The Spartacus War

by Strauss, Barry

  They would take office on 1 January 70 BC. With political success assured, the two generals might have each disbanded his army, save for one remaining item of business: the victory parade. Every Roman general aspired to the supreme honour of celebrating a triumph. A triumph was a spectacular victory march through the city of Rome with his army, culminating in a sacrifice to Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill and a feast. The general who celebrated a triumph was called triumphator.

  Two other victorious generals had returned to Italy in 71 BC and they too each wanted a triumph. They were Marcus Lucullus, who had been summoned home to fight Spartacus after winning victories in Thrace, and Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius, proconsul and Pompey’s colleague in Spain.

  Every triumph was different. Few details of the triumphs of 71 BC survive, but on a plausible (but by no means certain) reconstruction, a triumph proceeded as follows.

  All Rome turned out on the day of a triumph. The triumphator began the morning outside the city with an assembly of his troops. He addressed them and distributed honours to a few and cash gifts to everyone. Then the triumphal parade began, entering Rome through the special porta triumphalis, ‘triumphal gate’, which was otherwise closed. It headed towards the Capitol via a long and very visible route. The Senate and the magistrates led the way, followed by trumpeters. Then came floats, displaying paintings of sieges and battles and heaps of spoils, with gold and silver prominent. Next came the white bulls or oxen headed for the slaughter, accompanied by priests. Freed Roman prisoners of war came next, dressed as the triumphator’s freedmen. Prominent captives marched in chains, usually headed for execution.

  Then, preceded by his lictors, came the victorious general. Dressed in a special toga decorated with designs in gold thread, the triumphator rode in a four-horse chariot. He carried a sceptre and wore a wreath of Delphic laurel. A slave stood beside him and reminded him that he was mortal. His grown sons rode on horseback behind him, followed by his officers and the cavalry, all on horseback. Finally came the infantry, marching proudly, singing a combination of hymns and bawdy songs about their commander. Caesar’s men, for instance, mocked their chief as ‘the bald adulterer’.

  The climax of the day came on the Capitoline Hill. There, after the execution of the enemy leaders, the triumphator attended the sacrifice to Jupiter. He gave the god a portion of the spoils as well as his laurel wreath. Afterwards he appeared as the guest of honour at a banquet on the Capitoline. Throughout the city the people feasted at public expense. Finally, the pipes and flutes accompanied the triumphator home at night.

  To celebrate a triumph, a commander had to receive the permission of the Senate and a vote of the people. He also had to fulfil certain requirements. He had to have won a victory in a foreign war over a declared enemy. He had to have killed at least 5,000 of the enemy and brought the war to a conclusion - one of many reasons for inflated body counts in ancient texts. He had to have held public office and fought in the theatre officially assigned him. As a final matter of dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s, he had to have carried out the proper religious ceremonies before fighting.

  His victory over Spanish rebels allowed Pompey to request - and receive - a triumph. So did Pompey’s co-commander in Spain, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius, and likewise Marcus Lucullus. Crassus, however, did not qualify for a triumph, in spite of his official commission and his victories, because his enemies were slaves. It was beneath the dignity of the Roman people to celebrate a triumph over a servile foe. Crassus had to settle for an ovatio instead.

  An ovation was a stripped-down version of a triumph. Like a triumph, it featured a victory parade through the city, leading up to the Capitol and culminating in a sacrifice to Jupiter. There was money for the soldiers and feasts for the people. But the general did not ride on a chariot like the triumphator; he either walked or, in Crassus’s day, rode a horse. He did not wear the triumphator’s gold threads but the standard purple-bordered toga of a magistrate. He had no sceptre. Trumpets were banned; the victor had to settle for flutes. Finally, he wore a myrtle wreath instead of laurel.

  As minor as this last detail seems to us, apparently it meant a great deal to the Romans. Crassus swallowed his pride when it came to accepting an ovatio instead of a triumph, but a myrtle wreath was too much. He asked the Senate for a special decree, a private bill as it were. The Senate complied, allowing Crassus to wear a laurel wreath at his ovatio.

