The Spartacus War (16 page)

Spartacus, for his part, seems to have moved northwards from Thurii into north-western Lucania, perhaps back into the fertile Campus Atinas, where his men had rampaged a year earlier. It was harvest time again, as it had been during their attack the year before, and food would have drawn Spartacus’s men there. In addition, the Campus Atinas offered other advantages to a shrewd commander like Spartacus: it was a good spot for his army to intimidate Crassus while his scouts inspected the new Roman forces. Crassus, meanwhile, put the pressure on as well. He sent two legions to circle around Spartacus and follow him. Their route, for example, might have taken them north into the valley of the Upper Silarus (modern Sele) River, then eastwards and back south into the territory of Volcei (modern Buccino). This route bypassed the Via Annia while following well-beaten and relatively level paths.

Crassus entrusted command of the two legions to Mummius. According to one source, these were the legions formerly under Gellius and Lentulus, and not the new units raised by Crassus. Crassus gave explicit orders: Mummius was to follow Spartacus closely but not to fight, not even in a skirmish. Evidently, the plan was to pressure Spartacus without risking a defeat against his battle-hardened troops. Unfortunately, instead of obeying orders, Mummius took advantage of the first good chance to join battle. Perhaps he occupied the high ground or perhaps his scouts said that the enemy had its guard down. In any case, Mummius lost. As the sources put it: ‘Many of his men fell, and many saved themselves by dropping their weapons and fleeing.’ In the ancient world, dropping one’s weapons to save one’s life earned a man great shame: it practically defined cowardice. The fugitive soldiers slunk back in disgrace to the Roman camp in Picentia.

If the Romans had stood firm in close order, they would have formed a wall against which the enemy charge might have broken. Instead, the Romans obligingly turned and ran. For the rebels, it was barbarian warfare at its best.

Crassus planned to turn the fiasco into what is nowadays called a teaching moment. No more defeatism: that was the rule of the new imperator. He began by treating Mummius harshly - precisely how is not known. Next, Crassus had new weapons issued to the men who had thrown theirs away, but only on the condition that they formally promised not to lose them again. Then he struck.

Crassus chose the first 500 runaways to have returned to his camp - ‘tremblers’, to use the old Spartan term employed by Plutarch to describe these men. These 500 soldiers perhaps belonged to one legionary cohort (battalion). Crassus divided the 500 men into 50 groups of 10 men each, and had one man chosen by lot from each group. These fifty men were forced to undergo decimation.

Decimation was an ancient Roman military punishment that had fallen out of use, but now Crassus revived it. The tenth of the 500 runaways who had been chosen by lot were clubbed to death by the other nine-tenths. Crassus, it seems, revived decimation with a vengeance. In historical times, the norm for decimation seems to have been five, eight or twenty men; Crassus had chosen fifty.

According to traditional procedure, the executioners survived but were forced to camp outside the defences of the main camp. There they were fed barley instead of wheat like animals. The sources don’t tell us how long Crassus’s men underwent this disgrace. It was a symbolic humiliation but also dangerous, since they were left unprotected and exposed to rebel raids.

Crassus had defined himself in his men’s eyes. As one ancient source says, he had made himself more fearful than the enemy. It was a high standard of military discipline, equal to that set centuries before by a Spartan mercenary general. The act of decimation probably took attention away from Spartacus and focused it on Crassus. Perhaps now someone remembered that Crassus’s grandfather had earned the nickname Agelastus, ‘he who does not laugh’. Stickler or tyrant, Crassus was indisputably in charge.

Perhaps to underline that point, Crassus now took the offensive. He led his men out against the enemy. Spartacus retreated southwards through Lucania. One of our sources implies that Spartacus and his high command reached this decision on their own, without a blow being struck. Apparently they had taken Crassus’s measure and concluded that they could not match him. Better to draw the Romans into the mountains of Lucania than to risk fighting them on the Picentine plain.

But it is hard to imagine Spartacus persuading his huge army simply to give up after their victory over Mummius. Besides, it would have taken nearly supernatural foresight to gauge the change in the Roman army. Surely the rebels had to bleed first before they awakened. That brings us to a different source and a more plausible account, at least more plausible in parts.

