SPARTACUS
James Leslie Mitchell, pen name ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’, was born in 1901 and spent most of his childhood in a farming community in the Mearns. He was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, essays and science fiction, and his writing reflects his wide interest in religion, archaeology, history, left-wing politics and science. His military experiences in the Middle East inspired his first short stories and much of his future work. His most famous work, the trilogy A Scots Quair, was published in successive years (Sunset Song in 1932, Cloud Howe in 1933 and Grey Granite in 1934) and has become a landmark in Scottish literature.
He was writing at full pressure when in 1935 he died suddenly, leaving an unfinished Scottish novel The Speak of the Mearns, eventually published in 1982, and many projects which would have established him further as one of the leading men of letters of his time.
This eBook edition published in 2013 by
Birlinn Limited
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www.birlinn.co.uk
This edition published in Great Britain in 2005 by
Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd
First published in 1990 by Scottish Academic Press
Copyright © the estate of James Leslie Mitchell, 1990
Introduction copyright © Ian Campbell, 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in
any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-90459-856-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-725-7
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
CONTENTS
Introduction
Note on the Text
An Introductory Bibliography to J. L. Mitchell
SPARTACUS
I Insurrection
II Legio Libera
III Rex Servorum
IV Rome!
V In Rhegium
VI The Masters
INTRODUCTION
The author
James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon) was born in Auchterless in Aberdeenshire in 1901, grew up in the Mearns he was to immortalise in Sunset Song (1932), then early moved to the Scottish cities for a life of largely hated journalism in Aberdeen then in Glasgow. Failure here, compounded by the Depression years, made work impossible to find and he enlisted in the armed services, working in England and in the Middle East before settling to marriage and civilian life in London, and finally in Welwyn Garden City where he enjoyed a few years of amazingly productive authorship before his sudden death through stomach trouble in February 1935. He left behind a widow and two young children; he left also a growing reputation as a major Scottish novelist whose work, crammed into these last years, was only beginning to be appreciated when death removed him from the Scottish scene. His true critical place is still being debated, though his importance is now not in question; today he is seen as one of the major figures of the renaissance in Scottish writing of the present century.
A Scots Quair (Sunset Song, 1932; Cloud Howe, 1933; and Grey Granite, 1934) is his single most remembered work, now famous through repeated republication, television serialisation and teaching at school and university. Spartacus (1933) was to take longer to catch fire in the public imagination; and though it is repeatedly mentioned by Mitchell’s critics in respectful tones, it has been largely out of print since the author’s death and has been overcast by Howard Fast’s better-known recreation of the Spartacist slave rebellion chosen by Hollywood for the celebrated film Spartacus. The present reprint, one of several in the last decade, is part of the process of correcting the picture of a ‘one-book’ author, for few so little fit that description as the astonishingly prolific James Leslie Mitchell. Under his Scottish pseudonym of ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’ he made A Scots Quair public property and established it as a Scottish classic; under his own name, which he reserved for a different kind of publication (and for the pleasure of reviewing his own work – often favourably) he published history, archaeology, and accounts of exploration. As Mitchell or as Gibbon, he well merits the revival of interest he is now enjoying. His science fiction (Three Go Back, Gay Hunter), his books of archaeological discovery and argument (The Last of the Maya, Nine Against the Unknown, Hanno or the Future of Exploration) and his short stories alone entitle him to serious consideration, along with his other Scottish writing (The Thirteenth Disciple, Stained Radiance) which has until lately been all but unavailable outside a few libraries and a very few expensive specialist bookshops.1 The Polygon reprints are at last changing this situation, and it is encouraging that the Grassic Gibbon centre in Arbuthnott is the scene of vigorous debate and display and, more recently, dramatisation.
