Slave Revolts in Antiquity

by Urbainczyk, Theresa;

  Ἔν τε ται̑ς ἑορται̑ς καὶ ται̑ς εὐχίαις λέγεσθαί τε καὶ ἄ̣δεσθαι παρ᾽ αὐτοι̑ς εἰς τὸν ἥλιον, αφ᾽ οὑ̑ τάς τε νησους καὶ ἑαυτοὺς προσαγορεύουσι (Diodorus, 2.59.7). There are seven islands of about the same size, the same distance from each other and following the same customs and laws (ibid., 2.58.7).

  64.

  Ibid., 2.55–60. The details we are given indicate that this is fantasy rather than reality: they were all the same shape and size, had flexible bones and were very strong. They had big ears, which they could close up; they had a forked tongue with which they could talk with two voices, conversing with two different people at the same time. Their islands were neither hot nor cold, the days were the same length as the nights and there was an abundance of food and drink. They brought up their children together and did not divide off into family units. Although their homes were richly endowed with all they needed they were not idle and they all took turns to work at some craft, except old people. Any disabled people or those beyond a certain age (although they lived to be very old, some as much as 150 years old) killed themselves for the good of the community. The significance for Aristonicus’ followers is that there was no place for slaves in this description. See Doyne Dawson, Cities of the Gods: Communist Utopias in Greek Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) on utopias in antiquity. He mentions this one briefly (ibid., 172).

  65.

  Plutarch, Life of Tiberius Gracchus, 20. See Farrington, Diodorus Siculus, 34–5, for an exposition of the view that there were ideological reasons for Blossius’ connection with Tiberius Gracchus and Aristonicus. See also Donald R. Dudley, “Blossius of Cumae”, Journal of Roman Studies 31 (1941), 94–9, who argues that we cannot generalize about Stoicism from Blossius’ actions, but that we can see Blossius as an opponent to Roman imperialism. See W. W. Tarn, “Alexander Helios and the Golden Age”, Journal of Roman Studies 22 (1932), 135–60, for a vivid exposition of the grand plans of Aristonicus and Blossius. It is possible that academics’ views of the influence of philosophers on society is influenced by their idea of their own importance in the world.

  66.

  Diodorus, 36.4.1–2.

  67.

  Ibid., 36.4.3–4.

  68.

  See Chapter 4 for a discussion on the qualities attributed to the leaders by our sources.

  69.

  Ibid., 36.4.8.

  70.

  Ibid., 36.4.7.

  71.

  Christian Mileta, “Quellenkritische Beobachtungen zur Vorgeschichte und zur Natur des Sizilischen Sklavenkriege in den Diodor-Fragmenten”, in Akten des 6. Oesterreichischen Althistorikertages Innsbruck 1996, P. W. Haider (ed.), 91–112 (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 1998), 99.

  72.

  Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion, 75.

  73.

  The effect would be rather similar to the theatrical shows mocking the Romans put on by Eunus outside one of the cities.

  74.

  Diodorus, 36.4.8.

  75.

  ἡ δὲ τύχη καθάπερ ἐπίτηδες αὔξουσα τὰς τω̑ν δραπετω̑ν δυνάμεις ὁμονοη̑σαι τοὺς τούτων ἡγημόνας ἐποίησεν (ibid., 36.7.2).

  76.

  παρέδωκεν εἰς φυλακήν (ibid., 36.7.2).

  77.

  The praetor was Gaius Claudius Glaber. Plutarch calls him Clodius and writes that it was merely a hill (Life of Crassus, 9). Appian calls him Varinius Glaber and tells us it was Mount Vesuvius (Civil Wars, 14, 116).

  78.

  Baldwin, “Two Aspects of the Spartacus Slave Revolt”, agreeing with Plutarch, challenges the idea that the Romans did not take these revolts seriously.

  79.

  For a modern echo of this in the 1831 rebellion of slaves in Virginia led by Nat Turner see Douglas R. Egerton, “Nat Turner in a Hemispheric Context”, in Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, K. S. Greenberg (ed.), 134–47 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 145: “Nor was there anything absurd about Turner’s stated expectation that his army could obtain weapons as they marched”.

  80.

  Appian, Civil Wars, 1.14.117.

  81.

