The Spartacus War Read online

  And although Spartacus hated Rome, he didn’t hesitate to borrow from it. He modelled his army on the legions, at least in some respects. ‘They attained a certain level of skill and discipline that they had learned from us,’ said Caesar of the insurgents. Like the renegade Vettius, a Roman who led the slave rebellion in Capua in 104 BC, Spartacus might have organized his soldiers in centuries, eighty-men units that were the companies of the legions.

  The insurgents designated their units by Roman insignia. The victorious rebels had captured Roman battle flags, silver eagles and fasces. The eagle was the symbol of a legion, while the flags stood for cohorts (480 men each) and centuries. The fasces were the insignia of a Roman praetor, consul, general or governor.

  We might imagine the insurgents proudly carrying Roman flags and eagles into battle to taunt the enemy. As for the fasces, Spartacus accepted them as symbols of his own office, presumably to be carried by his bodyguard. It was a sign of the world turned upside down, but it was also a symbol of discipline. The fasces represented the power to punish. An effective commander must be not merely inspirational but stern. No soldiers enjoy punishment, but most accept it as the price of victory. Punishment builds discipline; discipline wins wars.

  Perhaps St Augustine had Thurii in mind when he wrote, centuries later, ‘from a small and contemptible start in petty crime, they [the insurgents] attained a kingdom.’ The language is imprecise, because although he held sway in a corner of Italy, Spartacus was not a king. The leaders of the earlier Sicilian slave revolts took royal titles but Spartacus did not. He had the favour of Dionysus, as the Thracian lady announced; he probably inspired religious awe in some of his followers. But he had no throne.

  A paradox lay at the heart of Spartacus’s enterprise. His men had just thrown away their chains; they did not want new ones. They were herdsmen used to independence, field hands drunk on newly found freedom, and gladiators trained to kill each other. They barely shared a common language, Latin, and it belonged to their enemy. With women and no doubt children present among them, they resembled a caravan as much as an army. Most men probably felt closer ties to their family than to their fellow soldiers. No one knew if they would bow to Spartacus’s commands. Freedom built his army and freedom could destroy it.

  All he could do was try to make things work. And so, tens of thousands of marching feet now echoed on the Plain of Sybaris, as we might imagine. They meant something shameful for the Romans, honourable for the men: slave legions. As one Roman writer put it, even a slave is a human being, and if a slave takes up arms, he may become as free as a Roman citizen. But, as he adds, for a Roman to have to fight such a man is to add insult to injury.

  As improbable as the slave legions were, even more improbable was the group of mounted knights riding beside them. In Germany as well, fighting on horseback brought a warrior high status. During their travels the rebels had captured wild horses that roamed the southern Italian countryside. To their good fortune, they were in horse country. Even today, wild horses are seen in the mountains of south-eastern Campania, in Lucania’s high valley of the Agri (ancient Aciris) River and in the Pollino Mountains on the border between Lucania and Bruttium. Celts, Germans and Thracians were good enough tamers to train them. And so was born the insurgents’ cavalry.

  They would need it. The Romans had not forgotten them. Neither the beatings they had suffered at the rebels’ hands nor the ruined farms and lost investments in slaves had escaped their attention. So the Romans chose new commanders for the new year, with more soldiers at their disposal to break up the rebellion.

  The mountains ringing Sybaris are covered with snow in the winter. When it melted, in spring 72 BC, torrents of water would run down into the riverbeds of the plain. The yellow flowers of the broom plant would set the hillsides on fire. Rome’s legions would march south on the peninsula’s paved roads; the insurgents would slip through the hills in an attempt to fight on terms of their own choosing. And all Italy would hold its breath.

  5

  The Stoic

  It was a war without glory. In 72 BC Rome needed men to fight against Spartacus. About 150,000 Roman citizens, all from Italy, were already in arms abroad, well above the average annual figure of 90,000 Romans in arms between 79 and 50 BC. But the recruiters would have to find many more soldiers. Cato volunteered.

