Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (38 page)

ment, see Shaw, “Bandits,” 34–35.

29 Tarkontidmotos: Shaw, “Bandit Highlands,” 226 for references. On the term “ritu-

alized friendship,” the basis for much premodern diplomacy, see G. Herman,
Ritual-

ized Friendship and the Greek City
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Shaw,

“Tyrants,” demonstrates how various forms of ritualized friendship mediated relations

among Romans, Herod, bandits, petty dynasts, and other power players in Judaea of

the late first century BCE.

30 On Mauretania, see Brent D. Shaw, “Autonomy and Tribute: Mountain and Plain

in Mauretania Tingitana,” in
Désert et montagne au Maghreb: Hommage à Jean Dresch
(
Re-

vue de l’occident musulman et de la méditerranée
41–42 [1986]: 66–89); idem,
At the Edge of

the Corrupting Sea: The Twenty-Third J. L. Myres Memorial Lecture
(University of Oxford,

2006).

31 On the Roman army as occupying force, see Isaac,
Limits
, chap. 3; Mattern,
Rome
,

101–4. See also Alston,
Soldier
, chap. 5; he argues that the army was not very good at

suppressing revolts and was mainly engaged in policing for banditry and other small-

scale threats. Alston also suggests persuasively that the army in Egypt was a strategic

balance to Syria’s large force, intended to deter the revolt of the latter province. To my

182 Mattern

knowledge he is the first scholar to argue that the possibility of revolt in heavily armed

provinces determined the strategic disposition of the army in other provinces, which

seems quite possible.

32 On the army of Judaea, see Isaac,
Limits
, 105–7; on Mauretania, see Shaw, “Au-

tonomy” and “On the Edge.”

33 On recruitment, for references see Mattern,
Rome
, 85; also Yann Le Bohec,
The

Imperial Roman Army
(New York: Hippocrene, and London: Batsford, 1994) (=
L’Armée

romaine sous le Haut-Empire
[Paris: Picard, 1989]), 68–102; Alston,
Soldier
, chap. 3, emphasizes that the garrison of Egypt was drawn from throughout the western provinces in

all periods (though recruits from Africa predominated after the first century) and that

Egyptian evidence contradicts the view of the army as a closed caste having little inter-

action with the native population. On the size of the auxiliary army, see P. A. Holder,

Studies in the Auxilia of the Roman Army from Augustus to Trajan
, British Archaeological

Reports (Oxford, 1980); A. R. Birley, “The Economic Effects of Roman Frontier Policy,”

in
The Roman West in the Third Century,
ed. A. King and M. Henic, British Archaeological

Reports (Oxford, 1981), 1:39–43.

34 For what follows, see Jonathan Roth, “Jewish Military Forces in the Roman Ser-

vice,” paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature, San

Antonio, Texas, November 23, 2004 (www.josephus.yorku.ca/Roth%20Jewish%20

Forces.pdf, accessed August 15, 2008).

35 Woolf,
Becoming Roman
, 240–41.

36 On the Greek East, the foundational study is Erich S. Gruen’s two-volume mas-

terpiece
The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1984). This may be the only scholarly work to date to give

full consideration to the role of indigenous politics and institutions in Roman imperial-

ism. I would argue that mechanisms similar to what Gruen describes operated in later

periods.

37 Shaw, “Tyrants,” 196.

38 For a subtle analysis of what follows and of the workings of personal power and

“ritualized friendship,” see Shaw, “Tyrants.” On the mechanisms by which personal

power worked, Lendon,
Empire
, is a key contribution.

39 For a concise history of Roman rule over the Jews from Herod’s death, see Mar-

tin Goodman,
Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations
(New York: Knopf,

2007), 379–423.

