slave makes rough sense.
Chattel slavery was widespread in classical and Hellenistic Greece
and in republican and imperial Rome. Athens and other city-states
such as Aegina and Chios, along with various parts of Anatolia, were
centers of Greek slavery, while Italy and Sicily and the Spanish mines
were foci of Roman slavery. Before its destruction by Rome in 146 BC,
Carthage also fostered large-scale slavery in North Africa. Communal
servitude was primarily a Greek phenomenon, found in such places as
Thessaly, Crete, and Argos, but the best-known example was the helots
of Sparta. They consisted of two regional groups, each having been
conquered separately by Sparta: the helots of (Spartan-controlled)
Laconia, in the southeastern Peloponnesus, and the helots of (Spartan-
controlled) Messenia, in the southwest.
186 Strauss
A preliminary word about sources is also called for. Ancient warfare
is relatively well documented, but the same is not true of ancient slave
revolts. Relatively few records survive. In part, this represents bad luck,
but it probably also reflects a lack of interest in the subject by the an-
cient elite. Slave wars offered little glory, less loot, and potentially a lot
of embarrassment. Slaves were deemed contemptible. It was no honor
to conquer them, a truth that the Romans recognized by refusing to
allow a triumph to a general for merely winning a slave war. Nor was
there much chance for booty, since commanders would not tolerate
looting in friendly territory. A final problem was the paradox of war
against slaves, in which killing the enemy was counterproductive, be-
cause it destroyed one’s countrymen’s property. Losing to slaves, of
course, was insufferable.
Another point about the sources is that virtually all of them repre-
sent the masters’ point of view. We can do little but make educated
guesses about the plans or motives of the rebels. Much the same is true
of the study of slavery even in more modern periods of history.
To turn to slave wars is to face two different phenomena: rebellions
by chattel slaves and rebellions by communal serfs. Communal serfs in
revolt had the advantage of common nationality and local roots going
back generations. They were more likely than chattel slaves to have
served in the masters’ army or navy, usually only as servants or rowers
but sometimes as soldiers.2 Representing as they did a potential sword
in the masters’ side, serfs had a chance of attracting support from the
masters’ enemies abroad. As rebels, chattel slaves had all the corre-
sponding disadvantages: heterogeneity, alienation, relative lack of mili-
tary experience, and the unlikelihood of gaining foreign aid. They did,
however, enjoy one big advantage over communal serfs: surprise. The
rarity of revolts by chattel slaves sometimes lulled masters into letting
down their guard. The lower status of chattel slaves probably tended
to help them as well, because it left the masters unenthusiastic about
waging war against so “unworthy” and ostensibly so weak an enemy.
Revolts by communal serfs were not unusual in classical Greece. Ac-
cording to Aristotle, the penestai (communal slaves) of Thessaly and
Sparta’s helots often revolted.3 We know little about Thessaly and a
fair amount about Sparta. Various ancient writers detail the security
Slave Wars of Greece and Rome 187
measures that Sparta took against helot revolt, from locking their doors
(and taking off their shield straps while on campaign) to declaring war
against the helots annually to unleashing eighteen- to twenty-year-old
Spartan military trainees in helot country. It was Messenia’s rather than
Laconia’s helots who represented the major threat. They rose around
670 BC in a shadowy revolt known as the Second Messenian War (the
first Messenian War, ca. 735 BC, marks the Spartan conquest of Mes-
senia) and in a slightly better documented uprising known as the Third
Messenian War from around 464 to 455 BC.4
The Third Messenian War ended in ca. 455, when Sparta granted the
rebels a safe-conduct to leave their stronghold; Athens, Sparta’s rival,
settled them in the city of Naupactus on the northern shore of the Co-
rinthian Gulf, a strategic naval base. In 425 Athens established a fort at
Pylos, on the coast of Messenia, and used Messenians from Naupactus
to raid the territory and encourage helot escapees. In 424 and 413 Ath-
ens set up other bases in Spartan territory in order to encourage helot
desertion. Full freedom for the Messenian helots awaited the invasion
of the Peloponnesus by the Boeotian army in 369, which liberated Mes-
senia and reestablished Messene as the capital of an independent city-
state after roughly 350 years of Spartan control.