  Marcus Porcius Cato - Cato the Younger - had the bloodlines to make him Rome’s ‘Mr Conservative’. His great-grandfather, Marcus Porcius Cato ‘the Censor’ (234-149 BC), championed Roman simplicity over Greek culture and coldly insisted: delenda est Karthago, ‘Carthage must be destroyed’. His uncle was Marcus Livius Drusus, known as ‘the patron of the Senate’ for his proposed constitutional changes, which were an attempt to coopt challengers to the old guard by bringing them into the elite. Drusus’s bold plan only got him assassinated but it was a lesson in courage for young Cato, already an orphan, who was raised in Drusus’s household.

  In 72 BC Cato was 23 years old. He was a patriot, but not too idealistic to forget his family. Cato idealized his older half-brother, Quintus Servilius Caepio, son of his mother’s first marriage. Caepio was chosen as a junior officer against Spartacus, serving under one of the consuls for 72 BC, Lucius Gellius, so Cato followed Caepio into the army. Cato’s family owned land in Lucania, which made them well aware of the danger posed by Spartacus, and maybe even made Cato one of Spartacus’s victims.

  The young soldier displayed the toughness for which Cato would become famous. He was, for example, a pedestrian for all seasons. Regardless of the weather, he never rode: there were no litters for the young follower of the Stoic philosophy. Cato always travelled on foot; indeed, he sometimes walked the streets of the city of Rome barefoot. He would have needed all his energy for Spartacus in 72 BC. The ex-gladiator led the Romans on a chase for nearly all of Italy’s 700-mile length. The Romans wanted to hit the rebels hard. Spartacus dared them to reach a moving target.

  By late 73 BC the Roman Senate, as one source claims, was no longer merely ashamed but afraid. No more praetors: it was time to dispatch the two consuls. They would have four new legions, about 20,000 men, raised in the final months of 73 BC. The consuls-elect sent out ‘searchers’ (conquisitores), that is, recruiting officers, to Italy’s various towns. They preferred volunteers but did not hesitate to pull out the census lists and force men to do their duty.

  Much as the Romans hated to admit it, they no longer faced a police action but a war. But to fight Spartacus, they had to find him. He would not make it easy. As the Romans came south, Spartacus would go north. He planned to march up Italy’s mountainous spine, keeping his mobile forces out of the heavily armed Romans’ reach. He would stop from time to time to forage, to loot easy targets, and to pick up new recruits. But mainly he would keep moving, heading ever northwards. A few of the rebels rode on horseback or in carts, but the vast majority walked. No doubt they were often hungry, tired and cold; surely most of them were barefoot and dirty; certainly they lost men to desertion, illness and death. They kept going.

  Their audacious goal was the Alps. Spartacus sought safety for his men across the mountains where they could head for their Celtic or Thracian homelands. In northern Europe, out of Rome’s reach, they had a fighting chance. Italy would be their graveyard.

  Meanwhile, if the Romans did find him on the march, Spartacus would fight them, but not by the books. Not for him to line up the men in methodical ranks and march them into a killing zone of Rome’s choosing. He would not send men armed with branch and rawhide shields and wooden spearheads against a wall of iron. Spartacus knew that irregulars could not beat the legion at its own game, not even a legion as soft as one of the new units of 72 BC.

  Still, the sources state that Spartacus fought at least one if not several pitched battles against the Romans that year. It is plausible that he dared to do so under the right circumstances. Hill country and mountains provided favourable terrain for the insurgents. Ambush, trickery, surprise, speed and psy
chological warfare all offered promising lines of attack. Superiority in cavalry gave Spartacus a way to harass the enemy’s flanks and to neutralize Roman light-armed troops.

  The events of the Spartacus War of 72 BC exploded into Rome’s consciousness. They shocked the city and marked the turning point in the rebels’ fortunes. But with the exception of an episode or two at the year’s end, most of the year’s activities survive in only the sketchiest form. Hence, the narrative must be even more speculative here than elsewhere.

  At the start of the campaign season in spring 72 BC, the Romans learned that the rebels had split into two groups: one led by Spartacus, the other by Crixus. Both men were on the move. Crixus’s group remained in southern Italy but not in Thurii. It headed to Apulia (today’s Puglia), a wealthy agricultural region of gently rolling hills and one stark mountain. Spartacus’s forces, meanwhile, turned northwards.

