The Spartacus War

by Strauss, Barry

  Spartacus knew what a terrible precedent his men had now set. He understood, as well, that wars are not won by raids. In his vain attempt to stop the massacre, Spartacus had told the men to be quick. Varinius, after all, would be coming.

  After their success in the Campus Atinas, the insurgents had to keep moving, to evade the Romans, and to find new sources of food. The new recruits had to be outfitted with weapons - probably makeshift weapons. They had to take whatever rushed advice about fighting that they could get while the army was on the move.

  They blazed the trail well, it seems, because by the time they reached the Ionian Sea, the insurgents had finished off Varinius. We don’t know where or when. By the accident of survival, the sources cast a spotlight on Spartacus’s movements from the Picentini Mountains to the Campus Atinas. Unfortunately, they grow dim again for the six or so months following. The insurgents stormed through Lucania; that much is clear, as is the outcome of the duel between Spartacus and Varinius. Otherwise, the narrative is mainly a matter of educated guesswork.

  The land drew the rebels ever southwards. Not just the Campus Atinas but most of Lucania was good to plunder. It was rich in pastures, grain fields, vineyards and woods, with large numbers of sheep, goats and game animals. Lucanian horses were supposed to be small and ugly but strong - not perfect cavalry mounts, but they would do.

  But where would the insurgents go and how would they get there? A look at the map can be misleading. It appears that Spartacus and Crixus had no choice in mountainous Lucania other than following the Via Annia, which ran southwards through the Campus Atinas and down to Bruttium (modern Calabria). But in fact they had other options. A series of roads along Lucania’s mountain ridges pre-dated the Romans: most of them have been called ‘winding, narrow, and cramped’ but the insurgents had seen worse.

  After sacking the Campus Atinas, Spartacus’s men could have, for example, followed the pass between the Magdalene Mountains (Monti della Maddelena) and the Pope’s Mountain (Monte del Papa), as they are known today, to the Roman colony of Grumentum. (Today, Italy’s Highway 103 follows that route.) There in the high valley of the Aciris (modern Agri) River, they would have found a shepherd’s paradise - and a recruiter’s delight. Heading eastwards, they then could have followed one of several routes to the Ionian coast and the cities of Metapontum (Metaponto) and Heraclea. From there, a coastal road led south to Bruttium and the city of Thurii.

  For what it is worth, modern folklore has Spartacus travelling widely in Lucania. For example, the towns of Oliveto Citra, Roccadaspide and Genzano di Lucania all claim to have been the site of one of Spartacus’s battles. Castelcivita‘ has a cave of Spartacus and a bridge of Spartacus. Caggiano, Colliano and Polla all boast that Spartacus passed through on his travels. But none of this is surprising, since southern Italy historically has been the land of brigands and Spartacus is the granddaddy of all outlaws. Nor do these claims prove that the insurgents passed through in autumn 73 BC rather than, say, a year later - if at all.

  Also, for what it is worth, the ancient evidence for the months following the rebels’ stay in the Campus Atinas refers twice to local guides. ‘They were very knowledgeable about the area,’ says one source about some of the insurgents. One local stood out for his pathfinding scouting skills. His name was Publipor.

  All that survives about Publipor is one line in a lost history book. Yet of all the bit parts in Spartacus’s saga, his might be the most intriguing. Among the insurgents’ various pathfinders, Publipor was probably the best. ‘Of all the men in the region of Lucania, he was the only one with knowledge of the place.’

  Publipor means ‘Publius’s Boy’. He was a slave, the property of one Publius. Publipor was a common slave name, shared, for instance, by the great Latin playwright Terence, a freedman who had been called Publipor as a slave. Publipor was probably not a boy, since the Romans often applied the word ‘boy’ to adult slaves. He was most likely an adult and, given his expertise in Lucania’s terrain, Publipor may well have been a shepherd.

  Tens of thousands of slaves fought with Spartacus, but aside from the gladiators, Publipor is the only one whose name survives. We don’t know why his local knowledge was important, but it surely was, since our source singles him out. Could it be that he did the insurgents the great service of showing them a spot where they could lie in wait for Varinius? Maybe Publipor helped Spartacus stage one of greatest coups yet.

