About the same time the Roman senate was actually taking steps to check the slave trade and to restore to liberty a number of persons then in slavery. It was decreed unlawful to make a slave of any free man or woman belonging to an allied nation, and whenever the case should arise, the governors of the provinces were ordered to set such persons free. In a short time more than eight hundred Sicilian slaves obtained their freedom under this law, and it was natural that many thousands should claim the same advantage, whether they had a legal right to it or not. The measure had been passed too hastily, and the result was that it seemed necessary to suspend it for a time. An immense number of slaves who had presented themselves in the hope of being emancipated were ordered to return to their masters. They knew what awaited them if they obeyed, and they took sanctuary in the sacred grove of the mysterious Palici, where they were protected as in a city of refuge by the immemorial tradition of sanctity which clung to the place. There, from hot, still pools, the intermittent springs send up from time to time high jets of steam and boiling mud, and then again these sink down and the froth subsides in the earthy cauldron and all is very still; for thus it pleased the twin gods to manifest their power. These pools are near the place now called Palagonia.
It is believed that from their safe retreat the slaves treated with their masters, in order that they might be taken back without suffering punishment for their attempt to gain freedom; but that, with the true Greek instinct for treachery, they agreed among themselves in a conspiracy to rise against their owners at a certain time. And so they did; for not long afterwards the slaves of two landholders in Halicyae, which is now Salemi, murdered their masters in their sleep, and rousing the slaves of neighbouring farms got together a force of two hundred and fortified themselves on a precipitous height to await events. Presumably, they expected news of other risings in the neighbourhood, but they had either anticipated the time agreed upon, or their friends lacked courage, for none stirred. The praetor appeared with a body of soldiers to storm the place, but finding it stronger than he had expected, he bought the services of a condemned criminal who had escaped justice and turned bandit, and this man was received in a friendly way by the slaves, with his troop of brigands, and he immediately betrayed them. The runaways fought to the death, and those who survived the combat that ensued threw themselves over the precipice rather than be taken alive.
The general uprising took place a short time afterwards. Again a number of slaves murdered their master, eighty against one man; and in a few days two thousand were under arms. They beat a detachment of Roman infantry in the first engagement, and before long their numbers swelled to twenty thousand foot and two thousand horse, the latter being, of course, the armed and mounted herdsmen of the great slave-owners. Their leader was one Salvius, a soothsayer, and he promptly attacked the strong place, Morgantia, now Giardinelli, on the southern slope of Monte Judica, overlooking the great Catanian plain. He promised freedom to the slaves within if they would join him; but their masters promised it to them, also, and so out-tempted the tempters, for the slaves in the city rightly judged that there would be time enough to run away if their masters did not keep the promise made, as indeed happened afterwards, when the siege was raised and the besiegers retired again to the groves of the Palici.
But meanwhile another leader had arisen in the west, had gathered ten thousand men, and attacked Lilybaeum. He was the steward of a great estate, an astrologer, and a man of unquestionable courage and ready resource. Before Lilybaeum he failed, of course, and he suffered a reverse when he withdrew from the siege; but still he gathered more and more followers, and many of the poor freemen came into his camp, still at last he exchanged embassies with Salvius, who had proclaimed himself king under the name of Trypho, and presently the two joined forces in a place called Triocala, the ‘thrice fair.’ But there King Trypho thought it wiser to throw King Athenio into prison and to rule alone, and he built a wall round the town, with a moat, and erected a little palace, and wore purple, and was accompanied by lictors. All these things happened in 104 B.C.
It was not until the following year that the Romans sent an army to attack the slave capital, and the magnitude of the force shows what was thought of the insurrection in Rome. It consisted of fourteen thousand Romans and Italians with two thousand Bithynians, Thessalians, Lucanians, and others. King Trypho now set King Athenio at liberty; what is more surprising is that Athenio does not seem to have resented his long imprisonment. He advised meeting the Romans in open battle, and charging at the head of two hundred horsemen he rode like a madman through the Roman ranks, leaving a broad river of blood where he had passed. In the desperate charge he was wounded in many places and fell at last, and when the shout went up that he was dead, the slave army fled in dismay. Yet the Romans did not pursue them, and they had time to retire upon Triocala, when its found that Athenio was still alive. By skill, by bribery, and by actual fighting he kept the Romans off, and when Trypho died in the following year, Athenio became the sole king of the slaves in his stead.
He now almost got possession of Sicily and ravaged the country in all directions, besieging cities and making himself master of more than one strong place. The apparently inexplicable inactivity of one praetor after another was accounted for well enough in Rome on the simple theory that each was bribed in succession by Athenio, and each was accordingly exiled at the end of his term of office; and when at last a man was found in the Consul Manlius Aquillius, the power of the slaves had grown so great that it required two years of preparation, and hard fighting, to crush it out of existence.
