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Senate had no choice but to yield. The consuls dedicated their year in
office to demolishing the unpopular constitution of Sulla and restoring
the power of the tribunes.
For the next decade, Roman armies engaged in small-scale skirmishes
with bands of fugitive slaves throughout southern Italy, but the revolt led
by Spartacus was the last great slave war in Roman antiquity. However,
Spartacus was almost certainly not a revolutionary in the contemporary
sense of the word. In examining the ancient sources, modern historians
agree Spartacus was not formally committed to the abolition of slavery,
nor did he plan the total overhaul of the Roman social system. If he had a
strategy at all, he “probably had as his limited design the restoration of the
largely foreign slaves back to their respective homelands” (Wyke, 35). It
remains a provocative fact that Spartacus merits only the briefest of mentions
in the standard Roman histories of the next several hundred years,
until his image as a champion of the oppressed is reappropriated, some
would say exploited, by the very class of people against whom he rebelled.
Background to the Film
Stanley Kubrick’s film Spartacus is based on the 1951 novel of the same
name by American author Howard Fast (1914–2003). But two hundred
years before the publication of Fast’s novel, European and American writers
began to revive the figure of Spartacus and the story of the great slave
uprising as a social, political, and moral symbol for contemporary concerns
and issues (Wyke, 34–60; Futrell, 2001, 83–8). Starting in the mideighteenth
century, and fueled by the bloody political revolutions in both
the United States (1776) and France (1789), the image of Spartacus, romanticized
for an era of new revolutionary ideals, became associated with
the natural human right to freedom, while his struggle against oppression
was used as a validation for radical and even armed resistance to unjust
tyranny. “From this period, representations of the ancient slave rebellion
and the gladiator Spartacus were profoundly driven by the political concerns
of the present” (Wyke, 36). In Paris in 1760, Bernard-Joseph Saurin
staged his tragic drama Spartacus, an immensely popular play that adapted
the historical account to suit current ideologies of individual liberty and
righteous revolt, while also portraying the tensions between the hero’s
private life and his political aims.
The figure of Spartacus also influenced anti-slavery debates of the
period and the increasingly charged discourses of emancipation in both
100 SPARTACUS (1960)