To what race did Spartacus belong? We are told that he was a Thracian, his family being shepherds. The Thracians were a brave people, but by no means remarkable for the highest intellectual superiority; yet Spartacus was eminently a man of mind, with large views, and an original genius for organization and war. Plutarch pays him the highest compliment in his power, by admitting that he deserved to be regarded as belonging to the Hellenic race. He was, says the old Lifemaker, "a man not only of great courage and strength, but, in judgment and mildness of character, superior to his condition, and more like a Greek than one would expect from his nation." It is not impossible that he had Greek blood in his veins. Thrace was hard by Greece, had many Greek cities, and its full proportion of those Greek adventurers, military and civil, who were to be found in every country and city, from Spain to Persia, from Gades to Ecbatana. What more probable than that among his ancestors were Greeks? At the same time it must be admitted that the Thracians themselves were capable of producing eminent men, being a superior physical race, and prevented only by the force of circumstances from attaining to a respectable position. They were renowned for soldierlike qualities, which caused the Romans to give them the preference as gladiators,--a dubious honor, to say the best of it. How, and under what circumstances, Spartacus became a gladiator, is a point by no means clear. We cannot trust the Roman accounts, as it was a meritorious thing, in the opinion of a Roman, for a man to lie for his country, as well as to die for it. Florus states, that he was first a Thracian mercenary, then a Roman soldier, then a deserter and robber, and then, because of his strength, a gladiator from choice. But, to say nothing of the national prejudices of Florus, he writes like a man who felt it to be a particular grievance that Romans should have been compelled to fight slaves, and particularly gladiators. This is in striking contrast with Plutarch, who was a contemporary of Florus, but whose patriotic pride was not wounded by the victories which the Thracian gladiator won over Roman generals. Indeed, as he was willing to admit that Spartacus ought to have been a Greek, we may suppose that he was pleased to read of his victories,-- a not unnatural thing in a provincial, and particularly in a Greek, who knew so well what his country had once been. Plutarch says not a word about the Thracian having been a soldier and a thief, but introduces him with one of his good stories. "They say," he tells us, "that when Spartacus was first taken to Rome to be sold, a snake was seen folded over his face while he was sleeping, and a woman, of the same tribe with Spartacus, who was skilled in divination, and possessed by the mysterious rites of Dionysus, declared that this was a sign of a great and formidable power, which would attend him