For most of the nineteenth century and up until recently, the slave rebellion has been one of the most important components of the educated public’s image of life in the Greek and Roman world. Since the 1960’s, academic scholars have come to see that there is little historical evidence to justify the traditional picture of slave societies as ‘police states’ constantly at the brink of violent rebellion, and that the frequency and scale of uprisings had been greatly overemphasized.

One reason for this overemphasis was the romantic nationalism that spread first with, and then in opposition to, the French Revolution; and its characteristic symbol has been the figure of Spartacus. The ancient accounts of the Spartacus war assisted the process, since alongside the expected hostile attitude towards him (to be found in Cicero and the Livian tradition), another group of sources treats him much more respectfully as Horace’s ‘Spartacus acer’. Spartacus was thus sufficiently noble to qualify as a subject for eighteenth-century French tragedy. The plot of Bernard-Joseph Saurin’s drama Spartacus of 1760 revolves around Crassus’ daughter falling in love with him. Then – partly in reaction against Saurin’s frivolous treatment – Spartacus was chosen by the dramatists Lessing (1727–81) and Grillparzer (1791-1872) to symbolize resistance against tyranny. Freemasons saw him as an Enlightenment hero in the struggle against ‘Roman’ Catholicism; and early nineteenth-century nationalism made Spartacus the liberator, not so much of slaves as a social class, as of the national groups enslaved by Rome.