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Roman RebellionOLD NEWSSpartacus Leads Slave Rebellionby Richard SheppardSpartacus was a warrior from one of the tribes that roamed eastern Europeduring the first century B.C. He served with the Roman army before beingarrested and sold into slavery as punishment for some crime, possibly desertion.According to Plutarch, the ancient historian, Spartacus was sold at theslave market of Rome in 73 B.C. Plutarch wrote:Some say that, when Spartacus was taken to the slave-marketin Rome, he fell asleep there, and a snake coiled itself upon his face.His wife, who had been enslaved with him, was a prophetess, a priestessof the frenzied cult of Dionysus. Seeing the snake on her husband's face,she declared that it was a lucky sign portending that Spartacus would growpowerful.Luck, however, seemed to desert Spartacus and his wife when they wereboth sold to a man named Lentulus Batiates, who ran a school for gladiators.This meant that Spartacus would be trained to entertain the public by fightingwith weapons in the arena.Spartacus and his wife were sent to the city of Capua, about twenty milesfrom Mount Vesuvius in central Italy. There Spartacus was enrolled in hismaster's gladiator school, which was essentially a heavily-guarded prison,where two hundred gladiators were trained by whip-wielding martial-artsinstructors.Although some of the gladiators in this school were convicted criminals,most were prisoners of war from northern Europe. They were taught to fighteach other using a variety of bizarre equipment, including nets, fishingspears, unbalanced swords, and armor that hid the face but left the stomachbare. Although they knew that they were doomed, the enslaved gladiatorsalso knew that an aura of glamor surrounded their profession. The most skillfulgladiators, who survived many duels, became celebrities before they died.In the city of Pompey, Roman merchants decorated their villas with portraitsof champion gladiators, and infatuated girls scrawled love-notes to gladiatorson public walls.Spartacus, however, felt no attraction to that sort of celebrity. Heallegedly told his fellow-gladiators, "If we must fight, we might aswell fight for freedom."Inspired by the fiery rhetoric of Spartacus, and the optimistic foretellingsof his wife, the gladiators staged a riot at the school. According to Plutarch:Two hundred gladiators tried to escape, but the guardsrecaptured most of them. Only seventy-eight men managed to fight their wayout of the school, using weapons they had found in the kitchen, such aschopping-knives and spits. Fleeing through the streets of the city, thefugitives had the good luck to find several carts full of gladiators' weapons,which were being shipped to another city. After arming themselves with theseweapons, the gladiators had no trouble fighting their way out of Capua.They paused at a defensible place in the countryside, where they electeda chief and two captains. As their chief they chose Spartacus. Althoughhe was a barbarian from one of the nomad tribes, Spartacus was brave, intelligent,and polite-more like a civilized Greek than a wild man from the Balkans...Hewas accompanied by his wife, who had escaped with him... When some soldierscame out of Capua to recapture them, Spartacus led the fugitives into battle.The soldiers were routed, and the gladiators captured from them a quantityof regular military equipment. As soon as the fugitives got their handson conventional weapons and armor, they threw away their inferior gladiatorequipment.Spartacus led his band south toward Mount Vesuvius, a volcano which hadbeen inactive for generations. Along the way, the gladiators plundered plantationsand liberated slaves, many of whom accepted Spartacus's invitation to jointhe rebel gladiators in a life of banditry.Slaves made up a large percentage of the population of Itay in the firstcentury B.C. Nobody knows exactly what percentage was enslaved, but in ruralareas the numbers were probably comparable to those in the slave statesof America during the 1850s, where there was one slave for every two freepeople. Most slaves in Italy were foreigners who had been captured byconquering Roman armies in northern Europe, North Africa, or the MiddleEast. Local authorities in Capua, alarmed by the growing slave rebellion,requested help from the central government in Rome. An army of three thousandsoldiers marched from Rome against Spartacus, who retreated with his menup the slope of Mount Vesuvius.Plutarch wrote:The gladiators took refuge atop the mountain, which wasaccessible only by one narrow and difficult passage. By keeping this passagewayguarded, the Roman general thought that he had caught the gladiators ina trap, since the mountain top was surrounded on all other sides with steepand slippery cliffs. On the mountaintop was a crater, in which grew a profusionof wild vines. Cutting as many vines as they needed, the gladiators twistedthem into ropes,and constructed ladders long enough to reach the bottomof the cliffs. By this means they all descended except for one man, whoremained at the top long enough to lower their weapons; then he also descended.The Romans had failed to notice what was happening, so the gladiators decidedto attack them by surprise. They stormed into the rear of the Roman campand captured it.Many of the slaves in that region now revolted against theirmasters and joined the rebel gladiators.After Spartacus defeated the army that had been sent to subdue him, theRoman senate dispatched two larger armies against the slaves. Accordingto the ancient historian Appian, these were not regular Roman armies, but"forces picked up in haste and at random, for the Romans did not considerthis a war yet, but a raid, something like an outbreak of robbery."Spartacus, however, attacked and defeated both of the fresh armies sentagainst him. According to Appian, "The Roman general himself only narrowlyavoided captured by a gladiator, and Spartacus did capture the general'shorse."Every time Spartacus won a victory against the Romans, more slaves joinedhis rebellion. By 72 B.C., less than a year after the gladiators had escapedfrom Capua, Spartacus was commanding an army of seventy thousand men. MostRoman armies were fighting wars of conquest