The Spartacus War (9 page)

Meanwhile, the insurgents had their own problems. By this point, they most likely numbered more than 10,000 people: some women and children but most of them men. They had more men than weapons. But the rebels were nothing if not inventive. Because they had no iron for spearheads, they hardened the wooden tips of their spears in the fire, to make them look like iron - and to ensure that they could open severe wounds. Food was a bigger problem. The fugitives were running out of supplies, and foraging raids were no longer safe with the enemy close by.

The solution was another clever stratagem. In the second watch of the night - between about 9 p.m. and midnight - they all left camp in silence. Only a trumpeter remained behind. Meanwhile, to trick the enemy, they propped up corpses on stakes in front of the gates. They even put clothes on them and weapons in their hands, to make them look like guards. At the same time, they left campfires burning.

The trick worked so well that it was only in the light of day that Varinius suspected something. He noticed the silence. Not only was the usual clanging and banging of a busy camp missing, so were the rebels’ special touches: they had been throwing stones at the Romans and taunting them with insults. Taunting the enemy, by the way, was a typical Celtic tactic on the eve of battle. Varinius sent a cavalry unit to a nearby hill to see if they could find the enemy. They were far away, but Varinius wasn’t taking any chances. He withdrew in a defensive formation, in order to allow time to replenish his forces with new recruits. Apparently, he went to the city of Cumae, an old Greek city on the coast about 25 miles north-west of Vesuvius.

Whether Varinius got his reinforcements is not known. He did manage to boost morale, but only seemingly so: Varinius did not recognize the difference between bluster and self-confidence. Although his men now talked tough, they were still raw and defeated soldiers. After a few days, Varinius decided to throw caution to the winds and to accept his men’s demands for a second chance: he led them against the enemy’s camp, which his scouts had located. They marched quickly. As they approached the rebels, silence replaced the Roman soldiers’ boasting.

They would have had to march quickly to catch the fugitives, who were constantly on the move. ‘They roved throughout all of Campania,’ as one Roman said. They went on raids in the southern Campanian plain, ranging north, east and south of Vesuvius, over the rich farm country lying between the Apennines and the mountains of the Amalfi peninsula. They devastated the territories of Nola and Nuceria. Whether the rebels moved as a single force or in separate units is unclear. Nor is the order of events known, but here is one plausible reconstruction.

Nola sits on the plain north of Monte Somma, in rich farm country. Lying as it does in the shadow of the mountain, Nola was directly in the rebels’ path. They had special reason to hate it because of Nola’s connection to Sulla. Ironically, Nola had fought hard against Rome in the Social War and later against Sulla too. But after his victory, Sulla acquired a villa at Nola and no doubt seized land there for his friends.

Spartacus’s men probably held Sulla’s men in special contempt. The Sullans had a reputation for high living. Meanwhile, the men whose lands they had taken were forced to get used to poverty - just the thing to make them join the rebels. The rebels might have enjoyed manhandling Nola.

Then the rebels turned on Nuceria, a city south-east of Vesuvius, on the road from Nola to Salerno. Nuceria was located high in the hills above the valley of the Sarno River. It was a prosperous community of farmers and traders. In 104 BC thirty slaves in Nuceria rose in rebellion but they were quickly foiled and punished. In 73 BC, Nuceria’s slaves had the chance to join Spartacus’s men as they plundered their masters’ lands.

From Vesuvius to Nuceria, the rebels had gone from strength to strength. Yet, like the Romans, they too faced an autumn of discontent. In fact, the rebels staggered with success. Spartacus’s men now had unrealistic expectations; the attempt to talk sense into them nearly broke the army in two. They were, says a Roman source, no longer willing to obey him.

What had happened is this: Crixus was in favour of attacking Varinius, while Spartacus wanted to avoid battle. A tactical difference, but a deeper, strategic disagreement divided them. Crixus wanted to widen the war in Italy. He wanted more loot, more revenge and, no doubt, more power. Spartacus did not think that the rebels were winning. In fact, in his opinion, the men were now in mortal danger. Their movements were aimless and ad hoc. Sooner or later the Romans would cut them off and wipe them out. To be safe, they needed to leave as quickly as possible.

