Spartacus: The Leader of the Roman Slaves. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1962
In the spring of 72 BC, therefore, the regular Roman army, the invincible legions of the Empire, were sent against the slaves. Two full consular armies, each under the personal command of a consul, took the field – six legions, with their auxiliary cavalry; a grand total of about 40,000 strong. In antiquity, with its more primitive transport, classical armies rarely exceeded 40,000 to 50,000 men. The best troops of the Republic were then engaged overseas, in Spain and Asia. In Spain, the civil war still smouldered, and Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great) had just been sent to finish it off. In Asia, Rome was still engaged in her desperate ‘Thirty Years’ War’ with the redoubtable Mithridates, King of Pontus, against whom the Roman army had just won a brilliant victory under Lucullus. It will be recalled that Spartacus’ own tribe, the Maedi, might have been the allies of Mithridates in his earlier war against Rome. None the less, the forces at the disposal of the consuls seemed amply sufficient, in view of their vast superiority in training and equipment, to finish off any number of untrained and ill-armed slaves.
Lack of military discipline has its psychological aspect, and frequently this is more disastrous than the lack of actual military experience on the battlefield. At this moment of desperate peril to the slave army, this lack of cohesion now manifested itself with disastrous results. Whereas the slave army in the two Sicilian wars seems to have consisted mainly of Asiatics, that of Spartacus and Crixus consisted chiefly of Thracians and of Gauls, each of which followed their own national leader.
And, obviously, these leaders were men of entirely different mental and military calibre. Spartacus was an outstanding personality, a great man and a military genius: a natural leader arising from the ranks of the gladiators by sheer ability and strength of character.
Contrarily, his associates throughout seem to have been little more than ordinary barbarians, swollen ‘with a little brief authority’, more anxious for loot and luxury than for a permanent victory for the slave class. The differences between the leaders seemed to have been reflected in their followers, who could not unite even in face of the deadly menace that threatened their common interests.
Hence, when the Roman armies finally marched under the personal command of the consuls, they found the slave army divided into two separate and, it would seem, antagonistic camps: the Germans and Gauls under Crixus and Oenomaus; the Thracians and the rest under Spartacus. The latter wisely kept to the difficult hill country of the Apennines, which afforded ideal cover for waging a guerrilla war, whilst the other army, under Crixus, marched south without any particular aim, except plunder.
Such a suicidal policy played right into the hands of the Romans, with whom ‘divide and rule’ had always been a primary maxim of state policy. They were, indeed, the original inventors of the phrase, if not of the policy. Accordingly, they began their 72 BC campaign with a spectacular victory. Whilst the consuls for that year, Lucius Gellius and Gnaeus Lentulus, proceeded to pen Spartacus up in the hilly country of the Apennines, the praetor, Quintus Arius, the successor of the ill-fated Varinius, succeeded in running down the Celtic army of Crixus on Mount Garganus, in Apulia, and in completely destroying it. Amongst the slain was Crixus himself.
No accurate details of the battle itself have survived, though it has been conjectured from the meagre information at our disposal that the Celtic slaves fought in their traditional national style. Formed up behind a circle of wagons, they received and repulsed the initial Roman attack, but were lured outside their entrenchments by a feigned flight, in a manner reminiscent of the later Norman victory at Hastings (AD 1066), where a similar style of fighting on the part of the Saxons was defeated by the very similar tactics of the Normans of Duke William. Once in the open, Crixus and his disordered bands could not withstand the disciplined attack of the heavily armed Roman legions. The ill-fated secession came to a summary and bloody end, and the few survivors of the holocaust took refuge with the army of Spartacus.
The slave-general was now faced with a desperate situation. The end of the servile war appeared to be at hand – the defeat and destruction of the slaves. Eager to put an end to its ravages, which affected directly the revenues of the land-owning plutocracy, the consuls embarked upon a grand encircling ‘pincers movement’ (to employ the technical phraseology of modern war), the aim of which was to surround and annihilate the slave army in a kind of classical ‘Sedan’. Whilst Arius and Gellius moved up from the south to take Spartacus in the rear, the other consular army under Lentulus barred the road of the slaves to the north. The lion was trapped. Spartacus, the professional ‘net’ fighter, was himself caught in a net!
