The Spartacus War

Chapter 3 — The Praetors

In 73 BC, 681 years after the founding of the City of Rome, during the consulship of Lucullus (Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus) and Cassius (Gaius Cassius Longinus), the Republic was fighting wars at either end of the Mediterranean. In Spain, Pompey ground down the renegade Roman commander Sertorius by taking out his strongholds, one by one. In Asia Minor, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, the consul’s brother, began an invasion of the homeland of King Mithridates, who had fought Rome on and off for fifteen years. In the Balkans, Gaius Scribonius Curio was the first Roman general, along with his legion, to see the Danube River. In Crete, Antonius got ready to sail out again against pirates attacking Roman shipping.

Given the big picture, the gladiators’ revolt might have seemed minor. Capua had seen a slave revolt before, in 104 BC, which had been crushed by barely the number of troops in a single legion - 4,000 infantry and 400 cavalry, for a total of 4,400 men - led by a praetor, a leading Roman public official. So the obvious policy in 73 BC was: send in the praetor.

In Rome, the Senate set public policy. Senators were all very wealthy men, and almost all members of a few elite families. They had automatically become senators, without election, after holding high public office, and they served for life. They were the oligarchy that ran Rome, except for those occasions when they were challenged by a general such as Marius or Sulla. Once rare, those challenges had become more frequent. But in 73 BC the senators enjoyed a period of power.

The senators chose Caius Claudius Glaber to send against Spartacus. He was one of eight praetors that year, each of them at least 39 years old, and each elected to an annual term. They were men of great expectations, since the praetors were the second highest ranking of the annually elected public officials in Rome; only the two consuls stood higher. Who was Glaber? We hardly know. He never rose to the consulate and he had no known descendants. He was a plebeian with probably at most a distant link to the more famous members of the Claudius clan. His obscurity was another sign of how little attention Rome gave Spartacus.

Glaber led a force slightly smaller than the one sent against the rebels of 104 BC: 3,000 men instead of 4,400 and, so far as we know, no cavalry. But the first revolt had been led by a Roman citizen who was a knight, no less, while the latest uprising was the work of barbarians and slaves. Apparently the Romans felt more confident in 73 than in 104 BC.

The news from Capua was digested, analyzed and classified. It was, to quote Caesar, ‘a tumultus of slaves’[53]. A tumultus was a sudden outbreak of violence requiring an emergency response. It was a serious matter but not organized war (bellum, in Latin).

Romans looked down on slaves. Their servile nature, said one contemporary, made slaves cruel, greedy, violent and fanatical while denying them nobility or generosity of spirit. For slaves to behave courageously was against nature. For slaves to behave like free men was strictly for the Saturnalia[54], an annual celebration featuring role-reversal - as a Roman officer once remarked in disgust when his men had to fight freed slaves. In revolt slaves were a nuisance but not a major problem. Or so the Romans told themselves, although the stubborn resistance of Sicily’s slaves in two revolts (135-132 and 104-100 BC) should have taught them otherwise.

And then there were the gladiators and their leader. Double-think runs like a red thread through Roman attitudes towards Spartacus. Fear and scorn, hatred and admiration, indifference and obsession - they were all there. For the Romans, gladiators were to be fed, trained, cheered, adored, ogled, bedded, buried and even, occasionally, freed, but never, never to be treated as equals.

As a slave and a Thracian barbarian, Spartacus was despicable to Romans. As a former allied soldier, he was pathetic. From their point of view, the Romans had offered Spartacus the hand of civilization by letting him into the auxiliary units of their army. Then, whether through bad behaviour or bad luck, he ended up a slave. He had lost the chance that the army had given him (again, that is, from the Roman point of view). But in their mercy, as far as the Romans were concerned, they gave Spartacus another chance. They gave him the gladius - the sword.

To the Romans, a gladiator was not just an athlete or even a warrior: he was holy. And he was sexy. Whenever they went to the games the Romans took a walk on the wild side. The beasts were supposed to growl back at them; it made a better show. But Spartacus did more than growl. Like many a professional athlete, Spartacus was feared for the same reason he was adored: he was dangerous. Yet, once he left the arena, a gladiator seemed almost harmless, even if he had taken up arms in revolt.

If this seems hard to understand, think of Spartacus as an athlete who rejected the love of his fans. We can forgive an athlete who misbehaves but not one who snubs us. Once Spartacus and his seventy-three companions left their barracks, they were no longer gladiators but runaway gladiators. In Roman eyes, they had shrunk from a fight, hence they were moral lepers: cowardly, effeminate and degenerate. They had sunk from the glory of the arena to the shame of banditry. Spartacus could have been the pride of Rome; instead, it seemed, he was back where he began, a barbarian. From the Roman point of view, his men were not soldiers but runaway slaves, fugitivi. No wonder the Senate had little fear of him - at first.

Two other things are likely to have kept the Romans from making a bigger push against Spartacus: ambition and greed. Glory was the oxygen of Roman politics but there was little to be won in a police action against criminals. A slave war, says one Roman, ‘had a humble and unworthy name’[55]. Plunder might have served as consolation, but that was out of the question. All Italians south of the Po valley were Roman citizens. Roman soldiers couldn’t plunder their own country.

Because they were responding to a tumultus (emergency), the Romans did not hold an ordinary levy of troops on the Campus Martius (Field of Mars) outside the city. Instead they probably instructed Glaber to do what Roman commanders often did in an emergency: to recruit troops on the road, as he marched south.

Glaber’s troops were probably not the best that Rome had, not by a long shot. Those were already fighting in Spain and in the East, where there were plenty of spoils and laurels to be won and top generals to lead the men. Italy had not been stripped of all its good soldiers, however: Sulla’s veterans, for example, represented a source of experienced troops. Sullan veterans were to be found at Pompeii as well as at Abella, and outside Capua, among other places. But they were not likely to sign up to help some nobody slap a few slaves back into irons. Glaber had to take what he could get.

So Glaber’s army was probably no more than a militia. And yet, no Roman army on the march was easily forgotten. The flash of mail armour and bronze or iron helmets as a long line of soldiers went by captured the eye. The clatter of the supply carts and the lowing of the oxen that drew them filled the air. And then there were the individual soldiers.

A standard-bearer, surrounded by trumpeters, carried the legion’s symbol, a silver eagle on a standard (that is, shaft). Every century (a unit of eighty men) also had its own standard, a spear embellished with discs and wreaths, carried by a standard-bearer in colourful dress, wearing a helmet decorated with an animal skin.

Meanwhile, six men called lictors marched in front of the praetor. Lictors served as attendants to all Rome’s high-ranking officials. They were strong men; each carried the fasces, a bundle of rods tied with ribbons and symbolizing the power to command. Outside the city limits of Rome, the fasces were wrapped around an axe, signifying the power of life and death.

And so they marched, the praetor and his men, following the rebels to Vesuvius. They made camp, probably at the foot of the mountain. Glaber decided not to attack the enemy, who was on the summit. This may seem overly cautious, but the terrain favoured the defenders. Only one road led up the mountain and it was too rough and narrow to deploy a legion. It was no place to test his new army. Instead, Glaber decided to seal in the enemy and starve him out. He posted guards on the road to prevent a breakout.