The ‘Mitchell’ books reflected a serious interest in history, social history and anthropology which predated Mitchell’s army and air force years, but which was fuelled by his army and air force service in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. A committed Marxist and implacably hostile observer of the Scottish and British social and political scene, he found a natural attraction in the story of the Spartacist rebellion:
When I hear or read of a dog tortured to death, very vilely and foully, or some old horse driven to a broken back down a hill with an overloaded cart of corn, of rats captured and tormented with red-hot pokers in bothies, I have a shudder of disgust. But these things do not move me too deeply, not as the fate of the old-time Cameronian prisoners over there, three miles away in Dunnottar; not as the face of that ragged tramp who went by this afternoon; not as the crucifixion of the Spartacist slaves along the Appian Way. To me it is inconceivable that sincere and honest men should go outside the range of their own species with gifts of pity and angry compassion and rage when there is horror and dread among humankind. (ScS 304).2
As ‘blasphemer and reformer’ (his own terms, skilfully used by W. K. Malcolm in his analysis of Mitchell) he was to produce in Spartacus a telling indictment of men’s inhumanity to those over whom they had total control – and the authorial disgust at such inhumanity pulses through every page of Spartacus.
‘Diffusionism’ in Mitchell needs to be understood for the reader to make sense of Sunset Song’s standing stones, the decadent Aberdeen of Grey Granite, the pre-lapsarian society of Three Go Back – and the Roman civilisation of Spartacus. Although clumsily titled, it is not really a difficult system to grasp. To the Diffusionist, civilisation is a slow curse, overtaking originally free and happy humanity from the Egyptian pyramid-builders onwards, bringing settlement, culture – and property, compulsion, war, tyranny, religion, mental enslavement. To Mitchell (and to his contemporary and friend MacDiarmid), civilisation was a blight, with its nadir evident in the Depression which they saw all around them and which Mitchell remembered vividly from his Glasgow years in the slums. Ewan in Grey Granite, wandering the streets of Aberdeen in the summer heat and taking refuge in the clean marble halls of the Art Gallery, embodies much of his author’s fastidious distaste for the Depression and its horrors:
There was a cast of Trajan, good head; Caesar – the Caesar they said wasn’t Caesar. Why not a head of Spartacus? Or a plaque of the dripping line of crosses that manned the Appian Way with slaves – dripping and falling to bits through long months, they took days to die, torn by wild beasts. Or a statuary group of a Roman slave being fed to fishes, alive in a pool . . . (SQ 406–7)
If this was civilisation, plainly Mitchell wanted little to do with it. Yet his creative imagination, uncomfortably enough (for much of his work is uncomfortably full of pain and suffering), could not leave it alone. The Spartacist rebelli
on was plainly a subject for a historical novel he could use as a trenchant commentary on his times.3
Spartacus
When he began to research the background to his 1933 novel, Mitchell was in his thirties, modestly successful, rising to a small house, a small family, a small car, and easy access to the British Museum and the London world of publishers and magazines. He had come from a poor home and lived through hard times – both points which were to give pungency to his Scottish novels at a time when sugar-coated pictures of Scotland had their devotees – and he relished the opportunity to use his time to look at books, historical sources, and write the kind of book his imagination impelled him to work on.
His anger fuelled his interest. As he wrote to Helen Cruickshank in November, 1933:
I am so horrified by all our dirty little cruelties and bestialities that I would feel the lowest type of skunk if I don’t shout the horror of them from the house-tops. Of course I shout too loudly. But the filthy conspiracy of silence there was in the past!4
Art galleries of pleasingly innocuous antiquity did little to damp that anger, and the historical reading he did for Spartacus intensified it. A view of the past which allowed for aesthetic satisfaction in the achievements of Greece and Rome, without making room for the dripping crosses of the Appian Way, was plainly not for him. From his earliest preserved school essays, he had been fascinated by the powerful leaders of the mass movements of history, by the power of individuals, by charismatic leadership, by mesmerism; by the power of writing, too, to blur earthly definitions and to transform the commonplace to ‘the wild dream of the German poet: “There is no beginning – yea, even as there is no end!”’5 The element of irrationality so strong in his version of the Spartacus story is perceptible in this view of history and the power of its leaders; early on described as a slave malleable in the hands of the literatus Kleon, Spartacus moves with maturity to a terrible power of his own beyond reason, beyond beginning and end – indeed, the very last paragraph of Mitchell’s story implies a circularity as the dead Spartacus and the as-yet unborn Christ combine in the agonised Kleon’s death vision.
