The revolt under Spartacus is the most horrible of all, because it was a revolt of men who were gladiators as well as slaves. Liberty or the rights of man had no more to do with this revolt than with any of the others. It arose from brutal oppression on the part of one Lentulus Batiatus, to whom a portion of the insurgents belonged: he was training them, in fact, that they might combat one another to death in the arena for his recreation. Neither in its origin, conduct, nor results did this servile war differ from any of the others. Like all of them, it originated in private wrongs, was purely personal in its antecedents, and neither in its progress nor results did it exhibit a single indication of democratic, philanthropic, or any other virtues than the usual military ones common to all Romans at the time. In truth, what we moderns understand by political and social rights (and without which we know that real liberty cannot exist for any people) was an idea altogether foreign to every class of Greeks and Romans, and, indeed, to the whole of antiquity, with the solitary exception of the Essenes.
Thus, public opinion conspired with law and custom to uphold direct human slavery throughout the ancient world. This opinion must have been all but universal, since not even slaves in revolt ever dreamt of abolishing slavery as an institution. They warred against certain incidents and accidents of slavery; never against the principle itself. This universality of public opinion in its favour, coupled with the fact that direct slavery is an evil of far lesser magnitude than the indirect slavery of modern civilization, we take to be the true explanation of the old pagan system having endured so long in the world.
