. . Aventine lay south, and north, highcrowned, the Capitoline Hill. Rome! (S194)

Yet the greater part of the book is calculatedly barren of excitement, barren of emotion, whether in the reactions of the mutilated Kleon, the enigmatic Spartacus, or the hardened slaves themselves.

The extent of Mitchell’s calculatedly narrowed vision is seen easily enough in a comparison with Howard Fast’s Spartacus of 1951 (source of Rank’s 1959 film starring Kirk Douglas). Fast implants the story within the Roman society of the time, with flashback and forward through the experience of Crassus, Gracchus, Cicero and a young pleasure-seeking aristocratic Roman circle. Fast’s narrative has its own harrowing moments: a vivid insight into the early years as a slave in the Egyptian mines which Spartacus was lucky to survive; a dreadful description of the crucifixion scenes on the Appian Way. Perhaps Fast’s most vivid achievement is to realise, in a low-key way, the full horror of being a slave, in scenes underplayed skilfully as follows:

The litter-bearers, weary from all the miles they had come, sweating, crouched beside their burdens and shivered in the evening coolness. Now their lean bodies were animal-like in weariness, and their muscles quivered with the pain of exhaustion, even as an animal’s does. No one looked at them, no one noticed them, no one attended them. The five men, the three women and the two children went into the house, and still the litter-bearers crouched by the litters, waiting. Now one of them, a lad of no more than twenty, began to sob, more and more uncontrollably; but the others paid no attention to him. They remained there at least twenty minutes before a slave came to them and led them off to the barracks where they would have food and shelter for the night.16

To describe reality with as little emotion as this is to suggest powerfully the Romans’ contempt for the slaves as human beings, and their simple indifference to them. Indifference is something Mitchell and Fast both attribute to the Romans, Fast in a splendid aside attributed to Brutus waving a hand at the slave-crosses on the Appian Way, their troops’ handiwork:

Did you want it to be genteel? That’s their work. My manciple crucified eight hundred of them. They’re not nice; they’re tough and hard and murderous.17

Like Fast, Arthur Koestler in The Gladiators (1939) looks at Rome as well as at the slave camp, and produces a novel of interplay in a way which Mitchell simply is not interested in doing. Koestler’s Rome is a city of intrigue and strife and plotting, a city where interesting and often clever Romans intrigue for mixed motives, sharing a common humanity with a casual disregard for the welfare of their fellows, slave and free. Koestler produces (in William K. Malcolm’s words) a novel ‘more exacting in its psychological and economic analysis of the historical situation’,18 but the epic qualities of the story are sacrificed to that complexity.

This is a key to Mitchell’s success. Through savage concentration on the slave camp, with perhaps a moment’s eavesdropping or one glimpse of a sunny city from a distant hillside, he suggests the world of Rome without seriously attempting to penetrate it. Mitchell’s interest is in the rebellion, in the possibilities of rebellion to remedy society’s injustices. He would have shared Karl Marx’s admiration for Spartacus since he would have shared the grounds on which that admiration was accorded:

Spartacus is revealed as the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history. Great general (no Garibaldi), noble character, real representation of the ancient proletariat.

Pompeius, reiner Scheisskerl: got his undeserved fame by snatching the credit . . .19

In the leader of a great rebellion, Marx finds his great historical figure; history will work out its processes, for ‘he who composes a programme for the future is a reactionary’20 and Spartacus comes at the historical moment to exploit a weakness in the system. Mitchell admired Marx and his writings, and he also possessed, closer to home, an analysis of the world of classical antiquity which doubtless hammered home to him the importance of the right struggle at the right historical moment:

The existence of household slaves, generally war-captives, such as we meet in Homer, was an innocent institution which would never have had serious results; but the new organised slave-system which began in the seventh century BC was destined to prove one of the most fatal causes of disease and decay to the states of Greece . . .

The second half of the seventh century is marked in many parts of Greece by struggle between the classes; and the wiser and better of the nobles began themselves to see the necessity of extending political privileges to their fellow-citizens.21

This analysis in J. B. Bury’s History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great (1912) – a book from the Cairo Forces’ library which found its way into Mitchell’s private library22 – aptly sums up the processes by which Roman society inherited the pent-up pressures of the injustice of slavery. As Diffusionist, as humanitarian, as Marxist egalitarian, as human being, Mitchell rejected the circumstances of 73 BC with disgust.