The Spartacus War Read online

  It was probably just a small engagement but it might have been a turning point in the young revolt. We might speculate that news of the gladiators’ victory echoed down the mountain, the sign that some were waiting for: the gladiators had the power to achieve something worth risking one’s life for. In any case, it was around this time that local people began to join them.

  The sources tell us that while they were camped on Vesuvius, Spartacus and his men accepted new recruits: ‘many runaway slaves and certain free men from the fields’. One source claims that 10,000 fugitives joined the gladiators on Vesuvius, but running away was risky and the mountain was hard to climb, so ‘several thousand’ is a safer estimate. Some of the slaves were probably Thracians or Celts, like the rebel gladiators, but they also included Germans.

  The slaves worked on the estates that ringed Vesuvius. They were a hardy lot. Ploughmen were ideally strong and tall; vineyard workers were supposed to be broad, powerfully built and intelligent. Boys and even young girls looked after farm animals, but only the strongest young men were fit to be herdsmen. Leading cattle, sheep and goats up mountainsides was difficult work, requiring strength, stamina, agility and speed. Gauls were considered to be especially good herdsmen, particularly with horses, donkeys and oxen.

  Pasturage would have been a waste of the rich soil around Vesuvius: this was farm country. Ranches tended to be located further south. In Campania, large estates or plantations predominated, typically worked by hundreds of slaves. These were the famous Roman latifundia or ‘wide fields’, to use a term invented in the empire. By day the slaves worked in gangs of, ideally, ten labourers or fewer. At night they were kept in barracks, often in chains. In fact, they sometimes worked in chains as well: in vineyards, for example, because viticulture required intelligent slaves - and brains could lead to trouble.

  A privileged group of slave stewards managed the plantation. The key person was the vilicus or bailiff. Since most owners were absentee landlords, the vilicus really ran the estate. His purview ran from settling disputes to leading prayers. He took care of the finances, organized the workforce and oversaw its smooth operation. The vilica, a female official, was also essential: not only was she chief housekeeper on the estate but a teacher and truant officer. She was handy enough to lead the senior slaves in making their own clothes. For all their power, the vilicus and vilica were slaves, and so capable of revolting - and of freeing ordinary slaves from their chains. One of the leaders of the Second Sicilian Slave Revolt (104-100 BC), for example, was a runaway vilicus. Tough and hard-working, farm slaves made good rebels, vilici fine leaders and organizers, and vilicae excellent quartermasters.

  So much for slaves; what of the ‘certain free men from the fields’ who joined the rebels? As recruits to Spartacus’s cause, free men brought the perspective of Italian subsistence farmers. By the Late Republic (133-131 BC), the small farmers of Italy had been driven off the best land; in their place came latifundia and ranches. It was the great scandal of the Republic that Rome’s greedy elite so mistreated the farmer-soldiers who had won the Roman Empire. But the smallholders didn’t all disappear or move to the city. They stayed in the countryside, where they scraped by through farming marginal and inaccessible land. Around Pompeii, for example, there were many small farms here and there among the manors.

  In order to put more food on the table, some small farmers joined the Roman legions. They became the shock troops of the civil wars between Marius and Sulla, and, later, Caesar and Pompey, Antony and Octavian. Some won new land in reward. Sulla, for instance, gave about 100,000 veteran soldiers land in Italy, much of it simply taken from his enemies, the former supporters of Marius, who were evicted. Some of those Marians fled to Spain, to join the rebel Sertorius, but most stayed in Italy. Some worked as tenant-farmers or day labourers for the new owners. Others turned to that classic activity of the Italian countryside - they became bandits, a word that is Italian in origin. So did some of Sulla’s veterans who failed on their new farms because of bad harvests, hostile neighbours or hard-driving creditors.

  But few small farmers did anything so dramatic; most survived by doing seasonal and occasional labour for the well-to-do villa owners. They were the Roman equivalent of today’s migrant workers. The Roman elite needed them and frowned on them. They are essential for harvesting grapes and cutting hay, says the Roman writer Varro; but you have to watch them carefully, says the statesman Cato the Elder, or they will steal your firewood.