  Marcus Lucullus’s triumph probably took place first, well before the end of the year. Metellus Pius, Crassus and Pompey followed in late December, apparently within the space of a few days. Scholars reconstruct the order of events thus: Metellus Pius came first because of his rank as a former consul, then Crassus the ex-praetor, and finally Pompey, who, in spite of his military prowess, was a mere Roman knight.

  Within the space of about a week, some 100,000 men marched through the city and accepted the cheers of a public grateful that peace had been restored in the heart of the empire and in one province, if not everywhere. These were very lavish affairs to judge from a surviving detail of Metellus Pius’s triumph, that he served 5,000 thrushes for the public feasting. The cost for these birds alone was 60,000 sesterces, which was roughly equivalent to the annual pay of about 100 legionaries.

  By the time of Pompey’s triumph, Rome had crowned four brows with laurel wreaths in one year. It was the last day of December 71 BC. The Spartacus War was officially history. The legend had already begun.

  Conclusion

  In the consulship of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer and Lucius Afranius, the year we call 60 BC, a small army marches southwards from Rome under the command of Gaius Octavius. Down the great highways of Italy the men tramp, past Capua and Vesuvius, across the hills of Lucania and under the peaks of Mount Pollino, where they finally turn eastwards into Bruttium and Italy’s far south. Their goal is in sight. A dirty mission, and one postponed by the Senate for a decade, it is nonetheless essential to Roman honour. They have come to exorcize the ghost of Spartacus.

  For Octavius, it is a detour from his destiny. He has been named governor of Macedonia, a province across the Adriatic Sea and gateway to the Thracian front, with its rebellious tribes. Victory in arms there might lead to a triumph, which is an ambitious Roman’s dream. Octavius is the very model of the young man on the make. The product of the local aristocracy of a central Italian town, he has married into a prominent Roman family and is climbing the ladder of political and military office. Greatness beckons, but before Octavius can take ship at Brundisium, he has a job to do in Italy.

  Eleven years after the end of the great uprising, the last of the rebel’s men still controlled the hills around the plain of Thurii in Bruttium. A rich agricultural region, the plain housed many villas. Spartacus had once scored a great coup here; Thurii is the only city that he and his men ever captured. No wonder the remnants of Spartacus’s army chose to make their way back to these hills after Crassus’s victory in 71 BC.

  As far as we can tell, they survived as raiders not revolutionaries, content to huddle in the hills and sally forth for supplies. They no longer dared to face the legionaries’ steel on the open plains. Perhaps the dreamers among them hoped that Spartacus was still alive somewhere and that he would return - after all, his body had never been found. But Spartacus was dead, and a long row of crosses signalled the fate that awaited those who came out in the open to fight Rome.

  They continued on local raids for eight years when the tide of another failed uprising washed up on them. In 63 BC the renegade Roman aristocrat Catiline tried to raise a revolt of debtors and slaves, but the Senate crushed it. Survivors of that lost cause fled to Thurii and reinforced the Spartacans. The Senate now decided to wipe out the maroon communities around Thurii. Enter Octavius.

  ‘He put an end to them on his journey’: so say the sources, without wasting too many words on the fate of rebel slaves. But we can imagine the details: from the Roman cavalrymen suddenly riding in to the crash of swords
, some of them perhaps even wielded in defence by men trained in the house of Vatia long ago. We can hear the screams and the crackle of the flames and, finally, the hammering of nails into the inevitable crosses on the roadside.

  Whether Octavius knew it or not, his mopping-up operation marked the end of an era. It had lasted about three generations, from the outbreak of the First Sicilian Slave Revolt c. 135 BC until 60 BC. Each of the two Sicilian slave wars had continued for several years, while Spartacus’s uprising lasted more than two years. No further slave uprisings of that magnitude would follow. For example, Catiline’s ‘conspiracy’, as Cicero famously called it, took Rome three months to suppress, and it was largely an operation of free men, rather than of slaves.

  All was not peaceful with Rome’s slaves or gladiators, however. Having learned its lesson with Spartacus, the Senate now recognized the revolutionary potential of gladiators and moved to stop it. During the Catiline crisis of 63 BC, for example, the Senate decreed that gladiators be sent out of Rome and moved to Capua and other Italian cities. Both sides recruited gladiators to the political gangs whose violence plagued Roman politics in the decade of the 50s, as civil war loomed between Caesar and Pompey. When Caesar finally crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC and marched on Rome, his rival Pompey seized Caesar’s gladiators at Capua and distributed them among Roman colonists to be guarded: the gladiators were 1,000 or more men. The senators were right to worry about gladiators.

