Revolution in Antiquity: 
The Classicizing Fiction 
of Naomi Mitchison
Barbara Goff*
INTRODUCTION
One of the intersections between “ancient Greek and Roman culture 
and world communism from 1917” can be traced in the early works 
of Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999). She became famous with a series of 
novels and short stories set in the ancient world, some of which will 
be the subject of this paper. In particular, the representations of radical 
political change, of revolution, will be explored in a corpus of selected 
novels and short stories.
Married to a Labour MP, Mitchison was never a card-carrying 
Communist, but she espoused a range of left-wing causes, from birth 
control to Scottish nationalism. Her diverse oeuvre offers a series of 
variations on the quest for social and sexual justice and freedom, 
delivered through an ambitious range of genres. Because of this di-
versity, her work traces many of the preoccupations of the twentieth 
century, from socialism, feminism, democracy, and colonialism, 
to technocracy, ecology, migration, and multilingualism. Indeed 
several such themes can be read in her versions of antiquity, which 
were produced mainly in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of these bear the 
imprint of the Russian Revolution, as well as of other preoccupations 
characteristic of the progressive wing of early twentieth-century British 
culture.1 At the same time, they suggest new roles for Classics as a dis-
1 For a general introduction to Mitchison’s work, see Joannou, “Naomi Mitchison 
at One Hundred,” 292–304.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4312/clotho.4.2.155-179
* University of Reading, Department of Classics, Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6EL, 
b.e.goff@reading.ac.uk.
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BARBARA GOFF156
cipline. In terms of long-term popular or critical success, they have not 
all been favored, but they fail in interesting ways. A much later novel 
will also be discussed, which reworks the earlier texts’ preoccupations 
with greater success.
The discipline of Classics was entering modernity in the 1920s; 
compulsory Greek was abolished at the universities2 and the Crewe 
Report (1921), commissioned by Prime Minister Lloyd George, con-
sequently examined “The position of the Classics in the Educational 
System of the United Kingdom.” This report sought “the re-adjustment 
of [the discipline’s] claims to modern conditions” and is engaged in 
developing a sense of the discipline’s role in “the life of the nation as a 
whole.”3 Dethroned from its traditional place as gatekeeper to higher 
education, the discipline needed to espouse new stories about itself. 
Mitchison’s works of historical fiction approach antiquity from the point 
of view of subalterns – women, slaves, barbarians – producing new 
versions even of well-worn narratives. Her role in helping to produce 
an enlarged role for Classics can be seen in the enthusiastic reviews of 
her books and recommendations of them for schools.4
Although she was born into the Haldane family, which had 
supplied Britain with political and academic notables for genera tions, 
Mitchison was not formed by a traditional classical education. Her 
family connections meant that she could attend the Dragon School 
in Oxford, as the single girl among a class of boys, but at the onset 
of menstruation she was whisked away and delivered to governes-
ses.5 The tension between being classical and being female is legible 
through out her writings, including in the representations of revolution 
investigated here. Her autobiographies describe various unstructured 
encounters with antiquity, such as the much-quoted discovery of 
Plato’s Guardians:
I picked up and began to read The Republic and was much taken 
with the idea of being a Guardian … It is odd that I was not put off 
by the undoubted fact that all Plato’s Guardians were male and that 
he said many unpleasant things about the inferiority of women.6
2 Raphaely, “Nothing but Gibberish and Shibboleths?” 71–94.
3 “The Crewe Report,” 3 and 29.
4 See, e.g., Wilson, “Historical Fiction for the High-School Latin Class,” 107–115, 
and Beall, “Historical Fiction on Classical Themes,” 8–12.
5 Mitchison, All Change Here, 11–13.
6 Ibid., 40. See Hoberman, Gendering Classicism, 1–2 on the necessity for ambi-
tious women of the period to identify at least partly as male. Mitchison some-
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REVOLUTION IN ANTIQUITY 157
The informal encounter does not preclude a critical perspective. 
In Mitchison’s fictional writings on antiquity, the classicists whose 
guidance she acknowledges include her husband Dick Mitchison 
(1894–1970) and Theodore Wade-Gery (1888–1972), an established 
Oxford scholar and her lover.7 She thus came to antiquity obliquely, 
and this may be what helped to produce the radical vision that Peter 
Green celebrates in The Conquered (1923), Mitchison’s first novel, set 
among the Gallic victims of Rome:8
This book was not only excellently documented and a fine crea-
tive achievement in its own right: it forced readers to perform a 
radical revaluation of the ethics drummed into them during their 
schooldays. It came, indeed, like a slap in the face to complacent 
Caesar-nurtured imperialists by treating the Gallic Wars from the 
viewpoint of the Gauls.
All her subsequent classicizing works of fiction adopted a similar 
perspective.
With this thoroughly “democratic turn” to her writing on the 
ancient world, it may seem strange that Mitchison’s writing does not 
generate more critical interest from present-day classicists.9 This may 
be due partly to the range of genres in which she worked: her historical 
fiction is sometimes overshadowed by her science fiction and Scots 
novels. But she has been a “neglected” and then a “rediscovered” 
author ever since 1953, when Henry Treece wrote of The Conquered as 
“my favourite forgotten book.”10 We can also suggest that despite the 
work’s investment in antiquity, Mitchison is not a “classic”; from the 
perspective of early twenty-first century readers, much of the work 
has dated, and the style in particular can be gratingly sentimental.11 
times seems to have characterised herself as a “boy,” though not as a man. See, 
e.g., Calder, Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison, 47. 
7 See the dedication to Black Sparta and All Change Here, 164.
8 Green, “Aspects of the Historical Novel,” 53–60. 
9 A notable exception is Sheila Murnaghan, “The Memorable Past,” 125–139.
10 Calder, Nine Lives, 63. On neglect and rediscovery, see most recently the essays 
collected in the “Naomi Mitchison Special Issue,” The Bottle Imp 19 (2016).