  Although poor, the small farmers were free men and native Italians; some of them no doubt looked down on slaves. But if they were desperate, angry or adventurous enough, they joined Spartacus. And, in all probability, many were indeed desperate. Slave or free, it would have taken a hardy soul to climb Vesuvius and trust a band of professional killers. Surely most of the newcomers were young and probably most were men, but there is no reason to doubt that there were some women too.

  If a few free farmers joined Spartacus, even fewer elites would have backed an army of runaway slaves. Yet, perhaps a small number did. Wealthy but diehard Italian nationalists, still bitter over defeat in the Social War, were not about to join a slave-led army but perhaps they turned a blind eye rather than playing an active role in resisting him. And then, there were opportunists. Every society has people who say that money has no smell, as a Roman wit later put it. They saw no shame in doing business with runaway slaves and ex-gladiators if it could make them rich. The merchants who later traded with Spartacus’s army might fit this category and also one Publius Gavius, a southern Italian who, although a Roman citizen, was convicted of spying for Spartacus in Sicily.

  One possible index of Italian attitudes comes from the Mithridatic Wars. In 64 BC, during the last stage of his struggle against Rome, Mithridates tried to incite an invasion of Italy by Celtic peoples of the Balkans. Not only did he promise assistance; he assured Celtic leaders that they would find willing partners on the Italian peninsula. Most of Rome’s so-called allies in Italy, he told them, had really supported Spartacus, in spite of his degraded social status. But big talk is a politician’s stock-in-trade, so Mithridates’ claim deserves little credence. The Celts declined his invitation to invade Italy, in any case.

  One group was conspicuously absent from the list of Spartacus’s recruits: city-dwellers, whether slave or free. This seems odd because cities like Pompeii and Nola were nearby. True, city walls made it hard for urban slaves to leave, but that isn’t the whole story. Urban slaves were a privileged group who generally enjoyed an easier life than rural slaves; some of them had a reputation for being soft and lazy. Urban slaves were isolated from their rural counterparts, and perhaps even frightened of the rough, tough country folk. We might wonder how many of them would have survived in the Italian outback. In short, they may not have wanted to join Spartacus. If so, it was a sign of things to come. Spartacus’s revolt would remain overwhelmingly a revolt of the countryside.

  But that was not yet clear on Vesuvius, where the rebels’ numbers were growing and their character was changing. They were becoming an army. Their weapons were makeshift, their uniforms were homespun, and their experience was often minimal. But they trained, drilled and practised fighting together. No ancient source tells us this, but without such groundwork they could never have displayed the military virtues that they did in the coming months.

  We might wonder if they trained as much as needed, since temptation loomed. The ex-gladiators, former farm workers, runaway slaves, Thracians, Celts, Italians and miscellaneous others now devoted themselves to an alluring pursuit: crime. With runaway farm slaves and workers as their guides, they raided the rich villas of Vesuvius. They found food and drink, both solid fare and delicacies such as ostrich eggs and vintage wine. There were more luxury goods than one man could carry: silver and gold, ivory and amber, glazed terracottas and coloured glass, earrings and bracelets, medallions and plates, silver table legs shaped like lion’s paws and cameos of kings.

  Writing fifty years lat
er, the poet Horace marks a special occasion by telling his slave boy to bring the oldest vintage of wine. And then he adds, with a wink, ‘If roving Spartacus has spared a single jar.’

  Whatever the fugitives took they shared equally: Spartacus insisted on that. Whether justice or prudence motivated him is unclear. But more followers climbed the mountain.

  What a change! Good old Vesuvius had given Campania every reason to love it. Consider a fresco at Pompeii: it shows Mount Vesuvius, green and fertile, and beside it Bacchus, the god of wine, covered with grapes. A large snake is depicted below. Then came Spartacus. The rebels from Capua had appropriated the gladiator, the vine and Vesuvius: the very symbols of Roman rule in Campania.