It was not an imaginative or a self-confident plan but it might have worked, as long as the Romans kept up their guard. Instead, they handed the initiative to Spartacus. He decided to attack the Roman camp. Like any commander, Spartacus drew on his experience to put together a plan of battle. Rich and complex, that experience would serve him well, both at Vesuvius and later.

As a Thracian, Spartacus had a heritage of making war. In particular, Thrace specialized in light infantry, horsemanship, trickery and unconventional warfare. Homer considered the Thracians a nation of horsemen[56]; Thucydides[57] respected their daggers; Romans feared their pole-arm. Thrace had invented the pelt ast, the quick and mobile lightly armed infantryman who fought at close range with a knife or at a distance with a javelin. They excelled at attacking or defending hills, using hit-and-run tactics, setting ambushes, setting or dousing campfires, making opportunistic raids on heavy infantry formations, forming up in defensive mass against cavalry. Feints, ruses, tricks and stratagems were all chapters in the Thracian war manual. And plundering was a national habit.

Spartacus was born and raised with the Thracian way of war but as an adult he added an additional string to his bow: Roman military doctrine. He combined Thracian speed and stealth with Roman organization and discipline. Single combat and swords manship did double duty for him, since Romans as well as Thracians valued these practices. Gladiatorial training may have added some new tricks to his sword-handling.

At Vesuvius, Spartacus put all his military wisdom to use. Because of the dramatic changes to Vesuvius in the several eruptions since 73 BC, we cannot reconstruct the topography in detail. But the overall picture is clear.

Nowadays, Vesuvius actually consists of two peaks: an active crater, called the Grand Cone, and a second peak, Monte Somma, that lies across a saddle to the north. Before AD 79 it seems likely that the Grand Cone and Monte Somma were joined and that there was only one peak. They shared a dormant crater at the top, about a mile in diameter; its northern and eastern rims are probably today the interior walls of Monte Somma, facing the Grand Cone.

Many scholars believe that Spartacus and his men camped in this crater. The surviving interior walls of Monte Somma are steep, forbidding, pock-marked and precipitous. They are topped by a jagged series of crests. The highest point today is 3,700 feet. The walls are covered with broom, beech, locust trees and lichen. In Spartacus’s day, they were covered with wild vines.

Nowadays often considered a nuisance plant, the wild grape-vine, vitis vinifera sylvestris, is the hero of the story. Unlike Spartacus, it was native to Italy, where it was a familiar sight. Spartacus’s rural recruits ‘were used to weaving branches into baskets that they used for their farm work’[58]. This is nothing unusual for the Italian countryside; in fact until a generation or two ago, Italian country folk regularly wove baskets and containers in a similar way. We might also speculate that the sight of lava ‘ropes’ - rope-like lava formations - on the wall of Monte Somma’s extinct crater suggested the idea of using vine ropes on the mountainside. In any case, Spartacus’s rural followers cut off the usable vines and entwined them into long and robust ropes. Wild vines tend to be longer than cultivated vines, which eased the rebels’ task. Some other form of local vegetation with thinner branches probably served to bind the vines.

We don’t know what time of day the following action took place, but dusk would have served well. The rebels let the ropes down a part of the mountain that the Romans had left unguarded because it was so steep and rocky. The soil here was crumbly and unstable. We should not think of the rebels using the vines for rappelling down the mountain. Vesuvius’s slope is not vertical, and vines are not supple or strong enough to be coiled around someone’s body. Rather, the vine ropes probably served as handholds and guide rails. One by one, the rebels climbed down - all except one last man. It was his job to stay and throw down the weapons that they had taken from their camp, since the terrain was too uneven to carry weapons safely. Finally, having tossed all the arms down, the last man descended as well. Or so the sources say, but it seems more likely that a group passed the arms from man to man at the end.

We might guess that it was now night-time. Since Thracians specialized in night attacks, Spartacus might have wanted to deploy this advantage. The fugitives had carried out their escape under the eyes of the careless Romans. Now, they attacked.

Roman troops on campaign always constructed a defended camp to serve as a secure base both for attack and defence. Every camp was built on a standard pattern, usually a square, divided by streets, tent-lines and horse-lines, and surrounded by a ditch and rampart. As a Roman army completed its march, a good campsite was chosen, surveyors carefully laid out the skeleton of the place, and then the men did the rest. The soldiers slept in leather tents, eight men to a tent. The commander’s tent, known as the praetorium, served both as his living quarters and the army’s headquarters. With 3,000 men as well as animals, Glaber’s camp probably covered about 10 acres.

Because the Romans prided themselves on attacking the enemy, the camp’s defences were usually light. The ditch was normally only about 3 feet wide and deep, the rampart a low mound of earth topped with wooden stakes. Pickets were stationed outside the ramparts to warn of attack and to slow down the enemy. Of course, a dangerous and sly enemy required stronger defences. But Glaber took Spartacus too lightly. The Romans, says one ancient source, ‘did not yet consider this a war but rather some raid, like an attack by bandits’[59]. Glaber seems to have ordered no special security.

One ancient source says the fugitives came from an unexpected direction; another, that they surrounded the camp; another, that they came from a hidden exit in a crevice. It is not clear that they outnumbered the Romans but they had the advantage of surprise: the ancients all agree that the Romans were shocked - and well they should have been. Spartacus’s men probably picked off the sentries and then fell on the men in their tents. Without time to get into formation, the Romans had no choice but to fight a series

of mêlées, if they fought at all. The gladiators were big, agile and probably fast enough to have cut to pieces any man who stood up to them.

Thracians, Germans and Celts were all tall compared to Romans. Celts were known for their rapid and terrifying charges, accompanied by battle cries and songs. The Thracians’ war cry had a special name in Greek, the ‘titanismos’. The Germans’ battle cry was a ‘confused roar’[60] caused by putting their shields to their mouths; if the Germans with Spartacus didn’t have shields, maybe they used animal skins instead.

Some of the Celts might have worn their hair long or had thick moustaches in the manner of Gallic nobles; some might have spiked their hair by washing it in chalky water, and then combed it up to make them look taller. It is possible that a few went into battle naked, except for a sword belt and torque, as a traditional Celtic sign of ferocity. Any women at the battle were prominently cheering their men on, as was the custom of Celtic, German and Thracian women. Greek and Roman writers registered this practice with shock, and archaeology confirms it. In an immense mass grave[61] of Gallic warriors in northern France, erected as a trophy of a battle in 260 BC, one-third of the bones belonged to women: most of them, like the men, fallen in the prime of life.

One thing seems likely: few of the insurgents went into battle without first drinking wine. This was standard procedure for both Celts and Thracians and, for that matter, for most soldiers in the ancient world. The Romans faced attackers whose courage had been boosted by the fruit of Rome’s best grapes.

Another likelihood is that everyone prayed before beginning their charge. Each no doubt called on his native gods but they all might have shared a prayer to the god who guided the star of the man who had started the rebellion: Dionysus, the god of Spartacus.

