Spartacus: A Study in Revolutionary History. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1944

Chapter II: Early Battles

The defeat of Clodius and the consequent expansion of the original diminutive band of gladiators and runaway slaves into something approaching an army convinced the Roman Senate that the revolt was a serious affair. No longer could it be regarded merely as a ‘commotion of fencers’, as the historian Plutarch was later scornfully to term it. Accordingly, the Roman government sent the Praetor, or military governor of Rome, Publius Varinius, with two legions against the slaves. This represented a considerable army, about 12,000 strong. [1]

When the Roman general arrived in Campania, he found the slaves drawn up in battle array, ‘like a regular army’, despite their still defective equipment, which still largely comprised such primitive weapons as clubs and pointed stakes – poor enough weapons with which to attack the conquerors of the world!

Spartacus, however, had no intention of attacking; such a course would evidently be premature. To attack too soon is as disastrous as not to attack at all. An undisciplined rabble of slaves, even if stiffened by a handful of gladiators and ex-soldiers, could be no match for a well-trained and equipped army. From the meagre details that survive, it is clear that, in the ensuing campaign, Spartacus demonstrated outstanding ability as a tactician, worthy of the greatest guerrilla warriors. Like an ancient ‘De Wet’, he was everywhere and nowhere at the same time!

It was now the autumn (73 BC) and the Roman army advanced slowly, hampered both by the damp autumn weather, by consequent disease, and by frequent desertion from the army, which seems to have consisted largely of unwilling militia conscripts. However, on two successive occasions, the Roman general overtook his elusive enemy and drew up his lines for the pitched battle that would end the revolt. But the Roman invitation to ‘come and be killed’ produced no response from the slave army. Like Spanish guerrillas in the Peninsular War when faced with the invincible armies of Napoleon’s marshals, the slave army carefully avoided battle in the open. ‘In the deepest silence it had broken up and had turned to the south towards Picentia (Vicenza, near Amalfi), where Varinius overtook it, indeed, but could not prevent it from retiring over the Silarus into the interior of Lucania, the chosen land of shepherds and robbers.’ [2]

Taking full advantage of the difficult country, Spartacus, whilst still declining battle against the main body of the enemy, proceeded to deal a series of swift and staggering blows against isolated detachments of the pursuing army. In succession, he launched a series of ruthless and victorious counter-attacks on the scattered divisions of the Roman army which vainly attempted to catch up with, or encircle, the fleeing slaves.

A French historian thus describes this succession of victorious counter-strokes:

Soon he [Spartacus] had gathered an army of about 7000 men, some Thracians like himself, others Gauls and Germans, like Crixus and Oenomaus. In this kind of war it is always a mistake to divide the attacking army into isolated detachments. However, this was exactly what Varinius did. Having divided his army, for the purpose of marching faster, he met with nothing but defeats. His advance guard of 2000 men, under the command of his subordinate Furius, was annihilated. In his haste to avenge the rout of Clodius Glaber, he had marched too far ahead. A second division, under the brigadier-general (legionary commander) Cossinus, met the same fate. It was taken by surprise whilst its general was taking the baths at Salina, between Pompeii and Herculaneum. Before Varinius had time to reorganise his forces after these disasters, Spartacus took the offensive and completely defeated the Praetor himself, capturing his fasces (lictors’ rods), the symbol of his official rank, and even the Praetor’s own horse. The latter, unlike his subordinates, succeeded in making his escape and made urgent representations to the Roman Senate to send reinforcements. [3]

Spartacus, having defeated the Roman army by this process of attrition, went on to make himself master of the fertile province of Campania. The Roman corps, under Gaius Thoranius, which had been left there by Varinius, was destroyed, its camp was stormed, and its commander killed. The slave army pressed home its successes and even considerable towns, such as Consentia, in the Bruttian country, Thurii and Metapontum in Lucania, Nola and Nuceria in Campania, were taken by storm and sacked. It would appear that upon these occasions Spartacus was not altogether successful in restraining his followers from paying off old scores, though he did his best to restrain them, both on the grounds of humanity and of policy, as he desired to secure the support of the lesser Italian towns against Rome.

The result of this staggering succession of victories was to make Spartacus the master of Southern Italy. His army grew by leaps and bounds, being swelled by runaway slaves from all parts of Italy, until, by the spring of 72 BC, it had attained a strength of at least 40,000. Moreover, the gladiator general set to work to turn this miscellaneous horde into a regular army capable of meeting the main Roman armies in the field. For Spartacus possessed the rare faculty of being able to keep his head even in victory. He knew that his previous successes had merely been skirmishes, affairs of outposts only. No undisciplined force would have any chance of meeting on equal terms the ‘ever-victorious’ Roman legions. Consequently, Spartacus set himself to remedy the military chaos represented by an untrained horde of miscellaneous slaves.