  No new Spartacus arose to rally Italy’s slaves. Leaders of his calibre do not come often, and any who did would have had a hard time convincing men to risk the fate of Spartacus’s followers. Slaves took up arms again but in the service of one or another of Rome’s revolutionary politicians rather than under the banner of a rebel slave. The best-known case is that of Sextus Pompey, son of Pompey the Great, who ran a successful pirate fleet from Sicily between 43 and 36 BC. His men included 30,000 runaway slaves.

  Spartacus was dead, but his legend was alive and well. Twenty years after Spartacus’s death, Caesar cited the lessons of Spartacus’s revolt when he fought Celts and Germans in Gaul. Thirty years after Spartacus’s death, the Roman general Mark Antony threatened the Republic with his armies. There were no slaves among them but Cicero branded the man ‘a new Spartacus’, nonetheless. Spartacus echoed in Horace’s poetry fifty years after his death. A hundred years after his death, Spartacus’s name came up at the spectre of a gladiators’ revolt in central Italy.

  From Caesar to Tacitus to Augustine, the Roman elite never forgot Spartacus. Two of the first historians to write about him were Sallust (probably 86-35 BC) and Livy (59 BC - AD 17). To Sallust, Spartacus was a great man, a hero and patriot who tried to keep his soldiers from committing atrocities and who wanted to lead them out of Italy homewards. But Sallust despised the Senate and much of Rome’s political elite, so his sympathy for a rebel slave makes sense. Livy, a more establishment figure, saw a darker Spartacus, to judge by what little remains of his chapters on the revolt of the gladiators. To Livy, Spartacus was the man who had terrorized Italy.

  The voices of ordinary people and slaves are nearly impossible to recover, but they may have left the trace of a whisper. To them, Spartacus might have been a figure of resistance and hope, a reminder of Rome’s Achilles’ heel. The evidence is especially speculative, but we should consider it. Let us begin with Crassus’s chosen instruments of punishment. Pieces of the 6,000 crosses on which Spartacus’s men were crucified might have ended up as relics in the hands of ordinary Italians. The Romans believed in the magical value of a nail or piece of cord used in a crucifixion. Wrapped in wool and placed around the neck, these amulets were thought to cure malarial fevers. The Romans also believed that the hair of a crucified person could ease the disease. Malaria was endemic to Roman Italy, and people sought whatever relief they could find. We can imagine soldiers grabbing nails and cord from the slaves’ crosses and cutting hair from victims’ corpses, and then perhaps even selling such items. If only in amulets kept in Italians’ cupboards, the memory of the slaves’ final agony lingered.

  In Rome there was precedent for treating great men like demi-gods. For example, the Gracchi brothers had been assassinated (in 133 and 122 BC) after trying to put through land reform for the common people of Rome. They enjoyed a virtual martyr cult, including statues and daily offerings, while the places where they died were considered sacred. In 86 BC, to take another case, Romans erected statues to a now obscure praetor, Marius Gratidanus, and offered wine and incense to thank him for currency reforms. Slaves could not erect statues to Spartacus, but they could bless his memory and keep it alive.

  Worshipping great men might have come naturally to Roman slaves. Slaves took part in the rituals of the little religious community that every Roman household represented. It was standard practice for slaves to worship the genius - that is, the ‘life force’ - of their master, although many would have preferred to worship the memory of the man who had tried to free them.

  A painting in Pompeii, though fragmentary and puzzling, may tell us something about popular memory. A cartoon-like fresco, it labels one of its characters as Spartacus: literally, SPARTAKS, which is the Oscan version of the Latin name Spartacus. Oscan was the language of Pompeii. After Sulla planted a colony of his veterans there in 80 BC. Latin quickly dominated the city’s public life, but the Oscan language lingered. Did it record the great rebel gladiator? In truth, Pompeii could not have forgotten Spartacus easily.

