The Roman Guide to Slave Management (21 page)

Whatever the reality of the Saturnalia, it is true that normality nearly always returned afterwards. There are only a few cases of the festivities getting out of hand and resulting in riots and other displays of lower-class discontent. Slaves certainly don’t seem to have tried taking advantage of the momentary relaxation of the rules to advance their cause in any more forceful way.

Brief references to the goings-on of the Saturnalia can be found in Martial
Epigrams
14.1, Seneca
Letters
18, Lucian
Saturnalia
, Augustine
Sermon
198.1, Tacitus
Annals
13.15, Epictitetus
Discourses
1.25.8 and Libanius
Oration
9.5–6. For the killjoy Pliny, forced to take himself off to a quiet room to escape the noise emanating from the household party, see his
Letters
2.17.24. A discussion of the Saturnalia and lower-class leisure in general can be found in
Chapter 3
‘The World Turned Bottom Up’ of my book
Popular Culture in Ancient Rome
.

   
CHAPTER VIII
   

‘Y
OU HAVE AS MANY ENEMIES
as you have slaves.’ And even if it is us who have made them enemies, as a slave owner you must keep this traditional saying constantly at the back of your mind. For no matter how trustworthy and loyal your slaves might appear to be, they would nearly all jump at the chance of being free. If you give them that chance, you might find that they will take it. And you will be the loser.

The great mass of slaves in our society is like an unexploded volcano, waiting like Vesuvius to erupt and destroy our great Roman civilisation. Their conditions are not always as fair as they should be and they harbour grudges for the defeats and perceived indignities they have suffered at our hands. You should not be surprised, therefore, to find that many slaves will carry out many acts of resistance against your authority. Some of these are major and threatening, others far more minor and merely annoying. Let me outline some of these risks in order that you can guard against them.

Slave rebellions have been mercifully rare but were none the less shocking for that. The first slave insurrections took place shortly after the second war with Carthage, which had left the Roman state tired and exhausted by long years of fighting. Not only that, but we had as a result of our ultimate victory huge numbers of slaves in our possession in Italy and Sicily who had not yet been sold off into households. Perhaps most dangerous of all was the fact that these slaves shared the same ethnic background and so were able easily to communicate, incite and conspire with each other. Even then, if they had stayed a leaderless rabble that need not have mattered too much. But their former military officers were also among them and so were able to lead them when given an opportunity to revolt.

Few civil wars have been so great as that of the slaves in Sicily. Cities were ruined, countless men died, women and children suffered the greatest misfortunes, and the whole island nearly fell to runaway slaves. These rough slaves wanted only to trash the place, and targeted the free population in particular as if to get revenge for their servitude. Most of the inhabitants were shocked at this outbreak of rebellion, but a look at the background will show that it did not arise without due cause. Sicily was a prosperous island, whose inhabitants enjoyed the benefits of its abundant harvests. People grew more rich and arrogant in equal measure. Luxury spread. As a result, they treated their slaves worse and worse, and this maltreatment made the slaves increasingly angry with their masters. At the same time, the great landowners bought up whole consignments of slaves to work on their estates.
Some were bound with chains, and many were worn out by the hard labour they were forced to do. All were branded with humiliating marks on their foreheads.

Such a huge number of slaves flooded the whole of Sicily that those who heard about it thought it had been exaggerated and did not believe it. The landowners’ arrogance grew to such an extent that, rather than give their herdsmen food, they told them to steal it from others. These men were therefore compelled by their lack of provisions into dangerous raids, and crimes of this sort started happening all over the island.

At first, they attacked people who were travelling alone or in pairs in particularly isolated places. Then they banded together in groups and attacked farms in the middle of the night. They plundered them of their possessions and killed any who resisted. They grew ever bolder. Sicily became unsafe to travel in and even unsafe to live in outside of the cities. Everywhere was blighted by violence and robbery and murder. The herdsmen were used to living in the open and carrying weapons and increasingly acted as if they were bands of soldiers. The great quantities of milk and meat which were available for them to eat had the effect of dehumanising their minds and bodies, as such foods are known to do, turning them into wild animals. The entire island, therefore, came to be occupied by scattered groups of armed wild slaves. The governors wanted to control them but they were in the pay of the major landowners and so dared not move against the slaves. They were forced to overlook the fact that the province was being plundered.