Compared to revolts by communal serfs, revolts by chattel slaves
were rare. Greek history affords only three certain examples of such
revolts: one on the island of Chios, led by a certain Drimacus, prob-
ably in the third century BC; another in Athens, Delos, and elsewhere
around 135–134 BC; and a third in Athens around 104–100 BC. Much more
common in Greek history was the phenomenon of states or rebels who
offered freedom to chattel slaves in exchange for their support, much
as Athens offered freedom to Spartan helots during the Peloponnesian
War. During the last years of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC.), for
instance, more than 20,000 Athenian slaves escaped to the Pelopon-
nesian fort at Decelea in the hills on Athens’s northern border.5 The
Spartans, who set up the fort, were only taking revenge for Athenian
assistance to rebellion on the part of Sparta’s Messenian helots. By
the way, some of the Athenian runaways seem to have gone from the
frying pan to the fire, since apparently some of them were “bought
cheaply” by Thebans across the border from Athens.6
188 Strauss
Other examples of rebels or states that promised to free slaves in-
clude what seems to have been an attempted coup d’état by one
Sosistratus in Syracuse in 415–413 BC; offers of freedom to slaves in anti-
Roman wars by Syracuse in 214, by the Achaean League in 146, and by
Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus in 86 and again in 65 BC; a nationalist
revolt against Rome in Macedon by Andriscus in 149–148 BC that seems
to have had some slave support; and a similar uprising in Anatolia by
Aristonicus of Pergamum in 133–129 BC.
To turn to Roman history, the sources for revolts by chattel slaves
are somewhat better, although still hardly rich. We hear of uprisings
from the earliest days of the republic, but the first reliable report is
of a slave rebellion in central Italy in 198 BC, a revolt of enslaved Car-
thaginian prisoners of war, captured during the recently ended Second
Punic War (218–201 BC). Several other slave insurrections in southern
Italy (and in one case, central Italy) in the 180s and around 104 BC are
recorded. Several of these were revolts of herdsmen, in some cases
possibly inspired by ecstatic religious rituals. Some of these
incidents
involved thousands of rebels, but they were dwarfed by what followed.
Huge slave insurrections, each involving many tens of thousands of
rebels, broke out first in Sicily and then in Italy between 140 and 70 BC.
They were the First and Second Sicilian Slave Wars (respectively 135–132
and 104–100 BC) and Spartacus’s rebellion (73–71 BC). These were the
greatest slave wars of the ancient world; indeed, they rank among the
major slave revolts of history. They took place within a space of sev-
enty years and within a relatively small geographic area—even smaller,
if one considers that Spartacus tried to spread his revolt from southern
Italy to Sicily. Spaced about twenty to thirty years apart, they repre-
sented roughly three generations of revolt.7
Exaggerated in their significance by Marxist scholars and dwarfed
in most “bourgeois” accounts of the late republic by other events, the
great Roman slave wars were genuinely important. Rome’s failure to
suppress the first Sicilian revolt contributed to the sense of military
crisis that spurred the reforms of Tiberius Gracchus, which in turn
began the Roman revolution.8 Rome’s inability to stop Spartacus ad-
vanced the careers of the career generals who represented the greatest
threat to the republic. By rendering the countryside unsafe, rebel slaves
Slave Wars of Greece and Rome 189
contributed to the sense of insecurity that made Romans ready to turn
the state over to the Caesars.
Neither the timing nor the location of the great slave wars was an
accident. Between 300 and 100 BC, a new slave economy emerged in
Roman Italy and Sicily. Fueled by its military conquests around the
Mediterranean, Rome flooded Italy with nonfree labor. By the first
century BC there were an estimated 1–1.5 million slaves on the penin-
sula, constituting perhaps about 20 percent of the people of Italy. A
large percentage of those slaves had been taken from freedom. The
sources of slaves were Roman commanders, local entrepreneurs and
slave traders, and pirates. The last group proliferated in the eastern
Mediterranean around 100 BC and entered slave trading in a big way.
Just as criminal cartels today move drugs across international boundar-
ies, pirates moved people—innocent victims of kidnapping who were
sold as slaves.
Although some of Rome’s slaves engaged in urban pursuits, most
were employed in agriculture, where large-scale enterprises predomi-
nated. The two main units of agricultural production were farms and
ranches, both staffed by slaves. Sicily and southern Italy, especially
Campania, were the main centers of slave agriculture. The countryside
in these regions teemed with slaves.
Rome inadvertently set the stage for rebellion by breaking all the
rules. It combined mass exploitation with scant attention to security.
Although ancient writers from Plato and Aristotle to Varro and Colu-
mella warned against concentrating slaves of the same nationality, the
Romans dumped huge numbers of slaves from the eastern Mediter-
ranean together. Although they came from various countries, most of
them spoke a common language, Greek. The Romans also permitted
large concentrations of Thracians and Celts, for example, in the gladi-
atorial barracks where Spartacus’s revolt was hatched. Spartacus was
Thracian and his two co-leaders, Crixus and Oenomaus, were Celts.
By the same token, the policing of slaves was inadequate. Public
police forces were primitive or nonexistent. Farm slaves faced a fairly
strict security regimen of chains and barracks, but things were differ-
ent on the ranches. Herders of cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats were left
free to drive their herds from pasture to pasture. They moved from the
190 Strauss
highlands in the summer to the plains in the winter. Their knowledge
of the backcountry made them experts at hiding from the authorities.