The sources all agree that the Roman soldiers fled. Triumphant and maybe even shocked at the ease of victory, Spartacus’s forces took Glaber’s camp. They promptly plundered it. No doubt they found food, clothing, weapons and possibly letters from the Senate.

No casualty figures survive from the engagement. Some men surely were killed or wounded, most of them Roman. The rebels stripped the arms and armour from the dead. Experienced soldiers knew that they had to move quickly before rigor mortis made it difficult to undress a corpse. The gladiators probably suffered fewer casualties, but one of them might have been their third leader, Oenomaus, the Celt. We know that he fell in an early battle.

Part of Spartacus’s success can be chalked up to Roman incompetence, but only part. Spartacus, Crixus and Oenomaus were shrewd soldiers. Rather than attack the enemy head-on they went after his weak point. They came up with an ingenious plan that maximized their minimal resources and executed it with daring and efficiency. Rugged mountainous terrain did not concern them; Thracians would have felt at home in that kind of country.

Spartacus and perhaps others had the advantage of knowing the enemy. True, when he had fought for Rome, Spartacus was an auxiliary, and auxiliaries did not receive Roman training. They used their own style of fighting, and they tended to have native commanders. But they benefited from Rome’s impressive logistical and support system. Anyone with his eyes open would have seen just how well organized and disciplined the legions were in battle. Auxiliaries had ample opportunity to learn from the Romans. Nor are they likely to have underestimated the enemy.

Perhaps the most impressive things about Spartacus and his men were their cohesion and leadership. The rebels barely knew each other but they cooperated beautifully. Only the gladiators were in fighting trim, even if some of the runaway country folk were probably former soldiers. As slaves or farm workers the runaways were tough, and as oppressed people they had incentive to fight, but it takes more than that to win a battle. To take just one example, amateurs used their swords to slash rather than to make the more effective move, which was to thrust. New soldiers had to learn many such skills (and this happened to be a technique that gladiators could teach well). They also had to fight as a team. Leadership had moulded the rebels into a victorious force. The three commanders surely deserve credit; the Thracian woman and her prophecies might also have played a role.

Glaber is never heard from again, at least not in our sources. Spartacus and the gladiators, on the contrary, might now have been household names around Vesuvius. They attracted many new recruits, in particular shepherds and cowherds from the surrounding area. They were ‘fast-moving brawlers’[62] and the rebels armed them with weapons captured from Glaber’s camp. At a guess, the new recruits included a number of Celts, who had a reputation as good herdsmen. They probably also included a large number of women, since Roman experts advised supplying herdsmen in the bush with women to cook for them and meet their sexual needs. Spartacus used herdsmen to serve as scouts and light-armed troops and - who knows? - some of those soldiers might have been women.

We might imagine that the rebels’ base was now the Romans’ former camp. There they could have lived in tents, a step up from the open air of the mountain. Glaber’s praetorium was now Spartacus’s headquarters, perhaps shared with Crixus. It ought to have been a busy place.

Basic food and supplies dictated continued raids around Vesuvius. But to keep on winning against the Romans, the rebels would have to forge weapons; they would have to train and drill. They needed to learn how to trust and communicate with each other. Hard work; plunder and vengeance were easier and more fun. Spartacus and Crixus had to strike a balance between what their men wanted and what they needed.

Meanwhile, the news of Glaber’s defeat arrived in Rome. The Senate appointed another praetor to replace him: Publius Varinius. He recruited troops on the road as he marched south. Around the same time or shortly afterwards the Senate chose yet another praetor to advice and assist Varinius - Lucius Cossinius; unfortunately, he is only a name to us. Cossinius too, it seems, was told to raise an army on the march.

It was now autumn 73 BC. The fugitives first encountered Varinius indirectly, via his legate Lucius Furius, at the head of 2,000 men. A legate was a high-ranking officer, a member of the Senate, who was authorized to command in his superior’s absence. A certain Furius had served as praetor in a corruption case in 75 BC, and they may be the same man. If so, Furius was a better judge than general, because he was attacked by the rebels and they trounced him.

We don’t know where the engagement took place, but probably it was in Campania, like all the other fighting in this period between the Romans and the rebels. Like Glaber, Furius was most likely surprised or ambushed by Spartacus’s men, who had neither the training nor the equipment to face the Romans in regular battles.

The defeat of Furius was a bad omen for Varinius, but there was worse to come. Spartacus’s scouts were closely watching the movements of Varinius’s colleague Cossinius. It was now that the Thracian caught Cossinius bathing in a villa near Pompeii - the incident described earlier. Cossinius’s humiliation, defeat and death all followed fast. For the third time in a few months, a force of gladiators and fugitives had defeated an army led by a Roman senator.

But that was not all. Spartacus and his men managed to capture - or at least to raid - two more Roman camps: first, the camp of another of Varinius’s subordinates, Gaius Toranius, and then the camp of Varinius himself. Unfortunately, none of the details of these events survive. But the result is clear: a blow to the morale of even the most seasoned soldiers. Varinius’s men were overwhelmed.

Some of them were sick ‘because of the unhealthiness of the autumn’[63]. Some had run away after their recent defeats and had refused to return to the colours, despite a stern order to do so. As for the rest, as a Roman author reports, ‘the height of their disgrace is that they were shirking their duty’[64].

Varinius decided to send a report to the Senate. It was both a way of asking for reinforcements and a way of covering himself if later he was blamed for failure. He gave this sensitive mission to Toranius, who could provide an eyewitness account. Presumably Varinius trusted Toranius either as a loyal friend or as a shrewd subordinate who knew that it would be dangerous to point a finger at his chief. Toranius served as Varinius’s quaestor, a financial official with various civil and military responsibilities. The quaestorship was the lowest rung on the ‘ladder of honours’. There were twenty quaestors, each elected to an annual term, and all granted entrance to the Senate afterwards. They had to be at least 30 years old and they all came from wealthy families.

While Toranius was away, Varinius did not stand idle. Four thousand troops were willing to follow him to a position near the enemy, if not actually into battle. These troops probably represented the remnant of the various armies of Glaber, Furius and Cossinius, as well as Varinius’s own men. Varinius led his men and pitched camp near the enemy; he had the Romans fortify the camp with a wall, trench and extensive earthworks. Gone was Glaber’s overconfidence.

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,’[65] 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[66].

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,’[67] 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.’[68] 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.

Chapter 4 — The Pathfinders

In 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’[69]. (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.

Lucania was a land of woods, pastures and slaves, a guerrilla’s favourite landscape. Like Sicily, it was populated by slave shepherds[70] and slave field hands. They were a rebel recruiter’s dream. This was Spartacus Country.

All that lay before them, but first Spartacus, Crixus and their followers had to slip past the Romans. Surely the Romans had posted guards on the bridge where the Via Annia crosses the Silarus? Enter the Picentine guide. A Roman writer describes the situation concisely: ‘and having hastily found a suitable guide from among the Picentine prisoners, he [Spartacus] made his way hidden in the Eburian Hills to Nares Lucanae and from there at first light he reached Forum Annii.’[71]

This puts Spartacus’s tactics in a nutshell. He made a quick decision that gave his men the advantage of local knowledge. And the result was a nimble, gutsy and effective manoeuvre.

