The Spartacus War (2 page)

It’s a story that should have been in pictures, and, of course, it is. In 1960 Spartacus appeared, a Hollywood epic starring Kirk Douglas and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The film was a hit then and remains a classic. It was loosely based on a bestselling 1951 novel by Howard Fast, which he wrote after serving a jail term for contempt of Congress during the McCarthy era. An American Communist who eventually left the party, Fast was not the first Communist to admire Spartacus. Lenin, Stalin and Karl Marx himself saw Spartacus as the very model of the proletarian revolutionary. German Marxist revolutionaries of 1919 called their group the Spartacus League; their failed uprising grew legendary. Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian wrote a ballet about Spartacus that won him the Lenin Prize for 1959.

Non-Communist revolutionaries admired Spartacus as well. Toussaint L’Ouverture, the hero of the Haitian Revolution, history’s only successful mass slave revolt, emulated Spartacus. Giuseppe Garibaldi, who fought to unify Italy, wrote the preface to a novel about Spartacus. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Zionist revolutionary, translated that novel into Hebrew. Voltaire, the French Enlightenment philosopher, judged Spartacus’s rebellion as perhaps the only just war in history. Even anti-Communists approved of Spartacus: Ronald Reagan, for example, cited him as an example of sacrifice and struggle for freedom.

But while Spartacus was the stuff of legend he was no myth. He is, however, an enigma to us. Spartacus left no writings. His followers scratched out no manuscripts. Surviving ancient narratives come from Roman or Greek writers who wrote from the point of view of the victors. To make things worse, few of their writings survive. Still, they leave absolutely no doubt about it: Spartacus was real.

Plutarch (c. AD 40s-120s) and Appian (c. AD 90s-160s) provide the most complete accounts of Spartacus to survive from antiquity but they are short, late (150-200 years after the revolt) and each come with an axe to grind. Even shorter is the discussion by Florus (c. AD 100-150), but his concise remarks are full of significance. These three writers relied on important but now mostly lost earlier works by Sallust (86-35 BC) and Livy (59 BC - AD 12). Almost nothing of Livy’s discussion of Spartacus survives, and we have only a precious few pages’ worth of selections from Sallust’s account of the war.

Three other contemporaries of Spartacus comment briefly on his activities: the great orator Cicero (106-43 BC), the scholar and politician Varro (116-27 BC) and the inimitable Julius Caesar (100-44 BC). Many other ancient writers over the centuries mentioned Spartacus, from the poet Horace (65-8 BC) to St Augustine (AD 354-430), although they add but little. Even by the standards of ancient history, it represents slim pickings.

However, there are archaeological finds, the results of topographical research, and experiments in historical reconstruction ranging from gladiators’ contests - without real weapons, of course - to weaving vines into ropes such as Spartacus’s men used to climb down Vesuvius. Coins, frescos, sling balls and fortifications all record the rebels’ path through the Italian countryside. The bones of a gladiators’ cemetery in Turkey reveal training secrets and recall the agony of death. Tombs, shrines and towns; gold and iron; plaques and paintings: all take us beyond the stereotypes of barbarians in Greek and Roman texts. Finally, Roman slavery comes to life through graffiti, chains, auction buildings, slave quarters and slave prisons.

The story of Spartacus is, first of all, a war story: a classic case study of an insurgency, led by a genius at guerrilla tactics, and of a counter-insurgency, led by a conventional power that slowly and painfully learned how to beat the enemy at his own game. The Spartacus War is also a tale of ethnic conflict. Spartacus was Thracian but many of his men were Celts; they were proud, independent and fighting-mad. Tribal divisions turned the rebels into feuding cliques who ignored their chief. The march for freedom degenerated into gang warfare, and, as so often in history, the revolution failed.

In addition, the Spartacus narrative is a love story and a crusade. Spartacus had a wife or mistress; her name is not recorded. A priestess of Dionysus, this unnamed companion preached a rousing message. She drew on the liberation theology that had fired Rome’s earlier slave revolts and still fuelled the anti-Roman war that had raged for fifteen years in the eastern Mediterranean. Spartacus had a divine mission.

