Right-winger Mel Gibson's "Braveheart" was not the first or even the best movie about men who would rather die on their feet than live on their knees. And Kirk Douglas's "Spartacus" (and the Starz series as well) say a lot more about how the One Percent would like us to live under their heel. They want to destroy our worth as human beings, and then treat us as slaves. I say thee, Nay!

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Arcades of the courtyard of Palazzo Pitti, Florence: Gladiator. Ancient Roman statue (2nd century), copy after an Ancient Greek original (5th century BC). The head is from another Roman statue, it was added in 16th century. Picture by Giovanni Dall'Orto, October 28 2007. Used with permission from Wiki Commons.

I Am Spartacus!

By Richard Girard

" The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation." Anaïs Nin (1903--77) Franco-American novelist, diarist. Preface to Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller(1934).

I have just finished watching the DVD's of the Starz Original Series "Spartacus: Gods of the Arena," and "Spartacus: Blood and Sand." I borrowed them from my local public library, so I was able to watch them in the chronological historic order given above, rather than the order in which they had been shown to the viewing public.

I have always loved the story of the slave and gladiator who rose against Rome. The revolt of Spartacus made Rome tremble in fear at the potential of the overthrow of their corrupt system, a system which exploited the peoples of the Mediterranean every bit as much as the Romans exploited their slaves.

My love for this story goes back to the first time I saw the movie "Spartacus" (1960), with Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Laurence Olivier, and Jean Simmons in the early 1970's. It is very tame when viewed today: almost none of the darkest aspects of Roman system of slavery are even hinted at, let alone mentioned. Still, you can't help but cheer for Douglas and his army of gladiators and other slaves, as they confound Rome for almost two years.

Neither the 1960 movie, nor the two Starz miniseries, are particularly accurate in the historical sense. The escape from Batiatus's lanista ( gladiatorial school) was much closer to the facts in the 1960 movie. However, in 1960, no movie maker alive could have brought anything close to the violence and depravity of the Late Roman Republic to the movie screen: it would have been described as smut. The two Starz miniseries certainly do a better job in that regard.

Rome in the Late Republic was a very tightly restrict ed , class based society, where true upward mobility was almost unknown. Those few who succeeded in rising to a higher class, like Gaius Marius and Marcus Tullius Cicero, were fated to be branded novus homo, "new men" by Rome's "One Percent;" individuals to be used but never accepted by the older nobility.

As invariably happens with every strongly hierarchical society, a slave class (de facto or de jure) eventually comes into being. Rome had long had slaves, but in the century following the Second Punic War, the conquests of Rome made it easier and cheaper to buy slaves to work the misappropriated lands of deceased and absent veterans of Rome's wars, than it was to hire Roman citizens. These large plantations (latifundia) were used to grow cash crops rather than grain for their new owners, while Rome itself became dependent on the grain from its conquered territories in Sicily, Sardinia, Africa, Asia Minor, Cisalpine Gaul, and Spain. Like outsourcing today, this policy undercut the ability of Rome's middle class--its remaining yeoman farmers, who were also traditionally the source of its military manpower--to support himself and his family. This in turn forced them to sell their farms to rich patricians and equites (knights, the social class just below the senatorial families), and move to the cities--with the city's grain doles--simply to survive.

The mere fact of slavery led to one of the most interesting aspects of Roman law, which so prided itself in its precision and ability to categorize principles of jurisprudence. Georg W.F. Hegel described this fact in his Philosophy of Right (p. 22), " Omnis definitio in jure civili periculosa ; and in fact the more disconnected and contradictory the phases of a right are, the less possible is a definition of it. A definition should contain only universal features; but these forthwith bring to light contradictions, which in the case of law are injustice, in all their nakedness. Thus in Roman law, for instance, no definition of man was possible, because it excluded the slave. The conception of man [in Rome] was destroyed by the fact of slavery."

America is facing its own de facto forms of slavery today. This exists not only in the illegal immigrants who do not dare voice complaint against working conditions for fear of being reported to Immigration, but, in the attempts by Republican governors like Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, and Jan Brewer of Arizona, to disenfranchise our nation's unions, and establish the so-called "right to work"--actually right to starve--state within their own jurisdictions.

These policies are simply a continuation of the process begun by the Taft-Hartley Act sixty-five years ago, which first established the idea of the "right to work state." This was done to counter the "union shop," something the oligarchs in the South and West especially hated. (See my September 11, 2010 article The Daft-Heartless Act , for more on the real reasons behind that monumental piece of dog excrement masquerading as a piece of legislation.) "Right to work" invariably means right to be paid less than a decent, living wage with benefits, as well as the right to be summarily fired if you complain about that fact. The motivation for this is both racial and class oriented (how dare you tell me how much I pay my Negro/Mexican/White trash employee), and is used as a means to keep control of the masses. (See Douglass A. Blackmon's book, Slavery by Another Name, for more on this subject as it applies to African-Americans.) Parts of the West and most of the South have yet to recover from this oligarchic system of imposed poverty and near poverty even today.

