Spartacus: A Study in Revolutionary History. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1944
Marcus Licinius Crassus Dives (the Rich), the new Roman commander-in-chief, the leader of the Roman plutocracy, was a man whose career was highly representative of the age in which he lived and of the class to which he belonged. An adherent of the plutocratic party, Crassus was an experienced soldier and politician who had fought with distinction in the Roman Civil Wars and played a leading role in the political life of the Roman state. These activities were, however, subordinate to his main social aim: the acquisition of personal wealth. Crassus was, indeed, the most successful representative of the new usurious capitalism that was just then coming into power in Roman society. He had made a huge fortune out of the misfortunes of his opponents in the civil war. By buying confiscated property cheap and selling dear, the Praetor had become the richest man in Rome and had well earned his soubriquet of ‘Dives’.
In such a plutocratic society as was that of the Roman Republic, money was power. And just as his modern antitypes, the Rothschilds, used their vast wealth to acquire political influence at the courts and in the parliaments of modern Europe, so did the ancient Dives with regard to that highly susceptible organisation of financial corruption and political jobbery, which, in the first century BC, concealed its nefarious activities behind the high-sounding title of ‘the Senate and People of Rome’. Crassus manipulated this financially sensitive organisation like a modern Tammany Hall boss. For Dives was a very ambitious man, to whom wealth and power were synonymous terms. He aspired to the dictatorship left vacant by his former leader, Sulla, and later to be restored in perpetuity by Julius Caesar.
But in 72 BC, when he assumed command against the slaves, the chief rival of Crassus for supreme power was not Caesar, then a young man of about thirty, not yet a front-line figure in Roman politics, but the famous general Pompeius Magnus (that is, Pompey the Great), another general who had also risen to fame in the civil war, and who, at that very moment, had just finished off the popular party in Spain, where, under the democratic leader Sertorius, it had made its last stand.
Crassus intended to use his command not only to beat the slaves, but, ultimately, to capture supreme power over the Roman world. For this reason he at once rejected a suggestion to recall the victorious Pompey and his legions from Spain. For him to attain his supreme objective it was essential that he, and no one else, should reap the laurels of victory against Spartacus. However, before he could rule Rome, first he had to save it! Accordingly, the first prerequisite, upon which all the rest necessarily depended, was to beat the slaves. Crassus, therefore, proceeded to evolve a strategy for this purpose.
First of all, by dipping his hand freely into both the public treasury and his own, Crassus reorganised the demoralised Roman army. In addition to the legions which had survived the defeats of the consuls, he raised six more, and finally took the field with eight legions at full strength, about 50,000 men. With this numerically imposing army, Crassus set to work to end the Servile War.
His first movement was one of encirclement. His lieutenant Mummius, with two legions, was instructed to hang on the flank of the slave army, and thus hinder its movements, until Crassus and the main army could catch up with it and bring it to a decisive battle, which would end the revolt once for all. Taught by the fate of the consuls, Crassus gave strict instructions to Mummius not to attack the slaves before the arrival of the Commander-in-Chief.
This initial plan, however, quickly miscarried. After some successful skirmishes, Mummius, fired with contempt for the slaves, disregarded his orders and made a premature attack, eager to reap the laurels of victory before the arrival of his military superior. The result was a fiasco: the Roman troops turned tail at the first attack, and their general and the survivors took refuge in the camp of Crassus.
The Roman general took drastic steps to prevent the recurrence of similar fiascos in the future. He revived the brutal Roman discipline of earlier centuries, long since discarded as a relic of a more primitive age, by which the defeated troops were ‘decimated'; that is to say, one in ten were executed in the sight of the whole Roman army. (As has so often been demonstrated in class wars, the combatants stop at nothing!) Having thus restored discipline by terror, Crassus led his army against the slaves who, perhaps flushed with victory, or more probably impelled by lack of food, seem to have forced Spartacus to abandon his wiser guerrilla tactics and to accept battle.
No details of the resulting engagement have survived, but, for the first time, Spartacus had the worst of it. However, he showed in defeat the same remarkable coolness and tactical skill that he had previously shown in victory. He extricated his army from the field, converting what might have been a decisive defeat that would have ended the slave war into a mere reverse of which the Romans could take no advantage. Leaving 6000 dead on the field and 900 prisoners in the hands of the Romans, the revolutionary army made a masterly retreat, first to Thurii, where Spartacus enforced a severe discipline in the reorganisation of his army, and, finally, to Rhegium, in the extreme south, on the ‘toe’ of the Italian peninsula, facing Sicily.
A new phase of the war now dawned. Unable to take Rome, and outmatched in the field by the regular Roman army, there was, henceforth, no question of the slaves winning a decisive victory over the Roman Republic. What Hannibal could not do with vastly superior resources, they could not do either. Meanwhile, the road to the north was closed by the victorious army of Crassus.
