The Spartacus War (21 page)

Another source provides the missing piece of the puzzle. It says that Spartacus set up camp near the headwaters of the Silarus River, not far from the modern town of Caposele. The valley of the Upper Silarus skirts the Picentini Mountains, lying to the west. Caposele sits on what was a border region in ancient times between north-western Lucania, south-western Apulia, and north-eastern Samnium. Caposele lies about 45 miles north of Paestum, a few days’ march away. The nearness of the two sites, the presence of the Picentini Mountains, and the vicinity of Samnium (Spartacus’s goal after the Melìa Ridge) all make the area of Caposele a strong candidate for the place ‘towards the Peteline Mountains’ where the next events unfolded.

Wherever Spartacus and his men were heading, they probably did not get very far before the Romans caught them. Crassus had sent a contingent of troops after them, under the command of his lieutenants, Lucius Quinctius and Gnaeus Tremelius Scrofa. Scrofa served as quaestor, Quinctius was the cavalry commander who tricked Spartacus at Cantenna. Why Crassus himself did not undertake this important mission is unclear. Presumably he wanted his men to assess the enemy’s intentions before he committed the bulk of his army.

Once again Crassus had misplaced his trust. Neither Quinctius nor Scrofa exercised the appropriate caution as they pursued Spartacus. Instead they clung to his heels, oblivious to the danger of his turning on them. Suddenly he did, and the Roman army fled in panic. In spite of the disappointment of recent defeat, the veteran fighter still had tricks in him. Things went so badly for the Romans that Scrofa was wounded and the men barely carried him away to safety. They might have wondered what awaited them at camp, a medal or decimation.

The sources contain two different stories about Spartacus’s next move. This is not surprising, as ancient observers had to piece together the truth from the few surviving rebel eyewitnesses and from the claims of Roman commanders. Ultimately they might have had to guess at Spartacus’s plans.

According to the first account, Spartacus now began to lead his army towards the city of Brundisium (modern Brindisi). Now more than ever, he had only one reasonable goal: leaving Italy, the sooner the better. A southern Italian port city on the Adriatic coast, Brundisium was the maritime gateway to the East. Sulla, for instance, had landed there when he returned to Italy in 83 BC from the Mithridatic War, ready to begin his bloody march of conquest up the Appian Way, which stretched 364 miles from Brundisium to Rome. Perhaps Spartacus hoped to find ships at Brundisium to take him and his fellow Thracians home; maybe this time he would meet pirates who kept their promises. Failing that, there was Apulia, the region in which Brundisium lay; it was rich in food and potential recruits. So, the rebels went back on the march.

From Paestum, the road to Brundisium led through Caposele. (Another reason to identify it with the place ‘towards the Peteline Mountains’, if only military history were neat and logical.) An ancient highway from Italy’s Tyrrhenian coast to the Adriatic ran through the valley of the Upper Silarus. Not far from the headwaters of the river, near the city of Aquilonia, Spartacus would have reached the Appian Way. From there, Brundisium lay about 175 miles to the south-east. Presumably, this is just the route that he started his army on after their victory over Quinctius and Scrofa.

But bad news stopped them in their tracks. The situation in Brundisium had changed. Spartacus learned that Marcus Lucullus had landed there with his troops, fresh from his success in Thrace. Better now to march into the Underworld than into Brundisium.

The second account takes off perhaps from that point. It begins with the men on the road. They were wearing their armour, maybe to be ready for further Roman attacks. Fresh from their success over Crassus’s deputies, they had grown overconfident. ‘Success destroyed Spartacus,’ writes Plutarch, ‘because it aroused insolence in a group of runaway slaves.’ They no longer considered it worthy of their dignity merely to engage in a fighting retreat. Instead of continuing to obey their commanders, they threatened them with their weapons. In short, the men mutinied.

Mutinies are usually the work of soldiers who want less, not more fighting and Plutarch inspires less trust the more he ascribes motives. These reasons make the tale of the mutiny suspect, but there are grounds for believing it. Victorious armies do not like to retreat, especially if they are people’s armies, in which the ordinary soldier is used to voicing his opinion. Death before disgrace is a familiar motif of ancient warfare, not least in accounts of Thrace. Spartacus himself had encouraged this way of thinking. At the very outset of the revolt, back in the house of Vatia, he had said that freedom was better than the humiliation of being put on display for others. One of the rebels, possibly Spartacus himself, had said, perhaps on Vesuvius, that it was better to die by iron than by starvation.