11 For critiques of her style see, e.g., Hoberman, Gendering Classicism, 178, and 
Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 114, 136. Q. D. Leavis famously dismissed 
Mitchison’s style as an “average magazine story” with “a nauseating brand of 
sentimentality” (“Lady Novelists and the Lower Orders,” Scrutiny [September 
1935]: 112–132, 114, 128) and Calder notes the Cape Times excoriating the “mad-
dening infantile lisp of a style” (Nine Lives, 88). 
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BARBARA GOFF158
However, it should be noted that in writing revolutionary versions of 
antiquity which foregrounded the experiences of those usually silenced 
in the ancient sources, the texts were undertaking a genuine struggle, 
which marks them with tensions. Some of the narratives discussed 
here, especially those collected in The Delicate Fire (1933), are messy 
and unfocused, and the summaries provided do not capture the fairly 
abrasive reading experience; few modern critics pay any attention to 
the short story collections. Most of Mitchison’s work is out of print, 
although critics interested in the early twentieth century have started 
to re-examine the texts.12
 In the critical terms of the early twentieth century, Mitchison’s 
work was defiantly “middlebrow,” i.e., not striving for a role as a 
classic in “high culture,” and currently critics are inclined to site 
her within the movement to take the characteristics of Modernism 
and adapt them in order to communicate more effectively with a 
wider general audience.13 Mitchison’s own writing addresses the 
question of how to reach different groups; the difficulty as to how 
to reconcile audiences and ambitions is visible in her diary entry 
for August 24, 1941:14
I feel I don’t care about being in the same tradition as Shakespeare 
and Beethoven if only I can do something for my own people in 
Scotland. I would like of course, just for once, to be a best seller […] 
But it doesn’t matter. I want what Yeats wanted. I want the small 
group. I want to write history for two or three dozen people who 
may or mayn’t read what I write, for the small, tiny group who said 
I knew more about Pindar than anyone but Wilamowitz,15 I want to 
write like a bit of history in The Blood of the Martyrs [1939], which 
probably nobody has noticed, but it is first class stuff. And then I 
want to write for people here, for Denny M and Duncan and Angus 
and Lilla and Jemima and Lachie, for Alec and Anna, for Willie and 
12 See, e.g., Purdon, Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time.
13 See, e.g., Joannou, “Introduction,” 1–20, and in the same volume, Bluemel 
“Exemplary Intermodernists,” 40–57, and Humble “Feminine Middlebrow 
Novel,” 97–111.
14 Mitchison, Among You Taking Notes, 159.
15 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was “possibly the greatest Hellenist of his 
age” (Magnelli), the author of numerous important books and articles on a range 
of ancient authors, including canonical scholarly commentaries. 
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REVOLUTION IN ANTIQUITY 159
Johnnie – to make them confident and happy. But I don’t want to 
write for the New Statesman boys, for the international culture of 
cities […]16
It is particularly interesting that classical antiquity makes it into this 
dissection of her literary ambitions, sitting somewhat awkwardly 
alongside not only her Scottish neighbors but also the left-wing journal 
New Statesman. It should also be noted that this generic and political 
tension is legible in Mitchison’s cultural background; as a scion of 
the Haldane family, her origin and upbringing are in some contrast 
with her later progressive allegiances and experimentations. The 
early classicizing novels and short stories, with the representations of 
revolution that I discuss, can be read as repeated attempts to square 
the recalcitrant circle.17 Mitchison’s gender and class identity and the 
frictions between them meet the progressive forces at work in her 
historical period and the available versions of classical antiquity to 
produce a specific oeuvre of historical fiction. The versions of antiquity 
purveyed in these works of fiction are all “revolutionary” in that they 
are characterized by transgressive desire, violence of various kinds, 
and sometimes radical ambivalence, but accounts of actual political 
change are infrequent and sometimes awkward.
REVOLUTION NARRATIVES OF THE 1920S AND 1930S
The stories collected as Black Sparta (1928) include “The Head and the 
Heart,” in which women are caught up in a full-scale revolution. This 
story, the earliest of the “revolution” narratives, is focalized through the 
figure of the aging Pindar, who is visited by his Milesian friend Pausilla. 
Pausilla recounts her history of sexual as well as political dissidence. 
Unmarried, and a foreigner, she has been living with an aristocratic 
political leader in the Greek colony of North Africa, Kyrene, and has 
become involved in the democratic revolution there. She lived with 
Damophilos outside marriage because she “wanted to be free and not 
belong to anyone, not even him.”18 Damophilos and his friends were 
16 The people named towards the end of this quotation are her neighbours in the 
Scottish village where she moved in later life.
17 We perhaps do not need to note that the “classical” and the “revolutionary” 
have not always been easy bedfellows; see on the overall relationship not only 
the present volume, but also Goff and Simpson, “Introduction” in Classicising 
Crisis, 1–10.
18 Mitchison, Black Sparta, 93.
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reluctantly drawn into revolutionary activity and ended up helping to 
lead the movement, but he has been executed by fellow revolutionaries, 
suggesting the contours of the French as well as the Russian Revolution, 
as successive cohorts of insurgents turn on one another.
Damophilos features as a character in Pindar’s Pythian 4, where 
the poem’s speaker entreats the ruler Arcesilaus to allow Damophilos 
to return from exile to Kyrene. In the story, it appears that this has 
happened, but to no positive effect, and Pindar laments, “What is the 
good of all this writing when people die … [Poetry] can’t do any of the 
things I said it could do.”19 The political and poetic failure is accom-
panied by sexual renunciation and compromise. When Damophilos 
was in political danger, Pausilla concluded that the gods required from 
her a supreme sacrifice, and she made a vow of chastity. This, as she 
points out, meant giving up any future life with her lover, any child, 
and indeed any sustenance, since she has no way of supporting herself 
other than by dependence on men.20 She later loses her faith in the 
gods and breaks her vow, quite cynically, with the captain of the ship 
on which she and her sister escape from Kyrene.21
 Most of her friends, who were also Pindar’s friends, have been 
killed, so her representation of the revolution is ambivalent at best. 
