Slave Revolts in Antiquity

by Urbainczyk, Theresa;

  Such claims to kinship, one might argue, led to sympathy on the part of observers, who considered that the enslavement of other Greek peoples was wrong, as well as an observation that this was not efficient. It was probably after observing the situation in Sparta that Plato and Aristotle declared it a bad idea to have slaves who spoke the same language as each other. In any case, the ancient sources are sympathetic to helots in a way that is very unusual. I would argue that, indeed, Sparta is a special case and it is precisely due to the special circumstances that we have as much evidence as we do about the attitude and activities of their slaves.

  Most of our sources are Athenian and thus, to some extent, anti-Spartan for this period. Athens produced the major literature of the period and many of its aesthetic, political and cultural values were passed down throughout the ages. When we study classical Greece, it is often the society of Athens that is under scrutiny. Much of the Athenian literature has survived, that is, in comparison with other states. Sparta, when Athens was at its height, was its enemy. It is a commonplace that societies make the customs of their enemies “other”. Just as Sparta was alien because of the way its women behaved, and were treated, so it was “other” in the barbaric way it treated its slaves. The situation was as different in Sparta and Athens as possible, although given the close geographical proximity, writers could not be too outrageous in their claims. But just as Plutarch later was to contrast how Cato treated his slaves with how the Greeks in general treated theirs (the Greeks treated their animals better than Cato treated his slaves), so the Athenians showed the moral inferiority of their opponents by the way they treated their helots (and their slaves even had a different name). We do not know how much of what the Athenian sources say may be true. It is the fact that it was written down that is important for us here, since normally how slaves had to lead their lives was passed over in silence.

  8

  Slave revolts in the ancient historiography

  What is striking when reading the ancient texts is that their writers considered the damage of slave revolts to be much greater than scholars do with hindsight. In their analyses of the fall of the Republic, the great slave wars were integral to the story. This is not the case in modern books, and indeed the difference between the ancient and modern viewpoints seems to be becoming even more marked. Yet it appeals to common sense that slaves were potentially an enormous threat to the authorities in both Greece and Rome.

  Finley observes: “I should say that there was no action or belief or institution in the Graeco-Roman antiquity that was not one way or other affected by the possibility that someone involved might be a slave”.1 The first sentence of the section on slave resistance in The Slavery Reader is: “The history of slave resistance is the story of slavery itself”.2 Taken together, one can see that if these two propositions have some truth, then the topic of slave revolts is a vital aspect of the study of antiquity. Yet although much has been written on Greek and Roman slavery, the same cannot be said for slave resistance in this period. One reasonable response might be that our sources are inadequate, but this difficulty has been, if not overcome, then courageously addressed by armies of scholars in respect of other aspects of slavery.

  As an indication of the scholarly attention to the topic of slave revolts it is interesting to note the differences of treatment of slave wars of the Roman Republic in the first and second editions of The Cambridge Ancient History, volume IX.3 The first edition, from 1932, discussed the first Sicilian slave war in Chapter 1, on Tiberius Gracchus, and the second war in Chapter 3, “The Wars of the Age of Marius”; they were discussed, in other words, in their historical setting, since these wars were 30 years apart.4 The reader of the second edition, on the other hand, has to search in the subsection “Sicily” of Chapter 2, “The Roman Empire and its Problems in the Late Second Century”, to find two pages dealing with both slave wars together.5 The second edition also puts Spartacus into a subsection of the chapter “The Rise of Pompey”, a subsection of some nine pages, entitled “The Wars against Sertorius and Spartacus 79–71”, but only two of those pages are about Spartacus.6 Sixty years earlier, the rebels under Spartacus had had a whole subsection to themselves entitled “The War of the Gladiators”.7

  Spartacus, the only slave leader to be mentioned, has only one reference in the index to a recent textbook, The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic (which incidentally has no chapter – out of a possible fifteen – with the word “slave” or “slavery” in the title).8 The reference is to a section entitled “Pompeius” in a chapter on the crisis in the Republic. Of the slave leaders only Spartacus is mentioned, and again only once, in another survey, A History of the Roman Republic, although there are five references to slave revolts in that volume.9 However, each of these refers only to a sentence or so, except for one that refers the reader to a paragraph on the Spartacan revolt. I mention these books only because they represent current attitudes in scholarship to the topic.