And finally, The Spartacus War is also a story about identity politics. A rebel against Rome, Spartacus was more Roman than he cared to admit and certainly more than the Romans could admit. He terrified the Romans not just because he was foreign but because he was familiar.

Spartacus was a soldier who had served Rome, and his behaviour might have reminded Romans of their heroes. Like Marcellus, perhaps Rome’s most red-blooded general, he thirsted to kill the enemy commander with his own hand. Like Cicero, he was an orator. Like Cato, he was a man of simple tastes. Like the Gracchi, he believed in sharing the wealth among his men. Like Brutus, he fought for freedom.

Like the most ambitious Roman of them all, he claimed to have a personal relationship with a god: like Caesar, Spartacus was a man of destiny. No sooner had he died than men began to dream of Spartacus’s return. The human Spartacus fell to the power of Rome; the legend might topple empires still.

The Spartacus War describes the complexity of slave revolts too. We do not know if Spartacus wanted to abolish slavery but, if so, he aimed low. He and his men freed only gladiators, farmers and shepherds. They avoided urban slaves, a softer and more elite group than rural workers. They rallied slaves to the cry not only of freedom but also to the themes of nationalism, religion, revenge and loot. Another paradox: they might have been liberators but the rebels brought ruin. They devastated southern Italy in search of food and trouble.

In the end, the story comes back to Spartacus. Who was he? What did he want? Our answers must be based less on what Spartacus said, about which we know little, than on what he did. By necessity, we must be speculative. But we can also be prudent in our speculation because Spartacus’s actions speak loudly. They fit the timeless patterns of insurgencies and uprisings, as shaped by the particulars of his case.

Rome was big, strong and slow; Spartacus was small, hungry and fast. Rome was old and set in its ways; Spartacus was an innovator. Rome was ponderous, while Spartacus was nimble. The Romans suffered so badly from Spartacus’s ambushes, night moves, sudden turnabouts and mobile flank attacks that eventually they gave up facing him in battle. They insisted on isolating his forces and starving them out before they were willing to risk combat.

The ancient sources describe a man of passion, thirsting for freedom and burning for revenge. Spartacus’s actions tell a different story. He was no hothead but a man of controlled emotions. Spartacus was a politician trying to hold together a coalition that was constantly slipping out of control. Whether by nature or training he was a showman. His greatest prop was his own body but Spartacus used many symbols, from a snake to his horse, to form his image. A cult of personality helped attract tens of thousands of followers but at a price of luring them into the delusion of invincibility.

Spartacus was Thracian, and in Thrace warfare was the most honourable profession. The name Spartacus - Latin for Sparada kos - is plausibly translated as ‘Famous for his Spear’. Thracians were masters of the horse, which made them fast, mobile and utterly different from the Romans, who were born infantrymen with little talent for cavalry. And the Thracians had a genius for guerrilla warfare. They perfected light armour for foot soldiers and hit-and-run tactics, to which the heavy-armed Romans were vulnerable. And thanks to his service in an auxiliary unit of the Roman army, Spartacus had been schooled in conventional warfare too.

When it comes to the Romans, our evidence is better, if still limited. The Romans were constrained by the enduring strategies of counter-insurgency. They had to locate, isolate and eradicate an enemy who avoided pitched battle while harassing them via unconventional tactics. To do this required achieving superiority in intelligence, which in turn required local knowledge. Still, while no Roman adopted a strategy of winning popular support, they displayed more savvy in dealing with locals than we might expect.

But the Romans had a lot more on their minds than Spartacus. In 73 BC Rome was a city of scars. Italy was a peninsula divided between Rome and its often unwilling allies. Over the centuries Rome had conquered Italy’s hodgepodge of peoples, including Greeks, Etruscans, Samnites, Lucanians and Bruttians. Many tensions existed, and two decades earlier they had exploded into a rebellion (91-88 BC). The Italian War (also called the Social War, that is, war of the socii, Latin for allies) took three years of bloody battles and sieges before Rome restored peace, and only at the price of granting citizenship to all the allies. Especially in the south, some Italians remained bitter and unreconstructed. The Italian War was followed by a civil war between the supporters of Sulla and the heirs of his late rival, Marius. Sulla won and served as dictator, but after his retirement in 79 BC and death a year later, civil war flared up again in 77 BC. Italy was at peace in 73 BC but stripped of legions, should trouble break out anew: they had been sent abroad to fight Rome’s many enemies.

