“When Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus & unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master’s body even as his own had been mutilated; and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of The Republic of Plato hidden in his breast.”
Ian Campbell discusses the vivid realisation of a slave revolt in Mitchell’s SPARTACUS (1933)