The Spartacus War

by Strauss, Barry

  But a ludus was also a barracks and a prison. Gladiators were not free to come and go as they pleased. The best evidence comes from Pompeii, where two ludi from different periods have been excavated. Both stood at the edge of town. The earlier ludus was virtually a fortress, isolated by a raised, sloping pavement and additional steps, bringing the interior a full 10 feet above street level - all unusual for Pompeii. Other security measures were found inside: an extra door and a sealed courtyard. Pompeii’s second, later ludus was more open but it did contain a small jail, complete with iron stocks, and it may have held a guard post as well.

  Vatia’s ludus too would probably have been built around an internal court, surrounded by stuccoed columns that were, in turn, covered with graffiti, such as these from Pompeii: Celadus advertised himself as ‘the one the girls sigh over’. Florus reports that he won on 28 July at Nuceria and on 15 August at Herculaneum, both nearby cities. Jesus (sic) says, punning, that the murmillo Lucius Asicius stinks like cheap fish sauce (muriola) and is as weak as a lady’s drink (also called muriola). Some gladiators record the name of their owner, while the gladiator Samus, who fought both as a murmillo and on horseback, says simply that he ‘lives here’. The gladiators Asicius, Auriolus, Herachthinus, Philippus and the ‘fearsome’ Amarantus scratched their names and positions into the white stucco.

  Ludus might mean ‘game’ but life there was serious. A new recruit took the most sacred oath imaginable - and the most terrible: he swore to be ‘burned’ (perhaps tattooed, tattoos being the mark of slavery), chained, beaten and killed with an iron weapon. It was, says the Roman writer Seneca, a promise to die ‘erect and invincible’, because facing death calmly was the height of the gladiatorial art. After his oath-taking, the new gladiator then followed a training schedule that was, in its own way, as pure and strict as a Spartan’s.

  Being a gladiator was a special privilege in Roman eyes, and not merely because gladiators were treated better than the average slave. Not that the Romans were simply positive about gladiators. Instead, they considered gladiators to be both good and bad. To be forced to be a gladiator was demeaning; to volunteer as a gladiator was depraved; to become skilled as a gladiator was dangerous, but to die as a gladiator was sublime.

  Gladiators didn’t have friends. They had allies, rivals, bosses, hangers-on, punks, spies, suppliers and double-crossers. The new gladiator learned whom to trust and whom to watch out for, who would cover his back and who would steal his food. He quickly took the measure of the men: the strong, the agile, the tough, the ruthless; the weak, the clumsy, the soft and the kind-hearted. A pecking order of leaders and followers would emerge, as brutal and as status-conscious as in any prison. One night a man shared a pre-combat meal with his comrades, the next day he killed his table-mate, and shortly afterwards arranged for the victim’s tombstone.

  Maybe some gladiators deserted because life in the ludus was hard, but by Roman standards life there was not especially harsh. Discipline in the Roman legions, for instance, could be nearly as strict. Unlike gladiators, soldiers could not be tortured but they faced severe punishment for crimes ranging from theft and engaging in homosexual acts to loss of weapons and failure to keep the night watch. These punishments included whipping and execution by being clubbed to death.

  Some of Vatia’s slaves might even have liked the discipline. They could hardly have minded the rewards. Victorious gladiators got glory, cash, celebrity and sex - which was better than what other slaves faced. And yet 200 gladiators decided to break out of Vatia’s ludus. If it was ironic that they, of all people, should spark a slave uprising, it was also typical. Throughout history, privileged slaves have often led revolts, maybe because they have high hopes. Did the gladiators explode because Vatia tightened the screws? Possibly; or perhaps theirs was a revolution of rising expectations.

  Hollywood made one of Vatia’s trainers especially brutal, but we know next to nothing about Vatia and even less about his trainers. Even Vatia’s name is uncertain, since the sources call him either Lentulus Batiatus or Cnaeus Lentulus. According to a plausible theory, ‘Batiatus’ is a mistake; he was really Cnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia, a Roman citizen from a rich and noble family known to have owned gladiators in Capua. The man was crude and thick-skinned enough not to mind having a job description - gladiatorial school owner (lanista, in Latin) - that Romans compared to butcher (lanius) or pimp (leno). Perhaps he kept his distance and left the management of the ludus to others, while he stayed in Rome. Maybe he never even met Spartacus before the revolt; who knows?