The Italian countryside included a large population of slaves, who often ran away and who sometimes rose in armed rebellion. In 73 BC Roman Italy was, in short, a bone-dry forest in a summer heatwave. Spartacus lit a match.

BREAKOUT

1

The Gladiator

S
partacus was a heavyweight gladiator called murmillo. A man ‘of enormous strength and spirit’, as the sources say, he was about thirty years old. Murmillones were big men who carried 35- 40 pounds of arms and armour in the arena. They fought barefoot and bare-chested, rendering all the more visible the tattoos with which Thracians like Spartacus proudly embellished their bodies. Murmillones each wore a bronze helmet, a belted loincloth and various arm- and leg-guards. They carried a big, oblong shield (scutum) and wielded a sword with a broad, straight blade, about a foot and a half long. Called the gladius, it was the classic weapon of the gladiator. It was also the standard weapon of a Roman legionary.

Although we know nothing of Spartacus’s record in the arena, we can imagine him locked in combat one afternoon. Fans that they were, the Romans have left masses of evidence about the games, and recent historical reconstructions enrich the picture. We know, for example, that Spartacus would have fought just one other man at a time, despite Hollywood’s image of mass fights. Real gladiators fought in pairs, carefully chosen to make an exciting contest - but not a long life for the contestants.

A murmillo like Spartacus never fought another murmillo; instead, he was usually paired with a thraex. Thraex means ‘Thracian’, but Spartacus did not represent his country in the arena, perhaps because his owner feared stirring up his slave’s national pride. The thraex was also a heavyweight but he had to be quicker and more agile. His arms and armour were similar to the murmillo’s but the thraex carried a small shield (parmula) that made him lighter and more mobile. And the thraex carried a curved sword (sica), like the one used by Thracians in battle.

Gladiatorial matches usually began with a warm-up with wooden weapons. Then the ‘sharp iron’ arms were brought in and tested to make sure they were razor-sharp. Meanwhile, Spartacus and his opponent prepared to die - but not by hailing the sponsor of the games. The famous cry, ‘Those who are about to die salute you!’ was, as far as we know, a rare - and later - exception. Instead, a match usually began with a signal from the tibia, a wind instrument like an oboe.

The contest unfolded with a combination of elegance and brutality. Gladiators attacked but rarely crossed swords, since their blades were too short. Instead, they thrust and parried with their shields, pushing an opponent back, drawing him forward, or - with the shield turned horizontally - hit him with the edge. The crash and boom of shields, rather than the metallic clank of swords, marked the sound of combat.

With his 15-pound scutum, a strong murmillo could hit harder, but a fast thraex could get in more blows in rapid succession with his 7-pound parmula. Knowing how much damage the curved sword of the thraex could do, Spartacus guarded his flank. Instead, he tried to keep the battle on a vertical axis, constantly standing with his left shoulder and left leg forward, thereby denying his foe an opening while keeping up the pressure. He held his shield close to his body to prevent the thraex from rapping at it with his parmula and destabilizing it. Every now and then Spartacus would bring his shield forward in a sudden, powerful thrust to shift the thraex off balance.

Denied Spartacus’s flank, meanwhile, the thraex might have ducked and lunged at Spartacus’s unprotected right leg. He might even have attempted the more difficult move of leaping up, powering his right arm over the top of Spartacus’s shield and stabbing him with his curved sica. If these murderous manoeuvres failed, however, they would have given Spartacus a sudden opening. The smart move for Spartacus would have been to feint, thereby tempting the thraex into thrusting towards him - only to find Spartacus ready to parry and deliver a deadly riposte.