The Spartacus War (14 page)

After defeating the consuls’ armies, Spartacus and his men continued northwards through the mountains. As they came down from the Apennines, they were greeted with the magnificent view of the broad plain of the Padus (modern Po) River. They crossed into the province of Cisalpine Gaul, ‘Gaul on this side of the Alps’, as the Romans called northernmost Italy. The province stretched to the Alps; in this era, most of its inhabitants were still not Roman citizens.

Their scouts might have told the rebels that trouble awaited them. About 10 miles north of the Apennines lay the city of Mutina (today’s Modena). One of about ten Roman and Latin colonies in the province, Mutina was the base of the governor, the proconsul Gaius Cassius Longinus. As provincial governor, Cassius had a standing garrison army to draw on, consisting of two legions (c. 10,000 men). It is plausible that he was assisted by the propraetor Cnaeus Manlius.

Cassius had been one of the two consuls the year before, 73 BC, and earlier had served as mint master and then praetor. It was a successful career, befitting his old and eminent family, but Cassius is best known for his son, also named Cassius, the famous murderer of Caesar. The son had a lean and hungry look, as Shakespeare later put it, and the father might have been equally keen. He was the only card that Rome had left to play between Spartacus and the Alps. Cassius threw down the gauntlet. ‘As Spartacus was pressing forward towards the Alps,’ says one writer, ‘Cassius . . . met him.’

Only the barest details of the battle survive. The insurgents crushed the Romans, inflicting many casualties, and Cassius barely escaped with his life. He never played a major role in public affairs again.

The road to the Alps was now open but Spartacus did not take it. Instead, he and his army turned back south. Spartacus’s strategy is a mystery. He supposedly aimed for the Alps and beat every army that stood in his way, only to turn around and head back to southern Italy. If he wanted to cross the Alps, why didn’t he do so? Many theories have been proposed, but the best explanation was already hinted at in the ancient sources. Spartacus’s own men probably vetoed him. In the past, they had never wanted to leave Italy; now success might have gone to their heads and aroused visions of Rome in flames. Perhaps Spartacus had held back the truth and told his men, as they marched north, that they were simply spreading the revolt and searching for loot in another part of Italy. Then, when they reached the plain of the Padus River and he tried to persuade them to cross the Alps, it was too late to change their minds.

The last straw might simply have been the sight of the Alps. As anyone who has ever looked up from the plain towards the rock wall of the Italian Alps knows, the mountains are overpowering. Most people in Spartacus’s army had probably never seen the Alps before. Many of them had never left southern or central Italy.

Other factors may have played a role. There is an outside chance that Spartacus received news from Thrace that gave him pause. The proconsul, Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus, had won great victories over the Thracians who had allied with Mithridates. It now looked more difficult than ever for Spartacus and his army to find safely in Thrace.

And perhaps Spartacus too had caught what the Japanese would later call ‘victory disease’. Spartacus was ‘elated by his victories’, says one Roman writer, in what is perhaps just a plausible guess. Maybe he had acquired a foolish belief in his own invincibility. Possibly he too forgot the Roman habit of responding slowly but inexorably to those who attacked Rome. He might have allowed himself a luxury that no general can afford: hope.

It is such a surprising turn of events that some scholars conclude that Spartacus had never planned to cross the Alps in the first place. But ancient writers took this plan seriously and they were in a better position to know Spartacus’s motives. Admittedly, they might have engaged in a certain amount of guesswork, since it’s not clear if the Romans debriefed captured rebels well. But I prefer their guesses to ours.

And so, the rebels headed south again. They had a new goal, they said: Rome. ‘Terror,’ says one ancient writer, ‘spread through the city of Rome, just as it had in the time when Hannibal had threatened its gates.’ No doubt Romans were terrified, but we might wonder if they had good reason to be afraid. Could Spartacus really threaten a city that was too well fortified for even Hannibal to launch a serious attack? Ten years earlier, in 82 BC during the civil war between Marius and Sulla, an army that tried to take Rome fought all night long. It was obliterated by morning. How could Spartacus think of success?

For one thing, he travelled light. He had unnecessary supplies burned, slaughtered the pack animals, and killed all prisoners of war. This last act might also have been meant to terrify the enemy. For another thing, Spartacus had a sizeable army.

