Some slaves in Enna were so badly treated by a particular couple, that they plotted revenge. Diodorus focuses on this Sicilian couple, Damophilus and Megallis, and sees their ill treatment of their slaves as the trigger that started the rebellion.10 Diodorus tells us that this couple were so brutal that their slaves plotted to kill them. But they seem also to have larger ambitions as they did not simply just murder their masters but went to Eunus, one of the slaves in the area, who was well respected as someone with self-professed connections to the divine, since he was able to perform sleights of hand. They asked his advice about rebelling and he replied that if they proceeded without delay, they would be successful. They did so and were.
After this outbreak, more slaves rose up against their masters on another part of the island, led by Cleon who was from Cilicia. They were also successful and took Acragas (Agrigentum, on the south coast, west of Enna). There followed a series of victories for both sets of rebels, who joined forces, and with each victory attracted more followers.11 Diodorus tells us that this insurrection on Sicily inspired others: 150 slaves in Rome took up arms; more than a thousand did so in Attica; and there was an outbreak on Delos and “in many other places”.12 We learn from Orosius the names of some of the places in Italy:
What is more, the contagious disease of the Sicilian slave war infected many provinces far and wide. At Minturnae 450 slaves were crucified. At Sinuessa, an uprising of about 4,000 was crushed by Quintus Metellus and Gnaeus Servilius Caepio. A revolt of slaves in the mines at Athens was repressed by the praetor, Heraclitus. On the island of Delos, slaves who were about to break out in a new revolt were repressed by the preemptive actions taken by the citizens of the island. All of these other incidents were caused by the first source of this evil in Sicily, which scattered the embers, so to speak, that sparked the other fires.13
Orosius’ account is extremely cursory and he does not say exactly when these other uprisings took place. The late Roman recorder of prodigies, Julius Obsequens, gives uprisings of slaves in Italy for the years 134 and 132 BCE and these may be the ones referred to by Orosius,14 but it is possible that these are different ones and that slaves had rebelled earlier in these other locations. It makes tactical sense for slaves to take advantage of other slave uprisings or in fact any military activity, to take action themselves. The more fronts on which the Romans had to fight, the more chance of success the slaves had. Livy, for instance, comments on the contemporaneity of events in the early second century: “When these events were taking place in Greece, Macedonia and Asia, a slave conspiracy created great danger in Etruria”.15 In the case of the Sicilians, one may suppose that it was at least in part due to the continued efforts of the slaves on the mainland that the war in Sicily lasted as long as it did. However it seems that the longest lasting of the revolts contemporary with the Sicilian one was in Pergamum.
Julius Obsequens includes the slave wars in his lists of strange happenings.16 He collected, probably in the fourth or fifth centuries CE, Roman portents for the period 249–12 BCE, although we only have those left for 190–12 BCE. He is thought to have used Livy for this work and thus it may be deemed to be reliable information. The portents include bolts of lightning, volcanoes erupting, hermaphrodites, the birth of deformed children, statues crying and slave revolts.17
In Sicily in the 130s BCE, from Diodorus’ account, one can observe that there was alienation of the slaves from their masters, large numbers of free-born slaves, a split in the ruling class and leaders ready to present themselves to the slaves: generally, most of the conditions identified by Genovese as present when slaves successfully rebel. The picture drawn by Appian of the period leading to the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus is one of large landholding units worked by slaves, so we also have the condition of large numbers of slaves in the same workplace, able to communicate with each other and able to organize.18