  What was Rome going to do about this revolt? Rome had to do something in the face of such a symbol of rebellion, if only because of the clout of the area’s wealthy residents. The rebels spread terror, what the Romans called terror servilis, the fear of slaves; the gentry surely demanded action. Spartacus might have guessed as much but, if he did, he didn’t let it stop him. Perhaps it was now that one of the rebels - maybe Spartacus himself - made the brave statement reported by one ancient writer: ‘If they come against us in force, it is better to die by iron than starvation.’

  They would not have to wait long. Maybe as they waited, at night, around a fire under the stars, the Thracian lady heartened them with visions of the power that heaven had given to Spartacus.

  VENGEANCE

  3

  The Praetors

  In 73 BC, 681 years after the founding of the City of Rome, during the consulship of Lucullus (Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus) and Cassius (Gaius Cassius Longinus), the Republic was fighting wars at either end of the Mediterranean. In Spain, Pompey ground down the renegade Roman commander Sertorius by taking out his strongholds, one by one. In Asia Minor, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, the consul’s brother, began an invasion of the homeland of King Mithridates, who had fought Rome on and off for fifteen years. In the Balkans, Gaius Scribonius Curio was the first Roman general, along with his legion, to see the Danube River. In Crete, Antonius got ready to sail out again against pirates attacking Roman shipping.

  Given the big picture, the gladiators’ revolt might have seemed minor. Capua had seen a slave revolt before, in 104 BC, which had been crushed by barely the number of troops in a single legion - 4,000 infantry and 400 cavalry, for a total of 4,400 men - led by a praetor, a leading Roman public official. So the obvious policy in 73 BC was: send in the praetor.

  In Rome, the Senate set public policy. Senators were all very wealthy men, and almost all members of a few elite families. They had automatically become senators, without election, after holding high public office, and they served for life. They were the oligarchy that ran Rome, except for those occasions when they were challenged by a general such as Marius or Sulla. Once rare, those challenges had become more frequent. But in 73 BC the senators enjoyed a period of power.

  The senators chose Caius Claudius Glaber to send against Spartacus. He was one of eight praetors that year, each of them at least 39 years old, and each elected to an annual term. They were men of great expectations, since the praetors were the second highest ranking of the annually elected public officials in Rome; only the two consuls stood higher. Who was Glaber? We hardly know. He never rose to the consulate and he had no known descendants. He was a plebeian with probably at most a distant link to the more famous members of the Claudius clan. His obscurity was another sign of how little attention Rome gave Spartacus.

  Glaber led a force slightly smaller than the one sent against the rebels of 104 BC: 3,000 men instead of 4,400 and, so far as we know, no cavalry. But the first revolt had been led by a Roman citizen who was a knight, no less, while the latest uprising was the work of barbarians and slaves. Apparently the Romans felt more confident in 73 than in 104 BC.

  The news from Capua was digested, analyzed and classified. It was, to quote Caesar, ‘a tumultus of slaves’. A tumultus was a sudden outbreak of violence requiring an emergency response. It was a serious matter but not organized war (bellum, in Latin).

  Romans looked down on slaves. Their servile nature, said one contemporary, made slaves cruel, greedy, violent and fanatical while denying them nobility or generosity of spirit. For slaves to behave courageously was against nature. For slaves to behave like free men was strictly for the Saturnalia, an annual celebration featuring role-reversal - as a Roman officer once remarked in disgust when his men had to fight freed slaves. In revolt slaves were a nuisance but not a major problem. Or so the Romans told themselves, although the stubborn resistance of Sicily’s slaves in two revolts (135-132 and 104-100 BC) should have taught them otherwise.

  And then there were the gladiators and their leader. Double-think runs like a red thread through Roman attitudes towards Spartacus. Fear and scorn, hatred and admiration, indifference and obsession - they were all there. For the Romans, gladiators were to be fed, trained, cheered, adored, ogled, bedded, buried and even, occasionally, freed, but never, never to be treated as equals.

  As a slave and a Thracian barbarian, Spartacus was despicable to Romans. As a former allied soldier, he was pathetic. From their point of view, the Romans had offered Spartacus the hand of civilization by letting him into the auxiliary units of their army. Then, whether through bad behaviour or bad luck, he ended up a slave. He had lost the chance that the army had given him (again, that is, from the Roman point of view). But in their mercy, as far as the Romans were concerned, they gave Spartacus another chance. They gave him the gladius - the sword.