The end of Athenio was as romantic as his short and brilliant career had been. In the final battle which decided his fate he exposed his life with the recklessness of a man who stakes a kingdom on every sword-thrust. On the other side Aquillius fought no less bravely for a baser motive; he had refused bribes, most probably, where his predecessor had accepted them, but only in order that by a complete victory he might have better opportunities of enriching himself, for he was the man into whose all-greedy mouth Mithridates is said at last to have poured molten gold, so that he died. Nevertheless, he fought like a brave man, and in the battle he met Athenio face to face; they fought one another hand to hand, the Roman for gold, the Greek for freedom, while men looked on and held their breath. Then the Greek wounded the Roman in the breast, so that he had great scars to show long afterwards, when he was accused; but the Roman killed the Greek and got the victory.
After that he reduced the slaves’ remaining strongholds one by one, and when the last thousand men surrendered on condition that their lives should be spared, Aquillius sent them all to Rome, to fight with wild beasts in the arena; but there, scorning to die the death of men condemned, they slew each other by the altars of the circus with the weapons that had been given them for the fight, and when they were all dead their leader Satyrus took his own life. Thus ended the great struggles for freedom which were fought by the slaves in Sicily during the forty years between 139 B.C. and 99 B.C., that is to say during more than a generation of men born in slavery, the sons and grandsons of those who first rose against the Roman oppression under Eunus the conjurer and soothsayer.
They were not all heroes; their revolutions generally began with treacherous murders of men asleep and grew by monstrous and wholesale plunder; their first leader died a coward’s death, and more than once they all turned and fled in battle before the Romans’ orderly advance. Yet they deserve the sympathy of mankind the sufferings that made them rebel, and for the courage many of them showed when their end was at hand. They had been trained to bear shackles, not arms, to receive blows, not to deal them, to think as convicts think, not as freemen; the armed overseer was their daily companion and his whip was familiar with their flesh; it was no wonder that they stabbed in the dark what was too strong for them by daylight, and conspired to murder those whom they were at first too weak to fight. If anything can make assassination pardonable it is the condition of the oppressed slave; and
in the south, though there were thousands of rough Africans who tilled the soil in chains, there were many, too, who belonged to quite another race and class, Greeks from Asia Minor, skilled in every art, delicately trained and intellectually by far the superiors of men whose property they had become by the evil violence of pirates and robbers, or by the unhappy chances of disastrous war; and with them were many of their women, their sisters, their wives, and their daughters, of free blood and of good lineage, reduced with themselves to the social rank of items in an inventory, and living at the best in the mean condition of favourite animals. The provocation to murder must have been indeed more than a man could bear; and in the end many died very bravely, for men who are ready to throw themselves from cliffs and precipices rather than be taken alive desire freedom more than they dread death, even though it be out of fear of living, and in the scale of bravery the names of Athenio and Satyrus may stand as high as many that are better remembered.
It is related that after the end of the slave wars, the enormous number of unburied bodies and the vast quantities of blood that had moistened the ground produced a plague of grasshoppers that ravaged the whole country. Holm considers this to be a somewhat fabulous tale, but says that it gives a good idea of the condition of Sicily. Entomologists may determine its possibility or explain what insect was taken for a grasshopper; it is at least certain that agriculture was temporarily checked by some visitation of the kind, which may well have had its origin in the frightful condition of many battlefields, where no attempt had been made to bury the dead.
Holm has given his opinion of the state of the island and of the results of the slave war in a passage which I cannot refrain from translating, for no historian has more carefully weighed the evidence of history nor formed upon it opinions which seem more just.
“Nevertheless,” he writes, “it may justly be said that the island had, on the whole, profited by the slave wars. Sicily was on the high road to become the mere pastureland of a few great men, as was already the case with many province so Italy. That which should have been prevented when the island became a ‘praedium’ of the Roman people, instead of a country given over to the Roman nobles, had actually happened more and more in the course of time. The mighty slave wars arrested the land on this descending course. In these struggles it was especially the rich that suffered; the death of such numbers of slaves was a direct loss to them, but the wars cleared the air for the poor freemen. This result of the war is not a mere subjective construction; we may infer it from the orations against Verres, which, though containing numerous individual statements that are false, have nevertheless an undeniable value as portraying the condition of the island in Cicero’s time. According to Cicero’s description, Sicily is an island in which, on the whole, the well-to‑do middle class preponderates, but in which excessive wealth is unusual. In this connexion it is a striking fact that there is hardly any mention of valuable works of art. With few exceptions no statues were owned by private citizens, whereas many possessed a silver saltcellar or a silver drinking-vessel. This preponderance of the middle class is a result of the slave wars, which produced a thorough clearing among the slaves and therefore also in the conditions of farming. No doubt many persons remained rich, in spite of the bad times, especially Roman landholders whose estates were not exclusively in Sicily; but the worst masters had been the native imitators of the Romans, and those were altogether ruined if, indeed, they still existed at all. The middle-class citizens and the poor citizens thus found a field for their activity, and Sicily could again have a more healthy existence, both on its own account and with respect to Rome, which it was to supply with corn.”