  The details of the fighting aren’t known. But it is a good guess that the insurgents avoided pitched battle, preferring instead ambushes, traps and hit-and-run attacks. Pitched battle was too dangerous because even if they outnumbered the Romans, the rebels could not match their equipment. They still had to rely on do-it-yourself arms and armour, as one source makes clear: ‘they were used to weaving rustic baskets out of branches. Because of a lack of shields then, they each used this same art to arm himself with small round shields like those used by cavalrymen.’ They stretched hides over the branches to cover the shields.

  The insurgents captured standards from Roman centurions. Better yet, they took control of Varinius’s lictors with their bundles of rods and axes - their fasces - that symbolized the praetor’s power. And they also grabbed Varinius’s horse; according to one source, they snatched it from under him, making his capture a very close call. Varinius escaped. But the real and immediate winner was the man to whom the standards and fasces were brought in triumph: Spartacus. It was now, it seems, that he really became ‘great and frightening’, as Plutarch describes him.

  The standards, the fasces and the horse were better recruiting tools than a praetor’s head on a pike (although the Celts, who were headhunters, might have disagreed). The standards were totems whose loss was immeasurable. The fasces was a sacred symbol, like a royal sceptre or a bishop’s crook. The horse was sacred to Celts, Germans and Thracians. In the glow of these icons Spartacus was more than an adventurer: he became almost a king.

  ‘After this,’ says one source, ‘even more men, many more, came running to Spartacus.’ ‘In a short time they collected huge numbers of troops,’ says another. The recruits came pouring in, usually barefoot, in coarse woollen cloaks, sometimes carrying their chains.

  Numbers are difficult. The ancient sources vary greatly, ranging from estimates of 40,000 to 120,000 insurgents. To make matters worse, good ancient ‘statistics’ tend to be approximations, bad ancient ‘statistics’ tend to be wild exaggerations. For example, the number 120,000 - the high estimate for Spartacus’s troops - appears often enough in ancient sources about this or that war to demonstrate that it was just a rhetorical maximum, the equivalent of ‘a huge number’. To complicate things further, it is unclear whether ancient statistics about the insurgents include women and children.

  The safest course is to follow the lowest figure, which gives Spartacus and Crixus about 40,000 men in spring 72 BC and even more by autumn. By ancient standards this was no small sum. It is more men than Hannibal had when he crossed the Alps, for example, and about the size of Caesar’s army when he conquered Gaul. For that matter, the number of 40,000 men roughly equals the size of the largest army that the Romans would ever muster against Spartacus.

  Around the time they defeated Varinius - we can’t be sure of the sequence of events - the rebels found themselves at Lucania’s Land’s End. The men who had washed their hands in blood in Capua now dipped their feet in the Ionian Sea. To be precise, they dipped them in a large inlet of the sea known as the Gulf of Tarentum (modern Taranto). The turquoise waters of the gulf, about 90 miles long and wide, wash the ‘arch’ of the Italian ‘boot’. The gulf’s coastline, stretching roughly from Tarentum to Croton, includes some of the most fertile land in Italy. This was once Magna Graecia, ‘Greater Greece’, a region of Greek colonies whose prosperity eventually outstripped that of the mother country. In its prime, Magna Graecia produced great generals, law-givers, doctors, artists and athletes. Pythagoras, one of ancient Greece’s leading philosophers, built his
school here. But the conquering Romans ended all that. The gulf coast was still lush and abundant, but power and influence had passed it by.

  Because the land was a backwater, it was useful for Spartacus and Crixus. Remote from Rome, the Ionian coast made a perfect base for the insurgents. It had a mild climate and was well stocked with food. Its large slave population made it promising recruiting country. Its farms and towns had furnaces that could be used for melting down slave chains and re-forging them as swords and spearheads. Its ports could attract merchants and pirates. Nearby loomed rugged hills and dense forests to retreat to in case the Romans arrived. It was, in short, a place to build an army.

  But it was not about to open its doors to the rebels; they would have to break them down. And so they attacked, inflicting ‘terrible slaughter’, as one source says. They might have been as brutal here as they had been in the Campus Atinas. One of the places the insurgents went after was the city of Metapontum. Indeed, archaeology may show traces of their onslaught. A stoa (portico) in town, used as a warehouse, was destroyed during this period. Some see the hand of the rebels in this, and it certainly isn’t hard to imagine them crossing the moat and breaking through the wooden palisade that was Roman Metapontum’s main defence. Perhaps the citizens had tried to stop them by using the catapult balls that were being manufactured around this time in a nearby villa. But that sounds rather grand for Roman Metapontum, a place whose best days were behind it. Metapontum in 73 BC was more like a small town than the great city it had once been.