  A reminder of Spartacus dominated Pompeii’s skyline: Vesuvius, visible throughout the city, and once the scene of Spartacus’s triumph. Some Pompeians might have suffered personally from his raids, which ravaged the local countryside. As a gladiator, moreover, Spartacus had an added claim to Pompeii’s attention, because Pompeians were dyed-in-the-wool fans. Archaeological evidence shows this, at least for the first century AD.

  The Spartacus fresco decorated a building on a busy street. In AD 79 its location was the entrance hall of a private house. But the fresco was painted much earlier, well before the volcanic eruption of AD 79; in fact, the fresco had been covered over by two layers of plaster by then and was no longer visible. In those days, it is possible that the room where it was found was part of a tavern next door; the evidence suggests that the architecture had been changed before AD 79. The painting is monochromatic, with reddish chestnut-coloured figures drawn on a white background, a common style in pre-Roman Campania. It looks a little bit like a comic strip.

  The Spartacus fresco depicts a series of combats. On the far right there is a trumpeter. To his left ride two horsemen armed with lances, helmets and round shields. The first rider looks as if he is trying to escape the second, but without success: the second horseman spears him in the thigh. To the left of the horsemen two men are fighting on foot. They are armed with swords, large body shields and helmets. Finally, on their left, comes a rectangular shape, possibly an altar.

  Some say the fresco depicts an actual battle, but it is clearly a gladiatorial combat. The two pairs of fighters and their arms and armour point to this conclusion. So does the altar, which recalls the tombs around which the earliest gladiatorial games took place. And then there is the trumpeter. Musicians accompanied gladiatorial games, and they sometimes dressed like animals. This trumpeter is wearing a mask, possibly representing a bear. He may be draped in a bearskin cloak as well. We know of another example of a trumpeter in the games who wore a mask and bearskin. That man’s stage name was URSUS TUBICEN, ‘the Bear Trumpeter’, presumably in reference to the instrument’s deep roar.

  Each of the four gladiators is labelled. The names of the men on foot are illegible while the name of the conquering horseman is FEL . . . POMP . . ., plausibly restored as Felix the Pompeian, which also means ‘the lucky Pompeian’. The wounded horseman is clearly labelled SPARTAKS.

  But was he the Spartacus? The experts disagree. Some say yes and argue, moreover, that the fresco depicts Spartacus’s last battle. Some even suggest that the man who commissioned
the painting - Felix of Pompeii? - had claimed to have wounded Spartacus. But the fresco depicts gladiators, not soldiers.

  Still, the fresco shows Spartacus in combat, and so it might have been meant as a symbol of his revolt. Some scholars insist, however, that the date of the painting makes that impossible. Stylistically, the fresco is most easily dated to the last period of Oscan Pompeii, before 80 BC, after which we no longer find examples of Oscan in public inscriptions in Pompeii. But easy answers are not always right. Besides, we don’t know for certain that Oscan wasn’t used after 80 BC, especially in a private inscription. Oscan inscriptions dating as late as the first century AD are found elsewhere in southern Italy.

  In fact, after 80 BC native Pompeians might even have wanted to flaunt the Oscan language in the face of Latin. The sources refer to bitter and protracted tension at Pompeii between Oscan-speaking natives and Latin-speaking colonists. The colonists held the upper hand but the natives had ways of resisting. They found friends and influence in Rome, as Cicero notes, and they could express local pride at home - the Spartaks fresco might just be an example of the latter. The fresco might be thumbing its nose at the colonists by reminding them of an enemy who humiliated Rome.

  The evidence does not permit certainty, but the reader might accept this hypothesis: the fresco offers a snapshot of myth turning into history. Spartaks is Spartacus as one segment of the public remembered him. Outside books and schoolrooms, historical truth usually becomes myth. Spartacus was larger than life; he was whatever people made of him. They might even have made him into a religious figure - the Spartaks fresco suggests that too. The possible presence of a tomb in the fresco points to funeral games, a common subject of Italian wall painting, documented in other wall painting at Pompeii. A funeral was a religious occasion; it was also, from time to time, an occasion for gladiators. It was a time-honoured Italian custom to celebrate the death of a great man with a gladiatorial combat beside his tomb; a death for a death, as it were.