Spartacus: The Leader of the Roman Slaves. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1962
The greatest servile insurrection of classical antiquity took place between the years 73-71 BC, that is, in the century prior to the origins of the Christian era and a generation before the commencement of the Roman Empire of the Caesars. Neither of those epoch-making events was, in our opinion, uninfluenced by the great slave revolution nor unconnected with it. Its starting-point was the city of Capua, in Southern Italy. Its first recruits were drawn from the gladiators trained to fight for public amusement in that city. And its leader, upon whom the revolt has conferred historic immortality, was the Thracian gladiator Spartacus, whose strong personality and undoubted military genius raised him to become leader of the slave army and the terror of the Roman legions.
The period which witnessed the outbreak of the Servile War was one of general decadence and deep corruption, as is unmistakably portrayed for us by the writings even of such contemporary ruling-class apologists as Cicero and the historian Sallust. The epoch of civil war had come to a temporary lull with the victory of the Roman plutocracy under Sulla a decade earlier, at the decisive battle of the Colline Gate, outside Rome (82 BC), which put an end to the civil war amongst the free classes. The death of the ‘fortunate’ dictator, Sulla, left the aristocratic oligarchy without a competent and undisputed leader, a state of things soon to lead to a fresh struggle for power that only ended a quarter of a century later with the victory of Julius Caesar. The confusion among the free classes and the indecisiveness of the ruling oligarchy were highly favourable to the success of the servile insurrection.
Despite, however, the prevailing social corruption, the Roman Republic still remained without a rival as the greatest contemporary power. If weak in the centre, at Rome itself, it was still immensely strong upon the circumference. At the very time that Spartacus was threatening to march on Rome and destroy the terrified metropolis, the Roman armies were winning astonishing victories against heavy numerical odds in Asia. And, only a little later, the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar (59-49 BC) again demonstrated the strength of the Roman war machine. The conquest of Gaul threw at least 400,000 more slaves on the market.
Indeed, from the purely technical standpoint, the Roman army had never been so powerful as in this era of political confusion. For only a generation earlier, the great General Marius, the uncle of Caesar, had abolished the old militia system of the Roman Republic, under the threat of a contemporary barbarian invasion, and had organised a professional army on the lines of a permanent war machine. This was a technological development that had not a little to do with the ultimate defeat of the slaves.
The great revolt of the slaves, which was destined to bring the Roman Republic to the verge of destruction, and, it can hardly be doubted, to shake the classical civilisation itself to its foundations, began inconspicuously, like so many of the major events in history. Amongst the major evils of Roman society was the brutal ‘sport’ of gladiatorial shows, in which specially trained men fought each other singly or in bands, or even confronted wild animals in the arena. This ancient ‘sport’, analogous to the bull-fights of modern Spain, enjoyed a wide popularity in antiquity. There were occasions in which as many as 10,000 gladiators appeared in the Roman arena. And every provincial town of any standing had its arena and training school for the human ‘exhibits’.
In the early summer of 73 BC, a band of these professional fighting men broke out of the Capuan training school, which was run by a man named Gnaeus Lentulus Batiatus, and fled from the city, armed with such primitive weapons as spits and knives, which they obtained in the kitchen of the training school. On their way they seized a supply of arms which, by good fortune, they met with when on its way to another gladiatorial school. Armed with these weapons, they put to flight a band of soldiers who had been sent in pursuit, and, arming themselves further at the expense of the dead men, they took refuge on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, in wild and inaccessible country.
The band of gladiators who accomplished this feat numbered seventy-four persons in all. They were men with some training in hand-to-hand combat and in the use of arms. Many of them were, no doubt, prisoners of war with previous military experience. Their leaders were two Celts, known by their slave names as Crixus and Oenomaus, and a Thracian from the Danube country, known by what was probably his own name, Spartacus.
The meagre details which comprise all that is known for certain about the previous career of Spartacus are thus summarised by the German historian Mommsen:
The last, perhaps a scion of the noble family of the Spartocids which attained even to royal honours in its Thracian home, had served in the Roman army among the Thracian auxiliaries, had deserted and gone as a brigand to the mountains, and had been there recaptured and destined to the gladiatorial games. [1]
From other sources we learn that Spartacus owed his life on this former occasion to his remarkable strength, which marked him out for success in his role of professional man-killer. He appears to have fought with the ‘retiarius’, or trident and net.
Very little, then, is positively known about the antecedents of Spartacus. The name is a Thracian one, and there was a dynasty of the same name about this time in the Black Sea regions, which has left coins. The ancient Thrace was roughly equal to modern Bulgaria. If Spartacus belonged to that family, that would have assisted his rapid rise to a position of ascendancy in an army largely composed of his countrymen. Both the leaders of the two Sicilian slave wars assumed the royal title, not merely to enhance their prestige, but also to establish some sort of permanent leadership. It should be remembered that to an army composed of former barbarians, of enslaved tribal warriors, the kingly title signified Commander-in-Chief more than anything else. Perhaps Spartacus did not need to do so on account of his already existing family prestige. In which case, perhaps he already had some experience of military command. According to Plutarch, Spartacus was of nomadic stock. But we know nothing positive.