Much of her narration, which dominates the story, is taken up with 
loving and sensuous descriptions of aristocratic life at Kyrene before 
the revolution, and subsequently, she condemns the revolution in 
strong terms. The demos, referred to as such, are not a very attractive 
proposition; Pausilla represents them in a patronizing way as “little 
shopkeepers or businesspeople who’d done badly,”22 and later she lists 
“labourers, shop people, sailors, street women.”23 Although she has a 
sense of their grievances against the king, once they no longer trust 
the aristocratic leaders, she condemns them:
I suppose we expected too much of the demos; after they’d seen how 
easy it was to smash things and how easy it was to kill they wouldn’t 
take orders or advice from anyone … they started killing people, not 
in hot blood but saying it was justice … And nobody did any work 
except the women.24
19 Mitchison, Black Sparta, 117.
20 Ibid., 110.
21 Ibid., 114.
22 Ibid., 97.
23 Ibid., 100.
24 Ibid., 108–109.
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REVOLUTION IN ANTIQUITY 161
Finally, she sums up: “that, you see, was the democracy of Kyrene. I 
suppose all democracies are the same more or less. I think there must 
be something inherently cruel and stupid in them, the reduction of 
everyone in a crowd to the lowest.”25 This recognizable anti-democratic 
discourse, and the later reference to the “ten days” of revolutionary 
upheaval,26 indicate that although the historical Kyrene did depose a 
king and move to democracy in the fifth century BC, it is the Russian 
Revolution which provides the foremost template for the imagined 
events in Kyrene. Mitchison visited the USSR in the 1930s and records 
an ambivalence about it, which she shared with many other British 
leftists.27
But Pausilla does not have it all her own way, since we are also 
offered another very different view of the revolution. Her sister, who 
accompanies her, has a different and more optimistic view, claiming that 
before the end of the ten days, things were much better, they really 
were! They’d got some sort of order into the State, they’d stopped 
robbing foreigners and started working again, they were making a 
constitution! … I’m sure a democracy might be beautiful.28
She is determined to get to Athens, where a different democratic 
revolution is firmly established and where Aeschylus is developing 
into a poet of Pindar’s stature.29 Like Pausilla, she is determined 
to live independently, and she is willing to live with an Athenian 
acquaintance, out of wedlock, in order to establish herself there. 
She is Aspasia, the future consort of Pericles. So although the story 
canvasses various forms of failure – political, sexual, and artistic 
– it also commits to the success of a new kind of poetry, a working 
democracy, and an independent female who does manage to put 
her mark on history.
This first “revolution” story involves tropes which will recur. 
Women’s sexuality is closely bound up with liberatory political 
developments and can cross class boundaries, while masculine 
politics display the figure of the sacrificial Frazerian king, here the 
25 Mitchison, Black Sparta, 112.
26 Ibid.
27 Mitchison, You May Well Ask, 187–91. See also Stead, “From Argyll with Love.” 
For more detailed accounts of British reaction to the Revolution, see Bullock, 
Romancing the Revolution.
28 Mitchison, Black Sparta, 112.
29 Ibid., 115.
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aristocratic political leader who suffers undeservedly for others.30 
While the leader whose followers turn on him is recognizable from 
the history of various revolutions, especially perhaps the French, 
this figure acquires further resonance from Frazer’s study of myths 
and rituals in which a king dies to preserve his society. A further 
element of this story which becomes characteristic of later ones 
is that the representation of revolution is complex enough that 
judgment must be reserved. Although all the characters here agree 
that the king of Kyrene was long overdue for his end, the aftermath 
of the Russian Revolution, with civil war and political repression, 
had shown that radical political change could immiserate as well 
as liberate. In subsequent narratives, we read variations on revolu-
tionary female sexuality, the Frazerian figure, and the multiplicity, 
or indeterminacy, of judgments on revolution.
In later works, women are more integrated into revolutionary 
activity but often figure in the revolutionary brotherhood, rather 
than being part of the actual organization of political action.31 
Although we can trace a move across the works to more optimistic 
representations, there is an undercurrent of failure, regret, and 
disappointment. In The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), 
Mitchison’s best-known novel, the central revolution is that of 
Kleomenes III, the historical late-third-century king of Sparta. 
He is represented as attempting to restore Sparta’s historical 
supremacy by bringing back Lycurgan institutions of common 
ownership and commensality, canceling debt, enfranchising helots, 
and redistributing the land. The revolution is represented not only 
through Kleomenes and his male supporters but emphatically also 
through women.32
30 On the influence of Scottish folklorist and anthropologist James George Frazer 
(1854–1941) in Mitchison’s work, and that of other women writers of the period, 
see Hoberman, Gendering Classicism, 17–19, 33–40. Frazer’s enormous compila-
tion of myths and rituals from around the world discerned a pattern underlying 
them of a king who periodically dies and is reborn as a guarantee of harvest and 
thus of social survival. Frazer’s work was highly influential, not least because it 
brought together study of classical antiquity and what were then perceived as 
“primitive” cultures.
31 See, e.g., Sponenberg “‘The Pendulum is Swinging Backwards,’” especially chap-
ter 4.
32 Mitchison’s sources here most likely included Plutarch, Agis and Cleomenes; the 
novel’s episodes of the deaths of Kleomenes and of his women family members 
follow Plutarch’s narration closely.
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REVOLUTION IN ANTIQUITY 163
Philylla, the maid of honor of the Queen, is first seen as a young 
girl practicing archery, determined to grow up into a “real” Spartan, 
a “soldier” rather than a “girl.”33 We understand that her investment 
in the revolution is partly because it gives her opportunities beyond 
the constrictions of the female role, and she pursues this double path 
of “soldier” and “girl” for the rest of the novel, identifying with the 
archaic ideal of Sparta which Kleomenes is endeavoring to revive. 