Not only did the slaves succeed in forming an effective army but their cause was supported by free people of Sicily, poor citizens who turned against the slave-owners. Diodorus describes how they welcomed the reversals of the wealthy because for a long time they had resented their wealth and arrogance. He adds that whereas the slaves were careful not to damage property or harvests, and not to harm those working on the land, the free rebels used the slave uprising as a pretext for rampaging over the estates, destroying crops and burning buildings.19
For 134 BCE when the consuls were Publius Africanus and Gaius Fulvius Flaccus (the latter being the man Livy reported was sent to Sicily when the praetors could not deal with the war), Julius Obsequens reports that the sun was seen by night, an ox spoke, there was a rain of blood, the tunic of a slave caught fire but when the flames died down there was no trace of a burn, on the Capitol a bird at night groaned like a human being, in the temple of Juno a Ligurian shield was struck by lightning, and finally war broke out in Sicily and another conspiracy of slaves in Italy was suppressed.20 In his short entry for 132 BCE, he writes that, when Publius Popillius and Publius Rupilius were consuls, many thousands of slaves in Italy were suppressed with difficulty, in Sicily the slaves slaughtered Roman armies and Numantia was razed.21
What is to be noted here is that in the entries for both years, he recorded uprisings of slaves in both Sicily and Italy.22 In both cases, the Italian revolts were crushed, but the Sicilian ones were not. We have far more knowledge of the Sicilian uprising because of the greater success of the slaves on Sicily and because of Diodorus’ natural interest in the place, as well as presumably an ease on his part in obtaining information about it. However, it is necessary not to lose sight of revolts elsewhere; those further away from Rome may not have been suppressed as quickly as they otherwise might have been, because troops were dealing with threats even closer to the centre.
Slave unrest in the East
We do not have detailed information about most of the slave revolts that appeared in places other than Sicily and they all seem to have been crushed fairly swiftly. The one other uprising about which we do know more and that does seem to have been more successful than the others was that in Pergamum. Here also we are told that the slaves had the support of free people, as in Sicily, because of the circumstances at the time: the kingdom had been left to the Romans by the king in his will. Consequently, those inhabitants of Pergamum who objected to this would have joined in the revolt. Indeed scholars have recently seen this as more of a nationalist uprising against the Romans than a slave revolt.23 However, Diodorus quite explicitly states that slaves were involved and would seem to attribute importance to their cause:
The result [of the maltreatment of slaves in Sicily] was that, without any communication between themselves, tens of thousands of slaves joined forces to kill their masters. Almost the identical thing happened in Asia at the same time, when Aristonicus claimed the kingship that was not rightly his. Because their masters had treated them so terribly, the slaves in Asia joined Aristonicus and were the cause of great disasters to many unfortunate cities.24
He makes a direct connection between the activity in Pergamum and the slave war in Sicily. He recorded the first outbreak of the first Sicilian slave war and attributed it to the bad treatment of the slaves by their masters.25 He comments that as a result they reacted violently when they had the opportunity, and that tens of thousands spontaneously rebelled. In the next sentence he remarks that similar events took place elsewhere, when slaves rebelled in the East. That is, at the same time as the slave war in Sicily, there was one in Asia Minor, although the situation in Pergamum was not exactly the same as Sicily. Diodorus reported, however, quite clearly, that something similar happened at the same time, and was quite precise in saying that the slaves rebelled.
The situation arose in the following way. In 133 BCE Attalus III of Pergamum died, leaving his kingdom to the Roman people in his will, while requesting that the city of Pergamum be free. Aristonicus, the illegitimate son of Attalus’ father, Eumenes, therefore half-brother of the dead king, took advantage of an u
prising of the slaves and formed an army to resist the Romans.26 Claiming that he was the true heir to the kingdom, for a while he had control of a large part of the area, only to be eventually defeated by the Romans four years later in 129 BCE. The area became the Roman province of Asia.
