Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (22 page)

Here, then, was another reason why the training schools tended to be concentrated in Campania, at a safe distance from Rome. The Romans could recognise the savagery in the soul of the gladiator and feared to have it harboured it in their midst. In the summer of
73, even though the number on the run was well below a hundred, the Romans still sent a praetor to deal with them, along with an army of three thousand men. The fugitives having taken refuge on the slopes of Vesuvius, the Romans settled down to starve them out. Gladiators, however, knew all about lunging at an opponent’s weak spot. Finding the slopes of the volcano covered with wild vines, they wove ladders out of the tendrils, then descended a precipice and attacked the Romans in the rear. The camp was captured, the legionaries routed. The gladiators were immediately joined by further runaways. Leg irons were melted down and forged into swords. Wild horses were captured and trained, a cavalry unit formed. Spilling out across Campania, the slaves began to pillage a region only just starting to recover from Sulla’s depredations. Nola was besieged yet again, and looted. Two further Roman armies were routed. Another praetor’s camp was stormed. His
fasces
were captured, and even his horse.

What had begun as a makeshift guerrilla force was now forming itself into a huge and disciplined army of some 120,000 men. Credit for this belonged to the leader of the original break-out, a Thracian named Spartacus. Before his enslavement he had served the Romans as a mercenary, and combined the physique of a gladiator with shrewdness and sophistication. He recognised that if the rebels stayed in Italy, it would be only a matter of time before their outraged masters annihilated them, so in the spring of 72 he and his army began to head for the Alps. They were pursued by Gellius Publicola, the humorist whose joking at the expense of Athenian philosophers had so amused his friends years before, and who had just been elected to the consulship. Before he could engage with Spartacus, however, the slaves met with the Roman forces stationed to guard the northern frontier, and destroyed them. The route over the Alps, and to freedom, now stood wide open. But the slaves refused to take it. Instead, meeting and brushing aside Gellius’
army, they retraced their steps southwards, back towards the heartlands of their masters and everything they had previously been attempting to escape.

The Romans were perplexed by this
volte face.
One explanation they offered for it was overconfidence: ‘the slaves were stupid, and foolishly laid too much confidence in the huge numbers who were flocking to join their force’.
³⁶
In fact, it would have been hard for the rebels not to have been overwhelmed by the discovery of just how many other slaves there were in Italy. Human beings were not the least significant portion of the wealth to have been plundered by the Republic during its wars of conquest. The single market established by Roman supremacy had enabled captives to be moved around the Mediterranean as easily as any other form of merchandise, and the result had been a vast boom in the slave trade, a transplanting of populations without precedent in history. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, had been uprooted from their homelands and brought to the centre of the empire, there to toil for their new masters. Even the poorest citizen might own a slave. In rich households the labour glut obliged slave-owners to think up ever more exotic jobs for their purchases to specialise in, whether dusting portrait busts, writing invitations or attending to purple clothes. By their very nature, of course, such tasks were recherché. The work of most slaves was infinitely more crushing. This was particularly the case in the countryside, where conditions were at their worst. Gangs were bought wholesale, branded and shackled, then set to labour from dawn until dusk. At night they would be locked up in huge, crowded barracks. Not a shred of privacy or dignity was permitted them. They were fed the barest minimum required to keep them alive. Exhaustion was remedied by the whip, while insubordination would be handled by private contractors who specialised in the torture – and sometimes execution – of uppity slaves. The crippled or prematurely aged could
expect to be cast aside, like diseased cattle or shattered wine jars. It hardly mattered to their masters whether they survived or starved. After all, as Roman agriculturalists liked to remind their readers, there was no point in wasting money on useless tools.

This exploitation was what underpinned everything that was noblest about the Republic – its culture of citizenship, its passion for freedom, its dread of disgrace and shame. It was not merely that the leisure which enabled a citizen to devote himself to the Republic was dependent upon the forced labour of others. Slaves also satisfied a subtler, more baneful need. ‘Gain cannot be made without loss to someone else’:
³⁷
so every Roman took for granted. All status was relative. What value would freedom have in a world where everyone was free? Even the poorest citizen could know himself to be immeasurably the superior of even the best-treated slave. Death was preferable to a life without liberty: so the entire history of the Republic had gloriously served to prove. If a man permitted himself to be enslaved, then he thoroughly deserved his fate. Such was the harsh logic that prevented anyone from even questioning the cruelties the slaves suffered, let alone the legitimacy of slavery itself.

