Spartacus

Between 73 and 71 BCE, a Thracian gladiator named Spartacus led a mass slave revolt against Rome. This book treats it as the greatest challenge the Roman Empire ever faced from below. It starts from the observation that today's rulers, in what the author calls an age of permanent inter-imperialist war, still glorify Roman 'civilisation', so the revolt is worth remembering now.

The text is a talk Chris Harman gave at the Marxism Festival in 1998, the year before his A People's History of the World appeared in 1999. It is published here for the first time, together with additional original notes by the author. It recounts the revolt as one of history's most heroic and also most tragic class struggles. It also offers a historical and materialist discussion of how slavery, the impoverishment of the Roman peasantry, and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire were connected.

Harman (1942-2009) was a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain and of its forerunner, the International Socialists. From the early 1960s he wrote about Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and the Spartakist League, notably in his 1982 work The Lost Revolution: Germany, 1918-1923.