40 A good introductory history of Sicily under the republic is R.J.A. Wilson,
Sicily

under the Roman Empire: The Archaeology of a Roman Province, 36 b.c.–a.d. 535
(Warminster,

UK: Aris and Phillips, 1990), 17–32. On taxation in Sicily, Cicero
Against Verres
2.3.13–15;

also see Christopher Schäfer, “Steuerpacht und Steuerpächter in Sizilien zur Zeit des

Verres,”
Münstersche Beiträge zur antiken Handelsgeschichte
11 (1992): 23–38, with full bib-

liography. Cicero normally refers to local tax collectors as
decumani
(e.g., 2.3.21, 66, 75),

so called because they collected the 10 percent grain tax of Hiero; he also calls them

publicani
(e.g., 2.3.77). Cicero refers to one representative of the Italian company that

collected the pasture tax in Sicily, named Carpinatius (2.2.169ff., 2.3.167), but there is no

evidence of a bureaucratic apparatus exported by the Italian corporations beyond this

one individual.

Counterinsurgency 183

41 Claudii Marcelli and Cicero: Cicero
Againt Verres
2.2.8, 2.1.16–17, 2.2.122.
Socii atque

i amici populi Romani, mei autem necessarii
: 2.1.15. Segesta and the Scipiones: 2.4.79–80.

Syracuse and the Marcelli: 2.2.36, 50–51. Messana and Verres: 2.4.17–26.

42
Hospitium
between Roman aristocrats and the Sicilian elite: Cicero
Against Verres
,

2.2.24, 83, 96, 2.3.18, 2.4.25, 49, and many more references throughout. On
hospitium
,

see also Koenraad Verboven,
The Economy of Friends: Economic Aspects of
Amicitia
and

Patron age in the Late Republic
, Collection Latomus 269 (Brussels: Éditions Latomus,

2002), 51, 58. Heius of Messana: Cicero
Against Verres
2.4.18–19. Sthenius of Thermae:

Cicero
Against Verres
2.2.110; see also 2.2.113, where Sthenius is acquitted by Pompey,

another former guest; Sthenius is Cicero’s own
hospes
also, 2.2.227.

43 Cicero calls them
Venerii
; e.g.,
Against Verres
2.3.61, 62, 65, and many more refer-

ences. On the cult, see Wilson,
Sicily
, 282–84. While there was no “Roman” army in

Sicily, there was a small Sicilian navy: Cicero
Against Verres
1.13, 2.3.186.

44 For aristocrats prosecuting their enemies, see the cases of Sopater (Cicero
Against

Verres
2.2.68–75) and Sthenis (2.2.83–118).

45 For cities sending delegations to the senate or to a patron, see, e.g., Cicero
Against

Verres
2.2.10–11, 2.2.122.

46 See, e.g., Cicero
Against Verres
, 2.2.8, 2.3.67.

47 On nomadic tribes and their relations with the Roman Empire, a wide scholarship

exists. See notably Isaac,
Limits
, 68–77; Brent D. Shaw, “Fear and Loathing: The Nomad

Menace and Roman North Africa,” in
L’Afrique romaine: Les Conférences Vanier 1980
, ed.

C. M. Wells, 29–50 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1982); D. Graf, “Rome and the

Saracens: Reassessing the Nomad Menace,” in
L’Arabie préislamique et son environment

historique et culturel
, ed. T. Fahd, 341–400 (Strasbourg: Université des Sciences Humaines

de Strasbourg, 1989).

48 Note recently Cullen Murphy,
Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of

America
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007); Thomas Madden,
Empires of Trust: How

Rome Built—and America Is Building—a New World
(New York: Dutton, 2008).

49 In a paper presented at the conference titled “Invasion: The Use and Abuse of

Comparative History,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, November 21, 2008.

184 Mattern

8. Slave Wars of Greece and Rome

Barry Strauss

Butchery of civilians, charismatic religious leaders proclaiming

reigns of terror, insurgents running circles around regular soldiers,

legionaries chasing runaway slaves into the hills, rows of crosses lin-

ing the roads with the corpses of captured insurgents, shrines later

springing up to the martyred memory of a chivalrous rebel: some of

the images are familiar, some are not; some were popularized by Hol-

lywood, others seemingly “ripped from the headlines,” as the tabloid

phrase goes. They are real images of ancient slave revolts. Except for a

seventy-year period in the Late Roman Republic, however, from about

140 to 70 BC, slave revolts proved rare events in the ancient world.

