Sarah E Bond (University of Iowa)
Long before the movie Black Panther, early modern Europeans embraced a different kind of “Black avenger”, one largely constructed by White abolitionists who drew upon select motifs, models, and myths plucked from the annals of Roman history. In particular, European playwrights, novelists, and philosophers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries focused on Rome’s foundational tale of the rape of Lucretia around 509 BCE and the later uprising of enslaved persons under the leadership of a Thracian gladiator named Spartacus in 73-71 BCE in the Third Servile War as heroes to be reborn in service of a new age of revolution.
This paper examines the authorship and applied roles of Lucretia for women and Spartacus for men within these abolitionist movements. It then dissects the authority imparted by the figures from Roman history which shaped early modern theatrical and literary motifs. Well-known figures from Roman antiquity were frequently grafted onto both real and imagined enslaved Africans as an often-misguided means of making them relatable to European audiences. This is seen particularly within the built mythology that surrounded the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). However, new scholarship focused on the Haitian Revolution and its leader, Toussaint Louverture (known as “Black Spartacus”), accentuates the uprising’s profound and unique impact on the history of the Atlantic world—and how Black scholars are taking back the narratives of the Caribbean while also divesting it of classical wrapping.
A final section looks at how African Americans would themselves later draw on Roman history as a means of rebutting Antebellum enslavers well-versed in the classical past. These appropriations underscore the social currency, authority, and justifying use of classical antiquity at the time, but also show that it was a two-way street that allowed abolitionists a language with which to rebut the justification of American slavery in the 19th century.