Spartacus began the campaign season with 30,000 men, enough to outnumber each of his various foes to date but not enough to attack Rome. Each victory boosted Spartacus’s reputation and so might have swollen his ranks. New recruits might have come from central and northern Italy, while the survivors of Crixus’s defeat might have made their way to Spartacus. He surely accepted most of them gladly.

According to ancient sources, after defeating Cassius, Spartacus turned away ‘many deserters who approached him’. Just who these ‘deserters’ were is an interesting question. The prospect that they were legionaries is intriguing but more likely they were slaves performing support duties for Roman troops. Turning them away was not only a gesture of contempt but perhaps also a cold psychological assessment of their unreliability and potential for espionage.

Spartacus could not have afforded to turn away good men because the Romans were about to attack him again. The two consuls, Gellius and Lentulus, had regrouped and joined forces. They now had an army of four legions or about 20,000 men, minus any losses already suffered and not replaced. If Spartacus enjoyed anything like the 3:1 advantage that he did against the first army he had faced that year, he would have commanded about 60,000 men by the time he faced the joint consular army in late 72 BC.

With all the ‘ifs’, ‘ands’ and ‘buts’ in the previous paragraphs, the conclusion is clear: we don’t know how many men Spartacus had. But an educated guess of 60,000 soldiers at the peak of the revolt in late 72 BC seems sensible and even conservative. In fact, 60,000 is the lowest estimate in the ancient sources for the size of Spartacus’s army at its height; other figures are 90,000, over 100,000 and 120,000. In addition to the soldiers there was an unknowable number of civilians: women, children and perhaps even old men.

The showdown between Spartacus and the joint consular army took place in Picenum, in north-central Italy. Once again, details are lacking. But the sources state that this was a pitched battle. Evidently his string of successes gave Spartacus the confidence to fight the Romans on their own terms. A vignette survives from either this or the earlier battle fought by the consul Lentulus; which one is uncertain. The report is as follows: ‘And at the same time Lentulus [left] an elevated position which he had defended with a double battle-line and at the cost of many of his men, when from out of the soldiers’ kit bags, officers’ cloaks began to catch the eye and selected cohorts began to be discernible.’

That seems to mean that Lentulus took up a defensive position on a hill, where he divided his troops into multiple lines. Caesar would do something similar in Gaul. Although they had to attack uphill, the enemy inflicted heavy casualties on Lentulus’s men. Apparently, Lentulus called for help, but he didn’t ride off until it became clear that the reinforcements were nearby. Or so this fragmentary sentence might be reconstructed.

The brief sentence speaks volumes about the conditions of ancient battle. Isolated on a hill, Lentulus had to rely on the naked eye to see the legion coming to his aid. The legion didn’t appear all at once but as a patchwork. First, the purple cloaks of the commanders appeared, then a few separate cohorts became visible. The phrase ‘out of the soldiers’ kit bags’ should mean that the reinforcements were marching near where Lentulus’s men had left their baggage.

The scene shows the insurgents at their best. They isolated an enemy unit. They executed the difficult manoeuvre of attacking uphill, a move in which their lighter armour increased their mobility. Although the rebels did not destroy Lentulus’s men before reinforcements arrived, they inflicted heavy losses. Presumably Lentulus expected the reinforcements to defeat the enemy, but that did not happen. Either the rebels on the hill remained strong enough to turn on the reinforcements and overpower them or Spartacus sent fresh troops against the reinforcements, which would speak well of his command and control of the battlefield.

The Romans lost the battle and, once again, they ran from the field. Spartacus had reason to be pleased. But he also had cause to re-evaluate the attack on Rome. As one ancient account says: ‘he changed his mind about going to Rome, because his forces were not appropriate for the operation nor was his whole army prepared as soldiers should be (since no city was fighting with him, but only slaves and deserters and the rabble).’

Rome’s stone walls were over 13 feet thick and in places over 30 feet high. The circuit of walls ran for nearly 7 miles and enclosed 1,000 acres. Spartacus had no siege engines nor experts to man them. He had few if any soldiers with experience of laying siege to a city or taking a city by assault.