The origin of the story came in research; from Appian, from Plutarch and from Sallust, the work of reading divided between husband and wife, bolstered by visits to the British Museum.6
Plutarch’s Life of Crassus is plainly the central source,7 providing as it does the following skeleton of events and character:
•Capua’s garrison is overcome.
•Clodius with 3,000 troops is defeated.
•Publius Varinus enters the story: his deputy Furius is routed (with 2,000 men) as is Cossinus (surprised by Spartacus), then Varinus himself.
•Spartacus seizes Furius’ horse. In an interval of poorer luck Gellius falls on a slave contingent (Crixus’ army in Spartacus) and destroys it.
•Lentulus and Gellius are then defeated by Spartacus, who sets off for the Alps, where he confronts and defeats Cassius and his 10,000 Romans.
•Crassus appointed by Senate; despatches Mummius, who disobeys orders, engages with Spartacus, and is routed.
•Crassus, decimating the survivors, establishes firm leadership while Spartacus heads South for Lucania and the sea; bargains with pirates but is betrayed by them.
•Spartacus camps in Rhegium; Crassus walls the slaves in with dyke and ditch; dissension in slave camp.
•Crassus begins to fear Pompey’s return which would steal his thunder; meanwhile Spartacus escapes with one third of his army through Crassus’ wall. The slaves, internally riven and weakened by desertion, are beaten once and head for the mountains, then beaten again at Lucania; Spartacus is slaughtered while trying to reach and kill Crassus.
With additions and modifications from Appian and Sallust, this is to be the groundplan of Mitchell’s plot for Spartacus. Sallust, for instance,8 gave him a keener insight into the relevance of the Spartacist rebellion to the machinations of the Roman Senate and its internal politics; the clash between Pompey and Crassus is an important off-stage element in the historical account. Appian provided a number of striking details which obviously appealed to the novelist’s imagination:
•The Mount Vesuvius details.
•The names of Oenomaus and Crixus.
•The sacrifice of Roman prisoners in memory of Crixus.
•The near-attack on Rome (not in Plutarch) inexplicably abandoned.
Appian’s description of breaking out of Crassus’ trap in Rhegium is full and vigorous. His description of the final battle which cost Spartacus his life is so vivid that Mitchell incorporates it in direct quotation at the climax of his own battle description:
AND SPARTACUS MADE HIS WAY TOWARDS CRASSUS HIMSELF THROUGH MANY MEN, AND INFLICTING MANY WOUNDS; BUT HE DID NOT SUCCEED IN REACHING CRASSUS, THOUGH HE ENGAGED AND KILLED TWO CENTURIONS. AND AT LAST, AFTER THOSE ABOUT HIM HAD FLED, HE KEPT HIS GROUND, AND, BEING SURROUNDED BY A GREAT NUMBER, HE FOUGHT TILL HE WAS CUT DOWN.
Flexibly but skilfully, Mitchell takes what he wants from each source, altering, tailoring; Plutarch has Spartacus kill his superb white stallion for ‘if they lost . . . he would have no need of a horse again’ (S 281). The horse is there in Plutarch but not as the property of Furius. The white stallion and the superb gladiator seemed to need to be introduced earlier in the book for artistic urgency, and Mitchell simply moved them forward.
