Customer Reviews

Spartacus: The Myth and the Man

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This is a very difficult subject on account of the fact that the Romans wanted to purge the very memory of the embarassment that Spartacus dealt to the Empire. Therefore, there are no detailed accounts of his battles and only a single possible image of this warrior upon which to build a biography. The modern ideal of Spartacus has been molded by the Hollywood image of Kirk Douglas in the classic film. M.J. Trow makes an admirable attempt to piece the available records into a coherent whole, but sometimes tends to ramble far afield in search of likely parallels when his source material runs dry. I think the author did a good job of showing the differences between that which might have taken place as opposed to fabrications of the Spartacus story that were used by Karl Marx and others to spread the ideas of Socialism.

This is by far the laziest book that I have ever read. I have to wonder whether there was any editing done at all. Even having read nothing on Spartacus before this book I was able to spot serious errors every other page or so. The most common ones were with dates. I know that dates can be tricky, especially during the period where things change from BC to AD, but this goes far beyond the occasional accident. I spotted at least a dozen times where he couldn't tell the difference between BC and AD. The Emperor Claudius was not ruling the Empire in the generation after Spartacus. There wasn't even an Empire to rule until near the end of that generation. Claudius came 110 years later, not 30. If he can't even be bothered to check these basic dates then how accurate can the rest of the book be?

The writing style is servicable and not unreadable, but the author tends to go off on tangents that are only loosely related to his topic. The most interesting of these is probably the section dealing with Kirk Douglas, Stanley Kubric, Howard Fast, and the making of the 1960 film. He probably only read a book on Kirk Douglas and called it a day since he never deviates from his point of view, but it works as a summary of Douglas' view on the project. Of course, that is not what most people read this book to find out about. This guy knows nothing about Roman history, probably never read any books on the subject other than the basic records in Plutarch, Appian, etc., and didn't even bother to fact check some pretty basic dates. This book is utter crap, and I don't think that I've said that about a book in my life. You would be better off reading an encyclopedia article on the man, or better yet read Barry Strauss' far superior The Spartacus War. It is very readable and comes from an expert on the Greeks and Romans who also knows how to write.