There is indeed a place for good narrative style, since the novel contains very few female characters, little straightforward love interest and a great deal of unpleasant violence. To counter the violence, to distract the reader’s attention from the relatively narrow spectrum of character and incident, Mitchell fortunately has at his command a flexible and arresting prose. The basic narrative medium is well-written narrative English, the language of Stained Radiance and The Thirteenth Disciple. As everywhere in Mitchell’s work, the reader is drawn without preamble into the fully active plot:

When Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus and unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master’s body even as his own had been mutilated; and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of The Republic of Plato hidden in his breast. (S 15)

The style is arresting; it raises expectations. It provides essential background unobtrusively. Above all, it intimates the general scene of violence, mutilation and death we can expect from the rebellion.

Two interesting points in Mitchell’s narrative strategy are the references to the Masters by the slaves’ name (rather than ‘Roman’), setting the tone for the narrative stance throughout, and the very early setting up of a stylistic device which Mitchell exploits to excellent effect throughout. Kleon is described in the first sentence as a literatus without explanation: it is soon clear from context that a literatus is one who can read, but already the reader is immersed in some variety of Roman experience, the Roman term used without gloss or explanation. Latin-derived words are used exactly: ‘the Way’, ‘casqued’, ‘slave-market’, ‘to compute’ appear early in the narrative; Kleon unwinds, does not open a book; the perverse sexual tastes of Kleon’s master are hardly explained, and certainly not illuminated by references to the tales of Baalim, Ashtaroth or Ataretos. The East is the ‘Utmost Lands’, the supreme deity ‘Serapis’. All this functions without delay to put the reader in the position of a reader of the time.

Mitchell is doing no more here than adapting the triumphantly successful technique of his earlier success in Sunset Song where he had re-shaped the narrative English to the ‘rhythms and cadences of Scots spoken speech’ while adding a minimum number of Scots vocabulary items to produce a narrative medium which gives a warm impression of participation in a Scottish community.23 In Spartacus the words and cadences are not from Scots, but from Latin, and share the same comforting feature in that they operate independently of the reader’s knowledge of Latin.

As the Scottish words in Sunset Song rapidly explain themselves by context, rendering glossary unnecessary, so the Latin (and occasionally Greek) words in Spartacus operate in the same way. In a description of the first century BC the reader can without difficulty decode references to the ‘half a century of cavalry’ (S 122), the sacrifices ‘to the manes of dead Crixus (S 163), to the decimation of the velites (S 209) already referred to, to Lavinia’s ‘himation’(S 159), to the instrument played by the ‘bucinator’(S 189).

So much for vocabulary. Rhythms and cadences are also skilfully imitated from the original Latin. Occasionally Mitchell is content to intrude a single archaism:

Then said Crixus: ‘We’ve come to the feast, but the meat is still uncooked.’ Thereat he took a javelin in his hand, rode forward, stood high in his stirrups, and hurled the javelin . . . (S97)

Sometimes the effect is denser:

The battle was to Spartacus, as once to Pyrrhus. But of the eighteen thousand Gauls and Germans a bare three thousand survived. With these fell Castus, as has been told, who loved Spartacus, and never knew him; and Gannicus, who hated the Gladiator, and was killed in his sleep. (S 261)

This is compounded of Latin translated directly into English (the battle was to Spartacus), commonplace tags from Latin narrative (as has been told), and a conscious archaism from the Bible (and never knew him) covering the point of Castus’ homosexual attraction to Spartacus. Carefully used, the device of direct translation from Latin into English functions powerfully to give the reader a sense of involvement:

The slave horse . . . met the circling Roman cavalry, and, armed with clubs, splintered the levelled hastae, and smote down the riders. In a moment the fortune of the battle changed. The Germans turned and the legionaries, caught between two enemies, struggled to reform in double lines. But this, in that marshy ground encumbered with dead, they could by no means achieve. (S 99)

This is an account which clearly draws upon an accumulated reading of Latin or Latin-inspired narrative. Fortuna belli, the fortune of the battle, is too prominently placed in the paragraph to be mistaken; and even if the hastae or spears are not recognised, ‘this they could by no means achieve’ is recognised for its unfamiliar syntax, even if not recognised as Latin. Retiring to a sleeping-room (S 112), fighting in a slave army which prepared to receive a Roman charge (S 150) and so on – the effect is immersion and participation through words used in a sense slightly or completely unfamiliar.

The weakness of the style is in repetition, occasionally injudicious reliance on one effect. Kleon is too often described as cold; Gershom strokes his beard irritably far too often; the violence and the chilling lack of pity finally can overcome reader squeamishness.