Nor had Spartacus’s experience of battle in 72 BC been entirely encouraging. He had won every engagement, but his colleague Crixus’s army had been destroyed and Crixus was dead, The Romans, meanwhile, refused to accept defeat. No matter how hard Spartacus hit the Romans, they kept coming back. There was no reason to doubt but that they would return. It was far more prudent to prepare for the next battle than to open a new front that was unlikely to bring success. And so the army returned to southern Italy, probably to Thurii.

There the insurgents had yet another encounter with a Roman army, possibly under the propraetor Manlius. They defeated the Romans and reaped a rich load of booty. It was a happy end to their journey, yet the men had reason to wonder just what they had achieved.

They had made a punishing trip of about 1,200 miles, which could hardly have taken them less than four or five months, considering the marching rates of ancient armies and the time needed to stop, forage and fight. They had fought four battles, mourned their colleagues’ defeat in a fifth, and amassed loot. They had buried old comrades and attracted new ones.

They might glory in their status as the dominant army in Italy. It was an astonishing truth that most would have ascribed to the gods and perhaps, above all, to Dionysus. Yet the rebels were only as strong as their ability to beat Rome’s next army. That army was sure to come, even if vain rebels and pessimistic Romans both failed to see it in the distance.

By summer’s end, Italy had seen two big stories in 72 BC. One was Spartacus’s Long March and the other was Rome’s disgrace. A rabble in arms had defeated a regular army.

One of the few to have served with distinction was Cato - but he also served with disdain. At the year’s end, Cato’s commander offered him a military honour, such as a crown, a neck ornament, a golden armband or one of the other decorations handed out to Rome’s best legionaries. Cato, however, refused. Family pride might have balked at accepting honours amid military disgrace.

Cato’s great-grandfather, Cato the Censor, had once sneered at a commander who awarded his soldiers crowns just for digging ditches or sinking wells - prizes, the Censor said, that would have required at least the burning of an enemy’s camp back when Rome had standards. Cato’s uncle Drusus had once rejected honours himself, no doubt aware of the malicious remark that they would have dwarfed the man who wore them. Malice might have come Cato’s way too if he had received honours while his brother did not, and the sources make no mention of honours for Caepio.

Few Romans could have bemoaned the nation’s defeats more than Cato. Austere, public-spirited and uncompromising, he lived for virtue. Most Roman politicians, including his allies, eventually fell short of Cato’s lofty standards. Cicero, a friend who felt Cato’s sting, once wrote in exasperation that Cato thought he was living in Plato’s Republic instead of the sewer of Romulus. In 72 BC Cato had abundant reasons to be displeased.

RETREAT

6

The Decimator

I
n autumn 72 BC a new general took command of the legions. Determined to restore discipline, he revived a brutal and archaic form of punishment. Fifty Roman soldiers who ran away from battle and disgraced the legions were caught, condemned and executed by their own army. Each of them was clubbed to death by nine of his fellow legionaries, men with whom they might have changed places, since the victims were chosen by lot. Five hundred men were caught shirking their duty; one out of every ten was selected for execution, which is why the procedure is called decimation (analogous to our word ‘decimal’, that is, one-tenth). Rome’s new general wanted his men to fear him more than they feared Spartacus. His name was Marcus Licinius Crassus.

A marble bust survives that is probably a portrait of Crassus; it is revealing. Stare directly and you see the picture of resolve: the skin of his face tightened, lips pursed, jaw clenched, eyebrows drawn down, neck muscles tensed. In profile, however, his jowls, a double chin and the crow’s feet around his eyes are all apparent. Not only vigour but caution and suspicion are etched into his features. The bust was found in Rome, in the family tomb of the Licinii, one of Rome’s most prominent families, but there are other copies, proof that they depict an important person. The style fits the end of the Roman Republic and the scholarly consensus is that the bust is Marcus Licinius Crassus.

Crassus took command at the order of the Senate and to the applause of the people. Bold politics, the choice made poetic justice. In his own way, Crassus resembled Spartacus. Not that Crassus wanted to overturn Rome: far from it. Like Spartacus, though, Crassus was a maverick. He wanted to rise to the top of Roman politics but he would beat his own path. Unwilling or unable to win the approval of the old nobility, Crassus courted the common people and made deals with new politicians. The optimates, literally, the best men, as Rome’s conservatives called themselves, did not approve. Given a choice, the Senate’s old guard would never have turned to a man like Crassus. Spartacus forced their hands and made Crassus the man of the hour.