That may seem odd, because slavery played a central role in the

economy of Greece and Rome. Millions of men and women around

the ancient Mediterranean lived and died in chains. Most of them made

their peace with the banal truth of enslavement; some found an escape

route in manumission, which was more common in ancient than in

modern slave societies. Others responded to mistreatment and humili-

ation with daily acts of resistance. Slaves misbehaved, manipulated the

master, or fled—or simply accepted their fates and made the necessary

accommodations. Yet rebellion—that is, armed and collective uprisings

in search of freedom—was exceptional.

Spartacus, the rebel gladiator whose revolt upended Italy between 73

and 71 BC, was as unusual as he is famous. Special conditions, as we shall

see, made the Late Roman Republic the golden age of ancient slave

wars. For the rest of antiquity, few slaves were willing to risk what little

they had in a war against the Roman legions or Greek phalanx; fewer

still had the know-how or the opportunity to fight in a rebel army, let

alone to raise one. But masters worried nonetheless, and the relative

scarcity of revolt reflects in inverse proportion the attention that mas-

ters devoted to security. Elite Greek and Roman opinion called for con-

stant vigilance by free people against violence by slaves. A whole range

of precautions by masters became common sense, from not buying

strong-willed individuals as slaves to keeping slaves of the same nation-

ality apart, lest they make common cause.

Still, revolts broke out, even in other periods than the late repub-

lic. Before describing them we need to define terms, because ancient

slavery was not a monolithic institution. The ancient world knew vari-

ous kinds of nonfree labor. The two main ones were chattel slavery

and communal servitude.1 Chattel slavery is the commonsense notion

of slavery, familiar today from such places as the American South, the

Caribbean, or Brazil, in which individuals are imported from abroad

and bought and sold like objects. Communal servitude refers to the col-

lective enslavement of whole groups, either within one community or

across community lines. For the sake of clarity, many scholars refer to

communal slaves as serfs, although the conditions of communal servi-

tude were harsher than medieval serfdom. Serfs, for instance, could not

be killed without cause, but the victims of communal servitude could.

Yet the ancients tended to treat chattel slaves with greater contempt

than those in communal servitude, so the distinction between serf and

slave makes rough sense.

Chattel slavery was widespread in classical and Hellenistic Greece

and in republican and imperial Rome. Athens and other city-states

such as Aegina and Chios, along with various parts of Anatolia, were

centers of Greek slavery, while Italy and Sicily and the Spanish mines

were foci of Roman slavery. Before its destruction by Rome in 146 BC,

Carthage also fostered large-scale slavery in North Africa. Communal

servitude was primarily a Greek phenomenon, found in such places as

Thessaly, Crete, and Argos, but the best-known example was the helots

of Sparta. They consisted of two regional groups, each having been

conquered separately by Sparta: the helots of (Spartan-controlled)

Laconia, in the southeastern Peloponnesus, and the helots of (Spartan-

controlled) Messenia, in the southwest.

186 Strauss

A preliminary word about sources is also called for. Ancient warfare

is relatively well documented, but the same is not true of ancient slave

revolts. Relatively few records survive. In part, this represents bad luck,

but it probably also reflects a lack of interest in the subject by the an-

cient elite. Slave wars offered little glory, less loot, and potentially a lot

of embarrassment. Slaves were deemed contemptible. It was no honor

to conquer them, a truth that the Romans recognized by refusing to

allow a triumph to a general for merely winning a slave war. Nor was

there much chance for booty, since commanders would not tolerate

looting in friendly territory. A final problem was the paradox of war

against slaves, in which killing the enemy was counterproductive, be-

cause it destroyed one’s countrymen’s property. Losing to slaves, of

course, was insufferable.

Another point about the sources is that virtually all of them repre-

sent the masters’ point of view. We can do little but make educated

guesses about the plans or motives of the rebels. Much the same is true

of the study of slavery even in more modern periods of history.