The Picentine was a man who knew the hills of the southern Picentini Mountains, north of the town of Eburum (Eboli). He might have been a herdsman or, more likely, a ranch owner, since he was a prisoner and not a recruit; a herdsman would probably have joined Spartacus voluntarily. It should not have been difficult to intimidate him into cooperating, given the dangers of captivity. Both Celts and Germans had a reputation for sacrificing prisoners[72] of war as a way of honouring the gods. Reports of gruesome practices[73] survive, such as cutting open a corpse to inspect the entrails, ripping foetuses out of their mothers’ wombs, and drinking blood from dead people’s skulls.

In any case, the Picentine took the rebels over the Eburine (modern Eboli) Hills perhaps as far as the valley of the Middle Silarus River, where they could have crossed via an ancient ford. Then they swung south towards the town of Nares Lucanae. The Romans had no idea where the rebels were. Spartacus had run rings around Varinius, and he owed it all to his Picentine prisoner.

Was that unwilling rebel rewarded with a drink at Nares Lucanae? There was plenty of water there; the name of the place may mean ‘Lucanian Springs’, and springs have been found at its site in the foothills of the Alburni Mountains. The finger-like peaks of those mountains rise across the valley south-east of the Picentini Mountains. There was good pasture land between both sets of mountains and the sea, so the insurgents may have picked up some supporters from the vicinity.

At Nares Lucanae the rebels’ route rejoined the main Roman road to Regium, the Via Annia. They travelled at night, no doubt to avoid detection. It was first light when Spartacus’s men reached the little town of Forum Annii. The distance between Nares Lucanae and Forum Annii is about 15 miles, which is a long way for even a light-armed force to cover in one night, especially if the group included women and children. But it was autumn, and the nights were getting longer; the chilly air might have hurried the fastest of them on to the prize ahead. Above all, they were determined to seize the offensive and achieve surprise. They did.

Spartacus and his men arrived at Forum Annii ‘unbeknownst to the farmers’[74]. Forum Annii was a farming community at the northern end of the Campus Atinas (modern Vallo di Diano). The Campus is a long, narrow, upland plain, green and fertile, watered by the Tanager (modern Tanagro) River running through it. It is closed in by hills, creating a constant play of light and shadow; in the west, the mountains roll in waves, sometimes ripples, sometimes breakers. An ancient area of settlement, the valley was very rich, with farms and villas spread over the lowlands and hills flowing with pastures. In a hill town north of the valley even today[75], the census lists 1,300 humans and 6,000 sheep; and some of the latter are brought down from the hills and paraded around a chapel by their shepherds in an annual festival each June.

The population was probably made up mainly of Roman settlers and their slaves. There were native Lucanians too, but they had been forced to make room for many Romans over the centuries, as punishment for choosing the losing side - something the hard-luck Lucanians had a knack for, from Hannibal to Marius to the Italian Confederacy of the Social War. The Roman settlers included both masters of large estates, primarily ranches, and small farmers. Some Late Republican tombstones[76] depict the managers who ran the estates for their masters: men with a signet ring on a finger of their left hand and a pen and writing tablets clenched in their fist.

One autumn morning in 73 BC the fresh air of the valley was full of screams. Spartacus and his men had arrived. They immediately went on a rampage against his orders, raping young girls and married women. Anyone who tried to resist was killed, sometimes in the act of running away. Some of the rebels threw flaming torches onto the roofs of houses. Others followed local slaves to drag their masters or their treasures from their hiding places. ‘Nothing was too holy or too heinous for the anger of the barbarians or their servile natures,’[77] says one Roman writer. And no help was forthcoming from Varinius’s army; it was nowhere to be seen.

Spartacus opposed the atrocities, either out of chivalry or a calculation that if farmers were well treated, some might favour the insurgents, and tried repeatedly to restrain his men, but it was a losing battle. Crixus’s stance is unrecorded. Later events show that he wanted to loot Italy, but he also wanted to fight Varinius, and indiscipline would weaken the army.

And then there were the local slaves, of various national origins. Some of them had not waited to bring the rebels to their masters’ hideouts but, instead, they had pulled out their quivering overlords themselves. It was a kind of offering to the insurgents and perhaps the local slaves were just trying to curry their favour. Or perhaps they were remembering the whips, chains, canes, stones, broken bones, gouged-out eyes, kicks, tongue-lashings, executions or other punishments that Roman slaves are known to have suffered. Or maybe they were thinking of minor humiliations, like having their forehead tattooed with the master’s symbol or having to pay the master for the privilege of having sex with another slave. Or maybe they recalled some friend or relative among the slaves who had been sold off because they were sick or aged.

The rebels stayed at Forum Annii for that day and the following night. For the local masters, it was twenty-four hours of savagery and slaughter. For the slaves, it was liberation day. They surely poured in from the surrounding area, because Forum Annii was not a big place but, by daybreak, Spartacus and Crixus had doubled the number of fugitive slaves in their group. Some of the new recruits would have been farmers but, if Spartacus had judged his prospects correctly, most of them would have been herdsmen. By autumn, they would have come down with their herds from the mountains to graze lower pastures, so they could have learned the news from Forum Annii.

At first light, the rebels broke camp again and made for a ‘very wide field’[78], which sounds like somewhere in the middle of the Campus Atinas. There they could see the farmers coming out of their houses, off to the autumn harvest. Those farmers never reached their fields. Along the way they ran into a column of refugees from Forum Annii. The farmers hurried off to safety, perhaps into the hills. The autumn harvest was left for Spartacus and his hungry army.

They had outmanoeuvred the Roman army, terrorized the master class, filled their ranks with new recruits and their bellies with fresh produce, but the insurgents were still far from victory. On the contrary, they had opened the door to defeat. Like all military activities, foraging and pillaging require discipline. Excessive looting breeds just the opposite, a breakdown in discipline. The Romans knew that soldiers who disobey commands while foraging would disobey commands while fighting. Besides, looters were subject to sudden enemy counter-attack. Ever cautious, the Romans insisted on discipline even for the simple acts of getting food and water.

Spartacus knew what a terrible precedent his men had now set. He understood, as well, that wars are not won by raids. In his vain attempt to stop the massacre, Spartacus had told the men to be quick. Varinius, after all, would be coming.

After their success in the Campus Atinas, the insurgents had to keep moving, to evade the Romans, and to find new sources of food. The new recruits had to be outfitted with weapons - probably makeshift weapons. They had to take whatever rushed advice about fighting that they could get while the army was on the move.

They blazed the trail well, it seems, because by the time they reached the Ionian Sea, the insurgents had finished off Varinius. We don’t know where or when. By the accident of survival, the sources cast a spotlight on Spartacus’s movements from the Picentini Mountains to the Campus Atinas. Unfortunately, they grow dim again for the six or so months following. The insurgents stormed through Lucania; that much is clear, as is the outcome of the duel between Spartacus and Varinius. Otherwise, the narrative is mainly a matter of educated guesswork.

