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With the trek to Mount Vesuvius improbably, and yet undeniably, having succeeded, Spartacus and his comrades dug in and started to prepare for the future. Whether they’d expected to get this far or not, they were quickly able to formulate a plan.
While the idea of slaves escaping and rebelling against their erstwhile masters may be heady stuff in a world where slavery has largely been abolished, there’s nothing to indicate that abolition was ever on Spartacus’ radar. His goal was much simpler. All he wanted to do was escape. But considering that he came from the center of the world’s greatest empire at the time, escape was not a simple thing. He would have to cover thousands of miles, miles that were swarming with Roman soldiers, in order to get away from Roman captivity once and for all. And all of his comrades were coming with him.
By the time they had reached Mount Vesuvius, Spartacus, Crixus, and Oenomaus had seen to it that they would be relatively well provided for. The journey from Capua to the mountain had taken them through fertile farmland, and the men and women that were tending those fields were sitting ducks to a group of gladiators. Spartacus led his band of liberated warriors to raid the farms for food, equipment, and weapons. The success of their raids was variable when it came to much-needed equipment, but at least they could get enough food to sustain themselves for a while, as well as arm themselves more thoroughly. Exchanging kitchen knives for axes, picks, and hoes, Spartacus and his men made it to Vesuvius feeling considerably more confident than when they’d fled the gladiator school.
Finding a hiding place on Mount Vesuvius was hardly difficult. Now a barren wasteland surrounding a smoking crater, Vesuvius was once a green and fertile place, covered with foliage and vines. It was difficult to traverse, too; three sides of the mountain were rocky cliffs that dropped off hundreds of feet to certain death. There was only one way up, and Spartacus’ men, once they reached the peak, carefully watched it. The gladiators holed up in the thick cover, and after some time, they realized that no one had found them. A collective sigh of relief ran through the hasty camp, and the escapees began to ask themselves a new question: now what?
The person with the answer to that question seemed to be Spartacus. He had plenty of military experience under his belt, and besides, there was something about the fire in him that lit a spark in the others. They elected him as their leader, and Crixus and Oenomaus were both seconds-in-command. There may also have been lesser-ranking commanders in the group.
Oenomaus and Crixus were both powerful gladiators in their own right, but no one could match Crixus for sheer pig-headed determination. The curly-headed gladiator had endured much in his life, and there was a bitterness in his heart that longed for more than escape. He wanted vengeance. In those early days, Spartacus managed to convince Crixus that escape was their primary goal, but there was a tension already present between the Thracian and the Gaul. The cheers of the Roman public had gone to Crixus’ head. He held onto his pride to ward off his fear, forgetting that the very same people who cheered for his victory would have cheered equally for his grisly demise and defeat.
It wasn’t long after the gladiator leaders had been elected that their leadership was put to the test. Bitterly complaining about the loss of his valuable gladiators, Batiatus had reported the incident to Rome, demanding that a legion come and recapture his warlike prisoners since it was certainly too great a task for him and his guards. Rome’s response was not what Batiatus had hoped. And part of this was because the Roman legions were not near Rome.
The First Mithridatic War, which had kept Sulla so busy in Pontus, eventually erupted into two more wars. The Third Mithridatic War, which started in 75 BCE and wouldn’t end until 63 BCE, was a large enough threat that many of the Roman legions were occupied with fighting in it. And in Spain, Quintus Sertorius, a former Marian commander, had stirred up a revolt that was almost on the same scale as Sulla’s civil wars. The Roman Republic was in its death throes, and its greatness would only be reborn as the Roman Empire in several decades’ time. For now, though, its legions were much too busy trying to uphold its crumbling borders to deal with a bunch of escapees.
Something did have to be done, however, and that was where Gaius Claudius Glaber came in. Glaber was a praetor, which was a high-ranking Roman official. He was told to sort out the gladiator problem so that Rome’s higher ranks could continue to focus on more important matters.
Little is known about Glaber except for his involvement with fighting Spartacus. However, from his actions at Vesuvius, one can venture to deduce that his laziness was matched only by his arrogance.
In the absence of the rigorously trained legionaries, Glaber had to seek manpower elsewhere, and so, he raised an ad hoc militia on the spur of the moment. His men were recruited from the surrounding area and were largely untrained; given some armor, weapons, and pay, they were told all they had to do was capture a handful of escaped slaves. Easy, right? Recruitment wasn’t hard, and Glaber didn’t anticipate any part of his task as being hard at all. He believed that a bunch of dumb slaves couldn’t possibly hope to stand against a Roman militia, even if it didn’t consist of legionaries.
