Comments Elsewhere

By-products of THE LIBERATOR scanning project: just went through all of Howard Fast’s novel _Spartacus_ (the major source for the Kirk Douglas film and all subsequent versions). Pretty sure the Douglas film is better, possibly a lot better, but Fast’s novel is structurally kind of fascinating, if you can get around the digressive Marxist speechifying and the obsessive homophobia. Anyway, now leading me on to one of Fast’s major sources, C. Osborne Ward’s THE ANCIENT LOWLY, which is kind of the source of 90% of the things imagined about Spartacus in 20th/21st century depictions.