Employers today treat the process of employment as if they were doing you a favor to hire you. The "job creators" attitude in our free market, capitalist system is that hiring human beings is a necessary evil, and if you could be replaced by a monkey or a machine, who would not talk back to them or demand raises, they would do so in an instant. Too many employers take the works of Ayn Rand seriously, and believe that their employees are merely things: parasites who survive solely because of the employer's creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.

Aldous Huxley was right. "Industrial man--a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement." (Time Must Have a Stop, chapter 30; 1944). As I have said before: evil begins in that instant when we make people into things, or when things are given the same rights and privileges as people, see " Choosing the Hardest Thing ," OpEdNews, June 15 2007 .

If, as many conservatives believe, we as Americans have a responsibility to have a job in order to feed, clothe, house, and provide the other necessities of lives for ourselves and our families, then logically employment--at least in the most general sense--is a right, not a privilege.

I would agree that we do not have the right to a specific job. Even a specific vocation is often a question of nature, talent and geography: you can't be a lumberjack in Death Valley, or a concert violinist if you are tone deaf. However, the Second Economic Bill of Rights of which President Franklin Roosevelt spoke on January 11, 1944, is still the minimum that every American should expect:

• useful and remunerative employment, together with the potential to find an avocation and not simply a job;

• wages that provide adequate food, clothing, opportunity for recreation, and decent shelter for themselves and their families;

• adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

• protection from unfair competition and monopolistic practices at home and abroad, for every business in America, large and small;

• the ability of farmers and ranchers to raise and sell the the bounty of their lands at a return which will give themselves and their families a decent living;

• protections from the fears attendant to old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

• a good, quality education, sufficient for the needs of our modern society; an education that is ongoing if needed or desired.

  No person should have to work two or more jobs in order to see any of these seven points achieved for themselves and their families. To require such, to limit other human being's lives to unceasing work, without hope for advancement, time with their families, or real stability; where a human being is required to live to work if they are to survive, is a form of slavery. To quote Georg F.W. Hegel (again from his Philosophy of Right , p. 42), "The slave knows not his essence, his infinitude, his freedom; he does not know himself in his essence, and not to know himself is not to think himself. The self-consciousness, which by thought apprehends that itself is essence, and thus puts away from itself the accidental and untrue, constitutes the principle of right, morality, and all forms of ethical observance. They who, in speaking philosophically of right, morality, and ethical observance, would exclude thought and turn to feeling, the heart, the breast, and inspiration, express the deepest contempt for thought and science." In other words, when a human being has no time to think, only to feel, and to react to base emotion, without consideration of consequences, he has been reduced to the status of slave.

  This is one of the lessons that we see in the two Starz Original Series, "Spartacus: Gods of the Arena," and "Spartacus: Blood and Sand." The slaves have all been stripped of any ability to act except at a purely emotional level. And although the Romans would never admit it, their actions in the final analysis are also purely emotional. Their "rationality" is animal cunning, not critical thought, and by Hegel's statement above, this makes them every bit as much slaves as the gladiators and other servants beneath them.

  And in this, they mirror modern American society to a very frightening degree.

  Batiatus (played with cunning cruelty by John Hanna) and his wife Lucretia (played with venomous vigor by Lucy Lawless), would like to be the Macbeth and Lady Macbeth of the Late Roman Republic: rising past their current station to real political power and prominence. They are not above using murder, blackmail, kidnapping, and turning their lanista into a very discrete brothel for the Roman upper classes to achieve their ends. They first use their slaves, then their friends, and finally those they were initially trying to impress, in an attempt to achieve their goals. Batiatus and his wife repay every slight, real or imagined, in blood or blackmail. Every seeming favor has a secret intent behind it: in the form of an expected many-fold repayment, or the favor of the House of Batiatus being taken away at the last second, through no (apparent) fault of this conniving pair.

  Never has the banality of evil been so wonderfully represented.

  My fascination with the Roman Republic has always been as the warning it presented to America, a lesson to be learned, never as an example to be emulated. With rare exceptions of individuals such as Tiberius and Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, or Gaius Licinius Macer, there is no good role model among the Romans that presents themselves out of the history from that time. These men demonstrated a very rare personal courage when opposing the machinations of Rome's optimate (One Percent) oligarchs, and all of them died opposing the destruction of Roman citizens' rights.