Besides, the mutineers’ goal had some merit. Having just successfully tricked Crassus’s lieutenants, it was reasonable for them to try tricking Crassus himself. With Pompey on his way, it was better to bring things to a head quickly than to let Rome build its military muscle. Spartacus might have objected that Crassus had learned too much by now to fall for a trick. But the men insisted.

Spartacus’s army probably stood on the Appian Way. If they marched southwards on it they would soon cross a bridge over the River Aufidus (Ofanto). Roaring for 100 miles to the Adriatic Sea, the Aufidus passed close to the the town of Cannae. There, about 150 years earlier, in 216 BC, Hannibal gave Rome its greatest battlefield defeat in history, killing perhaps 50,000 men in one day.

History, strategy, honour and mutiny all swirled around him. Rhetoric might change the mutineers’ minds, but only careful reflection could illuminate the right path. Spartacus paused, then he moved his army.

10

Spartacus

T
he Thracian was practically at the gates. His slaves and gladiators had already reached the Appian Way, and a march of 50 miles would bring them to Venusia (modern Venosa). An ancient city planted in the shadow of an extinct volcano, majestic Mount Vultur (modern Vulture), Venusia had been a Roman colony for 200 years. Now, in spring 71 BC, it would have been well advised to firm up its walls. Surely raiding parties had already looted outlying farms.

And raids were perhaps the least of it. People were saying this of the rebels: ‘they indiscriminately mix murder, arson, theft and rape.’ They took Roman citizens prisoner. One Roman matron was supposed even to have killed herself in torment over the violation of her sexual honour. Venusians could imagine worse still, based on recent experience. After joining the rebels against Rome in the Social War, Venusia had been stormed and recaptured by a Roman army in 88 BC.

One of the inhabitants of Venusia in 71 BC was a freedman named Horatius. Although an ex-slave, he was unlikely to have sympathized with Spartacus, because Horatius represented a success story. If the ancient biographical tradition can be trusted, he had started out selling salted fish: the kind of petty retailer who, in Cicero’s opinion, could turn a profit only by making a habit of lying. Currently, however, he was an auction broker, a profession that made up in profitability what it lacked in prestige. The prosperous freedman might have feared Spartacus as much as any blueblood did.

But Horatius need not have worried. Spartacus’s rabble in arms would not disrupt his road to success. If not then in 71 BC, then soon Horatius would own a farm as well as a townhouse. Six years later, in 65 BC, his wife (her name is not recorded) would give birth to their son, Quintus. He would prove to be a talented child. Horatius could afford to send the boy not only to the best school in Venusia but then to a better school in Rome and, finally, to university in Athens, where he shared classes with the son of Cicero, no less. Quintus would live to become Rome’s most polished poet: Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace.

In the end it would all work out for Horatius’s family but for one moment in 71 BC he held his breath. Or so we might imagine: Horatius, the poet Horace’s father, is a real historical figure but his situation as Spartacus approached Venusia is an educated guess. For that matter, Spartacus’s approach is itself a deduction from sources that are too sketchy and contradictory to permit certainty about the last phase of the war. In any case, it seems that Spartacus turned south and away from Venusia. He led his army down the valley of the Upper Silarus River towards the Romans’ camp - again, a plausible itinerary but not certain. What is clear is that, as one source says: ‘he gave up on all [his other plans] and came to blows with Crassus.’ Why?

The ancient sources disagree about Spartacus’s motivation. One says that his men forced him to fight the Romans, while the other says that he made the choice on his own. Was it the mutiny or the bad news from Brundisium? Historically, only one possibility can be right but the contradiction may reflect Spartacus’s own mixed motives. The Roman in Spartacus knew that the odds of battle were against him. As a Thracian chieftain, though, he embraced a fight to the death for freedom.

Meanwhile, Crassus was a moving target. As soon as he got the news of Spartacus’s approach, Crassus went on the march himself. He was eager to fight. Like many of the rebels, Crassus wanted to force a confrontation before Pompey arrived but he marched as much on political as on military grounds. Crassus wanted the credit for victory.

Naturally, Crassus wanted to win. He had grounds for optimism. Since taking command in the autumn, Crassus had improved the odds considerably in Rome’s favour. He had inflicted repeated and considerable battle losses on the enemy (dead, wounded and prisoners) in northern Lucania, on the Melìa Ridge and at Cantenna. In addition, Spartacus had lost the men of the Celtic-German splinter group and perhaps other individual defectors too as the going got rough. At its zenith, Spartacus’s army had consisted of about 60,000 men. It was ‘still of great size’, says one source, but it was surely much diminished. It would be surprising if he had more than 30-40,000 soldiers left, but that is just an educated guess.

