Jacky Dahomay goes even further, writing that the slaves on St Domingue did not even understand the principles of the French Revolution and one cannot call this an anti-slavery revolution; rather, it was an anti-colonial revolution that incorporated anti-slavery uprisings.13 He goes on to ask: “is revolution thinkable before the advent of modernity?”14 It seems not and thus my use of the term “revolutionary” will not be in this technical sense, since the concern here is to find out more about the uprisings of slaves, even the more minor ones, in order to discover in what circumstances slaves could rise up. Another consequence of looking for this “revolutionary” content to the revolts is that modern observers tend to emphasize the inevitable failure. What comes across quite strikingly is that for the participants the prospect of escaping slavery overrode fears of a violent death.
The purpose here is partly to indicate the difference in responses between ancient and modern writers, so I have used examples that are better known in order to illustrate this difference more effectively. The nature of the sources, however, has meant that there is a greater focus on the Roman Republic than on other periods and in Chapter 8 I draw some wider conclusions about that particular period of history. The helots of Sparta are sometimes not discussed with other slaves at all, because of their particular nature; I have addressed the issue of their status separately (Chapter 7). I look at the conditions surrounding known episodes of slave resistance so that, by the end of the book, the reader will be more aware not only of ancient and modern attitudes to slave rebellions, but also of the conditions that are beneficial to the successful organization of rebels. This structure was prompted by the following quotation from Finley:
It is a fallacy to think that the threat of rebellion increases automatically with an increase in misery and oppression. Hunger and torture destroy the spirit; at most they stimulate efforts at flight or other forms of purely individual behaviour (including betrayal of fellow-victims), whereas revolt requires organisation and courage and persistence.15
Finley highlights the extreme difficulties the slaves had to overcome simply to be in the position of forming an effective army. While it is easy to focus on the ultimate military defeat of the slaves, it is vital not to overlook the successful organization that made a military confrontation possible.
Slavery has been with us since records began and although legal nowhere it has not disappeared from the face of the earth. Orlando Patterson started his book Slavery and Social Death with these words:
There is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery. It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region on earth that has not at some time harboured the institution. Probably there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.16
In 1999 Kevin Bales documented the slavery that still exists in contemporary society. In the first chapter of his work he stated, “Slavery is not a horror safely consigned to the past; it continues to exist throughout the world, even in developed countries like France and the United States”.17 He estimated that there are currently 27 million slaves in the world.18
Although one might argue that chronic persistence does not necessarily entail easy accomplishment, it would not seem illogical to suppose that it is not very difficult to enslave people; indeed, it seems to have been, and still be, shockingly easy. Resisting enslavement is another matter, to which Finley’s remark draws our attention. In this book I attempt to illustrate how slaves in antiquity sometimes did succeed in rebelling.
In his book on slave revolts in the New World, Genovese identified conditions in which uprisings were more probable.19 They were: where the master–slave relationship had deteriorated; where there was economic distress and division between the masters; where there were large slave-holding units, in which slaves heavily outnumbered masters; where most of the slaves were free-born; where there arose opportunities for slaves to become leaders; and lastly where the geography of the area enabled the slaves to hide.20 Some of these factors overlap but Genovese’s list provides a useful starting-point for this study. As we shall see, many of these conditions hold true for those episodes of slave rebellion in the ancient world about which we have evidence. They are especially true of the period of history during which the most famous episodes took place: the later Roman Republic.
Some issues faced by the historian of antiquity have apparent parallels in the slave revolts of more recent times. Cross-cultural resemblances can be very misleading, and it is easy to draw entirely mistaken conclusions from seemingly similar sets of circumstances. The classicist or ancient historian who teaches both Greek and Roman material is used to remaining conscious of the wide gap between the two societies of Athens and Rome and the dangers of anachronistic assumptions. The difference between antiquity and the New World, for instance, is many times greater and it is beyond question that one must be alert to the perils of drawing simplistic parallels. It cannot be denied, on the other hand, that some issues faced by slaves and slave-owners were not unique to their own historical period, and that therefore it would be unnecessarily restrictive never to refer to, or to consider, other periods of history.21 Therefore, while remaining conscious of the dangers of looking at modern material in order to speculate about the situation in the ancient world, it is worth remembering that there is a long tradition of scholars of slavery looking at other cultures to help them at least suggest possibilities for the ancient world. Mark Golden’s remark is apposite:
Of course, reports on other cultures cannot in themselves replace missing data for Greece and Rome, but they can be useful all the same in providing models of the working methods of investigators into other cultures, in developing hypotheses, in identifying patterns from scattered scraps, in refuting generalizations.22
There was a huge number of armed uprisings by slaves in more recent history and we have quite a substantial amount of information on them. For instance, as Patterson notes in his article about slave revolts on Jamaica in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:
Few slave societies present a more impressive record of slave revolts than Jamaica. During the more than 180 years of its existence as a slave society, hardly a decade went by without a serious, large-scale revolt threatening the entire system. Between these larger efforts were numerous minor skirmishes, endless plots, individual acts of violence against the master and other forms of resistance, all of which constantly pressed upon the white ruling class the fact that the system was a very precarious one, held together entirely by the exercise, or threat of brute force.23
Genovese, surveying the revolts in the Caribbean and South America in his chapter “Slave Revolts in Hemispheric Perspective”, was trying to account for why there seemed to have been fewer revolts in the southern states in the United States in the same approximate time period than in these other slave societies.24 He asked, “Were the slaves in the United Sates unwilling or simply unable to rise in large numbers?”25 He concluded that there were fewer revolts for a mixture of factors, one of the most important being that the proportion of slave to free in the United States was much lower than in these more volatile places.