Under such desperate circumstances, Spartacus rose to the greatest heights. His consummate ability both as a strategist and a tactician were now displayed to the full. Hannibal himself had never struck swifter or more decisive blows than did the gladiator general at the head of his improvised army of slaves. The sequel is thus described by Max Beer in Social Struggles in Antiquity: [1]
The victorious praetorian army then made a junction with one of the two consular armies, which, divided into two columns, sought out Spartacus. The latter did not keep them waiting. With the greater part of his army – the smaller part he ordered to hold the other consular army in check – he hurled himself upon the first consular army [that is, that of Lentulus – FAR] and completely defeated it. He speedily joined the remaining section of his army, attacked the same day the second consular army, and also obtained a complete victory over the latter. The baggage and a great multitude of prisoners fell into the hands of Spartacus.
The ‘turning movement’ of the Roman generals had itself been turned! It was probably the most complete and spectacular disaster that the Roman army had experienced since Hannibal’s overwhelming victory at Cannae in 216 BC. The only detail in which the double victory missed completion lay in the escape of the consuls. No doubt this was due to the weakness of the slaves in cavalry for pursuit. Otherwise, the victory was as complete as Hannibal’s had been. The Roman armies had ceased to exist. The Roman eagles had fallen into the hands of despised slaves.
Such an outcome seemed a breach of the laws of nature in a society accustomed from times immemorial to the division of ‘civilised’ society into bond and free. One can almost hear the Roman historian Annaeus Florus gnash his teeth as he exclaims bitterly: ‘Thus, those who ought to have been hauled away by the overseers, themselves pursued praetorian generals in flight from the battlefield.’ We are reminded of the criticism that a certain modern imperialistic poet seemed to think ‘the defeat of an English regiment was against the laws of nature'!
The road to Rome now lay open before Spartacus, as, after Cannae, it had lain open before Hannibal. But, with similar prudence, the gladiator general declined to take it. His victories had been the result of his own genius and of the desperate courage of the slaves. But he did not command a regular army, and he had, in any case, no munitions of war, nor siege artillery, such as were necessary for the capture of a great walled city like Rome. Moreover, the defeat of Crixus had demonstrated that inherent weakness of a slave army; its lack, not only of military discipline, but of the even more essential revolutionary prerequisite of moral unity. This fighting morale, necessary to sustain the slaves in years of long drawn-out war, could only come from a social programme for the future of a slave class, freed from their masters and themselves the masters of Rome, but such a revolutionary programme was not yet possible for the slaves, only lately savage tribesmen, whose own ancient way of life had been destroyed during the agony of their slavery and who clung hopelessly to the idea of a return to the happy days of their past, a past that could never return, least of all for them.
The slaves could win battles, but after a victory they just disintegrated. Such an army could win battles, but could hardly hope to win a protracted war, particularly against such a tremendous opponent as the Roman Empire, against the granite structure of which so many more powerful opponents had merely dashed themselves to pieces. Anyhow, was it not the time-honoured and justified boast of the Roman army that however many battles it lost, it always won the last? Spartacus had no resources for a fight to the finish against so titanic an adversary.
These considerations weighed with Spartacus, who appears to have been able to survey soberly the possibilities of victory. Instead of marching south on Rome, he determined, whilst the going was still good, to retire beyond the Alps, beyond what were then the limits of the Roman state. Whether he then intended to found a state of his own, perhaps based on the ideas of social justice and equality akin to those of Heliopolis, or whether he merely hoped to return to his ancestral home, Thrace, dispersing his army on the way, we have no means of determining. Anyhow, when the victorious slave army marched, it marched northwards, towards the Alps, and not southwards towards Rome. Marharbal, Hannibal’s cavalry commander, had urged the great general to march on Rome after his overwhelming victory at Cannae. When Hannibal refused, Marharbal made the famous remark: ‘The gods have taught you, Hannibal, how to win victories, but not how to use them.’ We do not know whether there was any ‘Marharbal’ in the slave army to reproach Spartacus for his failure to pursue a bolder policy and to risk his all on the capture of Rome.