Because of the danger of bandits, bears, and boars, slave herdsmen
were allowed to carry arms. Many slaves knew how to use weapons
well, since many were prisoners of war who had been trained in for-
eign armies. Spartacus, for example, had served as an auxiliary in the
Roman army (that is, he fought in an allied unit, probably as a cavalry-
man) before he somehow ran afoul of the law and ended up as a slave.
No doubt other slaves had gained experience as speakers or organizers
in public life during their experience of freedom. Slave bailiffs too had
organizational skills, and some of them joined the rebels. Athenion,
for example, one of the leaders of the Second Sicilian Revolt, was an
ex-bailiff.
Left to find their own food for themselves, some Sicilian slave herds-
men formed gangs and turned to banditry. By concentrating slaves of
the same nationality or language, many of them former soldiers, and
giving them relative freedom and even weapons, as well as access to
mountain hideaways, Rome was playing with fire.
Readers might anticipate finding antislavery ideology as fueling an-
cient slave revolts. Modern movements such as abolitionism and the
earlier struggle to abolish the slave trade, as well as the American Civil
War and, above all, the Marxist appropriation of Spartacus as a symbol
of proletarian revolution, have all created this expectation. As several
scholars have pointed out, however, that ideology is lacking in the case
of almost all ancient slave revolts. We hear of a few people who op-
posed slavery in principle. They include Greek philosophers (only one
of whom, the little-known Alcidamas, is named by the sources), per-
haps two Jewish fringe groups, at least one Christian Church father,
Gregory of Nyssa, and perhaps certain Christian heretical groups.
Other wise, we know of no doctrine of abolitionism, either among free
citizens or among slaves.9
Naturally, rebel slaves sought their freedom. The slaves who re-
belled in the First Sicilian War complained of harsh and humiliating
treatment. The Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of the revolt were the
slave owners Damophilus of Enna and his wife Metallis (or Megallis) of
Enna, whose cruel punishments fueled the outbreak of slave violence.
Slave Wars of Greece and Rome 191
Damophilus owned huge cattle ranches and was known for his vulgar
display of his wealth; Metallis had a reputation for abusing her maids
with great brutality. When once approached by naked slaves in need
of clothes, Damophilus told them to steal cloaks from travelers, a “let-
them-eat-cake” remark if there ever was one.10 When the revolution
came, husband and wife were captured in the countryside and dragged
bound and chained to Enna, where they were displayed before a crowd
in the theater. Damophilos was killed there, without trial; Metallis
was tortured by her female slaves and thrown off a cliff. Their teenage
daughter, however, was spared because she had always treated slaves
humanely.
If the first war arose from excessive punishment, the Second Sicilian
Slave War emerged from false hope incited by t
he Romans. In response
to a complaint by an important ally in Anatolia, the Romans decided to
offer freedom to kidnapped slaves. The first hearings by the governor in
Sicily liberated several hundred slaves, but then rich Sicilian slave own-
ers used their influence to stop the process. Inadvertently, they spurred
another major servile insurrection.
To turn to another example, when Spartacus and his followers in
73 BC broke out of the gladiators’ barracks where they were enslaved,
they did so, according to one author, having decided “to run a risk for
freedom instead of being on display for spectators.”11 Liberty and dig-
nity motivated them, according to this account, but we hear nothing
of a more general desire to free all slaves. Nor, it seems, did they try.
Spartacus and his men, for example, freed mainly gladiators and rural
slaves; few of their followers came from the softer and more elite group
of urban slaves.
Occasionally there is a glimpse of what might have been a broader
ideology. Aristonicus’s revolt in Anatolia (133–129 BC) catches the eye
because he mobilized poor people, non-Greeks, and slaves, whom he
freed; he called them all Heliopolitae (“Sun citizens”).12 The Greek phi-
losopher Iambulus (possibly third century BC) had written about a uto-
pia called Heliopolis, “Sun City,” a caste society that possibly was free
of slavery; the few fragments of the work leave that unclear.13 Perhaps
Aristonicus himself had a utopia in mind, or perhaps he was simply
mobilizing propaganda to drum up support.
192 Strauss
It was also significant that Spartacus insisted on sharing loot equally
among his followers rather than taking the lion’s share. This might have
represented smart politics rather than incipient communism. Egalitari-
anism was not present in the Sicilian slave rebellions, whose leaders
declared themselves to be kings, complete with diadems and purple
robes. Spartacus took no kingship, but he did allow such trappings of
Roman republican high office as the fasces, symbol of the power to
command, including capital punishment.
A generalized hostility toward slavery on the part of rebels ought
not be ruled out entirely. Although it cannot be demonstrated in the
sources, those sources are full of holes and written from the masters’
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