  Like the Romans, we cannot be sure just what the two groups were up to. Was the split tactical or strategic, friendly or hostile? One ancient source says that Crixus left because of his ‘arrogance and presumption’. Perhaps, but irregular armies break up as easily as volcanic soil. Crixus and Spartacus had already disagreed the year before over whether to stay in Italy and loot. Meanwhile, ethnic differences, rival ambitions and the natural jealousies of former gladiators made common cause difficult. A friendly divorce made sense.

  Sound tactics argued similarly. The rebels needed food. They had no commissariat to feed 40,000 soldiers plus an unknown number of women and children. The prospects were better for two smaller groups, foraging in separate locations, than for one large group descending on a single spot.

  Spartacus had the big battalions. The sources say that he began the campaign season with 30,000 men, while Crixus had only 10,000. This seems right, however much ethnic ties bound his fellow Celts and their German allies to Crixus. Spartacus’s supporters followed him not because he was Thracian but because he was Spartacus. By now the rebels had taken his measure. They recognized a winning general and a favourite of the gods as well as a giant gladiator. His vivid gestures moved them. His austerity hardened them; his generosity helped them. His care for innocent civilians might have left them cold, but it underscored the word that sums up Spartacus: righteous.

  Spartacus’s authority was neither formal nor forced; it was moral. As Napoleon said, ‘in war the moral is to the material as three to one.’ No wonder three-quarters of the army followed Spartacus.

  But where did he tell them that they were going? They couldn’t stay in the Plain of Sybaris. When the Romans came they would force a battle, and the insurgents would want to fight in the hills, where the terrain was better suited for ambush, trickery and surprise. Sybaris is ringed by hills but, if they camped there, the rebels would have run out of food in short order. To the south lay the sea but they had no ships, so they had to go north. Italy had plenty of fertile land, plenty of loot and plenty of slaves to recruit. Let the Romans chase them.

  Every chase comes to an end, however, and Spartacus knew it. His plan was probably to lead his people to safety out of Italy, over the Alps, to Gaul or Thrace or - after dividing the army - both. The rebels could hardly have been sanguine about so daunting a task, and a prudent commander might have kept the plan to himself. We might speculate that Spartacus did not level with the army as they marched north. Perhaps he floated the notion that they were simply spreading the revolt and searching for loot in another part of Italy. Later, when they were caught between the Romans and the Alps, they would surely find it easier to accept the unacceptable. So Spartacus might have reckoned.

  After their forces split, Spartacus and Crixus had every reason to keep the door open. Each man should have hoped for the other’s success, if only to keep the Romans busy. Spartacus was too shrewd to burn his bridges. As an experienced soldier, he would have known the risks of his long journey. He had to retain the option of returning to the south and re-establishing contact with Crixus. Meanwhile, Crixus had no interest in hurrying Spartacus out of Italy and freeing the Romans to concentrate on him. Crixus might have encouraged Spartacus to take his time gathering supporters among the downtrodden of central and northern Italy. Both sides likely kept in touch via messengers.

  Rome surely knew little of this in spring 72 BC. The consuls were Lucius Gellius and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus. They held the highest regular office in Rome, each already having held the second-highest office, the praetorship. Ambitious Romans aimed for the consulship soon after their term as praetor. Lentulus had been praetor in 75 BC, so as consul in 72 BC he knew that his career was on track. But Gellius had waited two long decades since serving as praetor in 94 BC. In 93 BC he held office as a Roman official in the East and got egg on his face when he waded into a dispute among Athenian philosophers. Now, in 72 BC, his time had finally come. Was he ready for it? Neither he nor Lentulus was known for previous military commands. And Gellius was not young: he was at least 62 years old. No wonder that Gellius received a high-level assistant, another praetor of 73 BC, Quintus Arrius. He had been slated to take over the governorship of Sicily in 72 BC but the Spartacus War got in the way, and Arrius was reassigned to Gellius’s staff, with the rank of propraetor.

