The Spartacus War (3 page)

Every so often during a fight a glancing blow got through, leaving a man bleeding but not fatally wounded. Pumped up on adrenaline, he would have to keep fighting, however bruised, tired and sweating, all the while continuing to think on his feet, always shifting tactics. Although it appears that most bouts lasted only ten to fifteen minutes, there was no time limit; the fight went on until one man won. Meanwhile, each fighter had to close his mind to the noises of the crowd and the brass instruments accompanying the match and focus solely on combat. He also had to try somehow to keep the rules in mind. Gladiatorial bouts were no free-for-alls. A referee (summa rudis) and his assistant (secunda rudis) enforced the regulations. The most important rule was for a fighter to back off after wounding an opponent.

Let us imagine that Spartacus had driven his enemy off balance, knocked the man’s shield out of his hand, and stabbed him in the arm. Spartacus would then withdraw from the wounded man. Whether to finish off the thraex was not up to a gladiator or referee; it was up to the producer (editor).

The producer, in turn, usually asked the audience. A decision about a fallen fighter was the moment of truth. If the crowd liked the losing gladiator and thought he had fought well, they would call for letting him go. But if they thought the loser deserved to die, they wouldn’t be shy about shouting, ‘Kill him!’ They made a gesture with their thumbs, but it was the opposite of what we think today: thumbs up meant death.

In that case, the loser was expected to kneel - if his wounds allowed - while the winner delivered the death blow. At the moment that the loser ‘took the iron’, as the saying went, the crowd would shout, ‘He has it!’ The corpse would be carried away on a stretcher to the morgue. There, he had his throat cut as a precaution against a rigged defeat. Burial followed.

Spartacus, meanwhile, would climb the winner’s platform to receive his prizes: a sum of money and a palm branch. Although a slave, he was allowed to keep the money. After climbing down from the podium, he would wave the palm branch around the arena as he circled it, running a victory lap, taking in the crowd’s approval.

It was an unlikely school of revolution. Yet fights like this steeled the blood of the men who would start the ancient world’s most savage slave revolt.

 

Let us go back to where it all began, to the place where Spartacus lived and trained, the gladiatorial barracks owned by Cnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia. Vatia was a lanista, an entrepreneur who bought and trained gladiators, whom he then hired out to the producers of gladiatorial games. Vatia’s business was located in the city of Capua, which sits about 15 miles north of Naples. It is a part of Italy renowned for its climate, but Spartacus was not likely to appreciate the 300 days of sunshine a year.

He had come to Capua from Rome, probably on foot, certainly in chains, likely tied to the men next to him. In Rome he had been sold into slavery to Vatia. Imagine a scene like that of the slave sale carved on a Capuan tombstone of the first century BC, possibly marking a slave trader’s grave. The slave stands on a pedestal, most likely a wooden auction block, naked except for a loincloth - standard practice in Roman slave markets. It was also standard to mark the slave by chalking his feet. Bearded and broad-shouldered, with his long arms at his sides, the slave in the relief looks fit for hard labour. And the artist uses a size imbalance to suggest a power imbalance, because he makes the slave smaller than the freedmen on either side of him.

Spartacus’s first view of Capua might have been neither its walls nor temples but its amphitheatre. The building rose up outside the city walls and just to the north-west of them, beside the Appian Way. The structure had the squat and rugged shape of one of Italy’s first stone amphitheatres, built in the Late Republic.

Most of Spartacus’s life had unfolded on the broad plains and winding hills of the Balkans but now his frame of reference was no wider than the walls of Vatia’s establishment, with occasional glimpses of Capua. The city and the business had much in common. Neither was respectable in Rome’s eyes and both depended on slave labour. Each occasionally offered a ladder of mobility to slaves. But there was one difference: outside the house of Vatia, the ladder sometimes led to freedom, but inside, it usually led to death.

Spartacus had taken the long route to Capua. In his native Thrace, young Spartacus had served in an allied unit of the Roman army. The Romans called these units auxilia (literally, ‘the help’) and its men were called auxiliaries. These units were separate from the legions, which were restricted to Roman citizens. Although they were not legionaries, auxiliaries got a glimpse of Roman military discipline. Spartacus’s later military success against Rome becomes easier to understand if he had seen first-hand how the Roman army worked.

