduously in the bookshops for those tales that the merchant loved: Tales of the Baalim, of Ashtaroth and the obscene fecundities of the Mother Gods; the
Nine Rapings
of the Greek Ataretos; nameless works by nameless men, translations and retranslations of all the dark and secret and ecstatic imaginings of men who pondered on women. Arab and Indian tales he read, though their origins were long lost, tales from the Utmost Lands, from China and beyond. The merchant would nod and groan in pleasure, and drink from a bowl a mixture of honey and water, flavoured with aniseed, for he was an abstemious man.

And Kleon had forgotten love, but he had not forgotten hate. Yet that in time went by as well, even while he knelt and the wire-whip sang. For he read other books than the women-tales and saw that hatred was foolish. Great men had enquired in the meaning of Life, the nature of Fate and the loves of the Gods, the why of pain and terror and death, men slaves to lust and men slaves to men. And these things they had discovered were part of a divine plan.

For a while thereafter, conceiving Serapis, the Supreme Deity, to be insane, Kleon believed in him.

But at the age of twenty-one he and a Negro named Okkulos, too old to give pleasure to the merchant, were sold to a circus-trainer from Rome. In the course of the voyage Okkulos succeeded in breaking his manacles and freeing Kleon. Together they strangled the captain of the ship and threw overboard the circus-trainer from Rome. They were joined in revolt by the crew, and sailed to the White Islands, joining the pirate fleet of an Iberian named Thoritos, a tall man lacking a hand. He was said to worship in a cave a pointed stone fallen from heaven, and had gained great treasure in the Social Wars.

Thoritos had many wives, captured in his raids. Two of these, of whom he was weary, he presented to Kleon, for he grew to love the wit and learning of the Greek. And Kleon looked on the women and shook, and the pirates shouted with laughter. And Kleon took the women to his bed, in hate and a white, cold lust: and they kissed him, apt in love, to tears, and the wall of ice broke round his heart.

Now ten years passed on the great White Islands and the secret sailings from their windy coasts. Thoritos levied tribute across many routes, and his riches grew, and Kleon became his first captain. Yet he had no love of ships, though the sea he loved, sight and sound and smell of it in the long, amethystine noons, when his bed was set on a westward terrace and the world of the Islands grew still. Crouched at his feet one of Thoritos' women would sing and brush the flies from his face, and bring him cool wine to drink when he woke from his daytime dreams. And Kleon would drink and doze again, though he slept but little, lying still instead, companioned with thought. And the women would hear him groan as he lay, and think that a God was with him in dreams.

But he thought instead, till his thoughts were as knives: Why did men live and endure it all? For to-morrow came up with the selfsame sun, the night went down with the self-same stars, there were neither Gods nor beginnings nor ends, plan in the blood and pain of birth, plan in the blood and pain of death, only an oft-told tale that went on and knew neither reason nor rhythm nor right, men as beasts that the herdsman goads, the Herdsman himself but a slavering lout. And he thought of his captured stores of books, and the dream the great Athenian dreamt, of Herdsmen wise in the perfect state; and he knew it only an idle dream, yet he loved it and turned to it for ease; or woke and pulled the woman in his bed and buried his face in the peace of her breasts.

And the years went by like a fading breath, till he woke one dawn and found himself, in company with a score of others, redeemed the cross because of their strength, standing with white-painted feet in the ergastulum of the Roman slave-market. They had been captured by a disguised galley in an attempted raid on the Alexandrian wheat-route.

The overseer of Lucius Julius Pacianus bought him and three others and took them to the villa on the Palatine. Pacianus himself came out to inspect them. He had dull eyes and a grave mien and believed that he should have been made a consul. Standing in the sunlight, his green tunic edged with silver, his beard combed and oiled, he pointed first at Kleon and then at another.

‘That one and that. They will be safer so.'

Not until two grinning Libyans approached, and seized him and threw him on his back, did Kleon understand. Then he saw that they had brought an iron bowl where water steamed, and with it two small knives.

And suddenly, vividly, with an intensity that wrung his heart, he remembered the smell of the sea, and the smell of women, and never again so remembered them.

[ii]

Three mornings after setting out on the road to Capua he awoke on the edge of the dark and found two men bending over him. One held a pliant cord in his hands, and stooped with drooling lips. The young sunlight dappled Kleon's face and he smelt the dew-wet vines. He laughed and stretched himself and bared his throat.

‘I am ready,' he said.

They drew back, startled, threatening. Thereon Kleon suddenly leapt to his feet and struck at the nearest with his dagger. The man swore and jumped aside. Kleon laughed again. The roll of
The Republic
fell from his breast.

‘Slit throats are to the swift, you swine.'

Then he stood and considered them. They were shepherds, clad in grey felt tunics, with bare feet and legs and conical hats. One was tall, red-haired, an obvious Gaul, with sleepy eyes and curling lips. The other was of lesser stature and different breed, and he it was held the rope. His forehead and chin sloped steeply away from the line of his straight, keen nose. And, looking in his eyes, Kleon was aware that they were the eyes of one aberrant to the point of madness.

‘Why the stranglers' rope?' the literatus asked.

‘Why not?' said the sleepy-eyed shepherd, looking at his companion. The short man bared his teeth.

‘It's fit end for a Roman slave.'

‘Aren't you also slaves?'

‘We were – yesterday.'

‘Then you've heard of Capua?'

At that the eyes of the sleepy Gaul lit up. ‘We are making Capua,' he said; and added, with simplicity. ‘So we were to strangle you, to prove ourselves freemen and worthy to kill.'

Kleon picked up his copy of
The Republic.
‘I also was a slave. I am going to Capua. Come with me. We'll be crucified near one another.'

They scowled at him and stood fast. The short man's lips parted again, shewing decayed teeth.

‘You're mad, a fool, or an ill augur. Pity you woke so soon. I was to open your chest and offer your heart to Kokolkh – though Brennus, being but a Gaul, was against that.'

‘A sacrifice?' Kleon was coldly amused. ‘I hadn't heard of your God. Tell me of him as we go. This is a poor place to hide, and we must make the hills.' He added, as an afterthought, coldly, ‘I carry a charm that twists in agony the entrails of any who seek my life.'