It was a logic that slaves accepted too. No one ever objected to the hierarchy of free and un-free, merely his own position within it. What the rebels wanted was not to destroy slavery as an institution, but to win the privileges of their former masters. So it was that they would sometimes force their Roman prisoners to fight as gladiators: ‘Those who had once been the spectacle became the spectators.’
³⁸
Only Spartacus himself appears to have fought for a genuine ideal. Uniquely among the leaders of slave revolts in the ancient world, he attempted to impose a form of egalitarianism on his followers, banning them from holding gold and silver and sharing out their loot on an equal basis. If this was an attempt at Utopia, however, it failed. The opportunities for violent freebooting were
simply too tempting for most of the rebels to resist. Here, the Romans believed, was another explanation for the slaves’ failure to escape while they had the chance. What were the bogs and forests of their homelands compared to the temptations of Italy? The rebels’ dreams of freedom came a poor second to their greed for plunder. To the Romans, this was conclusive evidence of their ‘servile nature’.
³⁹
In fact, the slaves were only aiming to live as their masters did, off the produce and labour of others. Even on the rampage they continued to hold a mirror up to Roman ideals.

It was no wonder that the Romans themselves, who could recognise efficient looting when they saw it, should have begun to panic. With the defeat of Gellius’ army, and the Republic’s other legions all serving abroad, the capital suddenly found itself perilously exposed. Crassus, who had not boasted of being rich enough to raise his own army for nothing, now made his move. His supporters in the Senate were mobilised. After a furious debate the consuls were stripped of their two legions, and Crassus was awarded sole command. The new generalissimo immediately launched a recruiting drive, quadrupling the size of the forces at his disposal. Having won the chance to establish himself as the saviour of the Republic, he did not intend to waste it. When two of his legions, in direct contradiction of his orders, engaged with Spartacus and suffered yet another defeat, Crassus’ response was to resurrect the ancient and terrible punishment of decimation. Every tenth man was beaten to death, the obedient along with the disobedient, the brave along with the cowardly, while their fellows were forced to watch. Military discipline was reimposed. At the same time, a warning was sent to any slaves tempted to join Spartacus that they could expect no mercy from a general prepared to impose such sanctions upon his own men. Ruthless as Crassus was, he never did anything without a fine calculation of its effect. At a single brutal stroke the property-grubbing millionaire had transformed his image into that
of the stern upholder of old-fashioned values. As Crassus would have been perfectly aware, the traditions of Roman discipline always played well with the voters.

With his authority now firmly established, Crassus moved to ring-fence the capital. Spartacus responded by retreating further south. He knew that this was where he was most likely to find new recruits. Leaving behind the town-dotted prosperity of central Italy, his army began to pass through a dreary succession of vast estates. On the plains all was desolate save for toiling chain-gangs, while across the uplands there was no one to be met with save for the occasional foreign slave driving huge flocks or herds across otherwise empty ranches. What had once been a landscape of flourishing towns and villages was now ‘
Italiae solitudo
’ – ‘the wilderness of Italy’. Driving the rebels further southwards through this desolation, and away from Rome, Crassus finally succeeded in penning them in the very heel of the peninsula. By now winter was starting to close in, and to ensure that his quarry could not escape, Crassus raised a barricade stretching from shore to shore. Spartacus found himself trapped. Two despairing attempts were made to storm the legionaries’ ditch and wall. Both were repulsed, to Crassus’ immense relief, for he, like his quarry, was starting to grow desperate. Time was running out. An enemy far more threatening than Spartacus was looming on the horizon. After five years in Spain, Pompey was on his way home.