There were several factors that Glaber hadn’t considered, however. The first was that Spartacus’ group no longer consisted of just 78 gladiators. The landscape through which the gladiators had fled, the farms they had raided, and even the fertile flanks of the mountain were all thickly populated with slaves. Herdsmen tending their master’s flocks, hapless workers tilling in the fields, even girls working in the homes of farmers—these men and women didn’t swing swords or train hard as the gladiators had. In fact, they couldn’t have looked more different from the muscular gladiators if they’d tried. But gladiator or no, all these Roman slaves shared one thing in common: they wanted to be free. And Spartacus, somehow, had done it. He’d broken his shackles and fled to the mountainside, and the slaves of the surrounding area followed him in droves.
By the time Glaber sought to attack and recapture Spartacus and his men, the Thracian’s group numbered in the thousands, although the exact number is unknown. Glaber’s 3,000 men, which was thought to be overly sufficient faced with less than a hundred escapees, would not be as adequate as he had originally thought.
The other factor Glaber hadn’t thought of was that Spartacus and many of his comrades were far more than ordinary slaves. They were gladiators, and some of them saw actual battle more frequently than a Roman legionary. These men fought for their lives day in and day out, and it was all they trained for. It was all they were, in the eyes of their masters. What was more, Spartacus had been a Roman soldier long before he became a gladiator, and he understood how Romans commanded their troops. He knew his enemy with a bitter intimacy.
Totally failing to account for Spartacus’ prowess, Glaber gathered up his band of impromptu soldiers and marched on Vesuvius. Looking at the mountain, he decided that capturing the slaves would be childishly simple. Vesuvius provided plenty of cover, but there was little in the way of provisions to be scavenged from it. Cut them off from the farmlands, Glaber reasoned, and they’d have no choice but to come down. He wouldn’t even have to fight them. Starvation would be his only weapon: they would either come down from the mountain or starve up there, and either way worked for him.
Besieging Mount Vesuvius wouldn’t be difficult, either, with its single route up and down from the peak. Glaber brought his army over to the only way up the mountain and plopped them down for a leisurely siege that shouldn’t make anyone break a sweat. In fact, he seems to have failed to send scouts out or even arrange sentries among his ranks. They just kicked back their heels and relaxed, waiting for a few half-starved and desperate slaves to come stumbling out of the bushes toward them.
They didn’t expect a group of warriors to appear out of the cliffs themselves and attack.
Spartacus knew that, large though his force may now be, attacking the Romans head-on would be a death sentence. Instead, he decided to do what Roman commanders often failed to account for—he thought outside the box. Glaber would be expecting Spartacus and his men to come straight down the mountain toward them on the one route that could be taken on foot. So, Spartacus’ men would do the opposite.
They would come down the cliffs.
The men and women in the camp set to work. Gathering some of the many green vines that grew all over the mountain, they braided them together, forming springy green ropes that could hold the weight of a powerful gladiator. Once the ropes were done and night had fallen, Spartacus and the bravest of his men headed for the clifftops. Quietly, they secured the ropes at the top of the cliffs, gripped their weapons, and rappelled down the steep and rocky slopes to land feet first in the middle of the Roman camp.
Utter chaos broke loose. Torches were knocked over, and screams echoed through the night, as sleeping soldiers found themselves faced with desperate bare-chested gladiators wielding biting axes and razor-sharp cleavers. Terror reigned in the camp as the disorganized militia abruptly decided that no matter how much Glaber was paying them, it wasn’t enough to fight these men who’d appeared from nowhere. They scattered, being cut down where they fled. Glaber is not mentioned in any historical account following the Battle of Mount Vesuvius, and while he may simply have retired and faded into obscurity after this embarrassment, it’s entirely possible that he was one of the many who fell that day in the face of the gladiators.
The Romans were utterly routed. They fled back down the mountain, abandoning their camp just as it was. To Spartacus and his followers, the emptied camp was a boon, giving them an abundance of armor, weapons, and horses. They were able to hold real weapons again at last. There was also the presence of something that many of the slaves hadn’t possessed in a long time, if they’d ever even had it before: money. To people whose right to own anything had long since been ripped away, the sight of gold and silver coins must have been quite intoxicating. Spartacus made himself even more popular when he decided that the entire bounty of their spoils would be fairly and equally divided among all the slaves, even though he could have easily kept it all for himself.
One can only imagine the scale of the jubilation in that destroyed Roman camp that night. Perhaps they found some wine among the Roman belongings. Maybe there was dancing, and perhaps even a little music, knowing that they had just accomplished the impossible. They had money and security now. They had a leader they trusted.
But that leader, as he gathered together the weapons and armor, knew that their fight was far from over. Their initial escape may have ended, but the war was just beginning.
The Third Servile War was born beneath the cliffs that night. And the scale of its devastation and destruction had never been seen in a slave uprising before.