abroad, so the regular troopsin Italy found themselves outnumbered by the forces of Spartacus.After the rebel slaves smashed two armies commanded by the highest officialsof the Roman Republic, some senators feared that Spartacus might next attackRome itself.Plutarch wrote:Despite his success, Spartacus was wise enough to knowthat he could not match the power of the whole Roman Empire. He thereforemarched his army north, intending to escape from Italy by crossing the Alps.His plan, after crossing the mountains, was to disband his army and sendhis men to their homes in Thrace and Gaul. But the gladiators, puffed upwith their ownsuccess, would not obey Spartacus. Instead of escapingto freedom, they roamed up and down the Italian peninsula, looting and plundering.By 71 B.C., it was difficult for the Roman government to find a qualifiedgeneral willing to lead an army against Spartacus. Few leaders were willingto risk the disgrace of being defeated by an army of slaves. Appian wrote:This dangerous conflict, which the Romans had at firstridiculed and despised as a mere rebellion of gladiators, had now lastedtwo years. When it was time to elect new officials to deal with the crisis,all the political leaders were afraid to run for office. Nobody offeredhimself as a candidate until M. Licinius Crassus, a very rich nobleman,agreed to run for the office of praetor.After being elected, Crassus raised an army six new legions. Combiningthis force with four existing legions, Crassus marched against Spartacus.Crassus expected that Spartacus would now flee north toward the Alps,so he positioned his main force to block this escape route. He then senthis lieutenant, Mummius, with two legions to harrass the slaves and tryto provoke them into marching north. Mummius had strict orders not to fighta pitched battle, but he disobeyed his instructions and led a frontal assaultagainst the slaves. He was routed. After severely rebuking Mummius, Crassussentenced the defeated legions to suffer the traditional Roman punishmentof decimation. Plutarch described the process as follows:The soldiers were divided into groups of ten men each,who drew lots to see which of them would be executed. Those who drew theunlucky lots were killed in appalling and terrible ways, suffering disgraceas well as death before the eyes of the whole army, which assembled to watchthem die.Crassus then led his main army against Spartacus, who retreated southwarddown the Italian peninsula to the isthmus of Bruttium. When Spartacus reachedthe straits separating Italy from Sicily, he could retreat no further.Plutarch wrote:Meeting with some Cilician pirate ships in the straits,Spartacus decided to send a small force to Sicily, where a slave rebellionhad been been extinguished only a few years earlier. By landing two thousandmen in Sicily, Spartacus hoped to rekindle the fire which had so recentlybeen smothered, and which seemed to need only a little fuel to set it blazingagain. But after the pirates had struck a bargain with him, and collectedtheir payment, they deceived Spartacus and sailed away.To trap Spartacus on the peninsula of Bruttium, Crassus built a fortificationacross the entire isthmus. According to Plutarch:Much faster than anyone had expected, Crassus completedthis great feat of engineering, digging a ditch from one sea to the other,a distance of thirty-seven and a half miles, right across the neck of land.The ditch-fifteen feet wide and equally deep-was backed by a good, strongwall and a paling.Appian wrote:One day, Spartacus tried to break through the wall, buthe failed. Crassus killed about 6000 of Spartacus's men in the morning andas many more towards evening. The morale of the Roman soldiers had beenimproved so dramatically by their recent decimation, that only three Romanswere killed and seven wounded in this battle.The siege resumed. Spartacus did not make another serious attempt tobreak through the wall until he learned that Crassus was being reinforcedby the a fresh Roman army which had just returned to Italy from Spain. Hopingto escape before the enemy's reinforcements arrived, Spartacus made a dashwith his whole army through the lines of the besieging force, and fled northwardwith Crassus in pursuit. Spartacus still hoped to escape over the Alps tohis homeland, but he found his northern escape-route blocked at Brundusiumby a third Roman army, which had been recalled from Macedonia by the senate.At this point, early in 71 B.C., Spartacus decided to risk fighting a decisivebattle against the army of Crassus.Plutarch wrote.Spartacus, seeing that he could no longer avoid a pitchedbattle, set his army in array. When his horse was brought to him, he drewout his sword and killed it, saying that if he won the day he would geta better horse from the enemy; and if he lost the day he should have noneed of any horse.Appian wrote:The battle was long and bloody, as might have been expectedwith so many thousands of desperate men. Spartacus was wounded in the thighwith a spear and sank upon his knee, holding his shield in front of himand contending in this way against his assailants until he and the greatmass of those with him were surrounded and slain. The remainder of his armywas thrown into confusion and butchered in crowds. So great was the slaughterthat that it was impossible to count the dead Spartacans. The Roman losswas about one thousand. The body of Spartacus was not found. A large numberof his men fled from the battlefield to the mountains, but Crassus followedthem. Split into four separate groups, the slaves continued to fight untilthey all perished except six thousand, who were captured and crucified alongthe whole road from Capua to Rome.The fate of Spartacus's wife was not recorded.SOURCES:The Life of Crassus. by Plutarch.The History of Rome. by Appian.OLD NEWS (ISSN 1047-3068) is published six timesa year by Susquehanna Times & Magazine, Inc. Each issue is 11"x 17" (tabloid) size, 12 pages long and contains 4-6 articles on historicaltopics ranging in time from the fifth century B.C. to the 1920s. Subscriptionscost $17.00 per year; $33.00 for two years.OLD NEWS: 3 West Brandt Blvd. Landisville, PA 17538-1105(717) 898-9207. Return to Old News home page |
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