  To the Romans, a gladiator was not just an athlete or even a warrior: he was holy. And he was sexy. Whenever they went to the games the Romans took a walk on the wild side. The beasts were supposed to growl back at them; it made a better show. But Spartacus did more than growl. Like many a professional athlete, Spartacus was feared for the same reason he was adored: he was dangerous. Yet, once he left the arena, a gladiator seemed almost harmless, even if he had taken up arms in revolt.

  If this seems hard to understand, think of Spartacus as an athlete who rejected the love of his fans. We can forgive an athlete who misbehaves but not one who snubs us. Once Spartacus and his seventy-three companions left their barracks, they were no longer gladiators but runaway gladiators. In Roman eyes, they had shrunk from a fight, hence they were moral lepers: cowardly, effeminate and degenerate. They had sunk from the glory of the arena to the shame of banditry. Spartacus could have been the pride of Rome; instead, it seemed, he was back where he began, a barbarian. From the Roman point of view, his men were not soldiers but runaway slaves, fugitivi. No wonder the Senate had little fear of him - at first.

  Two other things are likely to have kept the Romans from making a bigger push against Spartacus: ambition and greed. Glory was the oxygen of Roman politics but there was little to be won in a police action against criminals. A slave war, says one Roman, ‘had a humble and unworthy name’. Plunder might have served as consolation, but that was out of the question. All Italians south of the Po valley were Roman citizens. Roman soldiers couldn’t plunder their own country.

  Because they were responding to a tumultus (emergency), the Romans did not hold an ordinary levy of troops on the Campus Martius (Field of Mars) outside the city. Instead they probably instructed Glaber to do what Roman commanders often did in an emergency: to recruit troops on the road, as he marched south.

  Glaber’s troops were probably not the best that Rome had, not by a long shot. Those were already fighting in Spain and in the East, where there were plenty of spoils and laurels to be won and top generals to lead the men. Italy had not been stripped of all its good soldiers, however: Sulla’s veterans, for example, represented a source of experienced troops. Sullan veterans were to be found at Pompeii as well as at Abella, and outside Capua, among other places. But they were not likely to sign up to help some nobody slap a few slaves back into irons. Glaber had to take what he could get.

  So Glaber’s army was probab
ly no more than a militia. And yet, no Roman army on the march was easily forgotten. The flash of mail armour and bronze or iron helmets as a long line of soldiers went by captured the eye. The clatter of the supply carts and the lowing of the oxen that drew them filled the air. And then there were the individual soldiers.

  A standard-bearer, surrounded by trumpeters, carried the legion’s symbol, a silver eagle on a standard (that is, shaft). Every century (a unit of eighty men) also had its own standard, a spear embellished with discs and wreaths, carried by a standard-bearer in colourful dress, wearing a helmet decorated with an animal skin.

  Meanwhile, six men called lictors marched in front of the praetor. Lictors served as attendants to all Rome’s high-ranking officials. They were strong men; each carried the fasces, a bundle of rods tied with ribbons and symbolizing the power to command. Outside the city limits of Rome, the fasces were wrapped around an axe, signifying the power of life and death.

  And so they marched, the praetor and his men, following the rebels to Vesuvius. They made camp, probably at the foot of the mountain. Glaber decided not to attack the enemy, who was on the summit. This may seem overly cautious, but the terrain favoured the defenders. Only one road led up the mountain and it was too rough and narrow to deploy a legion. It was no place to test his new army. Instead, Glaber decided to seal in the enemy and starve him out. He posted guards on the road to prevent a breakout.

  It was not an imaginative or a self-confident plan but it might have worked, as long as the Romans kept up their guard. Instead, they handed the initiative to Spartacus. He decided to attack the Roman camp. Like any commander, Spartacus drew on his experience to put together a plan of battle. Rich and complex, that experience would serve him well, both at Vesuvius and later.