  According to one ancient author, the gladiators decided ‘to run a risk for freedom instead of being on display for spectators’. It was humiliating to have to fight to the death for the entertainment of the Roman public. A certain greatness of soul runs through the whole story of Spartacus, from Capua to his last battle. One ancient writer says that Spartacus was ‘more thoughtful and more dignified than his circumstances, more Greek than his race’. Another says that Spartacus had the support of an elite few men of prudence and a free soul - in a word, of the nobles.

  There is a chance that Spartacus himself had been born an aristocrat. Straws in the wind: the name Spartacus is found in a Thracian royal family; the ancient sources say that there were a few ‘nobles’ among the insurgents, which probably means slaves of noble birth or descent; two contemporary Roman writers admired Spartacus, which would have been easier for them if he were patrician. Even among gladiators, the glamour of a noble name might have helped Spartacus to draw in supporters.

  As Spartacus and his allies gathered support for the revolt, they might have spoken of profit and vengeance as well as freedom and honour. They might also have pointed out that the time was ripe. They might have noted that Mithridates was still carrying the torch of Roman resistance high in the East and that Sertorius’s revolt still smouldered in the West. And perhaps they knew of some of the many earlier slave rebellions against Rome: a dozen uprisings in Italy during the second century BC, two massive uprisings in Sicily (135-132 BC, 104-100 BC), and an anti-Roman coalition of slaves and free people in western Asia Minor between 132 and 129 BC. When in 88 BC Mithridates sponsored a massacre of Romans and Italians in western Asia Minor, he offered freedom to any slave who would kill or inform on his master. With so much revolt in the air, only a hermit could have remained ignorant.

  Only thirty years before, Capua’s slaves had risen in revolt - twice. Old-timers in town might still have talked about it. In or around the year 104 BC, 200 slaves at Capua rebelled and were quickly suppressed; no other details survive. Another Capuan revolt in 104 BC was more serious. T. Minucius Vettius, a rich, young Roman, in love with a slave girl but buried under debt, rose in revolt from his father’s estate outside Capua. He formed an army of 3,500 slaves, armed and organized in centuries like a Roman legion. The Roman Senate took this threat seriously. They appointed Lucius Licinius Lucullus to restore order; he was a praetor, a high-ranking public official who was a combination of chief justice and lieutenant general. Lucullus raised an army of 4,000 infantry and 400 cavalry but he beat Vettius by cunning, not brute force. Lucullus offered immunity to Vettius’s general Apollonius (the name suggests a slave or freedman), who turned traitor. The result was mass suicide by the rebels, including Vettius.

  The uprising failed but it left encouraging lessons to insurgents. Slaves could form an army, and one that was well organized and well armed. Rome was sufficiently impressed that it used treachery instead of attacking the rebels head-on. It was striking too that Roman forces barely outnumbered the slaves. Maybe Rome didn’t send more troops because it couldn’t send more troops. In 104 BC the Roman army was otherwise engaged.

  The year before, in 105 BC, an army of migrating Germans and their Celtic allies had humiliated the legions at the Battle of Arausio (Orange) in southern France and killed tens of thousands of Roman soldiers. Not until 101 BC were the migrating Germans and Celts finally defeated. The two revolts in Capua c. 104 BC, therefore, c
hallenged a regime that already had enough trouble.

  Now, in 73 BC, the legions were abroad fighting Sertorius and Mithridates. At home a police force was all but non-existent. Maybe a new uprising could succeed where the old one failed. Opportunity beckoned but something more basic may have inspired rebellion: survival instinct.