As was so usual in antiquity – we have already noted it in the case of the Sicilian slave king Eunus – superstitious and miraculous phenomena were attributed to Spartacus. According to the credulous Greek historian Plutarch, serpents coiled around him whilst he slept, and his prophetess wife foretold his greatness even when he was still a slave. Her name has not survived, but, according to the same authority, she was a Thracian woman who accompanied Spartacus from Capua and took part in the revolt. We do not know what was her final fate. There is nothing inherently impossible in this detail, since the Thracian women were famous for their association with mystical cults. Indeed, one of the most famous plays in Greek drama, the Bacchae of Euripides, was written precisely around this last theme. But it is more likely that some historian, allowing his imagination to supply the lacking facts, has introduced the mystic, the religious, element without which no medieval writer considered an account complete.
Since the original edition of this book first saw the light, Professor Ziegler of Gottingen has made the interesting suggestion, based on an emendation of the text of Plutarch, that Spartacus belonged to the Thracian tribe of the Maedi and that he was born near the river Strymon in what is now Bulgaria. [2] As it is already known that the Maedi were the Thracian allies of the famous King of Pontus, Mithridates Eupator, the ‘Hannibal of Asia’, the great rival of Rome, we are able, according to Professor Ziegler’s hypothesis, to date the capture of Spartacus with a certain degree of exactitude, since Mithridates was defeated and driven out of Greece by the Roman general Sulla in 86 BC.
If this was the date of the capture of Spartacus, assuming that he was old enough to have fought against the Romans, his probable date of birth would be shortly before 100 BC.
Professor Ziegler’s supposition also adds some probability to the statement of Plutarch that Spartacus had a Thracian wife who was a prophetess.
This small band, under the leadership of Spartacus and the two Celts, necessarily adopted a life of brigandage, since even escaped gladiators must live! They soon became renowned for their boldness and for the success of their foraging expeditions. In a short time their numbers were swelled considerably and they acquired a more than local reputation. The fame of the daring band spread as far as Rome itself, and it became necessary for the Roman government to do something to safeguard ‘law and order’ against this well-armed and daring band of desperadoes, who, from the inaccessible shelter of their mountain fastness, robbed and plundered the wealthy region of Campania. This region contained some of the favourite health resorts of the Roman plutocracy, such as Pompeii, which, a century and a half later, was so sensationally obliterated by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (AD 80). At the period of which we are writing, the great volcano had been long quiet and was currently believed to be extinct. Its crater was popularly supposed to be the gate of hell!
Accordingly, the Roman Senate sent a force of 3000 men – that is, half a legion, probably militia rather than regulars – under a divisional general (praetor) named Clodius Glaber. When the Roman commander reached the foot of Mount Vesuvius, he found himself confronted with an impossible position. The only entry to the stronghold of the escaped slaves lay through a single narrow defile, which could only be traversed in single file. To force this pass could only be done by engaging in victorious single combat against gladiators – against professional duellists specially trained for this type of single combat! Unable, or unwilling, to induce his men to take this desperate risk, Clodius resolved to blockade the gladiators until starvation compelled them to come out and fight his greatly superior forces.
On the face of it, this looked the best strategy for the Romans to adopt, but it was baffled and turned into a complete Roman disaster by a daring stratagem of Spartacus. Faced with starvation, the trapped gladiators resorted to a last desperate device. The reverse side of the mountain from the Romans was so steep as to appear inaccessible, and was, in consequence, left unguarded. Resorting to the dangerous expedient, only possible to highly trained and desperate men, of descending the cliff with improvised ladders of vine branches, the band made the descent successfully.
Once the descent was made, the rest was easy. Advancing quickly round the mountain, the attackers took the carelessly guarded Roman camp by a surprise rush. The Roman militia made little resistance and a victory as rapid, bloodless and complete as that of Prince Charles Edward Stuart over Sir John Cope at Prestonpans in 1745, ended the first Roman attempt at suppression.
In revolts, more perhaps than in anything else, ‘nothing succeeds like success’. The victory of Spartacus over Clodius gave him both arms and prestige. His small band, equipped with captured Roman arms, was speedily swelled by an influx of escaped slaves, roving shepherds, and gladiators ‘on the run’. As the numbers of the slave army increased from scores to hundreds, from hundreds to thousands, both the scope of its operations and the magnitude of the danger, that, in such an unstable society, such a revolt represented to the classical social order, cumulatively increased. The brigand had become a leader. The gang of gladiators had become an army. The riot had become a revolt!
1. Theodore Mommsen, History of Rome (Bentley, London, 1862).
2. A reference to Joseph Ziegler’s contribution to the Göttingen Septuagint, a massive study of the Old Testament of the Bible – MIA.