Spartacus: The Man, the Myth, and the Modern Symbol of Rebellion

Abstract

On April Fool’s Day of 1865, Karl Marx’s elder daughter, Jenny, presented her father with a playful questionnaire. Not unlike the marketing surveys of our own day, it asked questions about his likes and dislikes: the qualities that he most preferred in a person, his favorite food (fish), his favorite color (not surprisingly, red), and various other preferences. The survey also asked about his hero, to which Marx replied, “Spartacus and Kepler.”¹⁴ The fact that Marx chose Spartacus suggests how well known the story of a single slave who had led tens of thousands of his fellow slaves in a war against their Roman masters had become by the mid-nineteenth century. It is rather surprising to note, therefore, that only a century earlier Spartacus was all but unknown, even to most well-educated people.