  A gladiator’s life expectancy was short. The best evidence comes from a cemetery at Ephesus, in Turkey, where 120 skeletons of gladiators have been excavated and studied. Almost all of them died before the age of 35, many before 25. Between a third and a half of them died from wounds violent enough to cut or shatter their bones - and about a third of those wounds were blows to the head. The other skeletons show no sign of bone damage, but the men might have died violently nonetheless, from dis embowelment or a severed artery or an infected flesh wound, for example.

  The Ephesus gladiators lived during the period of the Roman Peace in the second and third centuries AD, when the games were a state monopoly. During Spartacus’s era, in the Late Republic, the games were run by private enterprise, and that probably made things worse for gladiators. Sponsors were usually rich men in search of popularity, and the crowd loved bloodshed, so they might have tried to outdo each other in the number of gladiators they sacrificed. It would not be surprising if many gladiators died in their first match.

  And that match might have been looming on the horizon. The gladiators’ revolt began in the spring. It has been suggested that Vatia’s men were being trained for the annual Roman Games, also known as the Great Games, which began on 5 September. Gladiatorial contests were part of this two-week festival. With all Rome watching, the producer would have to give the crowd at least some blood. A number of Vatia’s gladiators could expect not to be coming home.

  Still, the life-expectancy argument can go only so far. Thracians, Celts and Germans prided themselves on their contempt for death. They believed in the afterlife and they preferred to think of themselves as fearless fighters, not cowards. Spartacus had to convince them that there was a better fight waiting for them as fugitives than inside the ludus.

  Gladiators wanted neither to flee nor to free others. But standing and fighting in Italy, killing Romans, stealing their wealth, and attracting supporters from the local slave population - that would have appealed to the men of the Familia Gladiatoria Lentuli Vatiae, Lentulus Vatia’s Family of Gladiators.

  And yet, this catalogue of reasons somehow fails to explain Spartacus’s success. Surely, his personal authority has to be added to the equation. When Spartacus spoke, men listened. It wasn’t just his prowess in the arena, or his experience in the Roman army, or his possible reputation as a bandit. It wasn’t simply his royal-sounding name or his communications skills - although those were doubtless considerable. Something else, some ‘X’ factor, multiplied his authority. But what?

  To answer that question, we will have to ask his woman.

  2

  The Thracian Lady

  In 73 BC a Thracian woman announced a miracle. A prophetess, she preached the word of Dionysus, who took possession of her during ecstatic frenzies. The god, she said, had bestowed great power on a man. Like her, he was a Thracian who lived in Italy. He was her lover: Spartacus.

  We know very little about the Thracian woman, not even her name. The surviving information, however, is tantalizing. She was Spartacus’s messenger, perhaps even his muse.

  Although nothing is known of her appearance, we can imagine the kind of ecstatic ritual that might have led to her prophecy, because a great deal of information survives about the worship of Dionysus. Popular in many places in the Mediterranean, Dionysus was the national god of Thrace. Thracian women danced for Dionysus, and wore long, ankle-length robes, barefoot with their upper arms exposed. Thracian women tattooed their arms with such patterns as geometric stripes, chevrons, dots, circles and a fawn. A Bacchante (that is, worshipper of Dionysus) wore an ivy wreath in her hair. As she worshipped the god she typically held a thyrsus, a giant fennel staff topped with a pine cone. Beside her might have lain the tiny items that she used in her ritual: amber, seashells, knucklebone and glass. But the most striking object would have sat in her right hand: a snake. Its body would have been curled around her upper arm and through her armpit, while its head would have extended downwards towards the ground. Knowing that the snake was Dionysus’s main companion and symbol, she probably felt no fear.

  Plutarch is our sole source of information about the Thracian lady. He lived 150 years after Spartacus but he based his work on the now largely missing contemporary account of Sallust. What Plutarch says might not satisfy sceptics, but other sources make it plausible.

  We meet the Thracian lady in Capua but we can imagine the process that brought her there. Consider a scene on a tombstone of a slave dealer. Two women are walking, modestly dressed in ankle-length tunics, their heads covered by shawls. Two children walk beside them. Ahead of them walk eight men, chained to each other at the neck, their bare legs showing below knee-length tunics. Leading the march is a man in a full-length, hooded cloak. He is a guard or slave dealer; the eight men are being led off into slavery. The women and children may be family, following two of the men into bondage.

