Smith, Greg dot com

Spartacus was a Greek slave sold into a Roman gladiatorial school (which were for-profit business ventures, like training racehorses today). In 73 BC he and some seventy followers seized the knives in the cook's shop and a wagon full of weapons, escaped from the school and fled to the caldera of Mount Vesuvius, near modern day Naples. There they were joined by other rural slaves. The group overran the region, plundering and pillaging. Spartacus's intention was to leave Italy and return home.

The Senate sent an inexperienced commander and reserve militia against the rebel army. Spartacus proved a brilliant leader and most of the force sent against him was killed. After this success many runaway slaves joined Spartacus until the group grew into an army of allegedly 140,000 escaped slaves.

For the next two years Roman armies chased Spartacus and his huge slave army around Italy as the slaves looked for ways to escape the peninsula and return to their home countries, in what became known as the Third Servile War. Eventually, despite fighting a brilliant campaign the slaves simply ran out of room to maneuver and were defeated. The Romans wanted to make an example of any slave or servant who might dream of freedom. 6,600 of Spartacus's followers were crucified along the via Appia (or the Appian Way) from Brundisium to Rome. The consuls Crassus and Pompey never gave orders for the bodies to be taken down, thus travelers were forced to see the decaying corpses for years after the final battle, an example to anyone who might consider disobedience to the wisdom and leadership of the State.

In the classic 1960 film starring Kirk Douglas, the spirit of defiance is captured in the famous final scene, as the Roman general offers to spare the last band of remaining rebels from crucifixion if they will turn over Spartacus to them:

I was thinking about this scene this week and how it relates to The American Dream, or at least the dream of me and a lot of other people I know. I reminded of it when I began seeing variations of this popping up everywhere, online and in the real world...

Judging by IP-addresses on my traffic stats, Walk Thru History has a lot of readers from outside the USA. If you don't know what the above refers to, please go here. For background reference you can read this.

Joe the Plumber has taken an incredible beating by the media and political class. They think that by pointing out that he's a regular dude with regular-dude problems they have shown he had no business asking the politician who showed up in his front yard a question that was "off-message."

But that misses the point: Joe doesn't make $250,000 per year, but he wants to. Dreams of it. Wants to buy out the owner of the small business he works for, grow the business, someday become a dude pulling in at least a quarter-of-a-million bucks a year. Will he? Who knows? But Joe wants to take his shot at it, even if it's a low-percentage shot. Then he wants to buy a bunch of stuff.

Good for Joe. Me too. I have a small business and I'm not going to make that kind of bank this year either. But I dream about it. I'm trying to add clients and employees to my marketing and design business. I'm talking to people who might work with me to pull off the Walk Thru History Tours. I'm staying up late after the family goes to sleep, trying to write a book. I used to work for one of the largest publishing companies in the world, and I know that if a book is successful the author can make a lot more than $250,000. Mine probably won't be that successful, but it's partly the dream that it could be that keeps me writing at 2 AM. My son wants to go medical school and hopes that after the four years of $75,000/year tuition, the years of residency, the risk and effort and investment, that maybe someday he could have a thriving medical practice with a few partners and some employees. I need him to have lots of disposable income so he can take care of his mother and me in our retirement in the style to which we have become accustomed.

Maybe the blog will fizzle, maybe no one will come with me on tours, maybe my book will tank. Maybe my son will wash out of med school end up on food stamps writing a history blog. But we can dream that someday, if we sacrifice and work hard, the rewards at the end will be ours.

To see the tax math on what happens to families in the entrepreneur class go read this article on CNN's website.

I am Spartacus. I am Joe.