The land drew the rebels ever southwards. Not just the Campus Atinas but most of Lucania was good to plunder. It was rich in pastures, grain fields, vineyards and woods, with large numbers of sheep, goats and game animals. Lucanian horses were supposed to be small and ugly but strong - not perfect cavalry mounts, but they would do.

But where would the insurgents go and how would they get there? A look at the map can be misleading. It appears that Spartacus and Crixus had no choice in mountainous Lucania other than following the Via Annia, which ran southwards through the Campus Atinas and down to Bruttium (modern Calabria). But in fact they had other options. A series of roads along Lucania’s mountain ridges pre-dated the Romans: most of them have been called ‘winding, narrow, and cramped’[79] but the insurgents had seen worse.

After sacking the Campus Atinas, Spartacus’s men could have, for example, followed the pass between the Magdalene Mountains (Monti della Maddelena) and the Pope’s Mountain (Monte del Papa), as they are known today, to the Roman colony of Grumentum. (Today, Italy’s Highway 103 follows that route.) There in the high valley of the Aciris (modern Agri) River, they would have found a shepherd’s paradise - and a recruiter’s delight. Heading eastwards, they then could have followed one of several routes to the Ionian coast and the cities of Metapontum (Metaponto) and Heraclea. From there, a coastal road led south to Bruttium and the city of Thurii.

For what it is worth, modern folklore has Spartacus travelling widely in Lucania. For example, the towns of Oliveto Citra, Roccadaspide and Genzano di Lucania[80] all claim to have been the site of one of Spartacus’s battles. Castelcivita‘ has a cave of Spartacus and a bridge of Spartacus. Caggiano, Colliano and Polla all boast that Spartacus passed through on his travels. But none of this is surprising, since southern Italy historically has been the land of brigands and Spartacus is the granddaddy of all outlaws. Nor do these claims prove that the insurgents passed through in autumn 73 BC rather than, say, a year later - if at all.

Also, for what it is worth, the ancient evidence for the months following the rebels’ stay in the Campus Atinas refers twice to local guides. ‘They were very knowledgeable about the area,’[81] says one source about some of the insurgents. One local stood out for his pathfinding scouting skills. His name was Publipor.

All that survives about Publipor is one line in a lost history book. Yet of all the bit parts in Spartacus’s saga, his might be the most intriguing. Among the insurgents’ various pathfinders, Publipor was probably the best. ‘Of all the men in the region of Lucania, he was the only one with knowledge of the place.’[82]

Publipor means ‘Publius’s Boy’. He was a slave, the property of one Publius. Publipor was a common slave name, shared, for instance, by the great Latin playwright Terence, a freedman who had been called Publipor as a slave. Publipor was probably not a boy, since the Romans often applied the word ‘boy’ to adult slaves. He was most likely an adult and, given his expertise in Lucania’s terrain, Publipor may well have been a shepherd.

Tens of thousands of slaves fought with Spartacus, but aside from the gladiators, Publipor is the only one whose name survives. We don’t know why his local knowledge was important, but it surely was, since our source singles him out. Could it be that he did the insurgents the great service of showing them a spot where they could lie in wait for Varinius? Maybe Publipor helped Spartacus stage one of greatest coups yet.

The details of the fighting aren’t known. But it is a good guess that the insurgents avoided pitched battle, preferring instead ambushes, traps and hit-and-run attacks. Pitched battle was too dangerous because even if they outnumbered the Romans, the rebels could not match their equipment. They still had to rely on do-it-yourself arms and armour, as one source makes clear: ‘they were used to weaving rustic baskets out of branches. Because of a lack of shields then, they each used this same art to arm himself with small round shields like those used by cavalrymen.’[83] They stretched hides[84] over the branches to cover the shields.

The insurgents captured standards from Roman centurions. Better yet, they took control of Varinius’s lictors with their bundles of rods and axes - their fasces - that symbolized the praetor’s power. And they also grabbed Varinius’s horse; according to one source, they snatched it from under him, making his capture a very close call. Varinius escaped. But the real and immediate winner was the man to whom the standards and fasces were brought in triumph: Spartacus. It was now, it seems, that he really became ‘great and frightening’[85], as Plutarch describes him.

The standards, the fasces and the horse were better recruiting tools than a praetor’s head on a pike (although the Celts, who were headhunters, might have disagreed). The standards were totems whose loss was immeasurable. The fasces was a sacred symbol, like a royal sceptre or a bishop’s crook. The horse was sacred to Celts, Germans and Thracians. In the glow of these icons Spartacus was more than an adventurer: he became almost a king.

‘After this,’ says one source[86], ‘even more men, many more, came running to Spartacus.’ ‘In a short time they collected huge numbers of troops,’[87] says another. The recruits came pouring in, usually barefoot, in coarse woollen cloaks, sometimes carrying their chains.

Numbers are difficult. The ancient sources vary greatly, ranging from estimates of 40,000 to 120,000 insurgents. To make matters worse, good ancient ‘statistics’ tend to be approximations, bad ancient ‘statistics’ tend to be wild exaggerations. For example, the number 120,000 - the high estimate for Spartacus’s troops - appears often enough in ancient sources about this or that war to demonstrate that it was just a rhetorical maximum, the equivalent of ‘a huge number’. To complicate things further, it is unclear whether ancient statistics about the insurgents include women and children.

The safest course is to follow the lowest figure, which gives Spartacus and Crixus about 40,000 men in spring 72 BC and even more by autumn. By ancient standards this was no small sum. It is more men than Hannibal had when he crossed the Alps, for example, and about the size of Caesar’s army when he conquered Gaul. For that matter, the number of 40,000 men roughly equals the size of the largest army that the Romans would ever muster against Spartacus.

Around the time they defeated Varinius - we can’t be sure of the sequence of events - the rebels found themselves at Lucania’s Land’s End. The men who had washed their hands in blood in Capua now dipped their feet in the Ionian Sea. To be precise, they dipped them in a large inlet of the sea known as the Gulf of Tarentum (modern Taranto). The turquoise waters of the gulf, about 90 miles long and wide, wash the ‘arch’ of the Italian ‘boot’. The gulf’s coastline, stretching roughly from Tarentum to Croton, includes some of the most fertile land in Italy. This was once Magna Graecia, ‘Greater Greece’, a region of Greek colonies whose prosperity eventually outstripped that of the mother country. In its prime, Magna Graecia produced great generals, law-givers, doctors, artists and athletes. Pythagoras, one of ancient Greece’s leading philosophers, built his school here. But the conquering Romans ended all that. The gulf coast was still lush and abundant, but power and influence had passed it by.

Because the land was a backwater, it was useful for Spartacus and Crixus. Remote from Rome, the Ionian coast made a perfect base for the insurgents. It had a mild climate and was well stocked with food. Its large slave population made it promising recruiting country. Its farms and towns had furnaces that could be used for melting down slave chains and re-forging them as swords and spearheads. Its ports could attract merchants and pirates. Nearby loomed rugged hills and dense forests to retreat to in case the Romans arrived. It was, in short, a place to build an army.