  In its heyday (c. 600-300 BC) Metapontum had been a success story, one of Greece’s greatest colonies. Its fertile fields made Metapontum a bread-basket, with ears of wheat proudly displayed on its gold coins. But then came Rome and the familiar pattern of oppression, revolt, occupation and punishment. The once grand urban space had shrunk to a small sector.

  In Metapontum’s countryside, meanwhile, the many small family farms of the Greek period disappeared. The land had been handed over largely to a few grandees, Romans or their local ‘friends’. Medium- or large-sized villas now dotted the river valleys and the coastal road or dominated the heights. Diversified agriculture was in decline, and pasturage was prevalent, especially of sheep, cattle and horses. In other words, this was in large part ranch country and, therefore, slave country: fertile ground for Spartacus’s recruiters.

  One of Roman Metapontum’s few urban renewal projects was the temple of Apollo, which was revived and expanded. In the form he was worshipped here, Apollo was, for practical purposes, equivalent to Dionysus, and the religion was very popular in the city and its countryside. The message of the Thracian woman, therefore, might have fallen on willing ears at Metapontum.

  About 12 miles south of Metapontum lay Heraclea, in the rich soil between the valleys of the Siris (modern Sinni) and Aciris Rivers. It was a centre of agriculture and crafts and a well-known market town. Unlike Metapontum, Heraclea had played its cards well with Rome. Over the centuries it maintained its autonomy - and on such favourable terms that it even hesitated to accept Roman citizenship when it was offered after the Social War. We hear nothing about Spartacus going to Heraclea, which may reflect the reception he expected to get there. But the people of Heraclea couldn’t be sure that Spartacus wasn’t coming and they therefore took precautions.

  Or so we might conclude from a small, grey vase that had been buried under a private house in Heraclea. The vase was filled with a gold necklace and over 500 coins, all of them Roman silver. The necklace is decorated with garnets and glass beads, with delicate gold terminals in the shape of antelope heads. The coins date from c. 200 to 70 BC; most of them come from a twenty-year period, 100-80 BC. Nearly half of the coins are small change, which is odd, considering the value of the necklace: one scholar takes this as a sign of haste, as if whoever filled and buried the vase had no time to separate good money from bad. Were these objects interred in a hurry at a sign of Spartacus on the horizon? Or perhaps it was their own slaves whom the Heracleots feared. The city was a centre of the Dionysus cult.

  South of Heraclea the coastal plain narrows sharply between the sea and the foothills of the Pollino Mountains (modern name). This range marked the southern boundary of Lucania. Beyond lies the southernmost region of Italy: Bruttium. Like Lucania, Bruttium is mountainous, and its people were similarly tough. Bruttium was destined to play a big part in Spartacus’s revolt. That role began here, just beyond the last foothill of the Pollino massif along the coast. A vast plain opens up here, wider, greener and lusher than even the country of Metapontum or Heraclea.

  This is the Plain of Sybaris, almost a world unto itself. About 200 miles square, the plain is cut off on the north and west by the peaks of the Pollino, towering and snowcapped for most of the year; on the south by the steep twisting hills of the Sila Greca; and to the east by the sea. The grand sweep of its fertile soil lies under the hot sun, watered by the Crathis (modern Crati) and Sybaris (modern Coscile) Rivers. The climate was mild enough to make the place famous for an oak tree that didn’t lose its leaves in winter.

  The golden plain was the California of antiquity, and its San Francisco was a Greek colony planted there c. 700 BC: Sybaris. The city’s luxury was so legendary that even today sybarite is still a byword for hedonist. Gastronomy was the preferred vice, and why not, when the land was so bountiful that the Sybarites supposedly ran wine rather than water through their clay pipes! In addition to its wine, Sybaris was famous for its olive oil and its wool. Grain was cultivated on the plain, while fig and hazelnut trees were grown on the hillsides. Wood and pitch were brought down from the thick forests of the Sila Mountains. The sea teemed with fish, including the much prized eel. Sybaris’s bustling seaport attracted traders from a wide variety of Mediterranean ports.