The Romans seem to have done better. Crassus had suffered some losses among his 45,000 or so legionaries on the Melìa Ridge and in the engagement ‘towards the Peteline Mountains’. After the end of the rebellion, the Romans liberated 3,000 Roman citizens held prisoner by the rebels; how many of them were soldiers is not known. At a reasonable estimate, Crassus now had 40,000 legionaries. In other words, the Romans matched the rebel army in size and may have outnumbered it.

That did not bode well for Spartacus’s men. The Romans were used to taking on larger armies and beating the odds through their superior training and leadership (especially at the centurion level). They had better arms and armour than the enemy and were surely better fed. They knew that reinforcements were on the way and from two directions but they were cocky enough to take on the enemy on their own.

The rebels could count. They cared little about expectations, however, because they didn’t want an ordinary battle; they wanted a grudge fight. They wanted to avenge their fallen friends. They wanted to achieve the hero’s death that Thracians, Celts and Germans had all been raised to desire. They wanted to kill Romans because rebel slaves knew what awaited them if captured. A group of Sicilian slaves in the Second Sicilian Slave War (104- 100 BC), for example, chose suicide over surrender; another group killed each other in captivity, according to some sources, rather than let the Romans send them to the lions. Spartacus’s men might have reasoned that if the coming battle was to be a slaves’ Thermopylae, then so be it.

It was 71 BC, probably April. As the rebels marched southwards through the Upper Silarus Valley, the Romans marched northwards. There was symmetry to the location. Spartacus’s first clash with a Roman army had taken place on Vesuvius, the most fatal volcanic region in Italy. Now, on a plausible interpretation of the evidence, the last act would unfold in one of Italy’s most dangerous earthquake zones, the valley of the Upper Silarus. In AD 79 Vesuvius erupted and destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 1980 an earthquake centred on Conza (ancient Compsa, a city near the Appian Way), killed 3,000 people, injured more than 10,000, and left 300,000 homeless.

The Silarus begins almost unnoticeably in the north, winding through a maze of hills. Then the river flows southwards for 20 miles following a regular course, guarded on either side by mountain walls as high as 5,000 feet. The Picentini Mountains rise in rocky highlands to the west, while the massifs of Mount Marzano and Ogna (modern names) wall off the eastern side of the valley. The space between the mountains is nowhere wider than about 3 miles. Much of the valley is hilly; the widest stretch of plain is about 2 miles wide. The valley ends dramatically in the south, where the curtain wall of mountains stops abruptly at the plain, leaving the Silarus to flow towards the sea over its middle and lower courses. Looking back towards the Upper Silarus from the plain, the mountains seem to retreat gracefully from each other at the valley’s entrance, only to throw up a rock wall again where the river turns.

Green and well watered, the valley’s air is fresh but humid, and clouds are not uncommon. It might look as much like Upstate New York or Quebec as the Mediterranean if not for the many groves of olive trees. No doubt slaves tended them in Roman times. Entering the valley from the plain, past the hot springs of Contursi Terme (modern name), the odour of sulphur is unmistakable. About 10 miles to the north sits the town of Oliveto Citra (modern name), on a hill overlooking the river.

Oliveto Citra claims the honour of being the site of Spartacus’s last battle. So does the town of Giungano (modern name), 50 miles away in the hills near Paestum. Neither claim can be verified, but Giungano can be ruled out, since in fact Giungano was probably the site of a different battle, the one in which Crassus defeated Castus and Cannicus. Oliveto Citra lies south-west of a plain that stretches for about 2 miles and which would indeed have made a good battlefield. Each side might have seen advantages in the relatively narrow space: the numerically superior Romans could not outflank the rebels, while Spartacus’s cavalry had only limited space to manoeuvre. If ancient conditions were like today’s, the valley contained olive trees and deep-ploughed soil. But in the west, the pockmarked cliffs of the Picentini Mountains mark deep gorges, while on the east, the long ridge of the Ogna massif stands guard. A Roman breastplate was once found in these fields. Still, one breastplate does not a battlefield make: safer to say that the battle probably took place somewhere in the valley of the Upper Silarus.