But she is also represented insistently as female, subject to sexual 
awakening and sexual threat. When she visits the family of her helot 
wet nurse on her fourteenth birthday, the nurse recognizes that she 
is making the transition to womanhood: “Her foster-mother was 
feeling at her with big wise hands […], touching at all the soft, very 
sensitive growing points of her body. Waves of feeling poured over 
her as she waited, shut-eyed, centering, centering […]”34 Philylla 
notices that she is taller than some of the helots, and feels that 
“there was nothing she was afraid of.”35 But the helots refuse to be 
properly respectful, saying, “There won’t be any of that soon! – not 
when we’re all masters, me and him and him.”36 She is shocked, 
and she senses a threat from the men, whose number she cannot 
quite see: “dark and laughing, they waited for her.”37 At first, as an 
elite Spartan, she recalls “all the powers of life and death, of prison 
and torture and abuse when the abused has to stand silent with his 
hands folded and neck meek.” But as a fellow supporter of the “King’s 
New Times,” she also recognizes that with his vigorous words, “the 
man had brought some sort of community between them.”38 She 
acknowledges and accepts the community of interest brought about 
by the imminent revolution, so that the sexual tension, generated 
by the figure of a young girl facing a group of men, is redirected to 
enable the crossing of class boundaries.
Kleomenes’ royal revolution, like that of Damophilos, is doomed, 
and he and his supporters flee to Alexandria in Egypt. In Alexandria, 
they are imprisoned by Ptolemy but plan to break out and try to rouse 
the Alexandrians with the cry for freedom. On the eve of their fatal 
attempt, they share a feast, and during this meal, they talk intimately 
of their love for each other, with Kleomenes and his lover reliving 
33 Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, 126.
34 Ibid., 155.
35 Ibid., 157.
36 Ibid., 157.
37 Ibid., 157.
38 Ibid., 158.
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BARBARA GOFF164
the scene of their first declarations.39 This feast clearly recalls the 
Last Supper of Jesus but is also a Mystery as at Eleusis and a version 
of the rites of Osiris, another dying king, alongside a celebration 
of homoerotic desire.40 Kleomenes is positioned as a similar kind 
of leader, celebrated in rites which ensure that although he dies, he 
persists, as the figure of the sacrificial king.41 Despite this figuration, 
his fall sweeps up all his followers. His male companions are killed 
in the streets of Alexandria, and the women of his family, his mother 
and his children, and the families of his followers, who have all been 
separately imprisoned as hostages, are executed by the Egyptian 
authorities. Philylla, the wife of his closest friend Panteus, achieves 
the kind of heroic identity she longs for only via these terrible events; 
she supports all the other women through the mass executions that 
follow, lays out the bodies, and finally ensures that her dress falls 
around her neatly when she is killed.42
A second female character is also caught up in Kleomenes’ movement 
and comes out of it more successfully. Erif Der is a Scythian princess 
and priestess who kills her father during a ritual and leaves Scythia 
for Greece in search of healing. At first, she uses her fertility magic 
for Scythians, Spartans and Egyptians alike, but once Kleomenes’ 
revolution is under threat, she deploys greater powers to stunning 
effect. When Kleomenes is killed in Alexandria, she goes into a trance; 
her spirit or Egyptian “khu” leaves her physical body and travels to 
guard the corpse in the form of an enormous snake.43 Since his corpse 
is thus preserved, there emerges a cult in his honor, which permits 
his revolution to enjoy a kind of afterlife. The novel closes with later 
generations of Scythians and Spartans alike tending his memory.44
A very different coordination of female sexuality and revolution 
unfolds in the collection The Delicate Fire (1933), specifically in the 
five narratives gathered under the title “Lovely Mantinea.” These deal 
with the aftermath of the destruction of Mantinea by the Macedonians 
under Antigonus in 222 BC.45 The destruction of Mantinea was itself 
fallout from Kleomenes’ failed revolution, so the Spartan events are 
39 Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, 646–648.
40 Ibid., 641–642. For the feast and the love of Kleomenes and Panteus, see Plutarch, 
Agis and Cleomenes, 37. The ritual overtones of the feast are not found in 
Plutarch. For the wife of Panteus, see Plutarch, Agis and Cleomenes, 38.
41 Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, 643. 
42 Ibid., 672.
43 Ibid., 685–687.
44 Ibid., 713–719.
45 See Polybius 2.56–58.
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REVOLUTION IN ANTIQUITY 165
in the background; Kleomenes’ revolution supplies a paradigm to 
which some characters aspire. Each of the first four stories is foca-
lized through a different character, while the last takes a more distant 
third-person perspective. Together they imagine how the aftermath 
of violent upheaval may lead to a utopian community. Over-full of 
contradictory events and emotions, plot developments that strain 
credibility, and a frequently ponderous and didactic tone, the stories 
have not made much of a mark in criticism; the contemporary review 
in the Times Literary Supplement passes no judgment except to say 
that the characters end up in a “happy communism,” which perhaps 
was condemnation enough.46 It might be suggested that Mitchison has 
exhausted the possibilities of the classical world, especially in relation 
to revolution. Murray’s introduction to the 2012 edition of The Delicate 
Fire concludes that the collection
illustrates a fundamental change in Naomi Mitchison’s work. The 
early stories are set in ancient Greece, like many before them. But 
here Mitchison effectively says farewell to that setting with accounts 
of the worlds of Sappho and “Lovely Mantinea.” … She turns away 
from Greece for good. She turns to the present, and will spend the 
thirties warning against fascism.47
It will be suggested here that The Blood of the Martyrs (1939) resists 
the fascism of the 1930s with a different kind of revolution and that 
Cleopatra’s People (1972) embeds the earlier tropes in a different culture 
and in a story even more dominated by women.
The only first-person story in the “Lovely Mantinea” group, “The 
Wife of Aglaos,” is ironically titled; although the narrator Kleta 
certainly begins the story as the wife of Aglaos, she takes on several 
other identities before regaining that status. Kleta is enslaved, along 
with her baby son and everybody else in Mantinea, when the city falls 
to Antigonus. In her new master’s house she tries to make friends 
with the other slaves, but without success because they are hostile to 
her former citizen status. She succeeds in forming a friendship only 
when she gives birth to her new master’s son, and is helped by a slave 
herdsman Damis. Once she recovers from the birth, they determine 
to run away and she abandons the baby. In hiding, when Damis helps 
her express her painful breasts, she goes on to feed him, and they 
subsequently become lovers.