  Sybaris had been totally destroyed in a war with its neighbours in 510 BC, but the plain was too fertile to leave fallow. In 444 BC a new Greek city, Thurii, was founded in its place. In 194 BC it was Rome’s turn. The Romans founded a colony at Thurii and renamed it Copia, ‘Abundance’. But most people continued to call it Thurii. Supposedly there was so much good land here that the Romans had trouble finding takers for all the lots. But nature abhors a vacuum. By 73 BC the valleys of the Crathis and Sybaris Rivers contained a number of Roman villas, some large, but most mid-sized. Roman senators and knights, and a veteran of Sulla are among those known to have owned property here. While herding took place, agriculture remained a major activity in this fertile country.

  Another of Thurii’s resources was a cadre of discontented slaves. Around 70 BC a property-holder in these parts armed his slaves and sent them to loot and murder on his neighbour’s farm in an attempt to take over the property himself. About ten years later slave insurgents were active in the area. In 48 BC the Roman thug Milo was sent to Thurii to raise a revolt among the shepherds in the vicinity.

  But the people of Bruttium were famous for waging guerrilla warfare: it was ‘their natural disposition’, says one Roman writer. In addition, Thurii had been a centre of Orphic religion for centuries, a cult with Dionysiac overtones, which offered a natural opening to the Thracian woman and her prophecies. It was, in short, promising recruiting ground for the insurgency. No wonder Spartacus and Crixus looked with wide eyes at Thurii in late 73 BC.

  Once they crossed into Bruttium, the insurgents fanned out into the hills. No doubt they went after Roman farms. Then, when they had found food and recruits, they turned on the city of Thurii itself. Until now, Spartacus and Crixus had damaged the territory of various cities but they had not conquered and occupied any urban spaces. Their supporters consisted of ‘slaves, deserters and the rabble’, as one ancient writer puts it. ‘Rural people, mainly slaves but also some free’, would be a more impartial description.

  At Thurii they finally conquered a city. If not a big city, Thurii was walled. The insurgents were making wicker shields, not siege engines, and they could hardly have stormed the town. It is unclear whether they had the patience and discipli
ne to surround the city for months until they starved it out. The most likely explanation of their success is an inside job. Someone within the city, maybe a group of slaves, opened the gates and let the men of Spartacus and Crixus in. The result was probably a slaughter.

  Perhaps it was around this time that the insurgents raided the city of Consentia (modern Cosenza), the capital of the Bruttii, an inland town located on the Via Annia, about 50 miles south of Thurii. Cosentia sat in a rich territory of farms and pastures with the prospect of additional supplies and supporters.

  From Metapontum to Thurii and perhaps beyond, the insurgents had brought fire, death and freedom. Yet they were also building an army. At Thurii, they could finally settle down to train. Among their urgent needs were weapons and discipline. Spartacus addressed both necessities by laying down the law: whatever merchants might offer, his people could not buy gold and silver; only iron and bronze for weapons were allowed. Crixus presumably backed up Spartacus. Another source of arms-grade metal was the runaway slaves’ own chains, which were melted down and re-forged into weapons. It is hard to say which is more striking, Spartacus’s strictness or the traders’ willingness to take a chance on dealing with the fierce insurgents. Were these ‘mer chants’ really pirates, as some suggest, or were they simply gamblers who saw big profits in risky business?

  Arms don’t make an army. The newcomers needed training. By winter 73/72 BC, the summer’s raw recruits had become old hands, and they no doubt passed on practical experience. Still, there was no substitute for a professional. Ex-gladiators and veterans, whether of Roman or other armies, played the most important role as drill instructors, we might guess.

  Spartacus must have known that building an army takes a first-rate management team. We might imagine him carefully choosing his battalion and company commanders. Any prior military experience was surely invaluable. Veterans of Marius or former soldiers captured in Rome’s border wars probably shot to the front of the pack. But organizational skill is a necessity in a commander, and slave foremen had that skill in spades. Nor can the moral factor in leadership be discounted. As an astute judge of character, Spartacus might have chosen some men without prior military experience to lead units of his army.