Spartacus here is much closer to Ewan and his angry rejection of the art gallery. Ewan’s anger and Mitchell’s coalesce in Grey Granite in that art gallery visit:
Why did they never immortalize in stone a scene from the Athenian justice-courts – a slave being ritually, unnecessarily tortured before he could legally act as a witness? Or a baby exposed to die in a jar – hundreds every year in the streets of Athens, it went on all day, the little kids wailing and crying and crying as the hot sun rose and they scorched in the jars; and then their mouths dried up, they just weeked and whimpered, they generally died by dark. (SQ 406)
Out of such anger, Spartacus’ narrow focus of hatred and ambition for success in the rebellion grows and achieves authenticity.
Mitchell skilfully does make some contact possible with an outside world which is beyond this immediate artistic interest. Gershom ben Sanballat comes in frustration to follow a leader whom ethnically he despises, since no better may be found. Crixus and Castus plainly follow Spartacus from a mixture of personal loyalty and sexual attraction. Even Kleon, mutilated beyond normal passion and anger, feels irrational loyalty beyond self-preservation to a barbarian he first thought he could manipulate, but finally saw he must follow to the death. Mitchell includes these outside contacts and occasionally replenishes them with new characters, but only very sparingly.
One really significant omission is the Romans – the Masters, as they are universally called here. Masters they are to the slaves, and Masters they are to the reader who never approaches them closer than the understanding of the slave army or the superior intelligence of Kleon. Glimpsed in the gathering dusk or in the distant dust-cloud, occasionally eavesdropped on in council or Senate discussion, the Romans remain in Mitchell’s novel a satisfactory enigma, not understood and therefore totally hated. In isolating the reader from the Roman lifestyle, which might encourage identification (and worse still, sympathy) in the modern reader, Mitchell compels sympathy with the barbarous and alien lifestyle of the slave army.
Barbarous the action certainly is. When Crassus the Lean finds his orders disobeyed, the Cambridge Ancient History wryly notes he found his relief in
decimating an unsteady cohort – with the most beneficent results to the morale of the remainder.15
Mitchell’s account of the episode laconically conveys not only the punishment but the complete lack of surprise or sympathy such a punishment might arouse:
When Crassus heard this, the face of the Dives went livid with anger. He commanded that the hundred men of the velites be decimated. Then the whole army stirred at the shouted orders of the tribunes and marched north on the slave-camp. (S 209)
It was the norm of life in the army. The death of one man in ten was hardly worth commenting on: ordinary army discipline. This calculated tight-lipped description of cruelty cumulatively does much to transmit the horror Mitchell obviously felt at the circumstances surrounding the rebellion, and the society which bred it. ‘Bring Cossinus’ head’, orders Spartacus at one point, ‘and Itul the Iberian hewed it from the trunk which his club had mangled, and brought it dripping’(S 93). No comment is required for an emotion doubtless no one felt.
The slaves implored the Gauls to free them. They were manacled one to the other, and when they were discovered with their overseer slain they would undoubtedly be crucified, as a warning to other slaves.
The Gauls listened and were moved a little. But they had no time to unmanacle the gang, and the slaves of it would encumber the scouts. So they left them, hearing their cries for long as they rode round the shoulder of the hill. (S 204–5)
Laconically, Mitchell tidies up the episode a few pages later:
They passed by the field where the ten chained slaves had watched the Gauls of Titul slay the overseer. Ten shapes lay very quiet there now: already the spot was a-caw and a-crow with ravens. Gershom glanced at it indifferently. (S 212)
In catching hardened indifference to suffering, torture and death Mitchell cleverly implants in the reader’s mind the ability to see the events of the novel, people and places, with the artificiality of a narrow slave perspective. Excitement is possible, no doubt, the excitement of personal loyalty to Spartacus, excitement of winning a battle over the Masters, even the thrill of seeing Rome,
at noon, from the Campagna, from the Sabine Hills, shining below them, Mons Cispius crowned with trees and the longroofed Doric temples, Mons Oppius shelving tenement-laden into the sunrise’s place, Mons Palatinus splendid with villas, fading into a sun-haze mist where the land fell . . . Aventine lay south, and north, highcrowned, the Capitoline Hill. Rome! (S194)
Yet the greater part of the book is calculatedly barren of excitement, barren of emotion, whether in the reactions of the mutilated Kleon, the enigmatic Spartacus, or the hardened slaves themselves.
The extent of Mitchell’s calculatedly narrowed vision is seen easily enough in a comparison with Howard Fast’s Spartacus of 1951 (source of Rank’s 1959 film starring Kirk Douglas). Fast implants the story within the Roman society of the time, with flashback and forward through the experience of Crassus, Gracchus, Cicero and a young pleasure-seeking aristocratic Roman circle. Fast’s narrative has its own harrowing moments: a vivid insight into the early years as a slave in the Egyptian mines which Spartacus was lucky to survive; a dreadful description of the crucifixion scenes on the Appian Way. Perhaps Fast’s most vivid achievement is to realise, in a low-key way, the full horror of being a slave, in scenes underplayed skilfully as follows:
The litter-bearers, weary from all the miles they had come, sweating, crouched beside their burdens and shivered in the evening coolness. Now their lean bodies were animal-like in weariness, and their muscles quivered with the pain of exhaustion, even as an animal’s does. No one looked at them, no one noticed them, no one attended them. The five men, the three women and the two children went into the house, and still the litter-bearers crouched by the litters, waiting. Now one of them, a lad of no more than twenty, began to sob, more and more uncontrollably; but the others paid no attention to him. They remained there at least twenty minutes before a slave came to them and led them off to the barracks where they would have food and shelter for the night.16
To describe reality with as little emotion as this is to suggest powerfully the Romans’ contempt for the slaves as human beings, and their simple indifference to them. Indifference is something Mitchell and Fast both attribute to the Romans, Fast in a splendid aside attributed to Brutus waving a hand at the slave-crosses on the Appian Way, their troops’ handiwork:
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 library22 – 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.