  ᾔδει δὲ καὶ ἔναγχος τὴὐ |ταλίαν σχεδὸν ἅπασαν ἀπὄ Ρωμαίων ἀποστα̑σαν ὑπὸ ἔχθους, καὶ ἐπὶ πλει̑στον αὐτοι̑ς πεπολεμηκυι̑αν, Σπαρτάκῳ τε μονομάχῳ συστα̑σαν ἐπ᾽ αὐτούς, ἀνδρὶ ἐπ᾽ οὐδεμια̑ς ἀξιώσεως ὄντι (Appian, Mithridatic Wars, 109: 519–20). However, Baldwin, “Two Aspects of the Spartacus Slave Revolt”, 294, cites the lack of Italian support as the reason why Spartacus’ enterprise was doomed from the start.

  82.

  On the nature of command see Zeev Rubinsohn, “A Note on Plutarch, Crassus X.1”, Historia 19 (1970), 624–27, and B. A. Marshall, “Crassus’ Ovation in 71 BC”, Historia 21 (1972), 669–73.

  83.

  Philip de Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 133, points out that no other source mentions the pirates and that the episode could have been included to discredit Spartacus, although it is not clear why it would have done.

  84.

  Suetonius, Life of Augustus, 3.1.

  85.

  Suetonius states that the Senate ordered Augustus’ father to pass through Thurii on the way to his province of Macedonia, because a group of outlawed slaves who had fought under Spartacus and Catiline were holding possession of the area (Life of Augustus, 3). This seems to be another example of a maroon community, causing no little damage to Roman morale. As a child the future Emperor Augustus was nicknamed Thurinus because his father had got rid of these slaves, although Suetonius gives an alternative reason, which was that some of his ancestors had come from the region (ibid., 6).

  86.

  Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion, 100.

  87.

  This may seem puzzling because in Slavery and Rebellion, ch. 1, he shows very clearly the dissonance between the reports from the masters and the slaves in the modern world. However, his purpose there is not to point out that dissonance, but to illustrate the phenomenon of maroon communities.

  88.

  Ibid., 101. Elsewhere Bradley writes:

  It does, however, require stress that the escalation of the revolt of gladiators into a sustained war of servile resistance cannot possibly have been what Spartacus and his immediate companions had hoped to achieve when they made their escape from Capua. The sources have little to say about the motivations of the rebel slaves, but everything that is said pertains only to the gladiators’ circumstances.

  (Ibid., 98, emphasis added)

  Armin Jähne, Spartacus: Kampf der Sklaven (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1986) likewise stresses that Spartacus and his followers only wanted their freedom (“Ziel und Programm”, in ibid., 157). Bradley remarks:

  There is no evidence to suggest that Spartacus and his followers, any more than the slaves at Enna or Halicyae in Sicily, purposely set out from the beginning to raise a general rebellion of slaves throughout central and southern Italy. Indeed, the peculiarity of their circumstances, once contrasted with those of other slaves, precludes any such thought.

  (Slavery and Rebellion, 98, emphasis added).

  If we translate “vindicari” in the more usual way, as discussed earlier, Florus (2.8) tells us that the slaves, having started out wanting merely to escape, turned their thoughts to revenge when they realized how many of them there were.

  89.

  The Roman soldiers under Sulla remembered the recent slave war ten years earlier when they called Fimbria “Athenion”, as if he were a slave leader (Appian, Mithridatic Wars, 59). The episode is mentioned by Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion, 90.

  90.


  Ibid., 104, emphasis added.

  91.

  Ibid. In arguing that all the slaves ever wanted was their freedom and nothing more, he ignores evidence he uses himself. He comments that the case of Spartacus was not a unique case of a gladiator rebelling (ibid., 89); in 21 CE some gladiators joined Sacrovir’s revolt (Tacitus, Annals, 3.43). As Bradley observes, this was a revolt not simply against slavery but against Roman rule, and yet he argues in earlier chapters that the slaves in Sicily could not have been intending to fight for an independent Sicily, but had merely been trying to escape and in the process had acquired too many followers.

  92.

  Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion, 90–92, concludes: “The violence of the revolt was the product of the violence slave owners themselves had long fostered in their slaves and for which they themselves had set the example” (ibid., 92).

  4. The role of the leader

  1.