In this version, Crassus’s army quickly encountered a detachment of about 10,000 men from Spartacus’s army, camping on their own. Just what the men were doing is unclear; perhaps they had been sent to follow the Romans, perhaps they had gone off in search of supplies, or perhaps they represent yet another factional split in the rebels’ camp. In any case, the Romans attacked them. With their vast numerical superiority, Crassus’s men won a great victory. The sources say that they killed two-thirds of the enemy and took only 900 prisoners. The numbers strain credulity but if they are true, they suggest that the rebels had guts. No one seems to have run away.

It was a big defeat for the insurgency, the biggest since the death of Crixus. Worse still, the Romans now had a commander who could keep up the pressure. Crassus then turned on the main rebel force. We might guess that the two armies met somewhere in northern Lucania. Spartacus commanded the rebels, while Crassus led the Romans. According to the sources, these two great generals met in battle for the first time. High drama, but unfortunately the sources are stingy. After crushing the enemy detachment, Crassus marched on Spartacus ‘with contempt’. Crassus ‘defeated him and pursued him vigourously in flight’. Another source says: ‘Finally . . . Licinius Crassus saved the Romans’ honour; the enemy . . . were beaten by him and fled and sought refuge in the tip of Italy.’

This reads like the stuff of official reports. But no one as cagey as Crassus would have then treated Spartacus with contempt. Furthermore, if Crassus won a splendid victory over Spartacus’s entire army, it is impossible to explain Crassus’s next move, which was to hold back and try to cut off Spartacus’s force, rather than to engage it in battle.

More likely, Crassus and Spartacus fought a skirmish. It did not lead to a major defeat but it was enough to make the point: Crassus had built a new Roman army. What Spartacus had warned his men all along was now coming true. The men had spirit but Spartacus knew the odds. He understood Rome’s overwhelming superiority in pitched battle. Earlier Roman soldiers had turned and fled but Crassus’s men would fight. Against previous Roman commanders there had always been room for ambushes and other tricks. Crassus, however, would not be easily fooled. In addition to the fact of defeat, Spartacus’s scouts might have discovered other evidence of the changes that Crassus had brought. They might have noticed, for instance, that unlike the earlier legions they had scouted, Crassus’s men marched in good order and that they did not dare engage in undisciplined foraging or looting. These Romans knew how to fight. It was better to draw them deeper into the Lucanian hills than to risk a battle on the plains.

Besides, Spartacus, we might imagine, was still looking for a way out. The rise of Crassus offered a golden opportunity. His men had preferred taking their chances against Lentulus and Gellius to undertaking a passage over the Alps. Faced with Crassus, however, they might have been willing to reassess matters.

So Spartacus led his men towards the other exit from the Italian peninsula. He marched them to the sea. Assuming they had enough of a head start on the enemy, they could have taken the Via Annia southwards towards the city of Regium. Down the road they went, past the cities of Atina, Nerulum, Cosentia and Terina until they finally reached the Tyrrhenian Sea.

As it hugs the mountainside near Italy’s southern tip, the road turns a bend and presents the traveller with a sudden panorama below: Sicily, rising majestically in the hazy blue sea. Only the narrow Strait of Messina separates Sicily from the Italian mainland. Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean, yet two of its three sides are visible from this point. An ancient traveller might have stood in wonder at the thought of the wealth and fertility that lay before him on the island.

Sicily was Rome’s first overseas province and remained its most important. Famous in antiquity for its fertile soil, the island provided much of Rome’s grain; it was rich in cattle as well. Lush and abundant, Sicily was a great prize. It fed the legions, and Spartacus might have reasoned that it could also feed his men. Then too, Sicily had long been a goal of Italy’s runaway slaves, who sought refuge there. In addition, the island seemed ripe for subversion. By stirring up the embers of the slave revolts that had convulsed the island a generation before, Spartacus could threaten Rome’s food supply and further shake the pillars of the social order. By transferring his men there from Italy he could save them from Crassus, but perhaps only temporarily. Since it surely occurred to Spartacus that Crassus could follow him across the strait, it might also have crossed his mind that Sicily would serve as just a temporary base. But it might give him a respite to find ships and move on, perhaps to North Africa, which lies only 90 miles southwest of the Sicilian coast.