But it was not about to open its doors to the rebels; they would have to break them down. And so they attacked, inflicting ‘terrible slaughter’[88], as one source says. They might have been as brutal here as they had been in the Campus Atinas. One of the places the insurgents went after was the city of Metapontum. Indeed, archaeology may show traces of their onslaught. A stoa (portico) in town, used as a warehouse, was destroyed during this period. Some see the hand of the rebels in this, and it certainly isn’t hard to imagine them crossing the moat and breaking through the wooden palisade that was Roman Metapontum’s main defence. Perhaps the citizens had tried to stop them by using the catapult balls that were being manufactured around this time in a nearby villa. But that sounds rather grand for Roman Metapontum, a place whose best days were behind it. Metapontum in 73 BC was more like a small town than the great city it had once been.

In its heyday (c. 600-300 BC) Metapontum had been a success story, one of Greece’s greatest colonies. Its fertile fields made Metapontum a bread-basket, with ears of wheat proudly displayed on its gold coins. But then came Rome and the familiar pattern of oppression, revolt, occupation and punishment. The once grand urban space had shrunk to a small sector.

In Metapontum’s countryside[89], meanwhile, the many small family farms of the Greek period disappeared. The land had been handed over largely to a few grandees, Romans or their local ‘friends’. Medium- or large-sized villas now dotted the river valleys and the coastal road or dominated the heights. Diversified agriculture was in decline, and pasturage was prevalent, especially of sheep, cattle and horses. In other words, this was in large part ranch country and, therefore, slave country: fertile ground for Spartacus’s recruiters.

One of Roman Metapontum’s few urban renewal projects was the temple of Apollo, which was revived and expanded. In the form he was worshipped here, Apollo was, for practical purposes, equivalent to Dionysus, and the religion was very popular in the city and its countryside. The message of the Thracian woman, therefore, might have fallen on willing ears at Metapontum.

About 12 miles south of Metapontum lay Heraclea, in the rich soil between the valleys of the Siris (modern Sinni) and Aciris Rivers. It was a centre of agriculture and crafts and a well-known market town. Unlike Metapontum, Heraclea had played its cards well with Rome. Over the centuries it maintained its autonomy - and on such favourable terms that it even hesitated to accept Roman citizenship when it was offered after the Social War. We hear nothing about Spartacus going to Heraclea, which may reflect the reception he expected to get there. But the people of Heraclea couldn’t be sure that Spartacus wasn’t coming and they therefore took precautions.

Or so we might conclude from a small, grey vase that had been buried under a private house in Heraclea. The vase was filled with a gold necklace and over 500 coins, all of them Roman silver. The necklace is decorated with garnets and glass beads, with delicate gold terminals in the shape of antelope heads. The coins date from c. 200 to 70 BC; most of them come from a twenty-year period, 100-80 BC. Nearly half of the coins are small change, which is odd, considering the value of the necklace: one scholar takes this as a sign of haste[90], as if whoever filled and buried the vase had no time to separate good money from bad. Were these objects interred in a hurry at a sign of Spartacus on the horizon? Or perhaps it was their own slaves whom the Heracleots feared. The city was a centre of the Dionysus cult.

South of Heraclea the coastal plain narrows sharply between the sea and the foothills of the Pollino Mountains (modern name). This range marked the southern boundary of Lucania. Beyond lies the southernmost region of Italy: Bruttium. Like Lucania, Bruttium is mountainous, and its people were similarly tough. Bruttium was destined to play a big part in Spartacus’s revolt. That role began here, just beyond the last foothill of the Pollino massif along the coast. A vast plain opens up here, wider, greener and lusher than even the country of Metapontum or Heraclea.

This is the Plain of Sybaris, almost a world unto itself. About 200 miles square, the plain is cut off on the north and west by the peaks of the Pollino, towering and snowcapped for most of the year; on the south by the steep twisting hills of the Sila Greca; and to the east by the sea. The grand sweep of its fertile soil lies under the hot sun, watered by the Crathis (modern Crati) and Sybaris (modern Coscile) Rivers. The climate was mild enough to make the place famous for an oak tree that didn’t lose its leaves in winter.

The golden plain was the California of antiquity, and its San Francisco was a Greek colony planted there c. 700 BC: Sybaris. The city’s luxury was so legendary that even today sybarite is still a byword for hedonist. Gastronomy was the preferred vice, and why not, when the land was so bountiful that the Sybarites supposedly ran wine rather than water through their clay pipes! In addition to its wine, Sybaris was famous for its olive oil and its wool. Grain was cultivated on the plain, while fig and hazelnut trees were grown on the hillsides. Wood and pitch were brought down from the thick forests of the Sila Mountains. The sea teemed with fish, including the much prized eel. Sybaris’s bustling seaport attracted traders from a wide variety of Mediterranean ports.

Sybaris had been totally destroyed in a war with its neighbours in 510 BC, but the plain was too fertile to leave fallow. In 444 BC a new Greek city, Thurii, was founded in its place. In 194 BC it was Rome’s turn. The Romans founded a colony at Thurii and renamed it Copia, ‘Abundance’. But most people continued to call it Thurii. Supposedly there was so much good land here that the Romans had trouble finding takers for all the lots. But nature abhors a vacuum. By 73 BC the valleys of the Crathis and Sybaris Rivers contained a number of Roman villas, some large, but most mid-sized. Roman senators and knights, and a veteran of Sulla are among those known to have owned property here. While herding took place, agriculture remained a major activity in this fertile country.

Another of Thurii’s resources was a cadre of discontented slaves. Around 70 BC a property-holder in these parts armed his slaves and sent them to loot and murder on his neighbour’s farm in an attempt to take over the property himself. About ten years later slave insurgents were active in the area. In 48 BC the Roman thug Milo was sent to Thurii to raise a revolt among the shepherds in the vicinity.

But the people of Bruttium were famous for waging guerrilla warfare: it was ‘their natural disposition’[91], says one Roman writer. In addition, Thurii had been a centre of Orphic religion for centuries, a cult with Dionysiac overtones, which offered a natural opening to the Thracian woman and her prophecies. It was, in short, promising recruiting ground for the insurgency. No wonder Spartacus and Crixus looked with wide eyes at Thurii in late 73 BC.

Once they crossed into Bruttium, the insurgents fanned out into the hills. No doubt they went after Roman farms. Then, when they had found food and recruits, they turned on the city of Thurii itself. Until now, Spartacus and Crixus had damaged the territory of various cities but they had not conquered and occupied any urban spaces. Their supporters consisted of ‘slaves, deserters and the rabble’[92], as one ancient writer puts it. ‘Rural people, mainly slaves but also some free’, would be a more impartial description.

At Thurii they finally conquered a city. If not a big city, Thurii was walled. The insurgents were making wicker shields, not siege engines, and they could hardly have stormed the town. It is unclear whether they had the patience and discipline to surround the city for months until they starved it out. The most likely explanation of their success is an inside job. Someone within the city, maybe a group of slaves, opened the gates and let the men of Spartacus and Crixus in. The result was probably a slaughter.