46 Smyth, “The Delicate Fire,” 444. 
47 Mitchison, The Delicate Fire, v.
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When the couple meet up with other escaped slaves who have 
set up a home in the hills, the outlaws assume that Kleta belongs 
to Damis. Damis quickly rebukes them: “She’s not my woman. She 
isn’t anybody’s. She is a free woman … She’s not a lady. She is a good 
woman.”48 Liberated from the notion of possession, Kleta sleeps 
with each of the outlaws in turn, and over the years she has two 
children whom the outlaws all acknowledge together. Her shared 
body thus works politically to unite the group: “I became one of 
them. I got their point of view.”49 Kleta’s first-person narrative tries 
on occasion to reclaim something of a higher status, in that she 
can teach the outlaws about poetry and philosophy. But she then 
comes to recognize that Homer and the philosophers do not speak 
to those who are enslaved or otherwise oppressed; she perceives her 
culture anew as well as her politics.50 She reflects on the Spartan 
revolution under Kleomenes and concludes that it failed because it 
came from the top down, because Kleomenes “could not get out of 
the possessors’ habit of wanting more power for himself” instead 
of making “a stable state where there would be no one under and 
no one over, but all equal.”51 So the physical sharing is furthered 
by a cultural and political sharing that works both ways. However, 
the idyll of egalitarian politics and sexual emancipation ends with 
the arrival of Kleta’s husband, himself having escaped from slavery, 
and her return to a more regular union with him.
Other stories concentrate on male survivors of the sack, Kleta’s 
husband Aglaos and her brother Arkas. The final Mantinea story 
brings all these people together once more and stages a real revolution, 
a slave revolt in which Kleta plays a prominent part. Her husband 
Aglaos has, like her, learned humility and brotherhood through having 
been a slave, but Arkas has not; although he suffered as a slave, he 
has clawed back power and has now become a brutal owner himself. 
Kleta and Aglaos move to Arkas’ farm, but are horrified by his cruelty 
toward his slaves. They befriend the slaves, and when the slaves in the 
whole neighborhood rise up against the owners, Kleta and Aglaos are 
spared. Indeed the rebel slaves allow them to help direct the course of 
the revolt, so that they end by saving the lives of most of the owners. 
Kleta occupies a prominent role in ensuring that the revolution is 
largely bloodless. The harmonious conclusion of the revolutionary 
48 Mitchison, The Delicate Fire, 166.
49 Ibid., 168.
50 Ibid., 170–171.
51 Ibid., 169.
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REVOLUTION IN ANTIQUITY 167
action may invite skeptical scrutiny; for instance, Arkas repents of his 
misdeeds with unconvincing alacrity, so that the narrative escapes 
the necessity to have Kleta, Aglaos, or the other ex-slaves kill him.
The perspective of this final and apparently optimistic story differs 
considerably from Kleta’s first-person narrative in her own tale. There, 
she questions at the outset whether “I can say what happened with any 
measure of truth,”52 and she often struggles to find exactly the right 
words to express her understanding of past events. The impersonal 
narrative of the final story, despite its multiplicity of exciting incidents, 
has no such difficulty and keeps all the characters at arm’s length. 
The story ends when the ex-slaves have killed the people they needed 
to, spared the others, and are planning a new settlement run along 
egalitarian lines. The upheaval and suffering, sexual and social, are 
positioned to bear positive fruit in a future characterized by freedom 
and equality. The ending, however, is not simply triumphant. Aglaos, 
who had been a philosophy student, reflects:
The old Stoic equality idea looked like coming real now that it had 
solid facts to work on! It would be very exciting to see whether it 
would be possible to run a community without slave-owning at all; 
it had never been done in the past, but – after all, why not?53
There is some irony here in that twentieth-century Western society 
has, in its own representation, managed without slavery for decades, 
whereas the notion of equality is still utterly radical. So the community 
of ex-slaves challenges its 1933 audience to make the kind of imaginative 
leap into an identification that Kleta had made earlier, and, despite the 
disillusionment with revolution legible in other parts of Mitchison’s 
work, the absence of slavery in the twentieth century could yield op-
timism about the possibilities for equality.54 Yet the final sentences are 
open to a different, ironic reading. “That winter they would be working 
together, but there would be no need for words, no need to talk about 
52 Mitchison, The Delicate Fire, 141.
53 Ibid., 274. “The old Stoic equality idea” is not fleshed out in the story, but Aglaos’ 
idea may relate to the strand of Stoic thought characterised by cosmopolitanism 
and human community. The lost Republic of Zeno apparently recommended 
that “we should consider all men to be of one community and one polity, and 
that we should have a common life and an order common to us all”; Plutarch, 
On the Fortune of Alexander, 329.
54 The absence of legal slavery is meant here, but we are also increasingly forced to 
be aware of enslaved people all around us. See, e.g., the Anti-Slavery Internati-
onal website’s details on modern slavery.
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all that, ever any more. No need between equals.”55 On the one hand, 
this can be read as an idealizing declaration of faith that the past can 
be managed toward a positive reconciliation among people who were 
earlier on opposite sides, and it might strike us as valuable, if naive; 
and it brings its own truth in that it is the final sentence of the story, 
so there is indeed no more talk. But that very silence may be thought 
ominous. It potentially closes down debate and leaves a difficult his-
tory unspoken. The fact that the characters will never discuss their 
previous lives again might imply, in quite a sinister fashion, that the 
life of “equality” is maintained only at a great price.
The Blood of the Martyrs (1939) is set among the early Christians 
in Rome and examines the difficulties attending the construction of 
a political movement in the face of persecution. This novel is perhaps 
more revolutionary even than “Lovely Mantinea” in that the institution 
it tries to build, the Christian church, does survive and still functions, 
although few would readily say that we now inhabit “the kingdom” 
of peace, justice, and freedom which the early Christians work for. 
The plot convenes a huge cast of characters from different parts of 
the Roman world who are drawn together by the magnetism of the 
imperial city as well as by their shared investment in the new religion. 