Before taking the northern road, which would take his followers definitely out of the Roman world, Spartacus took a spectacular revenge for the death of Crixus. Our authority describes this sensational infliction of ‘punishment to fit the crime’:
He arranged a solemn funeral for Crixus, and, on the occasion, compelled 300 Roman prisoners to appear as gladiators and engage in mortal combat in the sight of the entire Spartacist army.
Our author adds:
The despised slaves were now the spectators – the proud Romans were now the prize-fighters in the arena. Of all the news concerning the losses which had hitherto been suffered in this gladiatorial war, not any wounded the Romans so deeply, so bitterly, as this. The death as gladiators of 300 Roman warriors inflicted the most ignominious insult upon the majesty of Rome, and made an indelible stain upon its honour. [2]
That this last statement by Max Beer is in no way an exaggeration is proved by the brief but eloquent comment of the Roman historian Florus in his Epitome of Roman History, as translated in the Loeb Classical Library. [3] Florus says of Spartacus:
His men brought to their leader the insignia and fasces captured from the consuls and praetors, nor were they refused by a man who, from being a Thracian mercenary, had become a soldier, and from a soldier a deserter, then a highwayman, and, finally, thanks to his strength, a gladiator. He also celebrated the obsequies of his officers who had fallen in battle with funerals like those of Roman generals, and ordered his captives to fight at their [funeral] pyres, just as though he wished to wipe out all his past dishonour by having become, instead of a gladiator, a giver of gladiatorial shows! Next, elated by these victories, he entertained the project – in itself a sufficient disgrace to us – of attacking the City of Rome.
One can almost hear the gasps of outraged class-feeling running through the pages of our Roman ‘Tory’, even at a distance of eighteen centuries, and it is upon the testimony of men filled with such prejudices that we have to depend for virtually all that we know of the greatest social revolution of the entire classical era!
The funeral games of Crixus had the double effect of striking terror into the Romans and of indicating the magnanimity of Spartacus himself, who thus showed himself free from personal vindictiveness against the Gauls, whose unpardonable desertion had brought their doom on their own heads. Having fulfilled this double objective, the slave army marched north into Cisalpine Gaul (the modern Lombardy), which was then the most northerly region of the Roman Empire. Once over the Alps, the slaves would leave definitely behind them the Roman world – and the servile society of the Mediterranean. The dreams of Rome, the yearning for the past, the need to shake the dust of the arena forever from their feet, the urge to flee from the humiliations of servitude and the deep disgrace of a free warrior forced to serve in the gladiator show, combined to send Spartacus and his gladiators, with their great following of armed slaves, towards the border of the Roman world, towards freedom.
Rome, however, did not allow this vast slave emigration to proceed without a final attempt at prevention, any more than Pharaoh, King of Egypt, had done at a still earlier period in the world’s history in the case of his escaping Israelite slaves. In slave societies, such as ancient Egypt and Rome, such examples were too contagious! Accordingly, the Roman frontier army, under Gaius Cassius, the pro-praetor (military governor) of the province, barred the path of the slaves near the town of Mutina, at the foothills of the Alps. Again, however, the invincible ex-gladiator triumphed. The praetor escaped with difficulty, but his army ceased to exist.
The road to the north, across the Alps, now lay open and unimpeded before the slaves. The road to freedom! But they did not take it. At the last minute, Spartacus turned back. This was the decisive turning-point in the sequence of his revolt: the moment at which it passed from a blind revolt born of despair into a definitive social revolution. For, once back in Italy, in the heart of the Empire, it was now make or break: get on or get out! Either the slaves must crush the Republic, which was synonymous with the servile civilisation of the Mediterranean, or the Republic must crush the slaves. Henceforth, it was a class war without mercy or quarter, waged to the bitter end, as class wars always are. It was, in the words of the Greek historian Polybius, an ‘inexpiable war’, like that earlier war of Carthage against her mercenaries in the third century BC, or like those terrible civil wars in Russia and Spain in our own times. In such a war, it is class survival itself that is at stake, and such a war has only one effective motto: vae victis – woe to the conquered!
