The Spartacus War

by Strauss, Barry

  The heart of the Roman army consisted of the heavy infantrymen, that is, the legionaries. Each legionary was protected by body armour, typically a mail coat, and a bronze or iron helmet. He also carried a big, oblong shield (scutum). His weapons were a javelin (pilum) and a short sword (gladius). Some of Spartacus’s men had similar arms and armour, stripped from the enemy dead, but many of the rebels had only primitive weapons and light protection.

  Both armies no doubt advanced with war cries to hearten themselves and frighten their opponent. The Roman light-armed infantry usually tried to soften up the enemy by shooting arrows and slings, some of which had an effective range of perhaps 100 yards. After absorbing any losses, the insurgents probably raised the rebel yell and blew their war trumpets. Roman armies typically advanced by banging javelins on shields and shouting war cries. As the legions closed in, at a distance of about 50 feet, they would have begun throwing their javelins. They shouted, accompanied by the ‘threatening rumble’ of the commander’s horn, followed by the strident call of the trumpets. Then, with their banners flying, they charged the enemy at a run.

  Sometimes the Romans would make such an intimidating show of discipline and equipment that the enemy would turn and run away. But on this day it would come down to a hard fight. Legionaries would hack and thrust at the enemy with their swords, while the other side would reply with sword or spear.

  Ancient battle lives in the imagination as a climax: a collision, followed by dozens of disorderly, individual fights that go on until one side prevails. Real battle was probably episodic. Like boxers, the two sides combined, broke apart, regrouped each in its own corner, and then hit each other again. Finally, one army would collapse and run. Such typical Roman battle lasted two to three hours, but episodes of hand-to-hand fighting probably each lasted only fifteen to twenty minutes before exhaustion set in.

  The only detail of the battle of Mount Garganus to survive is the report that the rebels ‘fought extremely fiercely’: a conventional statement but it might just be true. Celtic warriors were known for their ferocity and tenacity in battle. We might imagine the bravest legionaries circling around the enemy’s flank or trying to stab their way into the enemy lines. Eventually they succeeded, but probably at a price. The insurgents perhaps forced the Romans to fight many ‘rounds’ of battle before a decision was reached. It was enough to do the rebels honour but not to avoid a massacre. According to one source, two-thirds of Crixus’s men died. Among the fallen was Crixus himself. This too fits the picture of Celtic warfare. Celtic warriors were supposed to group themselves around their chiefs in battle. It was a disgrace to abandon one’s chief and it was unthinkable for a chief to do anything but fight to the finish. Germans behaved similarly, to judge by the women of the Cimbri tribe who stood in the rear of one battle, mounted on chariots and killed the fleeing warriors with their own hands rather than let them run away.

  It was the first defeat after a string of victories for the insurgency. How can such a reversal of fortune be explained? Not by the prowess of Gellius and Arrius. As events later in 72 BC will show, they had not created a victory machine. The cause of defeat probably lay with Crixus. He was Spartacus’s equal in courage, but not in common sense. That Crixus shared Spartacus’s taste for discipline and austerity is doubtful; that he lacked due diligence when it came to scouts and pickets is apparent.

  Meanwhile, Spartacus marched northwards. He was somewhere in the Apennine Mountains in north-central Italy. The rebels had marched from a land of olive oil to one of butter, a zone that was cooler, rainier and greener than the south. There was plenty of fresh water and herds of sheep and goats, but there were also wolves and bears. As a landscape, the Apennines are vertical, narrow and difficult, all of which worked in the insurgents’ favour.

  Even so the Romans wanted to fight Spartacus. Roman doctrine called for offensives and Crixus’s fate bode well for success. But Spartacus’s army had reason for optimism. The men had fine leadership; past victories should have raised their morale; and their cavalry force should have been better than the Romans’. Their leader shared the men’s risks; he looked heroic and was physically courageous; he was charismatic and had a flair for the bold gesture; he could be inspiring on the battlefield. The insurgents were nimbler and tougher than the enemy, quick and violent enough to shock an inexperienced foe, and superior in numbers.

