Pinning down Spartacus - Mary Beard

[Epictetus]

The New York Review of Books has a nice article by Mary Beard entitled Pinning Down Spartacus. It is ostensibly a review of the English translation of Aldo Schiavone's book Spartacus (which sounds really interesting), but it is also a great overview of current scholarly and public opinion.

My favourite line from the article:

As a basic rule of thumb, the longer a book on Spartacus is, the less historically accurate it is likely to be.

[M. Demetrius]

:grin: He wasn't around all that long, as a "main character", was he?

[Marja]

I'd recommend Brent Shaw's book, which collates the sources, which can help counter the bias towards Plutarch's and Appian's later but more complete accounts.

But Brent Shaw's book can be frustrating, because he doesn't include any estimates of the slave population, or of the number of rebels, or the problems involved in estimating these, and he only mentions that Velleius Paterculus' figure for the number of rebels is corrupt, without any discussions of how it is corrupt. (Finally tracked that down via Robinson Ellis's text of Velleius Paterculus.)

[Marja]

Although Mary Beard's right about the incompleteness of the sources, I think she's wrong to assume that the numbers in the sources are exaggerations.

Walter Scheidel and Saskia Hin both estimate that about 20% of the population of Roman Italia were slaves, which comes out to somewhere between 1,200,000 and 1,620,000 for a low or middle count.

Since the slave rebels campaigned through much of peninsular Italia, depending how many rural slaves and how many urban slaves from the small towns were able to escape, and how many of the escapees join the rebel army instead of joining escapee communities in the hills, 120,000 is by no means a high estimate for the main rebel group at its peak, if this is counting noncombatants and if this is demographically more like a whole population [trying to escape Roman territory?] than an army.

I don't know where to begin to respond to the discussion/dismissal of 'proletarian revolution,' because although there was a proletariat in ancient Rome, it wasn't the slaves, and neither is the same class as the proletariat in modern times. I would also point out that slavery is a class relationship [as well as a legal status], and that serfdom and wage-dependency are different class relationships. And saying that slavery prevented the emergence of class relationships, when it was one [or more than one] is a bit confusing.

[Epictetus]

I don't know where to begin to respond to the discussion/dismissal of 'proletarian revolution,' because although there was a proletariat in ancient Rome, it wasn't the slaves, and neither is the same class as the proletariat in modern times. I would also point out that slavery is a class relationship [as well as a legal status], and that serfdom and wage-dependency are different class relationships. And saying that slavery prevented the emergence of class relationships, when it was one [or more than one] is a bit confusing.

Oh, what a nice point! But as Beard writes:

But as Schiavone insists, following many others (including M.I. Finley), “class struggle” implies the existence of “class consciousness.” Mere “social stratification” is not enough; any form of class action in the Marxist sense requires, as a necessary precondition, a clearly conceived relationship between the possessors of the means of production and the possessors of labor. “Such a relationship,” Schiavone writes, “never emerged in ancient societies, not even in first-century Rome.”

Did the ancients recognise slaves as belonging to a social class? If not, can there be a class struggle when no differentiated classes are identified?

Late Republican writers tended to view early social disturbances in their history (like the Succession of the Plebs) through the lens of what was happening in their own time (such as Optimates v. Populares). Is seeing class warfare in ancient Rome doing the same thing?

[Robert]

You could very well be right, as slavery then was very different to what we had in the colonies and the US. Slaves were regarded as property but not as basicly inferior beings, there was also upward social mobility, freedmen were a legaly recognised entity and could attain citizenship. We tend to look at other societies and judge them by our present day standards, value and mindset, while in truth they are based on a different value set then our own.

[Marja]

Well, if we consider the various disputes over land reform within the later Roman republic, that looks like class struggle. And the Senate functioned as a class organization, and the idea that the republic needed a stronger aristocratic element and a weaker popular element functioned like a sort of class consciousness. We shouldn't superimpose every element of nineteenth and twentieth century revolutions, but we shouldn't throw out those elements that turn up in other large-scale slave uprisings [which are unfortunately rare] and perhaps other uprisings of oppressed and/or politically excluded groups [helots, serfs, etc.].

[Medusa Gladiatrix]

I could suggest the book "The Spartacus War" by Barry Strauss. I think we've discussed this book already somewhere else here on RAT.