With the lightning rapidity of a Napoleonic strategy, Spartacus now changed his aim. He could no longer hope to win an absolute victory over Rome, but he could still win a limited one. With what was now a veteran army steeled in a dozen battles, he would cross over to Sicily, the fertile corn island just opposite his new headquarters at Rhegium. Sicily had, as we have not forgotten, a splendid tradition of servile insurrection. Twice, respectively under Eunus (133 BC) and Athenion (104 BC), the slaves had become masters of the island and had held out for several years of hard fighting against the power of Rome. In Sicily, there must still be veterans surviving from Athenion’s army a generation earlier. The memory of the two slave kingdoms was still green, and a general rising of slaves would be sure to follow the arrival of the formidable host of the gladiator. Indeed, many of the poorer free citizens might join such a rising, for Sicily was just then governed by a particularly infamous representative of the Roman plutocracy, Gaius Verres, whose unbridled rapacity was eventually too much even for his own class and still stands pilloried before history as an ancient ‘Warren Hastings’ in Cicero’s famous speech for the prosecution at Verres’ trial for fraud and extortion.
The sole but sufficient difficulty was transport. The two and a half miles of water that constitute the Straits of Messina – the classical ‘Scylla’ and ‘Charybdis’ – are marked by fast-flowing tides and could only be crossed on ships, of which Spartacus had none. Like Napoleon in his camp at Boulogne, Spartacus could only look hopelessly at the opposite shore and reflect: ‘How near and yet so far.’ Once across, he could master Sicily in a few days, and to dislodge him then would prove a task of extreme, perhaps impossible, difficulty. A free slave kingdom, a Sicilian ‘Heliopolis’, would be a kind of ancient Moscow, radiating revolution throughout the surrounding servile world. By hook or by crook he must get ships: the rest would be easy.
The only hope in the current situation was to get the ships ‘by crook’. For the Mediterranean was just then ravaged by pirates, chiefly of Asiatic origin, who swept the seas with impunity, like the Algerian Corsairs of a later age, until they were themselves swept off the seas a few years after the time of Spartacus by the great Roman general Pompey the Great. (Amongst their prisoners was no less a person than Julius Caesar, later to be the first Emperor of Rome and the eventual conqueror of their conqueror, Pompey!)
Spartacus approached a gang of these formidable buccaneers, then off the coast of Sicily, and, in return for cash down, tried to bargain with this ‘floating republic’ to transport his army across the Straits of Messina. The slaves were, however, ‘double-crossed’ over the transaction: the pirates took their money and played them false. Why, is not at all clear, since a permanent state of war, such as would have followed the conquest of Sicily by the slaves, would seem to have been in the pirates’ interest, if only as ‘the rejoicing third'; a few years later, when Rome turned her full strength against them, they were to pay dearly for their short-sighted treachery. Perhaps Crassus had bribed them, too? He, if anyone, had the money and knew how to use it!
Meanwhile, the Roman war lord was by no means idle. Unable or unwilling to attack the slaves in their strong defensive position, the Roman general proceeded to blockade them. The insurrection was scotched but not killed: hunger should finish off Spartacus as it had finished off so many earlier enemies of Rome. The Roman army proceeded to dig an enormous trench right across the southernmost ‘toe’ of the Italian peninsula. The peninsula of Rhegium was blockaded by a huge trench thirty-six miles long and about fifteen feet deep, reinforced by vast earthworks. Inside this network of fortifications the slaves were hopelessly cooped up between the Romans – the effective substitute for the Devil! – and the deep sea. Crassus had only to sit down and wait until starvation disintegrated the social revolution.
The position of the slaves was, indeed, desperate, and an unusually severe winter (72-71 BC) came to add to their misfortunes. In vain did Spartacus try every means at his disposal. A desperate sortie on the Roman lines was repulsed with heavy loss. A despairing attempt to cross the Straits on rafts made of skins was baffled by fast tides: ‘Time and tide wait for no man’ – not even for a revolution! As the winter wore on, the position of the slaves became more and more desperate. The winter passed with the hostile armies facing each other across the great dyke, separated by this classical ‘Torres Vedras’. [1] ‘Rothschild’ had cornered not only the market, but also the revolution!
In despair, Spartacus even tried to negotiate. But the Romans did not recognise slaves as ‘enemies’: Roman law always classed them with cattle as ‘things’ ('res’) and not as human beings, and as such they had no ‘rights’ in peace or war. In any case, all the trump cards now lay with Rome. Surrender meant the cross and the lash. As the spring drew near, the slaves hung grimly on.
The Roman ‘Torres Vedras’, however, had one weakness from the strategic point of view: it was too long. Big as was the Roman army, it was not big enough to hold its whole length in equal strength. The keen eyes of Spartacus detected a weak spot. In a raging snowstorm, on a night as black as pitch, the slave army forced the dyke, overpowered its guards, and, swiftly filling it up, marched across. When the snowstorm finally abated, the peninsula was empty. The birds had flown. Spartacus had again marched north. Again the carefully-laid plans of the Roman strategists had been outwitted.
Crassus was in despair. Once again the war was being carried to the gates of Rome. Once more the torch of social revolution and civil war was sent blazing throughout the peninsula. To be outwitted by a gladiator! In black despair, the Roman generalissimo made a fatal blunder: he sent to Rome urging the Senate to recall Pompey and his legions from Spain, which the Senate promptly did. Then, recovering his courage, he marched hot-foot after Spartacus to end the war before his rival arrived to rob him of his glory. The revolution had stolen a march on ‘Rothschild'!
1. The lines of Torres Vedras were impregnable defensive lines held by Wellington against the French in Portugal during the Peninsular War in 1810.