  The Romans, nonetheless, found the enemy and forced him to fight on what looked like auspicious terms. The consul Lentulus, thanks no doubt to good intelligence, was able to block the road ahead. Meanwhile Gellius, conqueror of Crixus, had marched up from Apulia in rapid pursuit of the main rebel army. Spartacus was trapped.

  One plausible theory locates the confrontation in a mountain pass in the Apennines north-west of Florence. The little village of Lentula lies at the foot of Mount Calvi (4,200 feet) in a valley that runs northwards towards Modena (the Roman Mutina). Local tradition insists on a direct connection between the village name and the consul Lentulus, just as it points out that Spartacus later made his way to Mutina. The theory is unproven, but the rugged terrain around Lentula would have made a fine site for the battle.

  Spartacus now showed what made him a great battlefield commander. It is possible for a good general to rescue his army from encirclement as long as he is decisive, agile and calm. He also has to be sure of complete loyalty and obedience on the part of his troops. Caesar had these very qualities, and he saved his army at the Battle of Ruspina (modern Monastir in Tunisia) in 46 BC. Finding himself surrounded, Caesar arranged his army in two lines, back to back, and had them each push the enemy back. That give him the breathing space to launch two coordinated charges, and he broke through to freedom.

  In the Apennines in 72 BC Spartacus achieved even more, and by different tactics. Admittedly, the Thracian’s situation was less desperate than Caesar’s. Spartacus outnumbered the enemy: he had 30,000 men while each consular army had a maximum of about 10,000 men. Gellius’s army might, in fact, have been even smaller, due to losses suffered in the battle with Crixus. Unlike Caesar, Spartacus had time and space to attack each of his enemies in turn. Like Caesar, though, Spartacus could never have succeeded without commanding his men’s trust. We can only imagine what he might have said in a pre-battle speech to rally his troops. But the message was as clear as a bugle: attack!

  The mere fact of the attack might have surprised the Romans; they might have expected to see the beleaguered enemy assume a defensive position. Spartacus went after Lentulus’s army first; one source claims that the rebels struck with a sudden rush. A cunning commander like Spartacus might have positioned part of his forces behind hills and then had them pour out to shock the enemy. He probably used his cavalry to good effect. A well-timed cavalry attack could break the enemy’s formation, particularly the light infantry, who wore little protection. The Romans typically counter-attacked against cavalry by means of arrows and slings, but they didn’t always do the job. A quick and sudden cavalry charge, for example, could prevent archers and slingers from inflicting much damage. If the legions held firm, they might have stopped a cavalry charge even so, by massing in a dense formation, almost a shield wall with room for thrusting with their pikes. Horses will not crash into a solid object or what looms like a solid object. The difficulty, however, was standing firm, because the sight of a cavalry charge was enough to terrify inexperienced troops. In a later battle the Romans appear to have taken additional precautions against Spartacus’s cavalry, which suggests bitter experience.

  In any case, once he had softened up the enemy with such tactics, Spartacus probably sent in his infantry. They surely struck with all the fury that made Celts, Germans and Thracians famous. We might guess that individual cases of valour paid outsized dividends. Let just a few of the enemy break into the line, or allow a strong cavalryman to gallop by and sweep up an enemy soldier, or have an enemy soldier issue a successful challenge to single combat, and a wavering army might turn and run.

  Howeve
r the rebels attacked, the Romans’ response was to panic and flee, disgracing the tradition of the legions. The insurgents’ attack was no doubt terrifying, but a disciplined army would have held its ground. The Romans usually were disciplined: they had long experience fighting barbarians; they had often defeated much larger armies. But in 72 BC neither their training, their trust nor, apparently, their commander was enough to make the legionaries stand firm. One source says that Spartacus defeated Lentulus’s legates and captured all the army’s baggage. Another says that the Romans abandoned the field in great confusion. Another says that Spartacus ‘thoroughly destroyed’ Lentulus’s army. Then he turned on Gellius’s forces and defeated them too; no details survive.

