He had come from a poor home and lived through hard times – both points which were to give pungency to his Scottish novels at a time when sugar-coated pictures of Scotland had their devotees – and he relished the opportunity to use his time to look at books, historical sources, and write the kind of book his imagination impelled him to work on.

His anger fuelled his interest. As he wrote to Helen Cruickshank in November, 1933:

I am so horrified by all our dirty little cruelties and bestialities that I would feel the lowest type of skunk if I don’t shout the horror of them from the house-tops. Of course I shout too loudly. But the filthy conspiracy of silence there was in the past!4

Art galleries of pleasingly innocuous antiquity did little to damp that anger, and the historical reading he did for Spartacus intensified it. A view of the past which allowed for aesthetic satisfaction in the achievements of Greece and Rome, without making room for the dripping crosses of the Appian Way, was plainly not for him. From his earliest preserved school essays, he had been fascinated by the powerful leaders of the mass movements of history, by the power of individuals, by charismatic leadership, by mesmerism; by the power of writing, too, to blur earthly definitions and to transform the commonplace to ‘the wild dream of the German poet: “There is no beginning – yea, even as there is no end!”’5 The element of irrationality so strong in his version of the Spartacus story is perceptible in this view of history and the power of its leaders; early on described as a slave malleable in the hands of the literatus Kleon, Spartacus moves with maturity to a terrible power of his own beyond reason, beyond beginning and end – indeed, the very last paragraph of Mitchell’s story implies a circularity as the dead Spartacus and the as-yet unborn Christ combine in the agonised Kleon’s death vision.

The origin of the story came in research; from Appian, from Plutarch and from Sallust, the work of reading divided between husband and wife, bolstered by visits to the British Museum.6

Plutarch’s Life of Crassus is plainly the central source,7 providing as it does the following skeleton of events and character:

•Capua’s garrison is overcome.

•Clodius with 3,000 troops is defeated.

•Publius Varinus enters the story: his deputy Furius is routed (with 2,000 men) as is Cossinus (surprised by Spartacus), then Varinus himself.

•Spartacus seizes Furius’ horse. In an interval of poorer luck Gellius falls on a slave contingent (Crixus’ army in Spartacus) and destroys it.

•Lentulus and Gellius are then defeated by Spartacus, who sets off for the Alps, where he confronts and defeats Cassius and his 10,000 Romans.

•Crassus appointed by Senate; despatches Mummius, who disobeys orders, engages with Spartacus, and is routed.

•Crassus, decimating the survivors, establishes firm leadership while Spartacus heads South for Lucania and the sea; bargains with pirates but is betrayed by them.

•Spartacus camps in Rhegium; Crassus walls the slaves in with dyke and ditch; dissension in slave camp.

•Crassus begins to fear Pompey’s return which would steal his thunder; meanwhile Spartacus escapes with one third of his army through Crassus’ wall. The slaves, internally riven and weakened by desertion, are beaten once and head for the mountains, then beaten again at Lucania; Spartacus is slaughtered while trying to reach and kill Crassus.

With additions and modifications from Appian and Sallust, this is to be the groundplan of Mitchell’s plot for Spartacus. Sallust, for instance,8 gave him a keener insight into the relevance of the Spartacist rebellion to the machinations of the Roman Senate and its internal politics; the clash between Pompey and Crassus is an important off-stage element in the historical account. Appian provided a number of striking details which obviously appealed to the novelist’s imagination:

•The Mount Vesuvius details.

•The names of Oenomaus and Crixus.

•The sacrifice of Roman prisoners in memory of Crixus.

•The near-attack on Rome (not in Plutarch) inexplicably abandoned.

Appian’s description of breaking out of Crassus’ trap in Rhegium is full and vigorous. His description of the final battle which cost Spartacus his life is so vivid that Mitchell incorporates it in direct quotation at the climax of his own battle description:

AND SPARTACUS MADE HIS WAY TOWARDS CRASSUS HIMSELF THROUGH MANY MEN, AND INFLICTING MANY WOUNDS; BUT HE DID NOT SUCCEED IN REACHING CRASSUS, THOUGH HE ENGAGED AND KILLED TWO CENTURIONS. AND AT LAST, AFTER THOSE ABOUT HIM HAD FLED, HE KEPT HIS GROUND, AND, BEING SURROUNDED BY A GREAT NUMBER, HE FOUGHT TILL HE WAS CUT DOWN.

Flexibly but skilfully, Mitchell takes what he wants from each source, altering, tailoring; Plutarch has Spartacus kill his superb white stallion for ‘if they lost . . . he would have no need of a horse again’ (S 281). The horse is there in Plutarch but not as the property of Furius. The white stallion and the superb gladiator seemed to need to be introduced earlier in the book for artistic urgency, and Mitchell simply moved them forward.

The larger context, the impact of the slave revolt of 73–71 BC on the volatile state of Roman politics, is very much present in the Latin sources, and very much absent in Mitchell’s account. Mitchell’s sympathies focus on the suffering slave, the human injustice, not on the cultured or sophisticated arguments of the Roman Senate. Not so the orthodox historians: the Cambridge Ancient History, which was published just as he was collecting his sources, saw Spartacus in quite a different light:

Like Eunus and Salvius, Spartacus is a tragic figure, but the significance of his career is small . . . the most notable legacy of the affair was its results on Pompey and Crassus.9

Liddell’s History of Rome (1858), a standard source-book Mitchell can be expected to have consulted, describes Spartacus’ revolt as ‘a formidable outbreak that took place in the heart of Italy, and threatened for a time the very existence of the Republic’,10 yet finds room for scarcely two pages of description in a book of over 720 pages – much of them devoted to the wider implications of Roman politics. Likewise Frank Marsh’s A History of the Roman World, to be published in 1935, devotes one single page out of almost 500 to a revolt which is not interesting so much for itself, as for its consequences:

Rome might have breathed freely again had it not been for the fact that there were now in Italy two generals of somewhat uncertain convictions at the head of victorious armies.11

Examples could be multiplied of the Spartacist rebellion assuming different shape according to the viewpoint of the observer. European observers can be cited discussing the effect on the larger shape of Italian politics12 of the effect on the thinking of the future ‘Spartakusbund’ activists, whose most famous representatives were Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.13 As individual hero, as leader of a significant political rebellion, as potential destabiliser of Rome, and as inspiration for future class struggle, Spartacus plainly is important.

Mitchell’s treatment

Clearly, Mitchell chose to write about a rebellion. Already we have seen his hostility towards a conspiracy which would make of history a cosy and unchallenging account of the past, and there is nothing at all about his version of the events of 73–71 BC which is relaxing. The inspiration of the novel is the enormous impetus given to the pent-up rebellious instincts of the slave class in Italy by the towering and charismatic leader in Spartacus the historical personality.

The plot starts with rebellion, if not with its ultimate leader. The plot has little to do with the events after Spartacus’ own death, except to record in its sickening detail Rome’s public revenge. The emphasis in the original historical sources is simply omitted; strict concentration on the rebellion itself is clearly the artistic intention of Spartacus.

The narrowness of Mitchell’s treatment is extraordinary when the novel is finished and the reader reflects. By the invention and retention of the character of Kleon throughout the narrative – Kleon anticipates Spartacus and survives him, narrowly – Mitchell is released from any obligations to provide a wider contextual framework in order to make sense of the rebellion. Kleon makes sense, sense enough for his own narrow intentions and sense enough to interpret a savage, over-simplified society to the reader. The unimpassioned account of a mutilated former slave is the ideal narrative vehicle for the passionate and often repulsive material of the story.