Utopia Under Arms

THE GLADIATORS--Arthur Koestler--Macmillan ($2.50).

Led by a 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.

The Gladiators' War which followed ranks high among history's forlorner hopes. For this mob of desperate men overran southern Italy for two years, trounced three Roman armies. Not the least of their achievements was the founding of Sun City, a Utopia as fantastic as the Transcendentalists' Brook Farm or Robert Owen's New Harmony.

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.

In Sun 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 Way.

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