Even this brief outline has been challenged. For example, Sallust has recorded a different interpretation of the trigger for these events in the letter of Mithridates, in which the misdeeds of the Romans are listed. Mithridates, writing to the king of the Parthians, Arsaces, as recorded by Sallust, attributes only one motive for the actions of the Romans, that is greed for power and money.27 He then proceeds to list examples of these actions and, in describing the events in Asia Minor, writes:
Later, having made him [Eumenes] the guardian of a captured territory, they transformed him by means of expense and insults from a king into the most wretched of slaves. Then, having forged an unnatural will, they led his son, Aristonicus in triumph like an enemy, because he had tried to recover his father’s rights.28
The sources that remain are thus rather critical of Roman conduct in this episode. More importantly for the discussion here, however, both Diodorus and Strabo report that Aristonicus was supported by slaves. It is almost as an afterthought that Strabo records any information about Aristonicus at all since he had not mentioned him in the more obvious place while discussing Pergamum and its kings, where he had related its history as far as the death of Attalus.29 Instead, we learn about Aristonicus in the description of Leucae, a place for which it would seem Strabo did not have many details, for it is here that we learn about the revolt, and not much else. Strabo writes that, after being defeated in a naval battle, Aristonicus went inland and gathered a large army of poor people and of slaves, whom he enticed with the promise of freedom and whom he called Heliopolitae.30
Aristonicus, like other individuals involved in slave uprisings in antiquity, was not a slave; even though Plutarch is derogatory about his birth,31 he was the illegitimate son of the king’s father, Eumenes. Diodorus observes that the slaves were alienated by their maltreatment and joined the rebellion out of anger. In other words, the situation seems to have been that the slaves had already rebelled and that these rebels joined forces with Aristonicus. In any case, the way that Diodorus reports the episode, it is not that Aristonicus recruited slaves because he promised them freedom, but rather they had been badly treated and so joined the revolt.32 This may or may not be a true analysis but, in his narrative, we see the slaves as active agents, not merely pawns in the power struggle of a weakened dynasty.
In Pergamum, the uprising lasted as long as it did (133–129 BCE) because the ruling class in the region was split between those in favour of the legacy leaving the kingdom to Rome, and those opposing it. In places other than Sicily it would have been the case that all the elements of society, apart from the slaves, were united in putting down the individual revolts. That is, although slaves who rose up against their masters elsewhere helped the rebels in Sicily, they themselves were overwhelmed by the forces against them. In Pergamum the situation was more like that in Sicily in that the region was clearly split between those who supported the Romans, or at least saw opportunities for themselves under their protection, and those who objected to the dramatic last will and testament of their king. This split presented the slaves with an opportunity to exploit, and consequently this particular rebellion was more successful and long-lasting.
Other revolts
The eventual Roman victory over the armies of slaves in the first slave revolt on Sicily did not succeed in crushing the slaves’ hopes of freedom, and some thirty years later there was a second damaging slave war in Sicily. The thirty years between the two great wars also saw several episodes of slave rebellion. These seem to have been relatively short-lived but the impression given is that the period was extremely volatile. As observed earlier, revolt, regardless of the final outcome, gives hope to others, often sparking further unrest, and this certainly seems to have been the case here.
Diodorus, who again is the main source of information about this war, reports that at the same time as the Romans had defeated Jugurtha and had had defeats in Gaul against the Cimbri, that is in 104 BCE, news came to Rome of another uprising of slaves in Sicily.33 Diodorus comments that even before this time there had been indications of unrest. Slaves in Italy had rebelled as if a sign from the gods of what was about to happen: “Even before the new uprising of the slaves in Sicily there had occurred in Italy a number of short-lived and minor revolts, as though the supernatural were indicating in advance the magnitude of the impending Sicilian disaster”.34 The first was at Nuceria, south of Nola and west of Pompeii, but only thirty slaves were involved and they were immediately stopped. The second was at Capua where 200 rose up but again they were crushed. The third was bigger, involving hundreds, and Diodorus gives us more details about this one, although not about where it took place. His lack of precision may be due to the fact that it took place in the same area as the previous revolt he had described, that is, Capua.