  Recently, Pierre Piccinin has argued that although there were slaves in Spartacus’ army, and although Spartacus and his generals were indeed gladiators, this uprising in 73 BCE cannot be called a slave war. It was rather a war against Rome: a nationalist conflict of Italians against Roman rule.10 Piccinin admits that his thesis is not new; he is building on the work of Zeev Rubinsohn, among others, who had asked whether this was a servile war and concluded that it was not.11 As he himself admits, this radical hypothesis means that most of our ancient sources are mistaken.12 But there are no overwhelming grounds for a total disregard of our ancient evidence, which does in fact present a coherent and consistent account of these episodes.

  A large problem for modern scholars has been the intentions of the slaves. What did they want? The line of argument that they could not have wanted the abolition of slavery and therefore their uprisings were not important may seem puzzling, but in essence it lies behind many discussions in recent times. Griffith, for example, remarks:

  With the best will in the world I cannot persuade myself that he was a prophet with a social message, dying for a cause for which the time was not ripe. Nor can I see his rising as in any sense a link in the chain of events leading from republic to empire. He gave the government at Rome a nasty fright but it may be that his influence upon history lies in a very different direction. It was his determined resistance that made it necessary to call in Pompey, on his return from the East, to help finish off … Had these two men [Pompey and Crassus] been able to work better together in the difficult years that followed history might have taken a very different course.13

  In other words, according to this view, Spartacus is important because of the role he played in the relationship between Pompey and Crassus. The fate of the Roman Empire lay in the hands of these two individuals, not thousands of slaves. Although an unquestioning acceptance of the statements of some of our sources may give this impression, it seems counterintuitive to imagine that a rebellion of tens of thousands of slaves had no further repercussions.

  First, we can never know what the slaves wanted, so to be certain that they could not have wanted the abolition of slavery is impossible. People today work for ends that others see as unrealistic, such as world peace, a nuclear-free world, making poverty history or equality for men and women. Simply because these aims may be unreasonable or even impossible has not stopped our contemporaries having them. One cannot argue that the slaves in antiquity by necessity would have been realistic and that they must have seen that there could be no end of slavery at that time.14

  It cannot be denied that the most famous slave revolts of antiquity happened in a relatively short space of time: sixty years or so in the period of the late Roman Republic. The period has always been seen as one of particular disturbance and attracted more comment than others and one might say that its peculiar nature resulted in a peculiar historiography. Those who tended to write about the end of the Republic were often writing in the Imperial period and so were happy to narrate events that perhaps r
epublican historians might not have. Or, on the other hand, one could suggest that the Republic was in such a state of upheaval that the republican historians were also divided and therefore narrated events that in a more stable set of circumstances would not have been reported.

  The first of these famous slave wars was the first Sicilian slave war, which broke out maybe in the 140s BCE and certainly carried on until the late 130s. The Spartacan revolt, which was the last great outbreak of this sixty or seventy year period, finished in 71 BCE. These dates alone are significant. In 133 BCE Tiberius Gracchus, who was acting on observations of what was happening in Sicily, that is, the slave war, was murdered for suggesting unpalatable reforms to redistribute to poor citizens the public land, which had sometimes been appropriated by wealthy landowners. In 71 BCE Pompey succeeded in wresting from the Senate a consulship to which he was not entitled, with the slave war having just been finished in Italy. The fact that the Senate allowed him to have this extraordinary consulship cannot be divorced from the extreme threat that had recently faced Rome with an enormous slave army marching the length of Italy defeating Roman armies on the way.

