The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (7 page)

Early Christians opposed gladiatorial fighting as a rival religious ritual that had martyred a couple of thousand Christians during the first three centuries of the Christian Era.
¹³
The games lost some popularity after the empire turned Christian and compassion became a virtue. Constantine tried to abolish gladiatorial combat by edict in 325 CE, but the abolition was sporadically enforced. After the Germanic invaders dismantled the Western Roman Empire, however, there was no longer a need for Romans to toughen up by watching men die. The new barbarian kings generally put a stop to gladiatorial combat whenever they took over. The last recorded fight at the Colosseum occurred around 435 CE, although public animal fights continued there for nearly a century more.

ROMAN SLAVE WARS

Death toll:
1 million
¹

Rank:
46

Type:
slave revolts

Broad dividing line:
slaves vs. masters

Time frame:
134–71 BCE

Location:
Sicily and Italy

Traditional translation of the name:
Servile Wars (
bellum servile
)

Who usually gets the most blame:
Roman slave drivers

Another damn:
rebellion against Rome

Economic factors:
slaves, grain

First Servile War (134–131 BCE)

In their continuous wars of conquest, the Romans acquired hundreds of thousands of prisoners and confiscated vast estates from enemies all over the world, all of which they auctioned off to Roman speculators. This was especially true in Sicily, where the Punic Wars had broken the old Carthaginian and Greek aristocracy, replacing it with huge plantations worked by slaves for the profit of Roman landlords. By the second century BCE, Sicily had become the granary of the republic.

In 134 BCE, the slaves of a wealthy Roman planter outside the Sicilian town of Henna killed their master. The murder put not only the killers under the threat of crucifixion, but also, by Roman law, every slave in the household. Faced with this gruesome penalty for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time, all of the slaves fled into the mountains. There they attached themselves to another runaway, a former Syrian slave originally named Eunus but now rechristened with the loftier royal name Antiochus. He had taken over a mountain shrine to the earth goddess Demeter. By hiding a nut filled with sulfur and fire in his mouth, Eunus breathed flames when he spoke, which amazed his followers and convinced them he spoke for the goddess.

Here grew a community of runaway slaves that supported itself by robbing travelers and plantations. It swelled to 2,000 followers as more slaves flocked to the temple of Demeter. Their general, a Greek slave named Achaeus, traveled around the island recruiting soldiers for the cause, attracting a number of free farmers who disliked the plantation owners as much as any slave. This rebel army then beat the Roman praetor (governor) of Sicily and his hastily assembled militia. That boosted Eunus’s following tenfold and more.

Elsewhere, another infestation of runaways formed around Cleon, a slave who had been born in Cilicia (now southern Turkey). He soon agreed to recognize Eunus as the king of Sicily. By now 70,000 slaves were under arms.

Because the Romans were tied up with wars elsewhere, they couldn’t give the rebellious slaves their undivided attention. Still, they managed to dispatch a new consular army every year to fight the rebels. Roman law decreed that all rebellious slaves taken alive had to be crucified, but local authorities considered that a waste of valuable property. Instead, they returned captured slaves to their master for discipline, which usually meant whipping rather than death. Eventually Publius Rupilius, the latest consul
*
in charge of crushing the rebellion, took it upon himself to crucify any slaves he captured alive, eventually nailing up 20,000.

Finally both Roman consuls took their combined armies into the heart of rebel territory and besieged Henna for two years. When the rebels were finally starved out and crushed, Eunus was taken back to Rome. However, he was not publicly strangled in the manner of an honorable foreign enemy. Instead, he died forgotten in prison some time later. Similarly, Publius Rupilius was not given all the pomp and glory of a full Roman triumph because beating mere slaves didn’t count as a
true
victory.
²

Second Servile War (104 –100 BCE)

While the big plantations prospered, small, free farmers all across Sicily were being forced into slavery by the crushing debt they owed to lenders and large land owners. Because so many of these new slaves had been subjugated via shady deals, the Roman governor of Sicily, Publius Licinius Nerva, established a court to hear claims. He proved too efficient for his own good. After he had freed about eight hundred wrongly enslaved people, the local planters bullied him into dropping the issue. The governor backed down and told any plaintiffs who still had cases pending that they would have to remain slaves. They rose in rebellion instead.

The rebel slave Salvius took control of the uprising under the new name Tryphon. By sheer numerical superiority, the slaves quickly took over most of the large country estates. Most towns shut their gates in time and remained Roman; however, the rebels kept food from reaching the towns, and famine followed.

