The Spartacus War (23 page)

Battle inspired, terrified and disoriented its participants. Always loud, the sound of battle echoed between the hills, leaving men uncertain about the location of a given action. Commanders might have had to guess the course of action by watching dust clouds raised by charging troops.

One source uses a metaphor from the arena to characterize the rebels’ fighting spirit: ‘As befit an army led by a gladiator, the battle was fought sine missione - to the death.’ Sine missione is a technical term for a bout in which the producer denies a defeated gladiator the chance to live. The Romans knew that no opponent was more dangerous than one who cannot live but can still kill.

By killing Spartacus the Romans had turned the tables on his strategy. They apparently inflicted the psychological shock on his men that Spartacus had hoped to inflict on the Romans. After he was killed, the rest of his army fell into disorder. The loss of cohesion is fatal in pitched battle. The legionaries, we can imagine, now pushed and chopped their way into the rebels’ lines, opening up pockets here, there and everywhere. The bravest of the rebels would have stayed and fought but many would have run - if they still could. ‘They were cut down en masse,’ says one source. Another puts it more admiringly: ‘They met with a death worthy of real men.’

They may have owed their courage in part to their women, who likely stood in the rear ranks. The Triballi, a tough Thracian people, are said to have stationed women there during one battle. They rallied any wavering men with cries and taunts. It was deserved humiliation, but at least the women did not kill them, as Cimbri women are said to have done under similar circumstances.

By the battle’s end, the Romans had crushed Spartacus’s army. They paid a price for victory: the rebels, it is estimated, had killed about 1,000 Roman soldiers. At about 2.5 per cent of Crassus’s troops, that amounted to what was probably a lower-than-average death rate for the winning side in a Roman infantry battle (based on the limited surviving evidence). The Romans caused massive carnage in turn.

One source claims 60,000 rebel dead, but that is preposterous. A more honest assessment of rebel casualties concludes that ‘a slaughter of them came about that cannot be counted.’ Still, thinking out loud is permissible. Lopsided casualty ratios were not unusual in ancient battles; soldiers who broke and ran were at the mercy of those in pursuit. We know of cases in Roman history in which the defeated army is said to have seen more than half of its men killed or taken prisoner. If there is an element of exaggeration in those figures, there is also the fact that victorious cavalry could ride down an enemy in flight, and infantrymen could encircle their foes and cut them to pieces. If the victorious Romans suffered a death toll of 2.5 per cent, it is possible that the defeated rebels suffered several times as many deaths: it is not difficult to imagine 5,000 to 10,000 deaths out of 30-40,000 rebel soldiers.

Indeed, the sheer number of slippery corpses and scattered weapons might have slowed down the Romans’ pursuit of their broken foe. Bodies might have been piled up two or three high, and even the air might have seemed to be thick with blood. A large number of rebels managed to flee into the nearby mountains. We might assume that any man who could took women and children with him, rather than leave them to the Romans. Crassus had to engage in extensive mopping-up operations after winning the battle. The shock waves spread even further, as survivors took the fight both north and south.

Contrary to myth, Spartacus was not crucified. Crassus could never have asked the question that led to the chorus shouting, ‘I am Spartacus!’ That response is a brilliant Hollywood touch - but it is entirely fictional.

Spartacus died in battle and his corpse was never found. This may seem hard to imagine in the case of so famous a man: surely, someone recognized him. But the slave commander might have worn ordinary armour: finery would not have suited a man who outlawed gold and silver, divided loot equally, and killed his own horse. Spartacus’s final struggle might have left only the badly disfigured body of a soldier dressed in ordinary armour. Then the tide of battle flowed over it, no doubt rendering it unrecognizable in the end. Crassus was denied the chance to decorate a trophy with the arms and armour of his rival.

Spartacus had failed. He had freed tens of thousands of slaves and built them into an army that even some free people joined. He had upended much of the southern Italian countryside. Conquering legion after legion, he had taxed Rome’s resources for more than two years. But in the end, Spartacus went down the same path of catastrophe as Hannibal and, in later years, Cleopatra. Spartacus’s defeat was both a failure of the intellect and of the imagination. Any thoughtful analyst would have reached the conclusion that, sooner or later, the Roman army would crush the insurgency in Italy. Most of the insurgents, however, could not imagine a safe and happy life over the Alps in a strange country. Spartacus built an army that was bold enough to win if it would only quit while it was ahead, but not wise enough to see this.