  The captured baggage offered Spartacus tools: mess tins, cooking pots, satchels, baskets, iron hooks, leather thongs, spades, shovels, saws, hatchets, axes, scythes and wheelbarrows. There were weapons too, both what could be taken from prisoners or stripped from the dead and what was carried as baggage: from extra arrows and spears to shield covers and neck guards. Cloaks and sandals were probably precious finds. But the greatest treasure was food, carried in wagons drawn by pack animals.

  Under Gellius and Lentulus, Romans ran in disorder from the battlefield. Hannibal had crushed Rome’s soldiers at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC; in the Apennines in 72 BC Spartacus humiliated them. The Carthaginian killed tens of thousands of Romans. The Thracian caused far fewer casualties but he made his point. He now proceeded to hurt Rome’s pride further.

  In a speech delivered fifteen years later, in 57 BC, Cicero still remembered Spartacus’s insult. Nothing, said Cicero, could have been ‘more polluted, deformed, perverted or disturbed’. What Spartacus did was to give gladiatorial games for slaves - a spectacle that Rome usually reserved for the free. Spartacus added a bitter twist by reversing roles: he made the slaves spectators and the Romans gladiators.

  The occasion was Crixus’s funeral games. The news of his comrade’s death and defeat had reached Spartacus, perhaps via a messenger, perhaps from the survivors of Crixus’s army. To have a pair of gladiators fight at the grave of a great man was an old Italian custom - barbaric to us but in ancient times a sign of honour and respect. Spartacus did not have merely one pair of gladiators fight: rather, he commemorated the fallen Celt by a spectacular ritual. Spartacus called up 300 (or 400, according to another source) Roman prisoners and had them fight to the death around a pyre - a symbol, at least, of Crixus, assuming that his corpse had not been recovered. This was a gladiatorial offering on the grand scale. It was all but human sacrifice: glorious to the memory of the dead, humiliating to the Romans who were about to die, and ennobling to the reputation of the host.

  What a morale boost for the men! By attending a gladiatorial game, they declared their freedom. In Rome, funeral games were reserved for victorious generals and for praetors and consuls. By awarding this honour to Crixus, Spartacus asserted equality. He also laid claim, at least implicitly, to being Roman. He wielded Roman symbols as well as if he had been born in Rome itself.

  As a gladiator Spartacus had been a man of the lowest social order. As an impresario, Spartacus reached a high status in Roman eyes. Thus, as a Roman writer says, Spartacus had in effect purged himself of all his prior infamy. Meanwhile, he gave Rome a black eye.

  After defeating the consuls’ armies, Spartacus and his men continued northwards through the mountains. As they came down from the Apennines, they were greeted with the magnificent view of the broad plain of the Padus (modern Po) River. They crossed into the province of Cisalpine Gaul, ‘Gaul on this side of the Alps’, as the Romans called northernmost Italy. The province stretched to the Alps; in this era, most of its inhabitants were still not Roman citizens.

  Their scouts might have told the rebels that trouble awaited them. About 10 miles north of the Apennines lay the city of Mutina (today’s Modena). One of about ten Roman and Latin colonies in the province, Mutina was the base of the governor, the proconsul Gaius Cassius Longinus. As provincial governor, Cassius had a standing garrison army to draw on, consisting of two legions (c. 10,000 men). It is plausible that he was assisted by the propraetor Cnaeus Manlius.

  Cassius had been one of the two consuls the year before, 73 BC, and earlier had served as mint master and then praetor. It was a successful career, befitting his old and eminent family, but Cassius is best known for his son, also named Cassius, the famous murderer of Caesar. The son had a lean and hungry look, as Shakespeare later put it, and the father might have been equally keen. He was the only card that Rome had left to play between Spartacus and the Alps. Cassius threw down the gauntlet. ‘As Spartacus was pressing forward towards the Alps,’ says one writer, ‘Cassius . . . met him.’

  Only the barest details of the battle survive. The insurgents crushed the Romans, inflicting many casualties, and Cassius barely escaped with his life. He never played a major role in public affairs again.