As an auxiliary, Spartacus was probably a representative of a conquered people fulfilling their military service to Rome; that is, he was probably more draftee than mercenary. As a rebel he would display the eye of command, which might suggest that he was an officer under the Romans. In all likelihood, he was a cavalryman.

Almost all of Rome’s cavalry were auxiliaries. None made fiercer horsemen than the Thracians. The Second Book of Maccabees (included in some versions of the Bible) offers a powerful image of a Thracian on horseback: a mercenary, bearing down on a very strong Jewish cavalryman named Dositheus and chopping off his arm. The unnamed Thracian had thereby saved his commander, Gorgias, whom Dositheus had grabbed by the cloak. That happened in 163 BC. In 130 BC a Thracian cavalryman decapitated a Roman general with a single blow of his sword. Fifty years later the Romans still shivered at the thought.

According to one writer, Spartacus next deserted and became what the Romans called a latro. The word means ‘thief’, ‘bandit’, or ‘highwayman’ but it also means ‘guerrilla soldier’ or ‘insur gent’: the Romans used the same word for all those concepts. We can only guess at Spartacus’s motives. Perhaps, like many Thracians, he had decided to join Mithridates’ war against Rome; perhaps he had a private grievance; perhaps he had taken to a life of crime. Nor do we know where he deserted, whether in Thrace, Macedonia or even Italy. In any case, after his time as a latro, Spartacus was captured, enslaved and condemned to be a gladiator.

In principle, Rome reserved the status of gladiator for only the most serious of criminals. Whatever Spartacus had done, by Roman standards it did not merit such severe punishment. He was innocent, as we learn from no less a source than Varro, a Roman writer in the prime of his life at the time of the gladiators’ war. Knowing that he was guiltless would have added flames to the fire of Spartacus’s rebellion. In any case, Spartacus had become the property of Vatia. The next and possibly last act of the Thracian’s life was about to begin.

Capua was known for its roses, its slaughterhouses and its gladiators. It was fat, rich and a political eunuch. In 216 BC, during the wars with Carthage, Capua had betrayed its ally Rome for Hannibal, Carthage’s greatest general. After the Romans reconquered Capua in 211 BC they punished the town by stripping it of self-government and putting it under a Roman governor.

Yet Capua had bounced back, richer than ever. The city was a centre of metalworks and of textiles. It was also the perfume and medicine capital of Italy as well as a grain-producer and Rome’s meat market, providing pork and lamb for the capital. Capua sits at the foot of a spur of the Apennines, Italy’s rugged and mountainous spine. To the south lies a flat plain, hot and steamy in the summer when the fields are brown, alternately rainy and bright in the winter when the fields are green. Some of the most fertile land in Europe, this was Campania Felix, ‘Lucky Campania’.

Lucky, that is, except from the point of view of its workers. Capua was in large part a city of slaves, both home-grown and imported. The number of slaves made Capua differ only in degree, not kind, from the rest of Italy. The 125 years of Roman expansion after 200 BC had flooded Italy with unfree labour. By Spartacus’s day, there were an estimated 1-1.5 million slaves on the peninsula, perhaps about 20 per cent of the people of Italy.

It was the heyday of exploitation in the ancient world, the zenith of misery and the nadir of freedom. Yet it was also an era of large concentrations of slaves, many of them born free, some of them ex-soldiers; of absentee masters, and of few or no police forces. Add to that the freedom given to some slaves to travel and even carry arms. Finally, consider the many possible refuges provided by nearby mountains. It is no accident that, within the space of sixty years, Sicily and southern Italy would explode into three of history’s greatest slave uprisings: first in two separate revolts on the island (135-132 BC, 104-100 BC) and then in Spartacus’s rebellion.

In the countryside, masses of slaves worked on farms, often in chains, usually locked up for the night in prison-like barracks. Others, employed as herdsmen, were left to fend for themselves or starve. Meanwhile, in town, slaves worked in every profession, from the shop to the school to the kitchen. In Capua, there were even slaves to collect the 5 per cent tax owed when slaves earned their freedom. A lucky few made it to freedom and some prospered; some, astonishingly, went into the slave business, turning their back on their humble origins. One Capuan freedman, for example, did not mind getting rich by manufacturing the rough woollen cloaks that were issued to slave field hands - issued once every other year, that is.