Whether Spartacus’ s leadership failed is a difficult question. He did not fail on the battlefield, where he excelled as a commander, as long as he maintained limited goals. Nor did he fail in training or inspiring the troops. Spartacus did not attempt to abolish slavery altogether nor did he make a serious effort to conquer the city of Rome, but he offered grand ideals nonetheless. He gave his followers realistic but noble goals: freedom, equality, honour, prowess, vengeance, loot and even the favour of the gods. But not even Dionysus’s favourite could convince them of his ultimate strategic goal: Spartacus failed to persuade his men to cross the Alps. It is doubtful that anyone could have persuaded them. Desperate men are easy to inspire but difficult to reassure. After proving to his army that the gods had turned against Rome and its legions, he could not convince them that disaster lay around the corner unless they fled Italy.

Spartacus suffered the common fate of prudent revolutionaries: he lit a fire that he could not put out. He discovered as well that the very vigour that makes insurgent armies successful makes them fragile. Rebel forces, built from scratch, are notoriously volatile and wilful. Spartacus’s army suffered from massive internal divisions between Italian-born and emigrants and, especially, from divisions among different ethnic and national groups. The mix of Thracians, Celts, Germans and Italians was unstable, yet it was all there was. Spartacus had no choice but to fight with the men he had.

Given those limitations, Spartacus acted well when Crassus brought on the inevitable crisis. It was prudent and proper for him to cross into Sicily. Spartacus cannot be blamed for being double-crossed by the pirates, especially if they were bribed and bullied by the Roman governor of Sicily, Verres. Did Spartacus botch the crossing by raft or was it beyond the technical capabilities of all but the best-supplied forces?

Spartacus was a failure against Rome but a success as a myth-maker. No doubt he would have preferred the opposite, but history has its way with us all. Who, today, remembers Crassus? Pompey? Even Cicero is not so well remembered. Everyone has heard of Spartacus.

Strangely enough, though, they often remember the wrong man. Neither firebrand nor idealist, the real Spartacus wanted to mix hope and prudence. Ultimately, one suspects, he would have been happy to carve out a small space free of Rome and retire as a king or lord in a corner of Thrace. But history taught him a hard lesson: unlike games in the arena, revolutions spill out of control.

Meanwhile, thousands of corpses lay back near the Silarus River. We can make educated guesses as to their fate. The bodies of officers might be transported back to Rome. For ordinary Roman soldiers, it was standard practice to be cremated on the battlefield, where their ashes would be buried in a mass grave. The corpses generated a thick cloud of smoke as the flames consumed them and filled the valley with a sickly-sweet smell. Before the pyre was lit, the legions would give their fallen comrades a final salute, marching around the pyre in full armour to the blare of trumpets, and it is possible that arms and armour were tossed into the flames. Numerous animal sacrifices ended the ceremony.

The rebels probably did not receive similar treatment. Wood was too expensive to waste on them, so their corpses were likely to have been dumped into a mass grave. The body that had been Spartacus probably ended up in an anonymous mound of flesh in a trench covered with dirt.

Somewhere between the headwaters of the Silarus and the spot where the river breaks out of the mountains into the plain, somewhere along the ancient highway between Italy’s two seas, somewhere between the road to Cannae and the beaches where the Allies would land one day, Spartacus was laid to rest.

11

The Victors

S
pring belongs to Venus, goddess of gardens and love. In Capua, the famous roses bloom. Crowds thicken in the city’s perfume market, where exotic scents fill the air. Meanwhile, in 71 BC, 681 years since the founding of Rome, in the consulship of Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura and Cnaeus Aufidius Orestes, the machinery of the Roman state grinds on. On 1 April - the Kalends of April, to the Romans - a Capuan slave named Flaccus inspects a sack of coins. He is the property of the house of Novius, a prominent business family in Capua. The slave confirms the authenticity of the coins, seals the sack, inscribes his name on an ivory rod attached to it, and completes a tiny step in the vast process of sending the Roman people its taxes. Taxes are as timeless as the roses blooming.

Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Capua, the Roman people exact another payment. Down the road to Rome, as far as the eye can see, there stretches a line of slaves dying on crosses. It is the end of Spartacus’s revolt.

The crucified were Crassus’s last victims. They had done everything they could to avoid this fate. After surviving defeat in battle in Lucania, a still considerable number of rebels had fled rather than surrender. They had lost Spartacus and their other leaders but apparently they chose new ones. If pitched battle no longer lay within their means, they could still carry out guerrilla operations. The sources say that they went into the mountains - perhaps the Picentini Mountains that they knew so well. Crassus and his army followed them. The rebels divided into four groups, no doubt hoping that by scattering they would increase the odds of survival. Apparently, they failed; Crassus claimed to have captured them all.

Crassus took 6,000 rebels alive. He then marched them to Capua, a distance of about 75 miles, assuming that they were captured in the Picentini Mountains. Were any of the original seventy-four gladiators who raised the rebellion among them? If so, they would not have had long to contemplate the irony of their return to the city where they had first broken out of the house of Vatia. Crassus had in mind a punishment that the Roman world considered ‘terrible’, ‘infamous’, ‘utterly vile’ and ‘servile’. He planned to crucify all 6,000.

In the western world, crucifixion has a profound religious meaning because of the crucifixion of Jesus. In ancient times, crucifixion signified capital punishment; the cross was the equivalent of the gallows but far crueller. The Romans considered crucifixion the supreme penalty, reserved for rebellious foreigners, violent criminals, brigands and slaves. Verres had crucified an alleged agent of Spartacus, thereby unwittingly subjecting a Roman citizen to a punishment from which he was exempt. Spartacus had purposely crucified a Roman prisoner in the Battle of the Melìa Ridge. He wanted to warn his men about what they could expect from the Romans, and he was right.

The crucifixion of 6,000 people maybe the largest recorded mass crucifixion of the ancient world. Only Octavian Caesar, the future emperor Augustus, matched it in 36 BC when he captured and crucified 6,000 slave rowers from the fleet of his rival, Sextus Pompey. In both cases, the figure 6,000 is an approximation and, like most ancient statistics, it must be taken with a grain of salt. But ancient sources mention other mass crucifixions, among them: 800 men crucified in 86 BC, with their wives and children killed before their eyes, under Alexander Jannaeus, king of independent Judaea; 2,000 rebels from Tyre crucified along the Mediterranean shore by Alexander the Great in 332 BC; 2,000 rebels crucified in Judaea by the Roman official Quintilius Varus in 4 BC; 3,000 rebels crucified in Babylon by the Persian king Darius in 519 BC. Supposedly 500 people a day were crucified during the six-month Roman siege siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, a shockingly high total of 90,000 crucifixions - if true.

If crucifying 6,000 slaves was extreme, the action bears Crassus’s signature. The man built his career on the willingness to go the extra mile, from buying a legion to decimating a cohort to walling off the ‘toe’ of the Italian ‘boot’. Why not cap his victory with a spectacular, cruel and extravagant gesture of Roman justice?

We find crucifixions disgusting, but Romans probably tolerated them as a grim necessity. Nowadays many people reject the death penalty as cruel and unusual or criticize a tough interrogation technique like waterboarding as torture, while other people accept them. The purpose of crucifixion, in Roman eyes, was less revenge than deterrence. Most Romans considered the slave revolt as a crime inflicted on the people of Italy. They disregarded the injustice of slavery and noted only the devastation of the countryside. The sight of slaves in arms had aroused the Romans’ fear, anger and indignation. Now they wanted peace of mind promised by a sight burned for ever into the mind’s eye, a warning to Italy’s slaves never to repeat their rebellion.

In Capua, the freedman Publius Confuleius Sabbio might have walked outside the city walls to take in the sight. Sabbio had done so well in the cloak-weaving business that, in the early to middle first century BC, he was able to build a large townhouse decorated with elegant and ornate mosaics. He welcomed guests with his favourite greeting, Recte omnia velim sint nobis, ‘I would like all things to go well for us!’ The ex-slave would probably have faced the prisoners on the crosses with less kind words. He was a city-dweller; they were country folk; he had achieved success in the Roman order; they had threatened to destroy it. Although Sabbio too had once faced the threat of the cross, he may well have thought that Crassus had done the right thing.