  Rome was an oligarchic republic. I have had people--primarily libertarians--write me to say that an oligarchy cannot be a republic. And yet, when you look at most republics in history, they are oligarchies. A republic is a nation which, through its constitution, establishes a set of rights for the citizens of that nation. John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government, stated that those rights were life, liberty and property. And if John Adams had his way, those words, rather than "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," would have been the statement of unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence, and America would be an oligarchic republic, not a democratic one.

  But Thomas Jefferson was the author, and the words of our immortal Declaration were "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Both Alexander Hamilton and John Adams did all that they could to steer the United States towards an oligarchy, headed by a hereditary aristocracy. The "Revolution of 1800," when Jefferson was elected President, put an end to that nonsense, at least for a time. But the wealthy and moneylenders have never completely surrendered their desire for an oligarchy.

  The dominance of property over human beings in American law, including the recognition of corporations as persons under the law--up to and including the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC--has been at the heart of the oligarchs' attempts to subvert our democratic republic since our nation's founding.

  The exaltation of property over human beings in law is as old as civilization itself. A system of law, without compassion for our fellow humans, whose primary concern is for things, not people, is far easier to administer than a system whose first concern is for the people affected by that law. Victor Hugo's classic Les Misérables, where Jean Valjean is hunted by the law for years--after stealing a loaf of bread when he is hungry--is the ultimate example of the wrongness of a system that puts things ahead of the needs of people.

  Ayn Rand--with her concept of producers and parasites--would have found the Late Roman Republic to be a world very much to her taste, which shows why she was a very poor historian, and no friend of real universal human freedom.

  Rome doomed her republican government by not preserving the human basis it was founded upon: the yeoman landholder who formed the backbone of both her legions and her middle class. The richest Romans--patrician and knight alike--manipulated the system to effectively wipe out Rome's middle class. The manpower shortage became so severe, that by the time of the multiple consulships of Gaius Marius at the end of the Second Century B.C.E., the Senate had to call upon and equip Rome's poor (the capite censi or "head count") to fill the legions' manpower requirements when an invasion by half-a-million Germans threatened Rome's very survival. These soldiers felt far more loyalty to their generals than they did to Rome, and the Republic's fate was effectively sealed.

  Spartacus's Revolt--also called the Third Servile War--arrived at an inopportune moment for Rome. Rome was exhausted from the combined exertions of: fighting the Social War against the non-citizen Italian states fifteen years before; the First Civil War between optimate and populare, whose last act was being played out at that moment in the Spanish provinces; the Third and final Mithradatic War, where Mithradates VI of Pontus--who had invaded Rome's Eastern Provinces during the Social War fifteen years earlier--was battling against Roman Proconsul Lucius Licinius Lucullus for control of Asia Minor; finally, the numerous pirate fleets who controlled the Mediterranean, regularly threatening Rome's grain supply, and any vessel that was not a warship.

  A large proportion of Spartacus's army--probably a majority--were not slaves at all, but Samnite freemen native to southern and eastern Italy, who hated the Romans with an unequalled passion after more than two centuries of wars and uprisings. Many of these Samnites were trained soldiers from the Social War, and with no trained Roman legions in Italy proper, you initially had veterans fighting against Rome's raw recruits. Rome's legions were initially badly overmatched in both quality and quantity, led by incompetents trying to put down the rapidly swelling ranks of Spartacus's force.

  Spartacus had no grand strategy, no final goal for his force to achieve. He had started with a half-baked idea to join the rebel forces of Quintus Sertorius in Spain, but that plan fell apart when Spartacus discovered Sertorius had been murdered by his lieutenants in Spain. So, the Spartacani (as Spartacus's army came to be called) wandered the Italian Peninsula, beating the commanders sent against them by Rome, embarrassing the Senate again and again in their incompetence.

  Rome finally, after more than a year of incompetence and defeats, with great hesitation, chose a capable--if unpopular with the Senate--commander from among its Senators, Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the richest men in Rome.

  Crassus was able to call veterans who had served under him in the First Civil War out of retirement to join him. One and one-half legions of Roman survivors of a battle with the Spartacani were decimated: one in ten ritually executed by their comrades before the rest of Crassus's legions, as an object lesson for running away, and leaving their armor and weapons behind.

  With eight legions--nearly 40,000 Romans--Crassus followed Spartacus and his 100,000+ up and down the Italian peninsula through the Fall and Winter of 72-71 B.C.E.. Crassus fought whenever he could achieve an advantage in position or numbers, and once, when he was ambushed by the Spartacani. An attempt by Spartacus to move the Spartacani to Sicily (the location of the First and Second Servile Wars) by ship failed when they were betrayed by the Sicilian pirates.

  Finally, in the early Spring of 71 B.C.E. Spartacus was brought to bay. Part of his army, protecting the Spartacani flank, had been annihilated when Crassus swooped down on them after they had captured a Roman supply depot. A few days later, on the Via Popilla, near Brundisium, the two sides collided. The Spartacani lost.