  The scene took place some time in the Late Roman Republic or Early Empire. The place is Thrace; the slaves were Thracians, sold into slavery in exchange for wine. But they may remind us of Spartacus and his female companion on the road to slavery in Capua in 73 BC.

  It may seem hard to believe that an enslaved gladiator was allowed to have a female companion. But gladiators could enjoy a stable family relationship, although as slaves they could not enter into a marriage that was valid in Roman law. Slave ‘consorts’ and children are well attested in ancient sources. Owners might even have liked a gladiator to have a wife, as an anchor in the rough world of the ludus.

  Spartacus’s lady came from the same people as her man, although just which Thracian people that was is unclear. Plutarch says that Spartacus came from a nomadic people, by which he probably means a people whose wealth came from flocks that they pastured in the highlands in summer and in the lowlands in winter. That doesn’t make Spartacus a humble shepherd but simply the product of an economy based on herding.

  In any case, ‘nomadic’ may possibly be a medieval copyist’s error; the ancient text might have referred not to nomads but to Maedi (singular, Maedus). The Maedi were a Thracian tribe who lived in the mountains of what is now south-western Bulgaria. Like Spartacus, they had a reputation for physical strength; like him, they fought alternately for and against Rome. Other Thracian peoples of this period provided hardy warriors, such as the Bessi and the Getae, and Spartacus and his lady may have belonged to one of those groups. Another possibility is the Odrysians, a people of south-eastern Thrace, located between the Aegean Sea and the Rhodope Mountains. They were Roman allies who fought against Mithridates.

  How Spartacus’s consort came to Italy, how she met Spartacus, and whether or not she too was a slave - these things are all unclear. Nor is it certain that she was with Spartacus in Rome, although that seems likely. But we do know that she cohabited with Spartacus in Capua and fled the city with him. And there is reason to think that the Thracian woman spread Spartacus’s fame.

  When Spartacus was brought to Rome to be sold into slavery, a remarkable event is supposed to have taken place. Plutarch records the story but he does not vouch for its veracity. While the Thracian was sleeping, a snake wrapped itself around his face. Or so the tale goes, even though modern experts explain that this is impossible. Italy is home to a quite a few snake species but, according to scientists, none of them would wrap itself around a sleeping person’s face. Perhaps Spartacus woke up with a snake crawling close to or even on his face: unlikely but not impossible. The story could then have grown in the telling, either by Spartacus or others. Or maybe Spartacus said merely that he had dreamed the whole thing.

  In any case, the Thracian woman interpreted the event as a miracle. Just as a snake had wra
pped itself around Spartacus’s face, so would he be surrounded by ‘a great and fearful power’. The result would be - well, the manuscripts differ, with some saying Spartacus would have ‘a lucky end’ and others saying ‘an unlucky end’. The first version is attractive, considering the positive connotations of snakes in Thrace, not to mention the worthlessness of propaganda that predicted ruin.

  The Thracian woman’s words carried the weight of prophecy. Thrace had a long tradition of prophetesses and oracles, and Thracians set great store by women’s religious authority. So did the ancient Germans, who believed that there was ‘something sacred and prophetic’ about women. But anyone can grasp the timeless stereotype of the woman who speaks for natural forces: the siren, the sibyl or the witch. Spartacus’s companion might have been ‘a woman to make your heart tremble’ as one seventeenth-century Englishman said of a woman who prophesied in public.

  Seers played a proven role as troublemakers among slaves. They had incited one revolt in Sicily in 135 BC and led another in 104 BC. The Roman agricultural expert Columella, writing around AD 60, might have had such events in mind when he warned managers to keep prophets and witches off the estate.

  We don’t know when the Thracian woman made her prophecy. Perhaps it only came later, when the revolt of the gladiators was under way. But if she predicted the future while Spartacus was still in Capua or even before, in Rome, then it might have been the spark that lit the rebellion. In the first century BC both rebels and Romans took seers very seriously.