The larger context, the impact of the slave revolt of 73–71 BC on the volatile state of Roman politics, is very much present in the Latin sources, and very much absent in Mitchell’s account. Mitchell’s sympathies focus on the suffering slave, the human injustice, not on the cultured or sophisticated arguments of the Roman Senate. Not so the orthodox historians: the Cambridge Ancient History, which was published just as he was collecting his sources, saw Spartacus in quite a different light:
Like Eunus and Salvius, Spartacus is a tragic figure, but the significance of his career is small . . . the most notable legacy of the affair was its results on Pompey and Crassus.9
Liddell’s History of Rome (1858), a standard source-book Mitchell can be expected to have consulted, describes Spartacus’ revolt as ‘a formidable outbreak that took place in the heart of Italy, and threatened for a time the very existence of the Republic’,10 yet finds room for scarcely two pages of description in a book of over 720 pages – much of them devoted to the wider implications of Roman politics. Likewise Frank Marsh’s A History of the Roman World, to be published in 1935, devotes one single page out of almost 500 to a revolt which is not interesting so much for itself, as for its consequences:
Rome might have breathed freely again had it not been for the fact that there were now in Italy two generals of somewhat uncertain convictions at the head of victorious armies.11
Examples could be multiplied of the Spartacist rebellion assuming different shape according to the viewpoint of the observer. European observers can be cited discussing the effect on the larger shape of Italian politics12 of the effect on the thinking of the future ‘Spartakusbund’ activists, whose most famous representatives were Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.13 As individual hero, as leader of a significant political rebellion, as potential destabiliser of Rome, and as inspiration for future class struggle, Spartacus plainly is important.
Mitchell’s treatment
Clearly, Mitchell chose to write about a rebellion. Already we have seen his hostility towards a conspiracy which would make of history a cosy and unchallenging account of the past, and there is nothing at all about his version of the events of 73–71 BC which is relaxing. The inspiration of the novel is the enormous impetus given to the pent-up rebellious instincts of the slave class in Italy by the towering and charismatic leader in Spartacus the historical personality.
The plot starts with rebellion, if not with its ultimate leader. The plot has little to do with the events after Spartacus’ own death, except to record in its sickening detail Rome’s public revenge. The emphasis in the original historical sources is simply omitted; strict co
ncentration on the rebellion itself is clearly the artistic intention of Spartacus.
The narrowness of Mitchell’s treatment is extraordinary when the novel is finished and the reader reflects. By the invention and retention of the character of Kleon throughout the narrative – Kleon anticipates Spartacus and survives him, narrowly – Mitchell is released from any obligations to provide a wider contextual framework in order to make sense of the rebellion. Kleon makes sense, sense enough for his own narrow intentions and sense enough to interpret a savage, over-simplified society to the reader. The unimpassioned account of a mutilated former slave is the ideal narrative vehicle for the passionate and often repulsive material of the story. Not for Mitchell the unctuous Spartacus of Susannah Moodie, refusing to embrace his child with speeches such as this:
‘Never, Elia, shall my arms embrace my child, till I am free. Thou canst pierce through the dark veil of futurity; how will the morning sun shine for Spartacus? Will it gleam upon my blackening corse, or gild my victorious arms?’
We need no prophet to tell us the outcome for Spartacus, admirable though many of the sentiments with which Susannah Moodie invests him may be. Her Spartacus is unfitted for a world where, when he enters the arena,
his eye glanced round the gay assembly, with a look fraught with contempt and hatred. ‘Is it possible,’ thought Spartacus, ‘that man can come, with light and joyous heart, to witness the sufferings of his fellowmen?’14
Mitchell’s hero, toughened by early hardship and unburdened by ideals plainly directed from author to audience over the character’s head, accepts survival, sexual gratification, and fierce hatred and loyalty as unquestioning motives,
memories dreadful and unforgivable, memories of long treks in the slave-gangs from their native lands, memories of the naked sale, with painted feet, from the steps of windy ergastula, memories of cruelties cold-hearted and bloody, of women raped or fed to fish to amuse the Masters from their lethargy, of children sold as they came from the womb, of the breeding-kens of the north, where the slaves were mated like cattle, with the Masters standing by. (S 97)
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