The early Christians, of mostly servile status, assume that the rich and 
the masters will not be part of their revolution,56 but meanwhile, the 
aristocrats of Rome are discussing their own brand of political change: 
how to depose Nero and develop a constitution without emperors but 
with proper senatorial power for themselves. They conclude that an 
actual revolution, “with equality and all that,” is impossible,57 but in 
their very houses, the slaves are working toward that end. The novel 
invites us to think of early Christianity as a version of socialism, and 
in the third part, the chapter titles include explicitly political terms 
such as “Difficulties of a United Front.”58 The identification is sealed by 
the “Dedication,” which thanks as contributors to the book “Austrian 
socialists in the counterrevolution of 1924, share-croppers in Arkansas 
in 1935 … and the named and unnamed host of the witnesses against 
55 Mitchison, The Delicate Fire, 275.
56 Mitchison, Blood of the Martyrs, 25–26.
57 Ibid., 288.
58 “United front” was the name given to various moves in the early 1930s towards 
cooperation between the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Labour 
Party. After 1935, the related term “popular front” denoted cooperation among 
all those opposed to fascism. See, e.g., Thorpe, History, 96–99; Worley, Labour, 
207–8; Morgan, Against Fascism, chapter 2.
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REVOLUTION IN ANTIQUITY 169
tyranny and superstition.”59 Conversely, Rome suggests the Fascism 
of both Mussolini and Hitler, complete with the dictator appearing in 
uniform on a balcony and crowds shouting Hail.60
The version of socialism purveyed here, however, is one fully in-
vested in the sacrificial Frazerian king, and the slaves explicitly link 
Jesus to Spartacus and Kleomenes of Sparta among others. These did 
not only die for their fellow-humans, but were also “all of them for 
the oppressed ones, the common people.”61 Conversely, the agency 
of women, especially their sexual agency, is harnessed to the revolu-
tionary ends, as when Lalage the dancer shares her body to promote 
community among her fellows.62 Equally interesting from the point 
of view of female agency is the fact that some of the women worship 
Isis as well as Jesus,63 so that even this transcendentally influential 
“Frazerian king” does not have everything his own way.
CLEOPATRA’S PEOPLE
Mitchison moves into very different territory after the 1930s, writing 
stories set in Scotland, Africa, and outer space. But 1972 saw a return to 
antiquity with Cleopatra’s People, in which some of the earlier themes 
appear in a new guise. Women’s agency in social change and in resi-
stance to oppression is again important, and female sexuality is explored 
as a part of that agency. The revolution is again led from the top, by 
a sacrificial ruler figure, and although it fails, its sacrificial gestures 
secure certain kinds of success as well, so that there are still multiple 
stories that may be told about it. In fact, there are two revolutions in 
the novel, one inspired by the other, the sequence possibly pointing 
forward to further attempts at justice, peace, and brotherhood. The 
ambiguous ending leaves room for some characters at least to find 
political security and harmony.
The two revolutions are responsible for the novel’s complex 
structure, which moves back and forth between three time periods: 
45–37 BC, when Cleopatra is planning how to escape Roman domi-
59 Mitchison, Blood of the Martyrs, “Dedication,” n. p. Mitchison had worked with 
both groups first identified.
60 Mitchison, Blood of the Martyrs, 175.
61 Ibid., 132.
62 See Hoberman, Gendering Classicism, 133. Benton, Naomi Mitchison, 114 notes 
the poor reviews of this novel when it first appeared. Recent important treat-
ments include those by Hoberman, Gendering Classicism, and Sponenberg, “The 
Pendulum.”
63 Mitchison, Blood of the Martyrs, 74–77.
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BARBARA GOFF170
nation; 31–30 BC, at the end of independent Egypt with the death 
of Cleopatra and her women companions Charmian and Iras; and 
26–25 BC, which marks the subsequent attempt to bring the surviving 
children of Cleopatra to Egypt and inspire an Egyptian uprising. The 
novel is thus divided between accounts of the Queen and her resistance 
to Rome and Octavian and accounts of the later attempt to arouse the 
subject Egyptians to revolt against the Romans. In the earlier period, 
the Queen is devising means to exploit Rome’s strength against itself, by 
helping Antony against Octavian but also by planning to increase her 
own independent strength through trade and alliances in other parts 
of Africa and India. In the later period, the initiative passes to a family 
of upper-class Alexandrians, the surviving relatives of Charmian. Hip-
parchia, Charmian’s sister, devises the plot and prevails upon her niece 
Aristonoë to help. The scheme is to contact the children of Cleopatra, 
Selene and Philadelphos, who are living in Rome in quasi-captivity, 
and bring them to Alexandria. Once the Egyptians see the children, 
Hipparchia believes, they will instantly rise up against the Romans. The 
holes in this plan are, of course, enormous, but it does almost work; 
the children are recognized, and the people of Alexandria do attempt 
a revolt in their name, which is immediately crushed by Rome. Hip-
parchia dies, although the other members of her family are spared, and 
the children of Cleopatra make various arrangements to escape. The 
Queen of Punt, an African kingdom south of Egypt, is instrumental 
in the rescue of Cleopatra’s son Philadelphos from the Romans. The 
rumor is put about that he has been kidnapped and eaten by savage 
cannibals, a tale which the Romans are only too ready to believe.64
As will be clear from the foregoing, the novel is spectacularly fe-
male-dominated, although a number of men play supporting roles, 
and the figure of Octavian, subsequently Augustus, looms threate-
ningly off-stage. Cleopatra is represented as a powerful queen with 
wide-ranging political ambitions furthered by acute intelligence; 
once dead, she inspires other women’s initiative as they preserve her 
memory and try to fulfill her plans. In the parts of the novel set du-
ring Cleopatra’s lifetime, she travels for trade and exploration, runs 
council meetings, and takes on the might of Rome. Her alliance with 
Anthony is far more political than erotic, and she maintains the upper 
hand. She is of Greek descent, but perceives herself as largely Egyptian, 
with responsibilities toward Egypt. After her death, it is the Greek 
women in Alexandria, Hipparchia and Aristonoë, who continue her 
work to undermine Rome. Men are peripherally involved, but they 
64 Mitchison, Cleopatra’s People, 201.
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REVOLUTION IN ANTIQUITY 171
can do little because they would come under more suspicion. The 
women characters are often educated and relatively independent, with 
helpful spouses, or, in Cleopatra’s case, devoted women companions. 
