Karl Marx read Spartacus as the greatest hero of antiquity — and later poets writing about class struggle inherit his admiration; A student poet might write "Spartacus put down the gladiator's sword and picked up the question that Rome could not answer: what is a man worth?" to use the revolt as a philosophical act; A poet writing "six thousand crosses on the Appian Way — Rome's answer to Spartacus was that the question itself was illegal" uses the crucifixion of the defeated rebels as a brutal closing argument; Howard Fast's novel and Stanley Kubrick's film kept Spartacus alive in the popular imagination — contemporary poets draw on the "I am Spartacus" scene as an image of collective solidarity; Byron and Shelley wrote in the tradition that celebrated rebels against empire — Spartacus belongs to their pantheon of freedom's beautiful, doomed champions