Herbert Aptheker’s earlier study of American slave revolts had a different focus. While admitting that the huge uprisings seen elsewhere were not present in the United States, he found from his study of the primary sources of the period that there had been more instances of rebellion than had previously been assumed. His meticulous study reveals a heavy reliance on personal letters and contemporary newspapers, exactly the sort of primary source not extant from the ancient world. Even with this type of evidence, the modern historian faces, as Aptheker illustrated, exaggeration, distortion and censorship, which we can see more clearly in the modern world because of the nature of the evidence we do have remaining.26 Aptheker’s conclusions would seem almost as appropriate for the ancient as for the modern world:
Yet, it is highly probable that all plots, and quite possibly even all actual outbreaks, that did occur, and that are, somewhere, on record, have not been uncovered. And the subject is of such a nature that it appears almost certain that some, perhaps many, occurred and were never recorded.27
From his examination of these primary sources, Aptheker showed that there were more slave revolts in the United States than had previously been thought and his book is a careful documentation of all the episodes for which he found evidence. He observed that: “The evidence, on the contrary, points to the conclusion that discontent and rebelliousness were not only exceedingly common, but, indeed, characteristic of American Negro slaves”.28
One is faced with the issue of what counts as a slave revolt. It has been objected that some of the episodes that Aptheker describes are very minor and hardly count as revolts. The bibliography, for example, on Nat Turner, the leader of the slave uprising in Virginia in the 1830s, is considerable and yet we read in a recent book on the topic:
The revolt was short, lasting little more than a day. Although panic spread throughout the South, major violence was confined to Southampton County. The number of people directly involved was limited – 60 to 80 active rebels who killed no more than 57 to 60 whites, and an infuriated white population who retaliated by summarily executing scores, if not hundreds of blacks.29
Compared to the ancient revolts, this was a very short-lived insurrection, involving very few slaves. If it had happened in ancient times it is extremely likely that it would not be recorded in any of the texts we have left. And yet for modern historians, Nat Turner’s uprising is necessary for our understanding of slavery of the time. To demand a quota for those involved, or a timescale in order to classify revolts and uprisings is beside the point. What Aptheker had wanted to discover was: were the slaves simply content to be slaves or did they try to escape their servitude? His conclusion was that they did indeed take every opportunity to gain their freedom. What Nat Turner’s revolt illustrates is that slaves were prepared to take extreme action to gain their freedom, as they have always done when possible.
In antiquity, particularly during the time of the Roman Republic, many (but not all) slaves were prisoners of war, so that they owed their slave status to the fact that they had been defeated militarily. The Romans understood their word for slave as deriving from this fact. The etymology of “servus” is discussed in the compilation of laws, the Digest, in the following terms:
Slaves (servi) are so called because commanders generally sell the people they capture and thereby save (servare) them instead of killing them. The word for property in slaves (manicipia) is derived from the fact that they are captured from the enemy by force of arms (manu capiantur).30
That is, slaves were people who otherwise would have been killed.31 This might have led to a psychological situation where they felt much less powerful than slaves who had merely been captured and sold. On the other hand, if they had once been soldiers they would have had more experience in what it took to form and lead armies. The initial band of men who rebelled with Spartacus were trained fighters, that is, gladiators, although the great mass of their army were not. The victories of the Spartacan armies were almost incredible since the Romans had in recent years conquered most of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, and yet for three years or so, this imperial force was unable to crush the slave rebels who, in massive numbers, marched the length of Italy.
