Word: spartacus
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...correspondent in Spain, he was captured by the Fascists, sentenced to death and released when the British Government intervened; in Cairo he once edited a German-Arabic weekly; in Haifa he once hawked lemonade in the streets. In 1939 he published a historical novel, The Gladiators, about the Spartacus revolt. From Darkness at Noon, it is obvious that he also knows Russia and the deep places of the human mind...
...martyred pathfinder, before 7000 B.C. prototype of Osiris, of Jesus, of the Artist; 2) a dim-witted burglar vivisected by Alexandrian scientists (Result: "We have now proved . . . that the arteries circulate air to the body from the lungs. ... It makes a man proud to be a doctor"); 3) Spartacus and his terrific slave revolt, disappointingly told; 4) the Emperor Tiberius, "a martyr to man's habit of tyrannizing over his fellowman." The four with the U. S. as their setting are studies respectively of cowardice, burnt-out genius, sexual fever as a product of Mississippi Valley boredom, acute alcoholism...
...tall Thracian named Spartacus, 70 Roman gladiators ran off from their master one night in 73 B. C. Times were restless; a year later Spartacus had a guerrilla army of 100,000, armed with clubs, spears, the tridents of the gladiators' trade...
Arthur Koestler, expatriate German journalist, retells the gladiators' story in an ironical novel which deftly suggests the case of modern Germany, less deftly suggests comparison with the historical novels of Robert Graves (I, Claudius, et al). Spartacus' inspired strategy tied his professional opponents in knots. When bald-pated Clodius Glaber's army penned the rebels up in the crater of Vesuvius, Spartacus lowered his men by ropes over the sheer rock face of the mountain's far side, then wiped out the Roman camp in a night attack...
...City property was communal, money abolished, law-breaking punished with crucifixion. But Utopias under arms are even less durable than Utopias in peace. End of Spartacus' briefly brilliant career came when asthmatic, cynical Marcus Crassus propped up the tottering Roman republic for a few more years by crushing the rebellion. Crassus celebrated his triumphal return by crucifying 6,000 of his captives along the Appian...