  Thomas Grünewald, Bandits in the Roman Empire: Myth and Reality, J. Drinkwater (trans.) (London: Routledge, 2004) (originally published in German as Räuber, Rebellen, Rivalen, Rächer [Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1999]), suggests that the noble outlaws we find in the texts, such as Spartacus, are merely literary conventions (see e.g. ibid., 13, 165–6). The translation does not help his case, perhaps, because in English the word “bandit” is more positive than the German “Räuber” that it translates. For instance, the sentence, “At the mention of ‘bandit’ ancient, like modern, readers anticipated grim exposes of the misdeeds of common, despicable thugs” (ibid., 165) does not ring true. For modern, native English-speaking readers the mention of “bandit” carries at the very least some connotation of a romantic individualist. Grünewald is right, however, to draw attention to the common characteristics of some of these people. On the other hand, usually the descriptions are very slight and only consist of a couple of adjectives, so that no nuanced portrait is possible. In the case of slave leaders, only some are presented positively.

  2.

  For that very reason when discussing rebel slaves it is a modern reaction to heroize the rebels since, whatever their motivation, they were participating in a fight against slavery on some level.

  3.

  This is very similar to a contemporary description of the rebel leader Nat Turner, who, we are told, was “little more than a trickster who ‘used all the arts familiar to such pretenders, to deceive, delude and overaw [the] minds’ of his disciples” (quoted by Egerton, “Nat Turner in a Hemispheric Context”, 138).

  4.

  Appian, Civil Wars, 1.14.

  5.

  It was not only slave leaders who had to be exceptional. The great enemy of Rome before this had been Hannibal, and in the historiography he is presented as exceptional. See, for instance, Cornelius Nepos’ Life of Hannibal. On attitudes to slaves Herodotus relates an improbable story about Scythians returning home after a campaign lasting almost thirty years to find that slaves, or the offspring of slaves, had taken over (The Histories, 4.1–4). They were unable to gain the upper hand until one of the Scythians suggested that instead of approaching them as equals, they should go with whips to remind them they were only slaves. This psychological analysis was successful and the Scythians regained their territory.

  6.

  Cassius Dio, Histories, 76.10.1–7, which comes from Xiphilinos, Epitome of Cassius Dio, 318, 29–321, 24. R.st. The state of the text of Dio’s Histories for this period is rather similar to that of Diodorus for the Sicilian wars. Indeed, the Excerpts of Constantine Porphyrogenitus are responsible for preserving some of Dio’s text, as they had been for parts of Diodorus. The other epitomisers were Xiphilinos, from the eleventh century, and Zonaras in the twelfth. See Fergus Millar, A Study of Cassius Dio (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 1–4. The restored text was edited by U. P. Boissevain, Cassii Dionis Cocceiani Historiarum Romanarum Quae Supersunt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1955).

  7.

  He reports that in the tenth anniversary of his reign, the emperor, Severus gave gold pieces to the people and praetorian guard, totalling 200 million sesterces. There were spectacles in Rome for the wedding of Severus’ son and Plautianus’ daughter. Fire erupting from Mount Vesuvius seemed to augur a change in the state, we read, and Plautianus was got rid of (Cassius Dio, Histories, 77.2). Plautianus had castrated 100 Roman nobles (ibid., 76.14); we read of other vicious behaviour by him (ibid., 75/76), and he gets his just deserts (ibid., 77). We also read that the sons of Severus, Antoninus and Geta were friends of gladiators and charioteers (ibid., 76/77.7), a sure sign of degeneracy. Just before he relates the story of Bulla Felix, we read that a man was executed because he was bald. Millar, A Study of Cassius Dio, 138–50, argues that there is “little justification for the view that Dio was hostile to Severus” (ibid., 138), although he admits that there are hostile elements in his account (ibid., 141–2).

  8.

  Ά̇γγελλε τοι̑ς δεσπόταις σου ὅτι τoὺς δούλους ὑμω̑ν τρέφετε, ἵνα μὴ λη̣στεύωσι (Cassius Dio, Histories, 76.10.4–5). He had pretended to be a Roman official in order to free two of his men who had been captured. He promised a centurion that he would betray the chief, that is, himself, if the centurion followed him. The gullible Roman did and was duly captured. Bulla then dressed himself up as a Roman magistrate and put on a mock trial to judge the soldier. It is then that he told him to pass on the message to feed their slaves.

  9.

  Ού̇τε δὲ ἑωρα̑το ὁρώμενος ού̇τε εὑρίσκετο εὑρισκόμενος ού̇τε κατελαμβάνετο ἁλισκόμενος; τοσαύτη̣ καὶ μεγαλοδωρία̣ καὶ σοφία̣ ἐχρη̑το (ibid., 76.10.2).