This third revolt in Diodorus’ account, which is reported at most length, is a rather unconvincing tale of a love-sick individual called Titus Vettius Minutius. The son of a wealthy father, he was a young man of the rank of equites, who fell in love with a slave and tried to buy her but could not afford her. Since we have already been told that his father was rich, this seems a little strange. As Diodorus writes: “Since he was still ablaze with love for the woman, he did something that was against all reason: he concocted plots against his creditors and began to claim the powers of a king”.35 What is perhaps stronger evidence for his loss of sanity is that he flogged and beheaded his creditors, armed 400 of his own slaves (and again this would seem to imply he had quite substantial wealth himself), and soon acquired a following of more than three and a half thousand rebellious slaves. The Senate sent out one of the praetors, Lucius Lucullus, who took 600 conscripts from Rome and at Capua summoned 4,000 infantry and 400 cavalry. By persuading one of the rebel commanders to betray his own side, Lucullus and his army gained the upper hand and all the rebels cut their own throats.36
We can see that the story of this uprising was passed down to us because of the moral nature of it – that is, the dangers of not being able to control oneself, of being a slave to one’s emotions – nevertheless, we have the seeds of yet another uprising of slaves, whatever the motives of the leader. The point is that whatever the intentions of Vettius Minutius, arming so many slaves had consequences far beyond one Roman noble either losing his senses from desire, or trying to escape his debts. One might imagine that such a story developed in order for the Romans to understand for themselves why one of their own took up with slaves. They could only understand it if the man was carried away by lust, just as the suggestion was put forward that Spartacus had been trained by the Romans. Only that could explain his huge success.
Keith Bradley makes some thought-provoking remarks concerning Diodorus’ narrative about these minor slave uprisings preceding the second big war in Sicily:
Diodorus, however, saw the three episodes as intimations of the war that was about to come in Sicily soon afterwards, just as he believed that the earlier revolts in Italy, Attica, and Delos were triggered by news of the first war. Similarly, Orosius wrote of sparks flying from Sicily to ignite servile unrest in Attica and Delos. With the benefit of hindsight such connections were easily made. But they are not credible. Most of the incidents are better understood as purely isolated responses to slavery of the sort that could occur at any time, as indeed had happened in the second century.…37
However, it would seem plausible that when slaves learnt of other uprisings, as they must have, this might give them ideas to attempt the same. Bradley does not put forward any evidence to support his statement and, as Joseph Vogt points out, slaves were generally central to the transmission of news in ancient society, being the messengers both public and private.38 It is true that if masters had not wanted slaves to kno
w some information then they may have employed free men to transmit certain messages. However, given the ubiquity of slaves in every aspect of life in the ancient world, significant events could not be kept secret from all of them. The isolated responses to slavery that occurred during the second century may well not have been as isolated as our scanty sources might imply.
Another revolt, this time recorded by Athenaeus, also took place at the same time as the second uprising in Sicily.39 This was again in Laureion, the Athenian silver mines.40 Athenaeus writes that he acquired this information from Posidonius, who reported that they revolted, murdered their overseers and took the hill of Sunium, and for a long time plundered Attica. He goes on to state that there were many of these uprisings and that more than a million slaves were killed.41 He adds that Caecilius wrote a treatise on the slave wars that would have included the details of the Athenian uprising, which, according to Posidonius, lasted a long time.42
The account for the second war, as preserved by Photius, gives the background information needed to understand the immediate outbreak of revolt in Sicily. It started with Marius’ campaigns against the Germanic tribe, the Cimbri, who had been very successful against the Romans. In 105 BCE the Roman army had suffered a terrible defeat against the Germanic tribes. This defeat scared the Romans so much that Marius was given a second consulship to deal with the threat from the north. Marius had been given permission to ask for help from overseas so he approached Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia. Nicomedes refused, saying that he could not comply because most of his countrymen had been enslaved by Roman government contractors.43 This improbable reply was not taken as a joke but rather seems to have reflected some reality because the Senate passed a decree saying no citizen of an allied state could be enslaved in a Roman province and if they had been, the governors of the provinces were to set them free.44
Slave Revolts in Antiquity Page 3