Coarse and rapacious, Capua was destined to become the centre of gladiatorial games. Its sunny climate was considered ideal for training fighters and so Rome’s impresarios came to scout talent. Julius Caesar himself would own a gladiatorial school in Capua.

And yet, by 73 BC, not Capua but Rome - the capital - put on Italy’s greatest gladiatorial games by far. Rome’s cautious elite refused to allow gladiators to be housed there, though. Violent and dangerous, gladiators would have been foxes in the Roman henhouse. It was safer to keep them outside the capital. Capua was ideal: only 130 miles away, and connected to Rome by the most famous highway in the world, the Appian Way, as well as by another great road, the Via Latina.

After travelling one of those highways or perhaps, even before, in the chain gang along the way, Spartacus was introduced to his new colleagues. They were a motley group. Almost all were slaves, whether from birth, by civilian capture and sale, or as a result of becoming prisoners of war. Many were Thracians. Thrace provided Rome with a steady stream of slaves, thanks to the endless wars with Rome’s bordering province of Macedonia. And thanks too to the Thracians’ burning passion for war.

Thracians loved three things: hunting, drinking and fighting. They were born brawlers with a reputation for brutality. Thracian cavalrymen, for example, fought ‘like wild beasts, long kept in cages and then aroused’ when they defeated the Romans at a skirmish at Callinicus in 171 BC. They returned to camp singing and brandishing the severed heads of their enemies on their spears.

Another people in the Roman world who were similarly spoiling for a fight were the Celts. The Celts ‘are absolutely mad about war’, says the Roman writer Strabo. ‘They are high-spirited and quickly seek out a fight.’ And Celts made up the second large group of Vatia’s gladiators. The sources call them Gauls, and surely some of them came from Gaul, that is, modern France. They might have been taken prisoner in one of several small Roman military operations in Gaul in the 80s and 70s BC. They might even have been the sons of war prisoners taken in Marius’s great victories in the West in 102 and 101 BC. But most had probably been sold into slavery by civilians: the going rate for a Gallic slave was as little as an amphora (large jug) of wine. The Romans exported an estimated 40 million amphorae of wine (about 2.64 million gallons) to Gaul in the first century BC and got back in return perhaps as many as 15,000 slaves a year.

But some of Vatia’s Celts may have came from the Balkans, a Celtic population centre and scene of wars with Rome in the 80s and 70s BC, and so a rich source of slaves. The Scordisci, for example, lived on the plains south of the Danube, in what today is north-eastern Serbia, and were Celts who had mingled with Thracians and Illyrians (another warlike people of the ancient Balkans).

If Vatia or his agents indeed had bought Scordisci, they had chosen the wrong Celts. Thracians and Scordisci shared a border and a hatred for Rome. In 88 BC the Scordisci and many Thracians supported Mithridates in his revolt against Rome. A joint army of Thracians and Scordisci invaded the Roman province of Greece in a major raid; both peoples later suffered in Roman punitive expeditions.

We probably ought to add Germans to the mix of gladiators in the house of Vatia. Germans too played a prominent role as Spartacus’s soldiers. Many of Italy’s slaves were German or children of Germans who, like Celts, had been captured in large numbers by Marius thirty years earlier; others had been sold into slavery by civilians. Besides, there was no clear distinction between Celts and Germans in 73 BC: boundaries blurred. In any case, both Greco-Roman writers and archaeologists agree that the ancient peoples of today’s Germany were warlike, like Celts and Thracians. ‘Peace is displeasing to [their] nation,’ wrote the Roman historian Tacitus, who stated that the Germanic economy rested on war and plunder. We don’t hear of Germans until Spartacus’s revolt spread, but maybe a few of Vatia’s gladiators were German.

Perhaps other ethnic groups from around the empire contributed men to Vatia’s enterprise. Anatolia and the Black Sea region both provided Rome with many of its slaves, and Vatia’s establishment possibly included representatives of those lands. But one last important group to consider was not foreign at all: free Italians, even Roman citizens. Both poor and rich citizens volunteered as gladiators, whether out of desperation, boredom or a search for adventure. In the first century BC such forays into the Italian underworld had already become fashionable.