  The road to the Alps was now open but Spartacus did not take it. Instead, he and his army turned back south. Spartacus’s strategy is a mystery. He supposedly aimed for the Alps and beat every army that stood in his way, only to turn around and head back to southern Italy. If he wanted to cross the Alps, why didn’t he do so? Many theories have been proposed, but the best explanation was already hinted at in the ancient sources. Spartacus’s own men probably vetoed him. In the past, they had never wanted to leave Italy; now success might have gone to their heads and aroused visions of Rome in flames. Perhaps Spartacus had held back the truth and told his men, as they marched north, that they were simply spreading the revolt and searching for loot in another part of Italy. Then, when they reached the plain of the Padus River and he tried to persuade them to cross the Alps, it was too late to change their minds.

  The last straw might simply have been the sight of the Alps. As anyone who has ever looked up from the plain towards the rock wall of the Italian Alps knows, the mountains are overpowering. Most people in Spartacus’s army had probably never seen the Alps before. Many of them had never left southern or central Italy.

  Other factors may have played a role. There is an outside chance that Spartacus received news from Thrace that gave him pause. The proconsul, Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus, had won great victories over the Thracians who had allied with Mithridates. It now looked more difficult than ever for Spartacus and his army to find safely in Thrace.

  And perhaps Spartacus too had caught what the Japanese would later call ‘victory disease’. Spartacus was ‘elated by his victories’, says one Roman writer, in what is perhaps just a plausible guess. Maybe he had acquired a foolish belief in his own invincibility. Possibly he too forgot the Roman habit of responding slowly but inexorably to those who attacked Rome. He might have allowed himself a luxury that no general can afford: hope.

  It is such a surprising turn of events that some scholars conclude that Spartacus had never planned to cross the Alps in the first place. But ancient writers took this plan seriously and they were in a better position to know Spartacus’s motives. Admittedly, they might have engaged in a certain amount of guesswork, since it’s not clear if the Romans debriefed captured rebels well. But I prefer their guesses to ours.

  And so, the rebels headed south again. They had a new goal, they said: Rome. ‘Terror,’ says one ancient writer, ‘spread through the city of Rome, just as it had in the time when Hannibal had threatened its gates.’ No doubt Romans were terrified, but we might wonder if they had good reason to be afraid. Could Spartacus really threaten a city that was too well fortified for even Hannibal to launch a serious attack? Ten years earlier, in 82 BC during the civil war between Marius and Sulla, an army that tried to take Rome fought all night long. It was obliterated by morning. How could Spartacus think of success?

  For one thing, he travelled light. He had unnecessary supplies burned, slaughtered the pack animals, and killed all prisoners of war. This last act might also have been meant to terrify the enemy. For another thing, Spartacus had a sizeable army.<
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  Spartacus began the campaign season with 30,000 men, enough to outnumber each of his various foes to date but not enough to attack Rome. Each victory boosted Spartacus’s reputation and so might have swollen his ranks. New recruits might have come from central and northern Italy, while the survivors of Crixus’s defeat might have made their way to Spartacus. He surely accepted most of them gladly.

  According to ancient sources, after defeating Cassius, Spartacus turned away ‘many deserters who approached him’. Just who these ‘deserters’ were is an interesting question. The prospect that they were legionaries is intriguing but more likely they were slaves performing support duties for Roman troops. Turning them away was not only a gesture of contempt but perhaps also a cold psychological assessment of their unreliability and potential for espionage.

  Spartacus could not have afforded to turn away good men because the Romans were about to attack him again. The two consuls, Gellius and Lentulus, had regrouped and joined forces. They now had an army of four legions or about 20,000 men, minus any losses already suffered and not replaced. If Spartacus enjoyed anything like the 3:1 advantage that he did against the first army he had faced that year, he would have commanded about 60,000 men by the time he faced the joint consular army in late 72 BC.

  With all the ‘ifs’, ‘ands’ and ‘buts’ in the previous paragraphs, the conclusion is clear: we don’t know how many men Spartacus had. But an educated guess of 60,000 soldiers at the peak of the revolt in late 72 BC seems sensible and even conservative. In fact, 60,000 is the lowest estimate in the ancient sources for the size of Spartacus’s army at its height; other figures are 90,000, over 100,000 and 120,000. In addition to the soldiers there was an unknowable number of civilians: women, children and perhaps even old men.