Talking slavery in Ohio

A reader from Toledo, Ohio, called on the telephone just now (a rare enough thing in these email days) to say that he had bought my Spartacus Road in the new Overlook Press American edition (for which I thanked him politely) and had been shocked and horrified at my imputation that Spartacus was not trying to end slavery and to make mankind free.

He had bought the book on the strength of a favourable review in the Sunday edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in which there was no mention of so heretical a thought. Surely the ending of the evil of slavery was the whole purpose of the revolt and, while the writer's (ie my) experiences on the Spartacus Road were of great interest, the descriptions of cancer especially so, the effect was spoilt by by failure to accept the central point of the whole story.

I thanked him again. A writer should be properly grateful when a reader reads a thoughtful review and then calls across the Atlantic. I pointed out that there was no evidence that Spartacus sought freedom for anyone but his own band. Yes, he did not want to be a slave himself but no, he had no more ambition to end slavery than anyone else at the time and for nineteen hundred years later.

There was silence at the end of the phone. Then a certain coolness. Lack of evidence seemed to be no defence at all against my caller's confidence in a self-evident truth. I tried another approach. Roman slavery, I suggested, was not quite like the American kind. It was very little do with race - or, at least, little to do with any particular race.  The Romans were notably even-handed in their view that other peoples could be enslaved, all other peoples, whatever their skin colour, hair colour, size, sex and other variants in the human appearance. They occasionally debated whether certain types were better for certain tasks, but only in the most desultory way.

Everyone everywhere kept slaves, well everywhere we know of. No one knows if Spartacus and his band had been slaves or freemen at home before they became Roman slaves; there were probably both kinds in the armies that defeated the Romans so terrifyingly regularly beween 73 and 71. Changing one' own designation was the key, not changing the system. More silence at the end of the phone. So was I suggesting that the slaves brought to America had been slaves  in Africa? Well some of them had been, I began, before recognising that the 'not my period' defence, so useful in so many academic arguments, was much the best one to deploy at this point. I stopped. He seemed almost satisfied. He said he was going to recommend that one of his best friends buy my book too - and that I might be hearing from him.

I thanked him again - most sincerely.

Comments

[ricardo]

maybe we all think of Kubrick's Spartacus, with music of Alex North. Or even the screenplay written by Dalton Trumbo and his ideology... That is why the freedom of all slaves seems natural and the opposite wrong...

[DiDi]

I love Britania best, better than all the rest. So don't get mad, but I was thinking of the English selling the Irish into slavery. Also, even English people (including children) were sometimes "spirited away" to the colonies. I first heard about all of the white slavery from rastafarians. However, you are correct that slavery existed in many cultures.

[bravegirl01]

Sorry bout that -- American schools are rotten at history in general, and the history of the ancient world in particular.