Chris Harman - Spartacus and the Slave Revolt that Shook the Roman Empire

Redwords have been bringing out a series of books with transcripts of talks by leading Marxists with new introductions. This little book is based on a talk by Chris Harman at Marxism 1998 in London as part of a course on battles that changed the world. In the talk Harman jokes that the reading wasn't to difficult as there are only two sources for the Spartacus rebellion, and these amount to five pages or so. But what we do know tells us a great deal about Ancient Rome and the position of slaves within it. Harman's historical materialist approach places the battles of the Third Servile War in the wider context of the development of Rome and the limits of the Roman Empire.

Give the short nature of the text Harman only touches on some subjects. Indeed, as Christian Høgsbjerg notes in his extremely useful introduction, at one point in the talk Harman realises he is running out of time and has to summarise a lot of material. It is useful then that Høgsbjerg has access to Harman's original notes as he is able to construct and include material that Harman couldn't include on the day of the talk. But two aspects of the talk remain vitaly important. The first is Harman's summary of the class nature of Roman society and how the army was an essential part of this:

Essentially, what happened was the victory of the Roman armies led to two sorts of immense wealth flooding to Rome. One was the immense wealth coming from the territoties which were conquered by Rome.. the second form of wealth ... was the massive enslavement of populations.

Harman continues:

The Roman rich had these vast sums of wealth... [which] enabled them to buy the slaves off the Roman state, and they systematically then established a situation in which they began tilling their estates with slave. And their calculation was quite simply this. 'The Roman army is invincible. Every year, we conquer more people. Every time we conquer more people, we enslave more people, there's an endless supply of slaves'.

This leads us to the second point of Harman's argument. This model was unsustainable and sections of Roman society understood this. The contradiction was that the cost of fighting the wars became prohibitive, and to try to resolve things the Roman ruling class tried to change society, by setting up forms of serfdom. But the centrality of slavery (and war) to the Roman economy made this impossible. 

This then places the activity of Spartacus and his rebels into context. Because the taking of Rome by the rebels would have meant them implementing the very regime they were rebelling against (they were, after all, former slaves). Harman's conclusion was that the revolt was heroic, but "history hadn't advanced to such a point in which it's possible for an oppressed class to see overthrowing the empire and estabishing itself as a new ruling class upon a higher, better form of organisation of society". In other words, rather like the peasants of the German Peasants' War, their victory could never be permanent, even if they could never overcome the ruling class's forces.

While it's a short pamphlet and, to be honest, Harman's speaking style doesn't readily translate into an easy reading text, there's a great deal in this talk. Once again Chris Harman's historical materialist approach gives us far more insights that we might expect from just five pages of original source material. Christian Høgsbjerg's excellent editing, introduction and footnotes flesh out the material and make this a fine quick read.

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