And go where? Crixus might have asked. Spartacus wanted to take the army north to the Alps, where they would split up and head back to their respective homelands, be they in Thrace or the Celtic lands. Parts of Thrace and most of Gaul were still free. Gladiators, runaway slaves and free Italians could all live there beyond the long arm of Rome.

It was an inspiring plan, and one that a follower of Dionysus might have relished: the Greeks, at any rate, believed that the god had travelled through the high and rugged Hindu Kush Mountains (located between today’s Afghanistan and Pakistan). Some even said Dionysus had been born there. Surely, the god would lead his follower Spartacus over the Alps.

It was, others no doubt replied, an impossible dream. But what was the alternative? The Alps were not easy to cross but they were not impassable. Hannibal had proved that. The Roman legions, however, were another matter. Spartacus knew the Roman army well, and he doubted the rebels’ ability to defeat the Romans in a regular battle. If the rebels could not defeat a second-rate force like Varinius’s, what would happen when the armies in Spain and the East came home, and the rebels had to fight veteran legions?

Spartacus understood the difference between guerrilla and conventional warfare. Guerrillas cannot defeat a conventional army by military means; they can only frustrate it. As long as the conventional army retains its will to fight, it will win in the end. And it was impossible to imagine the Romans losing their will in Italy. Eventually, the Romans would wipe out the rebels.

Spartacus was right but he was outvoted. He had only a small number of supporters, ‘a few farseeing people, men of liberal minds and nobility,’ as one Roman writer puts it. Crixus had behind him the majority of his fellow Celts as well as the majority of the Germans. Many of the Celts and Germans had been born in Italy, being the children of prisoners of war from 102 and 101 BC. ‘Going home’ might not have meant as much to them as it did to Spartacus. ‘Home’ was Italy.

But a Roman writer gives Crixus’s supporters lesser motives: ‘Some of them stupidly put their trust in the masses of new recruits flooding in and in their own fierce spirit, others were disgracefully heedless of their fatherland, and most of them had a naturally slavish temperament that longed for nothing except booty and bloodshed.’ These comments are bigoted but they are not entirely inaccurate. From Thrace to Gaul, barbarian warfare put a premium on the acquisition of loot. It brought only limited wealth, since much of the booty was consecrated to the gods, but cattle, gold and women were the coin of the realm, and Italy teemed with all three.

And military logic favoured some of Crixus’s points. After all, a reasonable person might have argued that if the rebels turned north now, they would have Varinius on their tail, and eventually he would force a battle. A reasonable person might also have pointed out the difficulty of crossing the Alps in autumn. The rebels would have to sit in northern Italy and fight off the Romans until the following spring before they could go over the mountains again. Northern Italy was neither as rich nor as warm as the south. Why not build a base under the southern sun? After all, the Roman armies in Spain and Asia Minor were not likely to come back to Italy soon.

From the operational point of view, Spartacus was probably wrong. It was safer to defeat Varinius before heading north. But strategically, Spartacus was right. The rebels had to leave Italy, if not today or the next day then soon. And eventually they had to cross the Alps. Spartacus was unable to win his case, but he did a signal service to his people even so: he held the army together.

Spartacus and his supporters might have quit. They might have worked their way quietly northwards avoiding Roman roads, and headed for the Alps. Or they might have used their loot to buy or bribe their way onto a boat heading east. But Spartacus was an armed prophet and did not want to be a general without an army. Dionysus’s chosen one was not about to slink off.

The quarrel was settled by a compromise. As Crixus wanted, the fugitives would continue plundering and they would fight Varinius. But as Spartacus wanted, they would not fight him yet. Instead, they would prepare carefully for the coming battle. It was inevitable, Spartacus said, that Varinius would rebuild his army. In preparation, the rebels needed to increase the number and quality of their troops. They needed elite recruits; the closest thing to that, Spartacus suggested, was to find shepherds. In order to find them, the rebel army would have to head out into more open country, somewhere more suited to grazing. In other words, they would have to go south into Italy’s pasturelands.

Spartacus knew what he was doing. Roman herdsmen were slaves, tough, hardy and independent. They were fighters, as they had to be in order to survive in the wild, where wolves and bandits were routine and bears were not unknown. Slave shepherds had made up the core of the great Sicilian Slave Revolts. Herders had sustained the Lusitanian (Portuguese) rebel Viriathus in his eight years of guerrilla war against the Roman conquerors (147-139 BC). The current Roman rebel in Spain, Sertorius, drew many of his supporters from shepherds as well.