We do not know the motive for this sudden and dramatic change in the strategy of Spartacus and his army. Was it due to the intoxicating effect of this last victory on the slaves, or to a desire to emulate the ill-fated Crixus and reap an ample harvest of plunder, including the richest prize of all, Rome, the Eternal City, instead of the dreary trek into the inhospitable north?
Or did Spartacus calmly weigh up the current situation which his unexpected victories had disclosed and conclude that the Roman colossus had feet of clay and that another well-aimed blow by determined men could bring the colossus down and smash its vast network of exploitation?
Conjectures of this nature are intriguing pastimes, but we simply do not know. The mind of the great slave warrior and his companions is obscured for us by the mists of ages. All that we know is that the slave army suddenly, at the very foot of the Alps, turned south and marched right down the Italian peninsula to the south.
The idea of attacking Rome itself appears to have crossed the minds of the slaves, who even seem to have made a feint against the capital, as if they meditated a serious attack. But, if so, it was not seriously pressed home.
Doubtless, many a German barbarian in the slave camp regarding the distant City of the Seven Hills, muttered what their remote descendant Blücher was to say of London in 1815. For Marshal Blücher, that reincarnation of the ancient German barbarians who overthrew the Roman Empire, was in this respect typical of all barbarians, from Attila the Hun and Alaric the Goth, those ancient conquerors of Rome, to his own countrymen, those more modern German barbarians, Hitler and Goering. After Waterloo, Blücher visited London and was shown the City from the dome of St Paul’s. Here, he turned to his staff and made his historic remark: ‘What a city to sack!’
But the capture of Rome was the end, not the beginning of the war; and, in any case, the necessary siege apparatus was lacking. Still, a desperate bid might just conceivably have succeeded. After all, the slaves in Rome must have sympathised with such a liberating army and might have opened the gates from within. Spartacus at the gates of Rome in 72 BC, like the Jacobites at the gates of London in AD 1745, makes us agog with speculation. But, in both cases, the historic moment – if it really was one – was missed. Spartacus, like the Young Pretender, marched the other way. And historians are left with the futile task of debating on ‘might-have-beens'!
Instead of launching an attack upon Rome, Spartacus led his men past the city onwards towards the extreme south of the Italian peninsula, where his army seems to have made headquarters at the port of Thurii.
The advance of Spartacus filled ‘the Senate and People of Rome’ with terror. Nothing like this had ever been known, even in the most desperate hours during which Rome had ‘lived dangerously’ – and the Eternal City had known many such hours! The slaves were at the gates of the city and, inside, every slave was a potential enemy, a permanent Fifth Column! Did not an old proverb say, ‘so many slaves, so many enemies'? The public elections produced no candidates. No one was anxious for the ‘honour’ of facing the invincible Thracian. The best generals of the Republic were away in Asia and Spain. To recall them when actually engaged with the enemy was hardly feasible, even if desired. The usual custom in such desperate emergencies was to proclaim a temporary dictator with absolute emergency powers. But it would be too humiliating to resort to such a desperate expedient against a sub-human species of slaves!
However, something had to be done. Without going quite as far as a dictator, the Senate appointed Marcus Licinius Crassus, surnamed Dives (’the Rich’) from his enormous wealth, a kind of Roman ‘Rothschild’, as praetor, with extraordinary power to supersede even the discredited consuls. Crassus, as the leader of the plutocracy and the richest man in Rome, had more to lose from the victory of the slaves than had anyone else, and had, therefore, every interest in their suppression. It was ‘Rothschild’ versus the revolution.
1. Max Beer, Social Struggles in Antiquity (Parsons, London, 1929).
2. Max Beer, Social Struggles in Antiquity (Parsons, London, 1929).
3. John Selby Watson’s translation of Florus’ Epitome of Roman History – MIA.