The novel’s themes of political and philosophical understanding, as 
well as its undercurrents of revolutionary sexuality, are articulated 
mostly via female characters. Women are represented as desiring men 
in considered, tactical ways, although the Queen is the shrewdest in 
planning her liaisons; while she enjoys sex with generous ingenuity, 
on occasion also with women,65 she is adept at contraception,66 and 
her vitality is implicitly contrasted with the sexual arrangements 
represented among the Romans, which range from prostitution to 
domestic violence. In these respects, this novel builds on earlier works, 
but its sexual buoyancy seems almost prescient about the historical 
changes ushered in by the feminism of the 1970s.67
The initial revolution is spearheaded by Cleopatra herself. The 
revolutions in Mitchison’s earlier works on Kyrene and on Sparta 
are led from the top, by aristocratic and even royal figures, in a 
way that is contradictory and usually compromised. Cleopatra’s 
People endeavors to square that circle by making the Queen both 
an ordinary mother beloved of the ordinary people and a revolu-
tionary monarch. It attempts this by way of the figure of Isis. We 
see the Queen identifying herself ever more closely with Isis, both 
devastatingly powerful and maternal.68 As her plans to defeat Rome 
founder, Cleopatra understands herself also as Isis who suffers for 
others, and in death she identifies with the goddess even more 
closely.69 However, Cleopatra differs from other aristocratic revo-
lutionaries in Mitchison’s fiction. Unlike Kleomenes of Sparta, who 
died in exile, Cleopatra can really claim to have died for her country, 
and, moreover, when she becomes Isis on death, her companions, 
Charmian and Iras, who will die with her, will also be worshipped 
as cult figures. She reassures them: “through you will come help and 
healing. You will never die so long as women suffer.”70 Although 
Iras answers that “that will be always,” the Queen counters that “we 
shall intercede.” The last classicizing novel thus gives up the quest 
65 Mitchison, Cleopatra’s People, 17.
66 Ibid., 16.
67 The same year 1970 saw the publication of both Millett’s Sexual Politics and 
Greer’s Female Eunuch. Both of these had a huge cultural impact.
68 Mitchison, Cleopatra’s People, 12, 48.
69 Ibid., 72, 158.
70 Ibid., 157.
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for a dying king and invests fully in the dying savior queen instead, 
adding the hopeful note that she died for the good of women.
Despite this investment in Cleopatra’s positive leadership, it is 
never completely clear what her revolution entails, as it appears under 
different signs at different times. When Cleopatra is traveling on the 
Nile, she sees the temple of Akhnaton and contrasts the god’s peaceful 
way of uniting the world with that chosen by her ancestor Alexander.71 
She, meanwhile, builds up her country by means of trade and plans 
to evade the increasing power of Rome; Romans may rule by force 
of legions, but she proposes that money will ensure genuine domi-
nance.72 Later on, she offers her council two alternatives as counters to 
Rome. First, she suggests that they could leave Alexandria and found 
a new city “looking to East and South,”73 forging connections to India 
and other parts of Africa. Or they could accept that Egypt must take 
sides in Rome’s civil struggle and support the weaker side against the 
stronger in order to encourage Rome’s self-destruction.74 Her plans to 
marry Antony are simply a method to secure Egypt.75 She dreams too, 
it seems, of living in friendliness with other nations, trading fairly, 
and promoting brotherhood. After all, both her ancestor Ptolemy II 
Philadelphos (ca. 309–246 BC) and her son, Ptolemy XVI Philadelphos 
(36–29 BC), bear it in their names (Φιλάδελφος, lit. brother-loving).76 
Others claim that she wanted even more, convinced that the expulsion 
of the Romans would usher in an age of peace and justice. A councillor 
remembers that: “The Queen has said it will be different. We shall live 
in friendliness, trading fairly with other nations, not forcing our will 
on them.”77 Charmian speaks of her as wanting:
a golden age when there would be enough for everyone. No wars. No 
famines. A kind of light over us all … She could have been like the 
great Alexander and conquered the world, but not by war. By trade 
and friendship, by treaties, by justice everywhere.78
Similarly Iras says of Antony that “he seemed to want the same things 
as she did. The Golden Age, the rule of love. She showed him that and 
71 Mitchison, Cleopatra’s People, 14–15.
72 Ibid., 21.
73 Ibid., 45.
74 Ibid., 46–47.
75 Ibid., 50–51.
76 Ibid., 58.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., 69.
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REVOLUTION IN ANTIQUITY 173
he followed.”79 Charmian’s daughter Elpis, however, gives a slightly 
different notion of what Cleopatra wanted: “Certainly she wanted to 
rule the world. And destroy Rome. Who wouldn’t?”80 If Cleopatra’s 
revolution appears in different guises for different followers, we might 
nonetheless conclude that it continues to inspire, perhaps because of 
its very amorphousness.
Although this revolution is thus represented in sketchy terms, it 
commands the allegiance of many ordinary Egyptians and Greeks 
in Alexandria, especially once the Queen is dead. Aristonoë’s maid 
explains that the ordinary people remember the Queen and “believe 
she will give them justice and mercy.”81 Even if Cleopatra was mainly 
interested in resisting imperial Rome, we can conclude that it is her 
“people” who have developed the further progressive implications 
of her politics, toward justice and brotherhood, and that this is how 
the figure of Cleopatra inspires the second revolution by which Hip-
parchia and her associates try to incite the Egyptians to rebellion. 
Although this rebellion is crushed, Cleopatra’s children manage to 
escape the destinies designed for them by Rome, and we are invited 
to conclude that they are free to initiate their own kinds of political 
change. Her daughter Selene is set to build a new Alexandria in her 
husband’s land of Numidia, and her son Philadelphos escapes into 
the unknown regions of Africa.