The slaves who worked the land were in the meantime
exhausted by their hardships and by the unjustified and humiliating beatings they frequently suffered. In the end they could take no more. They gathered together when they got the chance and discussed how they could rebel, with their officers making detailed plans. Their leader, though, was not one of their own, but a strange Syrian, from Apamea. He was known as a magician and could carry out the most amazing miracles. He pretended that he could tell the future because the gods spoke to him when he was asleep, and many people believed him as he put on a very good act. He even pretended to have visions of the gods while awake, saying that he could hear directly from them what was going to happen.

He was also lucky in that some of the many fantasies he invented happened to come true. His reputation therefore spread and he was widely acclaimed throughout the island. In the end, he got so into his role that he would produce fire and flame from his mouth while in a trance, and would then produce divinely inspired utterances about the future. He managed to do this by means of a trick, whereby he put some fire and fuel inside a walnut in which holes had been drilled. Then he would place the walnut in his mouth without anyone seeing and would produce sparks and flames as he spoke.

Before the revolt started he proclaimed that a Syrian goddess had appeared to him and revealed that he was going to be a king. And once the revolt had taken hold, his prediction did indeed come true and he became leader of tens of thousands of slaves united in their hatred of their vicious masters and bent on destroying them.

But this first slave rebellion was as nothing compared
with that great revolt led by Spartacus. These renegades had no desire to set up their own kingdom, but simply wanted to return to their own tribes in the distant north with as much plunder as they could take with them. But as in Sicily it was the excessive brutality of slave owners that provided the spark for the revolt.

The rebellion began when a man called Lentulus Batiatus was keeping some slaves at Capua. Many of them were Celts and Thracians and they were being forced to fight as gladiators, not because they had done anything wrong, but because of the wickedness of their owner. Two hundred of them therefore decided to run away, but someone informed against them. Extra guards were brought in and only seventy-eight managed to escape, by snatching up some axes and spits from a kitchen and forcing their way out of the barracks in which they were imprisoned. Soon after they happened to come across some carts carrying gladiators’ armour and weapons to another city, which they took to arm themselves.

Spartacus emerged as their leader. He was a Thracian from a nomadic tribe, who was not only very brave and physically powerful, but also more intelligent and more humane than one would expect of someone whom fortune had made a slave. You might almost have mistaken him for a Greek. The story goes that when he was first brought to Rome to be sold, a snake appeared and wound itself round his face as he was asleep, and his wife, who came from the same tribe and was a prophetess, stated that it signified that he would achieve great power and success. He led his group of runaways to the top of Mount Vesuvius, from where he launched raiding parties.
He gained further popularity with his men because he divided the booty equally and his fame attracted many new recruits from the slave estates in the area.

Their first fight was a minor skirmish with some soldiers sent out from Capua. Easily defeating them, they took their weapons too. As they travelled through the countryside they were joined by more and more slaves who saw a chance to regain their freedom and return home. Their number grew so large that the praetor Clodius was sent out from Rome against them with three thousand men. Catching up with them, he besieged them on a mountain. There was only one narrow and difficult way up this mountain, which Clodius had guarded. Everywhere else there were sheer cliffs which offered no foothold. But the slaves made ladders out of the wild vines that grew at the summit and used these to climb down the steep cliffs. The fugitives were then able to surround the Roman force, which was completely unaware of what had happened. The attack threw the Roman troops into such disorder that they fled in panic.

The second general to be sent out against them was Publius Varinus. Spartacus first defeated his deputy Furius who was accompanied by two thousand soldiers. He then defeated another deputy, Cossinus, inflicting heavy casualties and capturing more equipment. The general himself finally deigned to march against Spartacus but was unable to defeat him in a number of engagements. After each victory, Spartacus burnt any equipment he didn’t need and killed all the prisoners and slaughtered the pack animals so that his army would not be impeded in any way.

But Spartacus was, as I have said, an intelligent man. He did not believe for one moment that he could break the power of the Romans even though his army now numbered seventy thousand. He knew what the outcome must therefore be: defeat and death. His only hope was to escape from Roman territory. So he led his army north towards the Alps, where they planned to cross the mountains, so each could then return to his own homeland, whether Thrace, Gaul or Germany. But his troops were enjoying themselves and their victories too much, and had become intoxicated with booty. Their arrogance and overconfidence had grown with their numbers, and they now thought themselves invincible. They therefore refused to follow their leader and instead marched all over Italy causing great devastation.