The civil wars of Rome proceeded naturally from the hatred of one class for another. Had the two been less evenly matched, the disturbance might have produced all the phenomena of the French Revolution, but Sulla and the aristocrats were as strong as Marius and the democracy, and stronger; and while it is always the instinct of the lower class to destroy the upper class altogether, the upper class, being unable to live without the help of the social inferiors whom it has such good reason to fear, necessarily aims at keeping them in a state not far removed from servitude. An upper class that has no means of controlling a lower class has no claim to be called an upper class at all, and is doomed either to destruction or to ridicule. In most modern countries the so‑called aristocracies have chosen to be ridiculous rather than to be destroyed. The final triumph of Sulla did not destroy the power of the lower class, it controlled it. The true leader of the people was to be Julius Caesar.
In Sicily the struggle had ended with Athenio’s death, and the island took no active part in the civil wars, but was governed alternately by the contending parties. When Marius, being on his way to Africa, wished to obtain water at Drepanum, he met with an energetic refusal on the part of the governor; a little later, his party was in power and the governor was one of his most active supporters; a little later again Sulla was in power, and the Marian governor retired hastily at the approach of Cneiusº Pompeius with six legions and a hundred and twenty ships; and the mild behaviour of Pompeius on this occasion is historical. The only city that resisted him was Thermae on the north coast, and when he was about to reduce it to submission, the chief man of the city came to him, demanding that the whole blame of the resistance should be laid upon himself. Pompeius was touched and forgave him. Only on two or three occasions the youthful Roman general behaved with a coldness that approached cruelty, conversing calmly with political prisoners whom he had already condemned to death.
When Sulla undid what Caius Gracchus had done, and gave back to the Senate the jurisdiction which the reformer had succeeded in placing in the hands of the Roman knights, the governorship of Sicily was no longer given to a praetor, but to a propraetor, who resided in the island altogether and exercised his power more continually than the praetors had done; for while the latter had relied much upon the services of tax farmers, who had every interest in hoodwinking their superior in order to enrich themselves, and in accusing him unjustly when he seemed to them unreasonably honest, the propraetor was able to extort money without their services, or at all events while controlling them for his own ends. This is the change in the form of provincial government that led to the frightful abuse of power of which Verres was found guilty.
Those who know Sicily even superficially must easily realize that its conditions of prosperity could change with surprising quickness in the alternations of peace and war. It was an altogether agricultural country, but it was, and is still, the richest in the Mediterranean. I will compare it, in its different states, to a great factory or manufactory. Everything required for the production of valuable merchandise is present, waiting to be smelted, cast, turned, and finished. Furnaces glow, hammers ring, lathes move silently and quickly, a thousand artisans are at work, and wealth is created hourly and instantly by sure and industrious hands. Presently comes the check; there is war, and the enemy is at hand, or the men strike and go away in a body. The place is the same, and yet it is all at once a dreary wilderness, the fires are gone out, the wind howls through the vast deserted sheds, the machinery rusts in the silence, and it all looks as if only a miracle could bring back the extinguished life. Yet all things ready for the making of wealth, as they were before. The enemy retires, or the strike is over, and in a day the factory is once again in the roar and blast of production, alive and awake.
Thus also Sicily lay waste from time to time, and awoke again to instant riches at the golden touch of peace. There is not a valley in the whole island where men have not lain in ambush to kill other men, nor a field that has not been dyed crimson, nor a lovely defile of the mountains whose rivulet has not run red. Within the narrow seagirt space, six hundred miles round, Greeks and Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Romans, Byzantines, Goths, Saracens, Normans, Frenchmen, Catalans, freemen, and slaves fought almost unceasingly for more than two thousand years; and in every brief interval of rest the rich soil brought forth its fruit a hundr
ed fold, the blood-stained meadows blossomed again, and the battlefield of many nations was again the garden of the world. Excepting Rome and the surrounding plains there is surely no like area in Europe where so many have died by violence; there is none where life is so ever ready to begin again.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1424
