James Chambers
Spartacus is surely the most famous freedom fighter of the Ancient World. He led the slaves of Rome in revolt, he bested armies of legionaries, and even when he had the chance to escape entrapment he remained with his men.
One of the abhorrent domestic benefits of Roman imperialism was an inexhaustible supply of slaves. In the cities family servants, particularly educated Greeks, were often valued members of their households, but the easily replaceable prisoners who laboured in gangs on the country estates were on the whole treated no better than the animals and, in spite of their enormous numbers, the Romans did not even regard them as a threat to internal security: when Asian slaves rebelled in Sicily, they were so disorganized that they were soon suppressed.
In 73 BC, however, seventy-four gladiators, who had been trained to a peak of excellence in the art of killing each other for their masters’ entertainment, broke into the armoury of their training camp in Capua, stole all the weapons and fled to take refuge on the summit of Mount Vesuvius. When thousands of slaves from the neighbouring estates escaped to join the revolt, the praetor Caius Claudius Glaber marched south with a legion and confidently began to surround Vesuvius. But these rebels were not the wretched and servile products of eastern slave markets, they were Thracian, Gallic and Teutonic prisoners of war, organized and instructed by formidable gladiators and led by an instinctive military commander – a Thracian gladiator called Spartacus, who had once served as an unwilling conscript in the Roman army and had been enslaved for desertion. One by one the Roman units were cut to pieces and by the end of the year the whole of southern Italy was under the control of an army of slaves.
In the following spring the consuls Lucius Gellius Publicola and Gnaius Lentulus Clodianus took the field with two legions each. The rebel army, which had been swollen to nearly 100,000 strong by the slave population of southern Italy, was divided into two corps, one commanded by Spartacus and the other by a Gallic gladiator called Crixus. Crixus was carried away by the temptations of easy plunder; exposing themselves to the inevitable attack of a Roman army, his men roamed aimlessly from town to town until they were isolated and annihilated by Gellius at Monte Gargano. But Spartacus was not interested in plunder or vengeance; his only objective was the freedom of his followers and, knowing that they could not survive in Italy for ever, he decided to lead them north to the Alps, where they could split up and escape over the mountains to their homes. As they marched north with more slaves joining them every day, Gellius followed and Lentulus raced past to intercept them. The destruction of Crixus had been no more than the Romans had expected and what followed was as terrifying as it was incredible. In Picenum Spartacus halted his slaves, fell on the following legions of Gellius and then turned to attack the army of Lentulus a few days later. Both the consuls were crushingly defeated and half their soldiers were killed.
The last army that stood between the slaves and freedom was the army of Caius Cassius, proconsul of Cisalpine Gaul, and when that too was defeated the roads through the mountains lay open. But by then their own success had convinced the slaves that, once they scattered, the humiliated Romans would track them down relentlessly. Believing that so long as they remained united they could always defeat a Roman army, they decided instead to return to the south and take over Sicily for themselves with the support of the Sicilian slaves and eastern pirates. It was a suicidal ambition: the slaves could never hope to hold the island against a republic that was capable of conquering Spain and most of the Middle East. Nevertheless, although his own chance of freedom was as good as it would ever be, Spartacus would not desert them and he led them south again.
The Romans were the masters of the Mediterranean, but their homeland seemed to be as vulnerable as it had been in the days of Hannibal and, already demoralized by political unrest and the first violent tremors of civil war, they began to blame their self-seeking leaders and demanded that soldiers be recalled from the outposts of the empire. When the rebels reached Rhegium, in the toe of Italy, Roman ships prevented them from crossing into Sicily and the praetor Marcus Licinius Crassus came up behind them with no less than eight legions. Hoping to contain the rebels until they starved, Crassus built a wall from coast to coast across the peninsula, but in spite of the size of his army it was ridiculous to imagine that he could hold all thirty-seven miles of the wall at once. Spartacus broke through and headed east to escape out of Italy from the port of Brundisium, in the heel. Before he reached it, however, it was occupied by Marcus Lucullus, who had sailed across with an army from the Black Sea. There was now no alternative but to return to the Alps. Yet the slaves were still so confident that two dissident groups, led by the Gallic gladiators Castus and Cannicus, began to make bandit raids as Crixus had done, and Spartacus lost valuable men extricating them from Roman ambushes until they were finally cut to pieces by Crassus.
Spartacus’s army no longer had numerical superiority and at last the full military might of the Roman republic was closing in on him. Lucullus was behind him, Crassus was somewhere on his left flank and ahead of him Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey), who had just returned in glory from Spain, was marching south from Rome. There was little left to do but hide in the mountains, but the slaves were eager to attack Crassus before Pompey arrived and once again Spartacus gave in to them. He knew that their chance of victory was slight, yet so now was any hope of freedom, and a glorious death was better than slavery or torture. Before the battle he rode out in front of his army and killed his horse so that he would have no means of escape. “If I am victorious,” he said, “I shall easily get another, and if vanquished I shall not need one.” By the time Pompey reached him, Crassus had already defeated the rebels and the body of Spartacus had been found in the middle of the field, covered in wounds on a pile of slaughtered Romans.
Along the roadside from Rome to Capua, 6,000 prisoners were crucified in hideous vengeance. A catastrophe had been averted and when the two victorious commanders returned the jubilant citizens elected them consuls. To the Romans, Spartacus was the dangerous bandit who had threatened their republic with revolution when it was already weakened by political rivalries, and it was not until their empire had fallen that he was remembered as a hero. All he had ever wanted was freedom and to that end he had defied the most powerful nation in the world, dominated southern Italy as Hannibal had done and defeated three Roman armies in open battle. It had taken more than a dozen legions to destroy him and his downfall had been due at least in part to the aimless indecision of the desperate fugitives whom he refused to desert.