Perhaps it was around this time that the insurgents raided the city of Consentia (modern Cosenza), the capital of the Bruttii, an inland town located on the Via Annia, about 50 miles south of Thurii. Cosentia sat in a rich territory of farms and pastures with the prospect of additional supplies and supporters.

From Metapontum to Thurii and perhaps beyond, the insurgents had brought fire, death and freedom. Yet they were also building an army. At Thurii, they could finally settle down to train. Among their urgent needs were weapons and discipline. Spartacus addressed both necessities by laying down the law: whatever merchants might offer, his people could not buy gold and silver; only iron and bronze for weapons were allowed. Crixus presumably backed up Spartacus. Another source of arms-grade metal was the runaway slaves’ own chains, which were melted down and re-forged into weapons. It is hard to say which is more striking, Spartacus’s strictness or the traders’ willingness to take a chance on dealing with the fierce insurgents. Were these ‘mer chants’ really pirates, as some suggest, or were they simply gamblers who saw big profits in risky business?

Arms don’t make an army. The newcomers needed training. By winter 73/72 BC, the summer’s raw recruits had become old hands, and they no doubt passed on practical experience. Still, there was no substitute for a professional. Ex-gladiators and veterans, whether of Roman or other armies, played the most important role as drill instructors, we might guess.

Spartacus must have known that building an army takes a first-rate management team. We might imagine him carefully choosing his battalion and company commanders. Any prior military experience was surely invaluable. Veterans of Marius or former soldiers captured in Rome’s border wars probably shot to the front of the pack. But organizational skill is a necessity in a commander, and slave foremen had that skill in spades. Nor can the moral factor in leadership be discounted. As an astute judge of character, Spartacus might have chosen some men without prior military experience to lead units of his army.

And although Spartacus hated Rome, he didn’t hesitate to borrow from it. He modelled his army on the legions, at least in some respects. ‘They attained a certain level of skill and discipline that they had learned from us,’[93] said Caesar of the insurgents. Like the renegade Vettius, a Roman who led the slave rebellion in Capua in 104 BC, Spartacus might have organized his soldiers in centuries, eighty-men units that were the companies of the legions.

The insurgents designated their units by Roman insignia. The victorious rebels had captured Roman battle flags, silver eagles and fasces. The eagle was the symbol of a legion, while the flags stood for cohorts (480 men each) and centuries. The fasces were the insignia of a Roman praetor, consul, general or governor.

We might imagine the insurgents proudly carrying Roman flags and eagles into battle to taunt the enemy. As for the fasces, Spartacus accepted them as symbols of his own office, presumably to be carried by his bodyguard. It was a sign of the world turned upside down, but it was also a symbol of discipline. The fasces represented the power to punish. An effective commander must be not merely inspirational but stern. No soldiers enjoy punishment, but most accept it as the price of victory. Punishment builds discipline; discipline wins wars.

Perhaps St Augustine had Thurii in mind when he wrote, centuries later, ‘from a small and contemptible start in petty crime, they [the insurgents] attained a kingdom.’[94] The language is imprecise, because although he held sway in a corner of Italy, Spartacus was not a king. The leaders of the earlier Sicilian slave revolts took royal titles but Spartacus did not. He had the favour of Dionysus, as the Thracian lady announced; he probably inspired religious awe in some of his followers. But he had no throne.

A paradox lay at the heart of Spartacus’s enterprise. His men had just thrown away their chains; they did not want new ones. They were herdsmen used to independence, field hands drunk on newly found freedom, and gladiators trained to kill each other. They barely shared a common language, Latin, and it belonged to their enemy. With women and no doubt children present among them, they resembled a caravan as much as an army. Most men probably felt closer ties to their family than to their fellow soldiers. No one knew if they would bow to Spartacus’s commands. Freedom built his army and freedom could destroy it.

All he could do was try to make things work. And so, tens of thousands of marching feet now echoed on the Plain of Sybaris, as we might imagine. They meant something shameful for the Romans, honourable for the men: slave legions. As one Roman writer[95] put it, even a slave is a human being, and if a slave takes up arms, he may become as free as a Roman citizen. But, as he adds, for a Roman to have to fight such a man is to add insult to injury.

As improbable as the slave legions were, even more improbable was the group of mounted knights riding beside them. In Germany as well, fighting on horseback brought a warrior high status. During their travels the rebels had captured wild horses that roamed the southern Italian countryside. To their good fortune, they were in horse country. Even today, wild horses are seen in the mountains of south-eastern Campania, in Lucania’s high valley of the Agri (ancient Aciris) River and in the Pollino Mountains on the border between Lucania and Bruttium. Celts, Germans and Thracians were good enough tamers to train them. And so was born the insurgents’ cavalry.

They would need it. The Romans had not forgotten them. Neither the beatings they had suffered at the rebels’ hands nor the ruined farms and lost investments in slaves had escaped their attention. So the Romans chose new commanders for the new year, with more soldiers at their disposal to break up the rebellion.

The mountains ringing Sybaris are covered with snow in the winter. When it melted, in spring 72 BC, torrents of water would run down into the riverbeds of the plain. The yellow flowers of the broom plant would set the hillsides on fire. Rome’s legions would march south on the peninsula’s paved roads; the insurgents would slip through the hills in an attempt to fight on terms of their own choosing. And all Italy would hold its breath.

Chapter 5 — The Stoic

It was a war without glory. In 72 BC Rome needed men to fight against Spartacus. About 150,000 Roman citizens, all from Italy, were already in arms abroad, well above the average annual figure of 90,000 Romans in arms between 79 and 50 BC. But the recruiters would have to find many more soldiers. Cato volunteered.

Marcus Porcius Cato - Cato the Younger - had the bloodlines to make him Rome’s ‘Mr Conservative’. His great-grandfather, Marcus Porcius Cato ‘the Censor’ (234-149 BC), championed Roman simplicity over Greek culture and coldly insisted: delenda est Karthago, ‘Carthage must be destroyed’. His uncle was Marcus Livius Drusus, known as ‘the patron of the Senate’ for his proposed constitutional changes, which were an attempt to coopt challengers to the old guard by bringing them into the elite. Drusus’s bold plan only got him assassinated but it was a lesson in courage for young Cato, already an orphan, who was raised in Drusus’s household.

In 72 BC Cato was 23 years old. He was a patriot, but not too idealistic to forget his family. Cato idealized his older half-brother, Quintus Servilius Caepio, son of his mother’s first marriage. Caepio was chosen as a junior officer against Spartacus, serving under one of the consuls for 72 BC, Lucius Gellius, so Cato followed Caepio into the army. Cato’s family owned land in Lucania, which made them well aware of the danger posed by Spartacus, and maybe even made Cato one of Spartacus’s victims.

The young soldier displayed the toughness for which Cato would become famous. He was, for example, a pedestrian for all seasons. Regardless of the weather, he never rode: there were no litters for the young follower of the Stoic philosophy. Cato always travelled on foot; indeed, he sometimes walked the streets of the city of Rome barefoot. He would have needed all his energy for Spartacus in 72 BC. The ex-gladiator led the Romans on a chase for nearly all of Italy’s 700-mile length. The Romans wanted to hit the rebels hard. Spartacus dared them to reach a moving target.