  Arrius was a self-made man whose life’s ambition was to be elected consul, an honour that had previously eluded his family. As praetor, he was well on his way. Chances are that Arrius would rather have been governor of Sicily than fight Spartacus. Governors could squeeze the locals and raise the equivalent of today’s campaign contributions. Law and politics, not war, were Arrius’s forte. Still, Arrius was ‘a vigorous man’, said Cicero, who once compared Arrius to a boxer. Given the assignment to fight the rebels, Arrius would surely work hard for the victory needed to advance his career.

  Even so, the Roman government ought to have been able to do better. Spartacus was too big a threat to give the job to anyone less than an expert general. But Rome faced the crisis with mediocri ties. It had happened surprisingly often in the past, in spite of serious threats such as Hannibal.

  Either in Rome or in the field the Romans got the news that the insurgents had divided. Lentulus’s assignment was to deal directly with Spartacus, while Gellius would attack Crixus first and then join the campaign against Spartacus. Lentulus had the much tougher job so we might imagine that he planned to nip at Spartacus’s heels, while avoiding battle until Gellius arrived. As it turned out, Gellius came with a dose of good news: the first Roman victory of the war.

  With Arrius’s assistance, Gellius crushed Crixus’s army. The struggle took place in Apulia near Mount Garganus (modern Gargano). Sometimes called the spur of Italy, Mount Garganus could be dubbed the sore thumb. It juts into the Adriatic about 90 miles north of Barium (modern Bari). It is not a peak but a rugged and thickly forested peninsula, attached oddly to Apulia’s undulating countryside. The rocky heights of the Garganus peninsula reach 3,500 feet, its limestone terrain pockmarked by caves, and in Roman times the area was famous for its oak forests. In short, the Garganus was natural guerrilla country.

  Mount Garganus would have made a good base for rallying the slaves of Apulia to revolt. The region’s slave shepherds had risen up against Rome before, so the rebel cry might have fallen on ready ears. If things ended up badly, an escape route by sea beckoned. At the end of the Garganus promontory are several harbours, should the rebels have sought help from pirates, as they would shortly afterwards. But Crixus failed to use these natural features to his advantage.

  The Romans outgeneralled Crixus: they took him by surprise. The rolling hill country beside the Garganus promontory was well stocked with farms, no doubt tempting Crixus to sally out on a plundering raid. Perhaps this is where the Romans caught him. Or perhaps they trapped him in an upland meadow on the promontory itself.

  It was typical for a consul’s army to consist of two legions. The ‘paper’ strength of a legion in the first century BC was 6,200 men; the real strength was about 5,000 men. That is, when the legion wa
s newly formed; in time, after losing men in combat or to illness or desertion, a legion’s strength was probably around 4,000 men. When a consul took office and raised an army of two legions, therefore, it probably comprised some 10,000 men. A legion was only as strong as the sub-units into which it was divided. The basic tactical unit of the legion was the cohort. Each legion consisted of ten cohorts, nominally of 480 men each; each cohort comprised six centuries, nominally of 80 men each. Light-armed troops and cavalrymen added to a legion’s numbers.

  The commander of each legion was called a legate. Below him stood six junior officers called military tribunes. Cato’s brother Caepio was a military tribune in one of Gellius’s two legions; Cato no doubt served on his staff. The lowest rank of officer was a centurion, commander of a century. The centurions were often the unsung heroes of the legion, because small-group leadership can make or break an army.

  These armies consisted almost entirely of infantrymen, with only small groups of cavalry, light-armed or specialist troops. They were inexperienced and far from the best Rome had, but they were much better armed than the insurgents, and they could be far more confident about food and housing.

  We know next to nothing about the battle. In the absence of evidence of creativity on the part of Gellius or Arrius, we might expect that they lined up their army by the book. Each legion was deployed in a three-line formation, with four cohorts (a paper strength of 1,920 men) in the front line and three cohorts (a paper strength of 1,440 men) in each of the two rear lines. The insurgents probably had to organize themselves more hastily. Given their reputation as horsemen, the Celts should have possessed a good cavalry, but might have lacked time to deploy it properly, and the Romans might have outnumbered it.