  10.

  Ibid., 76.10.7.

  11.

  Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 6.266b.

  12.

  Ibid., 6.266c–d.

  13.

  Ibid., 6.265e–266b.

  14.

  Readers in antiquity might have wondered at the arrogance of these slaves in setting themselves up as kings, and been frightened by their ability and planning; they might have realized the necessity, stressed by the agricultural writers (see e.g. Cato, On Agriculture 5.3–5; Columella, On Agriculture, 1.8.6), of keeping one’s slaves away from religion as far as possible, especially those slaves in positions of authority.

  15.

  Appian, Civil Wars, 1.117, 1.116. This passed into tradition, so that Pliny writes:

  But we know that Spartacus forbade anyone in his camp to possess gold or silver, so much stronger at that time was the moral fibre of our slaves. The orator Messala has recorded that the triumvir Antony used gold chamber pots for all the calls of nature, a charge that would have shamed even Cleopatra. Previously foreigners held the record for extravagance. (Natural History, 33.49)

  16.

  Diodorus calls Eunus a τερατίας (Diodorus, 34/35.2.8).

  17.

  καὶ τὴν ἀνταπόδοσιν τοι̑ς παρὰ τὰ δει̑πνα δεξιωσαμένοις ἐν γέλωτι οὐ χωρὶς σπουδη̑ς ἐποιήσατο τη̑ς χάριτος (ibid., 34/35.2.9). Photius gives some precise details, so we learn that Eunus killed his owners and that there names were Antigenes and Pytho.

  18.

  Diodorus, 34/35.2.41.

  19.

  Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion, 124.

  20.

  καὶ παραδοθεὶς εἰς φύλακὴν καὶ του̑ σώματος αὐτου̑ διαλυθέντος εἰς φθειρω̑ν πλη̑θος οἰκείως τη̑ς περὶ αὐτὸν ῥᾳδιουργίας κατέστρεψε τὸν βίον ἐν τῃ̑ Μοργαντίνῃ [Remanded to prison, where his flesh disintegrated into a mass of lice, he met such an end as befitted his knavery and died at Morgantina] (Diodorus, 34/35.2.23). In 1982 two articles appeared independently, without reference to each other, on the subject of this gruesome form of death. Thom
as W. Africa, “Worms and the Death of Kings: A Cautionary Note on Disease and History”, Classical Antiquity 1 (1982), 1–17, gives an overview of the sort of people who suffered such a fate but A. Keaveney and J. A. Madden, “Phthiriasis and its Victims”, Symbolae Osloenses 57 (1982), 87–99, differentiate between lice and worms, and say that Eunus suffered from scabies. Eunus’ namesake, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the monster of the Maccabean histories, died in a similarly horrible way. A fuller description of his death is given in 2 Maccabees 9:5, 8–9 – he had worms crawling from his eyes and he stank so much that no one could come near him (2 Maccabees 9:9–10) – than Diodorus gives of Eunus’ and it bears more similarity with Plutarch’s gory details of Sulla’s demise (Plutarch, Life of Sulla, 36).

  21.

  The only other woman who makes an appearance on the side of rebels is the wife of Spartacus, mentioned by Plutarch (Life of Crassus, 8).

  22.

  The first chapter of Diodorus, 34/35.1, that is the chapter immediately preceding the narrative of the slave war, is also from Photius and has details about the real king Antiochus and his “merciful” treatment of the Jews. The Hellenistic king had a counsellor called Achaeus, so this slave may also have changed his name.

  23.

  Ibid., 34/35.2.21.

  24.

  There is a sentence in the Excerpts, unconnected to the main narrative about the slave war, about the Syrian runaways cutting off not just the hand but also the arms of their captives, but what this refers to is not at all clear (οἱ Σύροι οἱ δραπέται [the Syrian runaways], 34/35.8). If this sentence is taken to refer to the slaves, it may account for why it has been supposed in the past that most of the slaves were from Syria. However, Diodorus does not generally call the rebels “runaways” but uses different terms to describe them, and at no other point does he include the country of origin to describe them. Also, if this did refer to the slaves on Sicily it would be unusual, since only in the initial attack on Enna, described by Photius, are the slaves described as acting with great brutality (ibid., 34/35.2.12). That is not to say that Diodorus did not thus describe them, but only that in what we have left this is not typical. More usually, it is the masters who are described as behaving in a violent and cruel manner.