  The start and end dates of these major slave wars mark the timespan of Rome in the Late Republic by Mary Beard and Michael Crawford, which in turn covers the same period as the first book of the civil wars by Appian.15 Appian’s narrative is central for any study of the period and many modern studies have not strayed too far from his structure, or his analysis. H. H. Scullard starts his classic From the Gracchi to Nero with the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus. This is not chance or laziness. Things in the Roman Republic did change dramatically with the murder of this tribune. As Appian remarks: “The sword was never carried into the assembly and there was no civil butchery until Tiberius Gracchus, while serving as tribune and bringing forward new laws, was the first to fall victim to internal commotion”.16

  According to Appian, the civil war started with the murder of Tiberius Gracchus. With his reforms he was trying to remedy problems caused by the phenomenally fast increase of the conquests of the Romans in the Mediterranean, which included a massive influx of slaves into the Roman system, resulting in the armed uprising on Sicily. Polybius had started his Histories: “For who is so worthless or indolent as not to wish to know by what means and under what system of polity the Romans in less than 53 years have succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government – a thing unique in history?”17 The fifty-three years in question were 220–168 BCE, that is, from the start of the Second Punic War until the end of the Macedonian monarchy, as he explained.18 In fact he started earlier than this and went back to the start of the First Punic War, 264 BCE, as he admitted,19 and continued until the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BCE. In other words, Polybius, having lived through a large portion of this period, thought the crucial years in the history of Rome were those years immediately preceding the first Sicilian slave war, the years that built up the situation that resulted in tens of thousands of slaves taking up arms against their masters. When in 146 BCE it looked as if Rome had vanquished all its enemies and was at the height of its powers, one aspect of this might was the enormous number of slaves it had taken. It was these that could have been its undoing.

  Appian

  To ancient writers, then, these years were highly significant, and to them the slave wars were an integral part of the general disintegration of society. With a ruling class divided, there was an opportunity for the slaves. Appian saw the split and wrote his history accordingly. He introduced his Civil Wars by saying that, after the murder of Tiberius Gracchus, there were numerous other atrocities ending temporarily in the dictatorship of Sulla; after his death, however, the chaos broke out again until Julius Caesar was made dictator for life. When he in turn was murdered, even worse civil war broke out. Octavius eventually emerged from this conflict to establish a lasting and masterful government that brought peace to the Empire. Appian comments: “So after all sorts of discord, the Roman state returned to harmony and monarchy”.20 The admission that the Romans had a monarch is striking since the Romans were traditionally supposed to hate the very word for king, rex.21

  Appian drew attention to the increase in the number of slaves used to work the land and stated that the large landowners employed slaves because their labour was more constant; slaves were not conscripted to go and fight as free labourers were. He adds a point often ignored by modern scholars: that the slaves reproduced more than the free precisely because they did not go and fight. He writes:

  At the same time the ownership of slaves brought them [the rich] great gain from the multitude of their progeny, who increased because they were exempt from military service. Thus certain powerful men became extremely rich and the race of slaves multiplied throughout the country while the Italian people dwindled in numbers and strength being oppressed by penury, taxes and military service. If they had any respite from these evils they passed their time in idleness, because the land was held by the rich who employed slaves instead of free men as cultivators.22

  This is not just a side issue for Appian but is crucial for understanding the problems of the times. It was of central importance, in his eyes, for the campaign of Tiberius Gracchus. In his introduction to him he reported almost immediately: “He [Tiberius Gracchus] inveighed against the multitude of slaves as useless in war and never faithful to their masters, and cited the recent calamity brought upon the masters by their slaves in Sicily …”.23 He explains that this was because so many had been recently brought on to the island and then comments on the war: “recalling also the war waged against them by the Romans, which was neither easy nor short but long-protracted and full of vicissitudes and dangers”.24 Tiberius Gracchus is supposed to be saying this in 133 BCE so it seems that the war had been going on for some time.