So Spartacus and his men might have reasoned when they reached the vicinity of Regium in late 72 BC. All they had to do was cross a narrow body of water.

7

The Pirate

A
s their ships drew near to Syracuse, capital of the Roman province of Sicily, the helmsmen took their bearings from the rays of sunlight reflected off the golden shield on the front of the Temple of Athena - that is, if the corrupt Roman governor, Gaius Verres, hadn’t already looted it. If he had, well, never mind, men like these, who knew how to ride the rough winter waves, could find their own way to one of the most famous cities in the ancient world. They travelled in four fast ships, small, sleek and stripped for action. They tended to stay clear of Roman naval harbours but today they were at ease. The night before they had run a squadron of the Roman fleet ashore about 20 miles to the south and had lit the night sky with their flames. They were pirates, captained by a man named Heracleo.

That day they sailed into the turquoise waters of Syracuse’s Great Harbour, perhaps admiring the marble buildings of the old city to starboard. They sailed right up to the quays. There they held water and, before the astonished and terrified eyes of the townspeople - watching from a safe distance - they waved wild palm roots. It was the visual equivalent of blowing a raspberry. The pirates had captured the roots the day before from the Roman fleet. Roman sailors normally ate grain, not wild palm roots, but Verres, it seems, had sent his ships out undermanned, underfed and poorly led. By waving the roots, Heracleo and his men taunted the Romans with their incompetence and shame. Then the victorious pirates sailed out of the harbour.

The details, like most involving Verres, may be exaggerated. The source is Cicero, who successfully prosecuted Verres for extortion in 70 BC and then laid it on thick when he published his speeches. Yet if the scene in Syracuse was extraordinary, the sight of pirates wasn’t. Pirates were the hijackers and kidnappers of the ancient world and this was their heyday.

For a moment in late 72 BC Heracleo or men like him held Spartacus’s fate in their hands. Pirate ships could carry the rebels across the Strait of Messina where they could reap all the strategic advantages offered by Sicily. What is more, the pirates might have done so with gusto, since they shared a common enemy in Rome. Driven to the toe of the Italian boot by a Roman army, Spartacus came up with possibly his most daring and ambitious move yet.

Pirates had terrorized the coast of Italy since 75 BC and other parts of the Mediterranean for decades before that. They captured Roman celebrities: two praetors in their purple togas; Mark Antony’s aunt; and, most famous of all, Julius Caesar. He was kidnapped as a young man around 75 BC and held for forty days until he was ransomed. He then returned with a force of marines, rounded up his former captors, and had them crucified - just as he had promised them he would.

From a distance of centuries the pirates excite our admiration, but these pirates were no Robin Hoods. Their primary source of income lay in the slave trade. At first, the Romans had been silent partners who were glad to buy free people from the eastern provinces snatched up by pirate slave traders. Eventually, the complaints of Roman friends and neighbours grew too loud. Beginning in 102 BC, the Senate sent commanders out to suppress the pirates, but they had little success.

Spartacus surely knew much of this. Perhaps he also knew that after Rome turned on them, the pirates turned on Rome; they fought for Mithridates in the East and for Sertorius in the West. It made sense for Spartacus to seek help from them now, at the end of 72 BC, as he and his men camped on the Italian side of the Strait of Messina. The rebels sat within sight of Sicily on a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea. Having reached the strait, the insurgents had travelled practically the entire length of the Italian peninsula, from the foothills of the Alps southwards. But they had come to the end of the line.

It was, moreover, winter. Southern Italy does indeed have winter. The west coast, facing the Tyrrhenian Sea, suffers harsher conditions than the east coast, on the Ionian Sea; the rebels in Bruttium would have missed the mild winter around Thurii. Along the strait, the average temperatures in December and January range between 48 and 58 degrees Fahrenheit; rain is common and it can be windy. Some days the turbulent sea sends waves crashing against the shore of the strait. The mountains climb up rapidly from the coast; in the higher elevations, it snows. It was a difficult time of year to travel or fight, making the pirates’ navigational experience especially valuable.