The Glory that Rome Wasn’t

I once found a library that no one else ever seemed to visit. It was devoted to Scottish Literature and works of reference, unstaffed and on the first floor of a terraced house belonging to the University of Glasgow. I’d gone there initially to look up some words in a rare dictionary of medieval Scots and was so taken with the place that it became a favourite haunt. During my subsequent visits – long afternoons of essay writing, dozing and dreaming – I never encountered another soul.

Alas, this scholarly idyll didn’t last for long. At some point during my final two years of study the place was closed down and its stock moved to the bustling main library on Gilmour Hill – a multi-storeyed edifice rumoured to be sinking into the earth because its architects had neglected to take account of the weight of all the books. I have fond memories though of that lost haven of quiet, with its shafts of dust-filled sunlight and smell of old books. And it was here too that I first encountered a then rare copy of James Leslie Mitchell’s historical novel Spartacus, a book I knew of by reputation but had never been able to find. Mitchell is best known for the novel Sunset Song, written under the pseudonym of Lewis Grassic Gibbon which he adopted for books with a Scottish theme. It was published in 1932 and told the story of an Aberdeenshire rural community devastated by the social and economic effects of the First World War. It is undoubtedly his masterpiece, but Spartacus, published the following year, runs it a close second. Others have written novels about the great slave uprising that engulfed the Roman Empire between the years 73 and 71 BC, but Mitchell’s account is arguably the most intense and the more compelling, focusing as it does mainly on the experience of the slaves themselves. The book was researched using classical texts held at the British Library and it paints a picture of the Ancient World like no other I’ve ever come across. The Rome of Mitchell’s Spartacus is not a place of grandeur, enlightenment or cultural achievement, but a cruel and perverse horror that has swept across the known world, warping the human spirit as it goes. Central to the novel, and indeed to all James Leslie Mitchell’s work, is his belief that a former Golden Age of freedom and happiness had been destroyed by a terrible prehistoric blunder made in the Nile Valley – the move away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture. With the subsequent spread of farming, and an end to nomadic wandering, had come civilization and all its ills: land ownership, class division, organized religion, warfare and burdensome toil. Rome, for Mitchell, was the very epitome of brutal civilization and it’s no coincidence that Spartacus, the leader of the slave rebellion, is described as a former hunter who once roamed lands as yet untouched by the plough. Among the representatives of civilization depicted in the novel is the historical figure of Gaius Cassius, the governor of Cisalpine Gaul. He is described as a man of culture and a great believer in the rule of law. He also owns a eugenic-style slave-farm in Umbria which provides him with the children he needs to satisfy his perverse desires. With well-chosen and vivid details Mitchell reveals the horrors of the slave-system that underpins Roman society. One girl sold to the Umbrian farm remembers her parents killed in a pit by wild dogs:

They had become old and games had been declared because of the news of some General’s triumph in Rome. She did not know what General that had been, but she remembered the pit and her father and mother: they had fought off the dogs for a little while.

Spartacus is the work of a sensitive young man outraged by the cruelties of the world. It describes how the small, localized rebellion, begun by a group of underfed gladiators, grew by stages into a fullscale war waged by a cosmopolitan slave army which threatened the very existence of Rome. Much of the story is taken up with battles and marches through the Italian countryside, with victories, defeats and bloody atrocities. It’s harrowing stuff at times, but Mitchell writes with an angry lyricism that shines through the darkness, and his singing prose can startle the reader with its beauty and poignancy, as in this passage describing a night watch by one of the slaves:

The Gaul did not sleep, staring out from the burned gateway over the stretch of water where the night-birds cried, where long grasses rustled and moved in the night-winds of Spring; and all the earth sent forth a dry, growing smell that caught at his throat, so that he remembered himself young, a boy, with no tormented men with gouting wounds in his memory haunting him: but only the woods and the millet patches of home, and play in the sun, and the grimed, laughing face of Brennus, whom he had tended and fought and loved, and the light dying from the forests where the aurochsen lowed.

Much of the story is told through the thoughts, feelings and words of leading participants in the war. We get to know and care about the fate of characters such as Elpinice, the lover of Spartacus, who sparks off the rebellion by leaving her master’s bed to unlock the chains of the gladiators; and Kleon, the Greek eunuch who tries to harness the gladiators’ power to build a version of Plato’s Republic, a scroll of which he carries at his breast; and of course Spartacus himself, at first distant as though in a dream, but later to grow in stature as a leader and who comes to identify with the suffering:

As though he were all the hungered dispossessed of all time: as though at moments he ceased to live, merging his spirit in that of the horde, his body in that of a thousand bodies, bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh.

For Spartacus is also a political novel, and Mitchell uses its story of resistance to convey his own hopes of a revolution to improve the lot of the industrial poor living in the city slums of his own time. Yet though he is a revolutionary he has the torn heart of a poet, railing at injustice one moment and expressing insights into the mysteries of Nature the next. Here he is on the ending of a long summer drought:

And the hills stirred, and the dying plants raised their heads, and the earth moved and put forth new smells, stirring to a fresh and unforeseen life, wakening and moving in the raining dark.

The ultimate fate of the slaves – crucified down the length of the Appian Way – is told in moving detail and naturally reminds the reader of the best-known Christian symbol and of the spiritual revolution that would one day conquer Rome. With this in mind, the novel begins and ends with the same simple statement: ‘It was Springtime in Italy, a hundred years before the crucifixion of Christ.’ Since that day in the lost library when I first turned the pages of this extraordinary novel its reputation has continued to grow and the book has reappeared in new editions, some under Mitchell’s better known pen-name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. The Hollywood film however, based on Howard Fast’s version of the story, continues to be uppermost in the public mind whenever the gladiator’s name is mentioned. Mitchell’s Spartacus, with its devastating critique of the ‘glories of Rome’ and its passionate defence of the underdog, deserves to be better known, and once read is unlikely to be forgotten.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © David Fleming 2025