Not for Mitchell the unctuous Spartacus of Susannah Moodie, refusing to embrace his child with speeches such as this:

‘Never, Elia, shall my arms embrace my child, till I am free. Thou canst pierce through the dark veil of futurity; how will the morning sun shine for Spartacus? Will it gleam upon my blackening corse, or gild my victorious arms?’

We need no prophet to tell us the outcome for Spartacus, admirable though many of the sentiments with which Susannah Moodie invests him may be. Her Spartacus is unfitted for a world where, when he enters the arena,

his eye glanced round the gay assembly, with a look fraught with contempt and hatred. ‘Is it possible,’ thought Spartacus, ‘that man can come, with light and joyous heart, to witness the sufferings of his fellowmen?’14

Mitchell’s hero, toughened by early hardship and unburdened by ideals plainly directed from author to audience over the character’s head, accepts survival, sexual gratification, and fierce hatred and loyalty as unquestioning motives,

memories dreadful and unforgivable, memories of long treks in the slave-gangs from their native lands, memories of the naked sale, with painted feet, from the steps of windy ergastula, memories of cruelties cold-hearted and bloody, of women raped or fed to fish to amuse the Masters from their lethargy, of children sold as they came from the womb, of the breeding-kens of the north, where the slaves were mated like cattle, with the Masters standing by. (S 97)

Spartacus here is much closer to Ewan and his angry rejection of the art gallery. Ewan’s anger and Mitchell’s coalesce in Grey Granite in that art gallery visit:

Why did they never immortalize in stone a scene from the Athenian justice-courts – a slave being ritually, unnecessarily tortured before he could legally act as a witness? Or a baby exposed to die in a jar – hundreds every year in the streets of Athens, it went on all day, the little kids wailing and crying and crying as the hot sun rose and they scorched in the jars; and then their mouths dried up, they just weeked and whimpered, they generally died by dark. (SQ 406)

Out of such anger, Spartacus’ narrow focus of hatred and ambition for success in the rebellion grows and achieves authenticity.

Mitchell skilfully does make some contact possible with an outside world which is beyond this immediate artistic interest. Gershom ben Sanballat comes in frustration to follow a leader whom ethnically he despises, since no better may be found. Crixus and Castus plainly follow Spartacus from a mixture of personal loyalty and sexual attraction. Even Kleon, mutilated beyond normal passion and anger, feels irrational loyalty beyond self-preservation to a barbarian he first thought he could manipulate, but finally saw he must follow to the death. Mitchell includes these outside contacts and occasionally replenishes them with new characters, but only very sparingly.

One really significant omission is the Romans – the Masters, as they are universally called here. Masters they are to the slaves, and Masters they are to the reader who never approaches them closer than the understanding of the slave army or the superior intelligence of Kleon. Glimpsed in the gathering dusk or in the distant dust-cloud, occasionally eavesdropped on in council or Senate discussion, the Romans remain in Mitchell’s novel a satisfactory enigma, not understood and therefore totally hated. In isolating the reader from the Roman lifestyle, which might encourage identification (and worse still, sympathy) in the modern reader, Mitchell compels sympathy with the barbarous and alien lifestyle of the slave army.

Barbarous the action certainly is. When Crassus the Lean finds his orders disobeyed, the Cambridge Ancient History wryly notes he found his relief in

decimating an unsteady cohort – with the most beneficent results to the morale of the remainder.15

Mitchell’s account of the episode laconically conveys not only the punishment but the complete lack of surprise or sympathy such a punishment might arouse:

When Crassus heard this, the face of the Dives went livid with anger. He commanded that the hundred men of the velites be decimated. Then the whole army stirred at the shouted orders of the tribunes and marched north on the slave-camp. (S 209)

It was the norm of life in the army. The death of one man in ten was hardly worth commenting on: ordinary army discipline. This calculated tight-lipped description of cruelty cumulatively does much to transmit the horror Mitchell obviously felt at the circumstances surrounding the rebellion, and the society which bred it. ‘Bring Cossinus’ head’, orders Spartacus at one point, ‘and Itul the Iberian hewed it from the trunk which his club had mangled, and brought it dripping’(S 93). No comment is required for an emotion doubtless no one felt.

The slaves implored the Gauls to free them. They were manacled one to the other, and when they were discovered with their overseer slain they would undoubtedly be crucified, as a warning to other slaves.

The Gauls listened and were moved a little. But they had no time to unmanacle the gang, and the slaves of it would encumber the scouts. So they left them, hearing their cries for long as they rode round the shoulder of the hill. (S 204–5)

Laconically, Mitchell tidies up the episode a few pages later:

They passed by the field where the ten chained slaves had watched the Gauls of Titul slay the overseer. Ten shapes lay very quiet there now: already the spot was a-caw and a-crow with ravens. Gershom glanced at it indifferently. (S 212)

In catching hardened indifference to suffering, torture and death Mitchell cleverly implants in the reader’s mind the ability to see the events of the novel, people and places, with the artificiality of a narrow slave perspective. Excitement is possible, no doubt, the excitement of personal loyalty to Spartacus, excitement of winning a battle over the Masters, even the thrill of seeing Rome,

at noon, from the Campagna, from the Sabine Hills, shining below them, Mons Cispius crowned with trees and the longroofed Doric temples, Mons Oppius shelving tenement-laden into the sunrise’s place, Mons Palatinus splendid with villas, fading into a sun-haze mist where the land fell .