  The wonderful film moment in 1960's "Spartacus," with the survivors rising as one and saying "I Am Spartacus," is a pure fabrication. The historians of the time say that Spartacus was seen to fall in battle, but no one could find his body afterward. He probably escaped in the confusion. Fifteen thousand of the Spartacani succeeded in fleeing the battle. Six thousand going north ran into Pompey the Great returning with his army from Spain in Northern Italy, and were slaughtered. Nine thousand disappeared into the Bruttian Mountains, to be hunted down, starve, or die of exposure.

  The six thousand six hundred captured by Crassus met a horrible death--crucifixion: one every one hundred feet for the one hundred and thirty-two Roman miles of the Via Appia between Capua and Rome. There was no breaking of legs to make the deaths quicker, and the bodies hung on the crosses until they rotted off eighteen months later.

  I went through this brief recapitulation of the history of Spartacus and his revolt to make a point. As much as I love the theory and practice of non-violence as stated by Gandhi and King, it could not always work throughout history. Non-violence, civil disobedience, and passive resistance can only work in a society or civilization where all human life is believed to have intrinsic value. The oligarchs are attempting to do away with that belief in the value of all human beings in America for that reason.

  In Rome, and throughout history, a slave has had no intrinsic value. As Hegel stated above, "Thus in Roman law, for instance, no definition of man was possible, because it excluded the slave," (op. cit., p.22). The slave could be killed, mutilated, tortured, raped, starved, beaten and abused without any legal recourse, because they were property. This was equally true two thousand years later in the Antebellum South.

  The devaluation of Humanity to being a thing, the expunging of Humanity's intrinsic value, is a grave danger to any civilization. Today, we risk the very idea of the Human Being destroyed by the legal convention of corporate personhood.

  A corporation is by definition property, held by shareholders. The corporation's historical purpose has been to help protect those shareholders against financial ruin should the corporation be forced into liquidation. By saying that it has any of the same rights as a natural person, a human being of flesh and blood, undercuts one of the primary arguments against slavery: human beings cannot be property; it is contrary to the dignity of the human being to be considered property. Its purpose is to protect human beings, not to be protected as if it were a human being.

  Whatever protections and privileges a corporation has, should be solely determined by its corporate charter, and the laws of the governments under which that charter was issued. As a thing, it cannot have rights--it is not a human being.

  The oligarchs ultimate aim is to use issues like this one and establish a multi-tier class system in our country--and around the world--where only those at the top of the economic ladder have any real rights, and those at the bottom--like the slaves of Rome--have none. The fact that corporations provide their executives with a layer of legal protection when endangering the public that the rest of us lack, is a prima facie example of this oligarchic advantage.

  Perhaps the oligarchs do not intend full-fledged slavery: a new feudal system with a bottom level of serfs--with virtually no rights--might suit their plans better. But never doubt for an instant, that unless you are one of the oligarchs, one of the financial One Percenters, you will wake up one morning in the near future, wondering why subjects you used to discuss openly at bars, are now only discussed quietly, behind closed doors, with close friends whom you trust.

  For most of the One Percenters, you and I mean no more to them than Mitt Romney's poor dog did many years ago, when Romney strapped the dog's kennel to the roof of the family station wagon for a twelve hour road trip. I've seen parents like Mitt Romney in my lifetime: you had by God better go to the bathroom before the trip starts, and God help you if you don't have a cast iron bladder and spring steel bowels; Daddy's not going to stop until lunch, no matter what. Romney put the family dog in his kennel on the roof, not because it was best for the dog or his family, but because it was most convenient for Mitt Romney. If the family had not been in the car when Fido had his "accident," I suspect that Fido would have been beaten, and left at the side of the road, having "run away while on a walk." In many states today, leaving a dog on a roof in a kennel would constitute animal abuse. For me it is a demonstration of how the lack of empathy by the One Percenters in general, and Mitt Romney in particular, turns human beings (and everything else living) in their minds into things to be used, not fellow creatures to be cherished.

  I for one do not intend to go down without a fight. I will not be made a slave to the One Percenters. My intrinsic value is measured not by my wealth, but in my merit as a writer, a researcher, a humanitarian, member of my family and a friend. I will probably die poor, but I believe that I will die missed by those whom I have loved and I have inspired. That is enough for me. Against the forces that would enslave our nation and the American people, I shout a modern watchword of a screenwriter's (probably Dalton Trumbo's ) imagination, expressing my desire for freedom for all of my brothers and sisters, no matter what their origin or current circumstance in life:

  I Am Spartacus!

  May we all be blessed in this struggle against oppression.

  
  
  
  Authors Bio:
  
  

  Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'