When Spartacus learned of this he attempted to capitalise on Crassus’ discomfiture by offering to negotiate. Crassus contemptuously refused. Spartacus responded by crucifying a Roman prisoner in full view of the barricades. All day long the screams of the dying man were borne on the icy wind to his fellow citizens. Then, as evening darkened and snow began to gust, Spartacus made a third attempt to force the barricades. This time he broke free. Fleeing Crassus, he began to zigzag northwards. Crassus, with one eye on the rebels and the other on the ever-nearing Pompey, followed
him at a frantic speed, picking off stragglers in a series of escalating clashes. At last the rebels were cornered again, and Spartacus turned and prepared to fight. Ahead of his marshalled men, he stabbed his horse, spurning the possibility of further retreat, pledging himself to victory or death. Then the slaves advanced into battle. Spartacus himself led a desperate charge against Crassus’ headquarters, but was killed before he could reach it. The vast bulk of the rebels’ army perished alongside their general. The great slave uprising was over. Crassus had saved the Republic.

Except that, at the very last minute, his glory was snatched from him. As Pompey headed south with his legions towards Rome he met with five thousand of the rebels, fugitives from Spartacus’ final defeat. With brisk efficiency he slaughtered every last one, then wrote to the Senate, boasting of his achievement in finishing off the revolt. Crassus’ feelings can only be imagined. In an attempt to counteract Pompey’s glory-hogging he ordered all the prisoners he had captured to be crucified along the Appian Way. For over a hundred miles, along Italy’s busiest road, a cross with the body of a slave nailed to it stood every forty yards, gruesome billboards advertising Crassus’ victory.

To most Romans, however, the war against Spartacus had been an embarrassment. Compared to Pompey’s achievement in slaughtering thousands of tribesmen in a far-off provincial war, Crassus’ rescue act in Rome’s backyard was something to forget. This is why, even though both men were voted laurel wreaths, Crassus had to be satisfied with a second-class parade, touring the streets of Rome not in a chariot but on foot. No pavement-pounding for Pompey, of course. Nothing but the best for the people’s hero. While Pompey, preening like a young Alexander, rode in a chariot pulled by four white horses, his trains of loot and prisoners snaking ahead of him through the streets, his adoring fans going wild, Crassus could only watch, and fume.

All the same, he was careful not to let his resentment show. Cheering crowds, however gratifying in themselves, were only means to an end, and that end, for Crassus, was always the substance of power. Infinitely more than a triumph, he wanted the consulship. With elections fast approaching, he performed a characteristically adroit somersault by suggesting to his great rival that they run on a joint ticket. Pompey, as nervous of Crassus’ political skills as Crassus was of Pompey’s popularity, at once agreed. Both men were duly elected unopposed.

Pompey was thirty-six when he became his country’s head of state, well below the minimum age set by Sulla. Uniquely for a consul, he had never even been a senator. Nervous about making gaffes, he had to ask a friend to write him a bluffer’s guide to the Senate House. Even so, for all his inexperience, Pompey was not the man to go tiptoeing around. Dash was what had raised him to the pinnacle of military glory, and dash was what he brought to the battlefields of politics. No sooner had he become consul than he introduced a bill to unmuzzle the tribunate and restore to it all the ancient privileges abolished by Sulla. The cornerstone of the dead dictator’s legislation was thereby casually demolished, and a colourful, and potentially destabilising, element restored to the Republic’s political life. The crowds, who had been demanding just such a measure for almost a decade, went delirious once more.

This time round, however, Crassus shared equally in their applause. Not wishing to miss out on the credit for giving the people back their ancient rights, he had been careful to co-sponsor the reform. Even Catulus, sensing the way the wind was blowing, had withdrawn his opposition. Not that this implied senatorial approval of Pompey. Far from it. His greatness, and the irregular nature of his consulship, remained deeply offensive to the traditionalist leaders of the Senate. This enabled Crassus, whose own consulship was entirely legal, to present himself as their champion.
As he was always happiest doing, he chose to hedge his bets. With one hand he splashed out on huge public banquets and free supplies of grain for the poor, while with the other he poured poison into his fellow senators’ ears, abusing Pompey as a dangerous demagogue and manoeuvring to block off any further crowd-pleasing measures. As a result, rather than working together for the good of the Republic, as consuls were supposed to do, Pompey and Crassus were soon openly at each other’s throat.