The governor had only unskilled militia at his disposal, and these were beaten outside the town of Morgantia. The town itself was saved from capture only when the Romans offered freedom to any town slaves who helped defend the walls.

Needing more men, the governor came to an agreement with one of the bandit gangs that ranged freely in the mountains—a pardon for the bandits in exchange for crushing the slaves—but this too failed to break the rebellion.

By now Sicily had two slave rebellions, and the two leaders, Salvius of the interior and Athenion in the west, agreed to rule jointly. Soon after, 14,000 Roman veterans arrived from the mainland. Although outnumbered, they beat the combined slave armies by superior discipline, but the Roman general did not press his advantage and the slaves escaped into the mountains. The general was replaced for his failure, but the next year, his replacement was himself replaced for doing no better. Finally a third general, the consul Manius Aquillius, wiped out the slave armies in two years of hard combat. Manius Aquillius also personally killed the enemy commander, Athenion, face-to-face in the middle of the battle—a rare feat in history.
³

Third Servile War (73–71 BCE)

You’ve heard of this one.

Spartacus was born in Thrace (now Bulgaria) and served in the Roman army until he deserted and turned to banditry. After being caught, he was sold to the gladiatorial school in Capua. There he was put through the customarily brutal training until he and about seventy of his fellow gladiators escaped into the countryside.

His band quickly grew to a thousand escaped slaves and knocked back the first Roman legion sent to punish them. Then they camped in the natural fortress formed by the dormant volcanic crater of Vesuvius. When a new Roman legion cornered Spartacus in this hideout, his army slid down a sheer cliff face on ropes made from vines. Then Spartacus snuck around and attacked his besiegers. The Romans had unwisely camped in a narrow defile, and without either the time or space to properly deploy, they were badly bloodied by Spartacus and his army.

Convinced now of the gravity of the uprising, the Roman Senate sent four legions to crush the rebels. Spartacus headed north, hoping to escape from Italy over the Alps, where his followers would split up to make their separate ways home; however, his army preferred to stay and loot Italy, so Spartacus turned south again and raped and murdered his way back down the peninsula. He beat every Roman contingent that went against him. With each victory, Spartacus gathered more weapons to arm his followers, who now numbered in the tens of thousands.

Spartacus eventually arrived at the very tip of Italy, where he planned to cross over to Sicily and detach that island from the Roman Empire. He had negotiated with pirates to ferry his army in exchange for allowing them to use the Sicilian ports, but at the last minute the pirates backed out of the deal, stranding the gladiators on the mainland. Meanwhile, the Roman war effort came under the command of Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome, who financed a new army. Crassus built a massive wall across the toe of Italy, which his 32,000 troops occupied, to hold the 100,000 rebels in the south and starve them through the winter.

Spartacus crucified a random Roman prisoner in front of his army to remind his men of the horrible fate that awaited them if they lost, and then they tried to break through the wall. This failed. He tried again, but only one-third of the rebels escaped with Spartacus. The rest were left behind to be leisurely wiped out by the Romans whenever they got around to it.

His forces now seriously weakened, Spartacus was harried up and down southern Italy while his army was whittled away. A second Roman general, Pompey, arrived to steal the glory from his political enemy Crassus. Going into his last battle with little hope of success, Spartacus slit the throat of his horse, declaring that if he lost, he wouldn’t need a horse, and if he won, he’d have his pick of the finest horse in Rome.

The gladiator army stood for one last battle and was swept off the field by Crassus, but Pompey took all of the credit by getting in the way of the rebels’ retreat and slaughtering them as they fled. Six thousand prisoners were nailed to crosses up and down the Appian Way, the highway connecting Rome with southeast Italy, to die slowly, their bodies rotting down to scattered bones as a warning to other disgruntled slaves. Spartacus probably wasn’t among them. He was never heard from again, but his body was likely among the tens of thousands piled up on the battlefield.
⁴

What’s Next?

After dealing with all of the Slave Wars together, we will jump back a bit to catch up on what’s been happening elsewhere in the Roman Empire.

For the next few chapters, our path will diverge from mainstream history. We have entered an era of Roman history when the wars themselves are less important than who’s fighting them. During the last few generations of the Roman Republic, ambitious Roman generals will kill hundreds of thousands of foreigners simply to raise their own public profile. Most modern historians of Rome follow the political ups and downs of these generals at Rome rather than their military ups and downs on the frontier. We, on the other hand, will be looking more at the hundreds of thousands of foreigners who were killed to make Rome great.