My aim in this book is to look more closely at the organization, courage and persistence identified by Finley in the quotation above, and to see what historical circumstances were most beneficial for an attempt at resistance. In another work, Finley writes:
In the whole of history there have been only four slave revolts on the scale of a genuine war, with many thousands of men under arms on both sides, with battles between field armies, with the siege and occupation of cities: the three in Sicily and Italy in the period 140–70 BC and the great revolt in Haiti which coincided with, and must be viewed as a by-product of, the French Revolution. Only the latter, headed by free blacks and mulattoes, was successful.32
His last sentence might seem to imply that it is the presence of non-slaves that helped the modern rebellion, perhaps indicating that he saw the actions of slaves as ineffective unless aided by the free. His views about the overall failure of the slave rebellions of antiquity reflect a consensus among ancient historians, which has resulted in a general lack of interest or at least lack of attention.
Yet one of the most striking features of this topic is that ancient writers thought the slave uprising were far more significant than modern commentators do. In Chapter 8 I shall discuss how ancient writers viewed the revolts in the Roman Republic and the impact the uprisings had on events at the time. Given the ease with which people have always been enslaved, I wish first to look at how the participants in the revolts not only took action, but maintained their revolt for several years in some cases. Chapter 2, therefore, is on the circumstances of the outbreaks of rebellions and asks whether there are common features discernible in the historical situation that tended to be favourable to slave rebellion like those Genovese observed for the modern world. Chapter 3 deals with how the armies maintained their revolt, and Chapter 4 looks at the leaders that emerged, and how their personalities have been recorded by our historians. Chapter 5 is about the aims of the slaves and the attitudes to freedom and slavery in antiquity that the slaves may be assumed to have shared.
The problem of the interpretation of source material is immense, as will become apparent in the course of this examination. Nevertheless there were some unusual individuals in the ancient world, such as the historian Diodorus Siculus, who, for whatever reason, presented a sympathetic picture of the slaves of Sicily; without his work, any study of slave revolts would be far briefer than this. Chapter 6 concentrates on this unusual writer.
2
Preparing for revolt
In the second half of the second century BCE the Romans virtually lost control of their first overseas province for almost a decade, not to Carthaginians, from whom they had won Sicily in the first place, but to the slaves whom they had imported to work the land. They had won a series of wars against neighbours in the Mediterranean and Rome’s rise to power in hindsight looked unstoppable, and yet this valuable source of revenue, the island of Sicily, a great wheat-producing area, was nearly snatched from them, not by a Hannibal or a Mithridates, but by slaves.1
The first slave war on Sicily
Diodorus Siculus, who is our main source, tells us that the war started around 141 BCE.2 He reports that when the servile war started, Sicily had enjoyed about sixty years of prosperity after the destruction of Carthage.3 The Third Punic War ended with the complete physical obliteration of the city of Carthage in 146 BCE, but he cannot be referring to this. The Second Punic War, which ended the Carthaginian presence in Sicily, had finished in 201 BCE; this is sixty years before 141 BCE. Sometimes 135 BCE is given as the year the war started, but then one must ask why Diodorus did not tell us that it was seventy years after the destruction of Carthage.4 So our fullest source for the war, Diodorus, who gives us a fairly precise date, would have us believe it started in the late 140s BCE and that it ended about a decade later.
Roman armies were sent out to defeat the rebel slaves and eventually they succeeded. The fact that the uprising took place in Sicily made it especially worrying because the possibility of the whole island being under slave control was a real one and the Roman authority there was certainly greatly threatened. As Diodorus tells the story, the basic outline is as follows. In the first half of the second century BCE, vast numbers of slaves had been imported into Sicily to work the farms and look after animals. There were so many that the masters could not properly provide, or at least had not provided, basic necessities such as food and clothing, so the slaves turned to mugging travellers and took control of many of the roads in Sicily, terrorizing the inhabitants of the island.5
&
nbsp; Diodorus’ narrative describes a split in the ruling class quite clearly and explicitly when giving details of the Roman governors’ unhappiness at gangs of slaves roaming the countryside but not daring to remedy the situation because they were scared of the masters. Most of the great landowners were Roman equites (i.e. members of the equestrian order) and as equites were also jurors in cases against Roman governors accused of maladministration, it was not in the interests of governors to alienate them, writes Diodorus.6 Gaius Gracchus’ reform giving the equestrian order control of the courts was not until 122 BCE, leading modern commentators to dismiss Diodorus’ account as simply incorrect.7 However, the issue of antagonism between the Roman officials and the local landowners might not be inaccurate.
The presence of gangs of slaves at large in the countryside clearly was unsatisfactory from an administrative perspective. Yet from the selfish point of view of the individual slave-owner, providing enough food and clothing for what were clearly large numbers of slaves may have presented problems. In another passage Diodorus relates how those who learnt of the huge numbers of slaves in Sicily could not believe the figures.8 His description of the situation on Sicily at this time is accepted as generally accurate, since the rapid but enormous expansion of Roman power in the Mediterranean had resulted in a massive influx of slaves into territory controlled by the Romans.9
Slave Revolts in Antiquity Page 2