The classical historian Mommsen tells us:

Spartacus doubtless – to judge by the little which we learn regarding that remarkable man – stood in this respect above his party. Along with his strategic ability he displayed no ordinary talent for organisation, as indeed from the very outset the uprightness with which he had presided over his band and distributed the spoil, had directed the eyes of the multitude to him quite as much at least as his valour. To remedy the severely felt want of cavalry and of arms, he tried, with the help of the herds of horses captured in lower Italy, to train and discipline a cavalry and, so soon as he got the port of Thurii into his hands, to procure from that quarter iron and copper wherewith to replace the crude arms of his followers. [4]

By these means, Spartacus sought to turn a rabble into an army capable of waging permanently successful war against the greatest military power that the world had known prior to his day. It was a tremendous ambition which, a century and a half earlier, had baffled even the great Hannibal, the greatest military genius, prior to Napoleon, in the whole history of war. And Hannibal had a veteran army and the richest state in the world behind him, not a hastily collected and half-armed rabble of slaves, as was the army of Spartacus.

With regard to the social ideals of Spartacus, it is more difficult to speak with assurance. We know that he forbade the use of gold and silver in his camp, but we cannot say how far this ‘war communism’ was merely a temporary measure dictated by the need to prohibit in the slave camp a luxury that would have been fatal to its continued morale. For example, ancient historians assure us that it was the luxury of Capua that undermined the iron discipline of Hannibal’s army and thus contributed to his downfall: Spartacus may have had this historic warning in mind when he uttered his prohibition.

It has also been alleged that Spartacus desired to found a ‘Sun-State’, an ‘Heliopolis’, like that of the ill-fated Aristonicus of Pergamus, which we have already described in the preceding chapter. Arthur Koestler has even incorporated this ambition in his fine historical novel The Gladiators, the subject of which is the Servile War. But I do not know what is his source for this statement and I do not find support for it in any of our extant classical authorities: it is true that they are far enough from being exhaustive!

In any case, the ideals of the ‘Sun-State’, of social equality and of Utopian communism, were, as we have seen, widely diffused in this era, and can hardly have been unknown in the great army of slaves gathered as they were promiscuously from all quarters of the Mediterranean world, which might even, just possibly, have included veterans of Aristonicus from the Asiatic ‘Heliopolis’ itself, and which, as the sequel was to show, still cherished vivid memories of the two Servile Wars in Sicily. [5]

In any case, if Spartacus and his associates cherished any such Utopian ideal, they had but little time to set to work on idealistic projects, for which survival and, therefore, military victory were the first essential prerequisites. In the Roman Empire of the first century before the Christian era – for it was already an Empire if as yet without an Emperor! – governed by a ruthless and mercenary plutocracy and sustained by the most powerful war machine known up to that date, idealism and communism were remote and unsubstantial dreams. North, south, east and west the slaves faced a cold and heartless world, which regarded with an incredulous smile any social milieu other and higher than the jungle of class hatred and oppression in which mankind had lived since patriarchal times – and which he has continued to inhabit down to our capitalist society of today!

For this world was now aroused. Spartacus and the slave army had woken the sleeping lion: they had disturbed the complacent sleep of the Roman Wolf! For ‘the Senate and People of Rome’ now found that they had, and this time on their own doorstep, a servile war of comparable extent and severity to those which, in the preceding century, in Sicily and Asia, it had taxed to the full the great military war machine of the Republic to suppress. And Spartacus was not only a greater general than Eunus, Aristonicus and Athenion, but was even more dangerous from his strategic situation right at the gates of Rome itself, where he could paralyse the vast empire by a mortal blow at its metropolitan heart.

Accordingly, in the spring of 72 BC, the Senate took an unheard-of step hitherto in a war against slaves. For the Roman citizens regarded their slaves as a barely human sub-species of men; for such was the current sentiment throughout antiquity regarding slaves in general, as is clear from the still surviving account of this war by the Roman historian Annaeus Florus, a conventional Roman ‘Tory’. To send both Consuls (that is, annual presidents of the Republic and Commanders-in-Chief) against the foe was a military distinction reserved for the most dangerous enemies of the Republic. This extreme step was now taken by the Roman government: a sure enough indication of its extreme fear. The gladiator had become a general. The horde of runaways had become an army. The revolt had become a revolution!


Notes

1. Since the reform of the Roman military system by Marius, a generation earlier, a legion, or brigade, was standardised at about 6000 strong.

2. Theodore Mommsen, History of Rome (Bentley, London, 1862).

3. Jérôme Carcopino, Histoire Ancienne: La République Romaine (Les Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1937).

4. Theodore Mommsen, History of Rome (Bentley, London, 1862).

5. Arthur Koestler, The Gladiators (Jonathan Cape, London, 1939).