  The land law of Tiberius Gracchus, as described by Appian, was an attempt to remedy the situation brought about by the importation of so many slaves and the detrimental effect of this on the Italians. The rich did not like Tiberius’ suggestions and brought forward objections, then the poor, he says, complained in their turn. Apart from complaining of poverty, and their military service: “they reproached the rich for employing slaves, who were always faithless and ill-disposed and for that reason unserviceable in war, instead of freemen, citizens and soldiers”.25 In the following chapter, in reporting Tiberius’ response to all this, Appian writes that, among other things, he asked whether a citizen was more worthy of consideration at all times than a slave.

  According to Appian the start of the civil war was due to the issue of the slaves in the Empire. Slaves were crucial throughout this period, in his eyes. Tiberius Gracchus was murdered at the same time as Aristonicus was leading his uprising in Asia. Appian makes this connection: “These things took place [i.e. the murder on the Capitol] at the time when Aristonicus was contending with the Romans for the government of Asia”.26 He is concerned here with the civil wars so he simply mentions this and passes on, but the reader knows that this trouble also involved slaves. So at the time when the Romans murdered Tiberius Gracchus for trying to solve problems incurred by there being so many slaves in the Empire, there was another uprising on the opposite side of the Mediterranean, which also took some time for the Romans to put down.

  Also in Appian’s first book we learn about the Social War: the war waged by the Romans against their allies, the Italians, who wanted Roman citizenship. This war is the backdrop to the survival of the army of Spartacus in the Italian countryside but was also a result of the Gracchan reforms, which were implemented by a commission even though the proposer had been murdered. Italians were losing their land owing to the redistribution, so they tried to protect themselves. One proposal to make the reforms more palatable was to give Roman citizenship to the Italians.

  The consul of 125 BCE, Fulvius Flaccus, and one of the agrarian commissioners involved in the redistribution, tried to bring it forward but failed owing to resistance from the Senate
. Later Appian goes back to this to explain the origins of the Social War.27 He sees this as part of the civil wars. As he remarks, it began in Rome and led to terrible consequences. Also related to our concern with slaves, in Mithridatic Wars Appian comments that the Italians had allowed Spartacus through their land because they hated the Romans so much. This hatred had its origins in the land reforms and the way the Romans dealt with their concerns, and earlier. When describing the revolt of the inhabitants of Asculum, he remarks that all the neighbouring peoples declared war at the same time and he lists them: “the Marsi, the Peligni, the Vestini, the Marrucini and after them the Picentines, the Frentani, the Hirpini, the Pompeiians, the Venusini, the Apulians, the Lucanians and the Samnites”, about whom he commented “all of whom had been hostile to the Romans before”.28 He then goes on to add other people who also joined in.

  The Romans, by their maltreatment of their neighbours several decades before, thus aided the revolt of the slaves under the leadership of Spartacus.29 When the Etrurians and Umbrians started thinking of revolt, Appian reports that the Senate gave in and gave the faithful Italians citizenship to keep them faithful, adding that they made sure their vote was ineffective by enrolling them in the ten new tribes, which voted last; this later became a source of conflict.30 We also learn in this chapter that there was a shortage of soldiers so that the Romans had to enrol freed men in the army for the first time.

  What is interesting about Appian’s narrative is that slaves are frequently represented as the deciding factor. When the Marians resisting Sulla in Rome promised freedom to slaves if they fought on their side, no one volunteered,31 clearly marking out their side as the losing one. And in the next sentence we are told that, in despair after this rejection by the slaves, they fled the city. A little later we are told that Sulpicius and his associates had been exiled from Rome because they had fought against the consuls, and had incited slaves to join them.32 Appian later describes how Pompey was expected to become a dictator and encouraged this in secret. When the slaves under Milo were rampaging and killing, the Senate also wanted to make Pompey dictator, in order to have protection against the slaves, but in the end they only made him sole consul.33