Spartacus knew one other thing too: the margin of error. The Romans could afford bad generals and defeated armies. In fact, Roman history was littered with failure, from the Allia to the Caudine Forks to Cannae. The Romans could lose many battles as long as they won the last battle. And Rome’s ironclad political system and profound population resources gave it the will and the manpower to go the distance.

The rebels had no room for mistakes. Spartacus knew that his men were good but also that they had been lucky. Roman incompetence allowed them the luxury of going on raids instead of drilling soldiers, of arguing with each other instead of fighting the enemy.

Rome could throw away praetors. The rebels needed a leader.

4

The Pathfinders

I
n autumn 73 BC when Spartacus and Crixus struck their deal, the army turned south. Aiming to avoid Varinius, they doubtless avoided the Roman road, which could be easily guarded. Instead, they probably headed for the hills. They likely travelled on byroads along mountain ridges, on the timeless paths of muleteers seated with their baskets, on trails beaten through the woods by herds migrating to the mountains in summer and back to the plain before winter. Heavy-armed legionaries and their supply wagons could not take that route, but light-armed rebels could.

However, the rebels could not find their way on their own. They needed pathfinders, whether willing or coerced. Without local intelligence to point the way and to indicate food supplies, the fugitives would have been lost. Grizzled farmers, shaggy mountain men, young girls on the way to draw water from a spring, slaves barely free from their chains, fat landowners too slow to run from the rebels: these would have been Spartacus’s eyes and ears in the Italian countryside.

The first example in our sources of one of Spartacus’s guides is a prisoner. He came from the region known as the Agri Picentini, the fertile plains south of the city of Salernum (modern Salerno). But he could hardly have been the first local guide for the rebels, because they had already travelled over rough country. After leaving the vicinity of Nuceria, they had headed inland and passed by Abella (modern Avella), a small city about 5 miles north-east of Nola. Abella sits at the foot of the thickly wooded Partenio Mountains (modern name), in the upper valley of the Clanis (Clanio) River. It lies in green, well-watered farm country, famous for its hazelnuts and its high winds. Rainy and snowy in the winter, Abella was isolated and rural, its cool, fresh air worlds away from the urban heat of Capua. But Abella had seen its share of history. An Italian city, it forged close ties with Rome. Roman roads, Roman land surveying, and Late Republican rustic villas have all been found in Abella’s farmlands. Abella stayed loyal to Rome during the Social War (91-88 BC) and, as a reward, was probably honoured with the status of ‘colony’ by Sulla. Now, as the sources say, Spartacus’s men ‘happened upon the farmers of Abella who were watching over their fields’. (The word for ‘farm ers’ can also mean ‘colonists’.) Their meeting with the rebels was probably not a happy one for them.

Spartacus and his men now made for the southern Picentini Mountains, about 30 miles away as the crow flies. Assuming they went through the back country, they would have crossed the hills of Irpinia and climbed into the Picentini Mountains, always heading south and east. They would have made their way through forests of oak and chestnut, past nearly 6,000-foot-high mountains, through gorges and over torrents. It was neither an easy route nor a rich one; the fertile plains below around the Via Annia were visible here and there in the distance, but they were in the Romans’ hands. No one could have eaten much on this march.

After leaving the Picentini Mountains, the rebels’ next goal was the Silarus (modern Sele) River, about 20 miles south-east of the city of Salerno (the Roman Salernum). In ancient times, the Silarus marked the regional boundary. Once they crossed it, Spartacus and his army would have left Campania for Lucania. About 8 miles further would bring them to a pass in the hills. As soon as they went over that, they would begin a new phase of their revolt.

They would now be in the heart of Lucania, where they would be sailing on a vast inland sea: green waves of hills broken by upland plains, thick forests, remote towns and craggy mountain peaks. Lucania’s rugged terrain stretched southwards as far as the eye could see until the ‘heel’ of the Italian ‘boot’, where it dropped off into a fertile, coastal strip bounded by the Ionian Sea.