Wednesday evening’s lecture by Barry Strauss, professor of history and classics at Cornell University (2013 Resident), took place in the elegant Palazzo Mattei di Giove, which is home to the Centro Studi Americani. Its president, the former Prime Minister of Italy Professor Giuliano Amato, drew additional attention to the event. He and the president of the American University of Rome, Richard Hodges, offered opening remarks to this event, which was orchestrated jointly by the American University of Rome and the American Academy in Rome.
Strauss, an expert on ancient military history, has authored books on The Battle of Salamis (2004), The Trojan War (2006), and The Spartacus War (2009) and has spoken about “Spartacus: The Man, the Myth, the Legacy.” The little that can be gleaned from history about this figure is taken from his contemporaries Cicero, Caesar, Varro, and Sallust and later Roman writers such as Plutarch, Appian, Florus, and Livy. Ultimately such accounts give a tantalizing, but incomplete, picture of the man whose life has inspired such widespread heroic fantasies.
Strauss first assured his audience that, unlike Ben Hur, Spartacus was a real historical figure of “adrenaline-pumping history.” Separating fact from fiction, he delineated the historical Spartacus against a backdrop of popular fiction. The 1960 film with Kirk Douglas, based on Howard Fast’s novel, imagines a Spartacus who is born a slave, son of a slave, but the real man was a Thracian who served in an allied unit of the Roman army and was captured by the enemy only to be unjustly sold back to the Romans, becoming an enslaved gladiator in Capua. He led his fellow gladiators in a shockingly successful revolt against the Romans and was joined by rural slaves and peasants on a campaign through southern Italy between 73 and 71 BC. Crassus eventually broke the back of this revolt in 71 BC, crucifying six thousand of Spartacus’s followers on the road between Rome and Capua. According to Strauss we should remember him as a charismatic leader, a superb military strategist, and a visionary egalitarian.
Nevertheless Spartacus failed to rein in his soldiers’ desire for vengeance or convince them to abandon the bountiful Italian peninsula to return to their own harsher northern homelands beyond the reach of Rome. Sometimes held up as a symbol of Italian nationalism or a figure of the Mezzogiorno, he and his followers were in fact immigrants who felt wronged by their adopted country. While he was most certainly opposed to his own slavery, there is no evidence that Spartacus was opposed to slavery on principle. While Spartacus was crucified alongside his men in the cinematic account, the real Spartacus is thought to have died in battle and his body was never recovered.
In the question and answer period that followed, Kim Bowes (2006 Fellow), AAR’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in-Charge of the School of Classical Studies, asked Strauss and Amato to reflect on the elasticity of the Spartacus legend. As noted in Strauss’s talk, Ronald Reagan celebrated Spartacus as a freedom fighter; Marx, Lenin, and Stalin also embraced him as an emblem of Soviet communist creed; and most recently Beppe Grillo has envisioned his own political enterprise as a revival of the Spartacan cause. Amato surmised that precisely because the facts are evasive, the myth has taken on a liberated life of its own.