This novel thus canvasses two related revolutions, one inspired by 
the other, both led from the top, and in one case by a figure who is 
not only royal but also eventually divine. This duality is developed by 
the double way in which revolution is discussed, being both desirable 
and also highly difficult and improbable – unlike, for instance, the 
troublingly swift resolution in “Lovely Mantinea.” The novel opens 
with a scene in which Aristonoë says of the Queen “I know two things 
… two separate kinds of things.”82 These turn out to be the two stories 
about Cleopatra, in which she is either a scandalous horror, as for 
the Romans, or as for the loyal Egyptians, a goddess. The “truth” is 
different in Rome and Alexandria.83 Different characters acknowledge 
the supreme difficulty of mounting a revolution, in a way that has 
not been notable in the narratives previously discussed. Aristonoë 
questions her aunt: “Everyone hates the army of occupation, but that 
79 Mitchison, Cleopatra’s People, 70.
80 Ibid., 107.
81 Ibid., 53.
82 Ibid., 3.
83 Ibid., 106.
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BARBARA GOFF174
doesn’t prove that they’d risk their lives, does it?”84 Aristonoë’s father 
Polemo, weighing up the fact that Egyptians pray to the Queen as 
Isis, reflects that “Praying and fighting, they’re two different things.”85 
Elpis concurs: “The people … love the memory of the Queen and the 
story of the Queen. But it is another thing to risk one’s life.”86 Juba, 
Cleopatra’s son-in-law, wonders how long oppression can go on if 
it has the means: “Forever? Or is it possible that, after all, there are 
gods watching? It did not look like that to him.”87 The duality of the 
discussions about revolution, simultaneously insisting on its success 
and doubting it, suggests stories told by the victors and the defeated 
respectively, but they are not the only possible stories. We know that 
the uprising in Alexandria has been defeated, like the earlier plans 
of Cleopatra herself, but the escapes of Cleopatra’s children allow us 
to imagine other possibilities.
It is relevant that the salvation of Cleopatra’s children is entrusted to 
Africa. Selene and Juba decamp to Numidia, and Philadelphos escapes 
to Punt, where the stories of being eaten by barbaric cannibals shield 
him from Rome. The prominence of Africa in the novel connects 
with Mitchison’s own life, as Murray notes,88 but also registers the 
geopolitical shifts of the postwar period and the profound changes in 
relations between Britain and her former colonies. By 1972 the various 
successful movements for independence in Africa could contribute to 
the idea that positive political change, even revolutionary liberation, is 
a realistic goal and not always doomed to failure; “other possibilities” 
had sometimes been successfully imagined. The African dimension of 
the novel also opens up the classical world beyond Greece and Rome, 
and beyond even Egypt, which had figured prominently in The Corn 
King and the Spring Queen (1931). It thus returns to the classical world 
of the 1920s and 1930s fiction with a renewed optimism about the 
possibilities of revolution in antiquity.
As noted above, the work of Naomi Mitchison is frequently redis-
covered, and the time may be ripe for such a development again.89 It 
would be highly appropriate for classicists to take their places among 
those who are thus rereading the relations between classics and the 
progressive movements of the early twentieth century.
84 Mitchison, Cleopatra’s People, 66.
85 Ibid., 155.
86 Ibid., 179.
87 Ibid., 199.
88 Murray, “Introduction” to Mitchison, Cleopatra’s People, ii.
89 See Purdon, Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time.
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REVOLUTION IN ANTIQUITY 175
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ABSTRACT
The writer and activist Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999) came from 
a prominent establishment family but was a member of the Labour 
Party and the wife of a Labour MP. Her work was explicitly marked by 
the Russian Revolution, even when she wrote about antiquity. In the 
1920s and 1930s, she produced a number of works of historical fiction 
set in ancient Greece and Rome, which were highly regarded at the 
time. The works use the canvas of antiquity to experiment with many 
forms of political and social radicalism, with a challenging focus on 
female sexuality. The article discusses four specific representations of 
revolution which mobilize female agency in ways that are themselves 
highly unconventional. However, these representations also invoke 
the Fraserian figure of the dying king who leads the revolution to 
disaster, compromising the revolutionary energy. This tension speaks 
to Mitchison’s own contradictory social positioning as a patrician 
radical. In 1972, however, the novel Cleopatra’s People revisits the 
theme and stages a more successful uprising. This novel is centered 
on the sacrificial queen instead of a king, it enlists a mass of people, 
and saves the revolution by hiding its key figures in Africa. During 
her final excursion into antiquity, Mitchison thus found a way to press 
history into useful service.
kEYWORDS: Naomi Mitchison, revolution, Scotland, Labour Party
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Revolucija v antiki: Klasiki in leposlovje Naomi Mitchison
IZVLEČEK
Pisateljica in aktivistka Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999) je izvirala 
iz ugledne in visoko situirane družine, vendar je postala članica la-
buristične stranke in žena laburističnega poslanca. Njeno delo je bilo 
izrazito zaznamovano z rusko revolucijo, tudi ko je pisala o antiki. V 
dvajsetih in tridesetih letih 20. stoletja je napisala več dobro sprejetih 
del historične proze, postavljenih v antično Grčijo in Rim. V delih je 
na platnu antike eksperimentirala s številnimi oblikami političnega 
in družbenega radikalizma, pri čemer se je izzivalno osredotočala na 
žensko spolnost. Članek obravnava štiri upodobitve revolucije, ki žensko 
agentnost izkoriščajo na nekonvencionalne načine. A te upodobitve se 
sklicujejo tudi na Fraserjev lik umirajočega kralja, ki vodi revolucijo 
v katastrofo in ogroža revolucionarno energijo. Ustvarjena napetost 
govori o lastni protislovni družbeni poziciji patricijskega radikalca, 
ki jo je izkušala avtorica. Leta 1972 se je v romanu Kleopatrino ljud-
stvo vrnila k revolucionarni tematiki in uprizorila uspešnejšo vstajo. 
Omenjeni roman se osredotoča na žrtveno kraljico namesto na kralja, 
k delovanju spodbudi velik del ljudstva, revolucijo pa na koncu reši 
tako, da ključne osebe skrije v Afriki. Med zadnjim izletom v antiko 
je Naomi Mitchison torej našla način, kako prisiliti zgodovino, da 
postane koristna.
kLjučNE BESEDE: Naomi Mitchison, revolucija, Škotska, laburistična 
stranka
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   179 21. 02. 2023   11:16:08