By late 73 BC the Roman Senate, as one source claims, was no longer merely ashamed but afraid[96]. No more praetors: it was time to dispatch the two consuls. They would have four new legions, about 20,000 men, raised in the final months of 73 BC. The consuls-elect sent out ‘searchers’ (conquisitores), that is, recruiting officers, to Italy’s various towns. They preferred volunteers but did not hesitate to pull out the census lists and force men to do their duty.

Much as the Romans hated to admit it, they no longer faced a police action but a war[97]. But to fight Spartacus, they had to find him. He would not make it easy. As the Romans came south, Spartacus would go north. He planned to march up Italy’s mountainous spine, keeping his mobile forces out of the heavily armed Romans’ reach. He would stop from time to time to forage, to loot easy targets, and to pick up new recruits. But mainly he would keep moving, heading ever northwards. A few of the rebels rode on horseback or in carts, but the vast majority walked. No doubt they were often hungry, tired and cold; surely most of them were barefoot and dirty; certainly they lost men to desertion, illness and death. They kept going.

Their audacious goal was the Alps. Spartacus sought safety for his men across the mountains where they could head for their Celtic or Thracian homelands. In northern Europe, out of Rome’s reach, they had a fighting chance. Italy would be their graveyard.

Meanwhile, if the Romans did find him on the march, Spartacus would fight them, but not by the books. Not for him to line up the men in methodical ranks and march them into a killing zone of Rome’s choosing. He would not send men armed with branch and rawhide shields and wooden spearheads against a wall of iron. Spartacus knew that irregulars could not beat the legion at its own game, not even a legion as soft as one of the new units of 72 BC.

Still, the sources state that Spartacus fought at least one if not several pitched battles[98] against the Romans that year. It is plausible that he dared to do so under the right circumstances. Hill country and mountains provided favourable terrain for the insurgents. Ambush, trickery, surprise, speed and psychological warfare all offered promising lines of attack. Superiority in cavalry gave Spartacus a way to harass the enemy’s flanks and to neutralize Roman light-armed troops.

The events of the Spartacus War of 72 BC exploded into Rome’s consciousness. They shocked the city and marked the turning point in the rebels’ fortunes. But with the exception of an episode or two at the year’s end, most of the year’s activities survive in only the sketchiest form. Hence, the narrative must be even more speculative here than elsewhere.

At the start of the campaign season in spring 72 BC, the Romans learned that the rebels had split into two groups: one led by Spartacus, the other by Crixus. Both men were on the move. Crixus’s group remained in southern Italy but not in Thurii. It headed to Apulia (today’s Puglia), a wealthy agricultural region of gently rolling hills and one stark mountain. Spartacus’s forces, meanwhile, turned northwards.

Like the Romans, we cannot be sure just what the two groups were up to. Was the split tactical or strategic, friendly or hostile? One ancient source says that Crixus left because of his ‘arrogance and presumption’[99]. Perhaps, but irregular armies break up as easily as volcanic soil. Crixus and Spartacus had already disagreed the year before over whether to stay in Italy and loot. Meanwhile, ethnic differences, rival ambitions and the natural jealousies of former gladiators made common cause difficult. A friendly divorce made sense.

Sound tactics argued similarly. The rebels needed food. They had no commissariat to feed 40,000 soldiers plus an unknown number of women and children. The prospects were better for two smaller groups, foraging in separate locations, than for one large group descending on a single spot.

Spartacus had the big battalions. The sources say that he began the campaign season with 30,000 men[100], while Crixus had only 10,000. This seems right, however much ethnic ties bound his fellow Celts and their German allies to Crixus. Spartacus’s supporters followed him not because he was Thracian but because he was Spartacus. By now the rebels had taken his measure. They recognized a winning general and a favourite of the gods as well as a giant gladiator. His vivid gestures moved them. His austerity hardened them; his generosity helped them. His care for innocent civilians might have left them cold, but it underscored the word that sums up Spartacus: righteous.

Spartacus’s authority was neither formal nor forced; it was moral. As Napoleon said, ‘in war the moral is to the material as three to one.’ No wonder three-quarters of the army followed Spartacus.

But where did he tell them that they were going? They couldn’t stay in the Plain of Sybaris. When the Romans came they would force a battle, and the insurgents would want to fight in the hills, where the terrain was better suited for ambush, trickery and surprise. Sybaris is ringed by hills but, if they camped there, the rebels would have run out of food in short order. To the south lay the sea but they had no ships, so they had to go north. Italy had plenty of fertile land, plenty of loot and plenty of slaves to recruit. Let the Romans chase them.

Every chase comes to an end, however, and Spartacus knew it. His plan was probably to lead his people to safety out of Italy, over the Alps, to Gaul or Thrace or - after dividing the army - both. The rebels could hardly have been sanguine about so daunting a task, and a prudent commander might have kept the plan to himself. We might speculate that Spartacus did not level with the army as they marched north. Perhaps he floated the notion that they were simply spreading the revolt and searching for loot in another part of Italy. Later, when they were caught between the Romans and the Alps, they would surely find it easier to accept the unacceptable. So Spartacus might have reckoned.

After their forces split, Spartacus and Crixus had every reason to keep the door open. Each man should have hoped for the other’s success, if only to keep the Romans busy. Spartacus was too shrewd to burn his bridges. As an experienced soldier, he would have known the risks of his long journey. He had to retain the option of returning to the south and re-establishing contact with Crixus. Meanwhile, Crixus had no interest in hurrying Spartacus out of Italy and freeing the Romans to concentrate on him. Crixus might have encouraged Spartacus to take his time gathering supporters among the downtrodden of central and northern Italy. Both sides likely kept in touch via messengers.

Rome surely knew little of this in spring 72 BC. The consuls were Lucius Gellius and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus. They held the highest regular office in Rome, each already having held the second-highest office, the praetorship. Ambitious Romans aimed for the consulship soon after their term as praetor. Lentulus had been praetor in 75 BC, so as consul in 72 BC he knew that his career was on track. But Gellius had waited two long decades since serving as praetor in 94 BC. In 93 BC he held office as a Roman official in the East and got egg on his face when he waded into a dispute among Athenian philosophers. Now, in 72 BC, his time had finally come. Was he ready for it? Neither he nor Lentulus was known for previous military commands. And Gellius was not young: he was at least 62 years old. No wonder that Gellius received a high-level assistant, another praetor of 73 BC, Quintus Arrius. He had been slated to take over the governorship of Sicily in 72 BC but the Spartacus War got in the way, and Arrius was reassigned to Gellius’s staff, with the rank of propraetor.

Arrius was a self-made man whose life’s ambition was to be elected consul, an honour that had previously eluded his family. As praetor, he was well on his way. Chances are that Arrius would rather have been governor of Sicily than fight Spartacus. Governors could squeeze the locals and raise the equivalent of today’s campaign contributions. Law and politics, not war, were Arrius’s forte. Still, Arrius was ‘a vigorous man’[101], said Cicero, who once compared Arrius to a boxer[102]. Given the assignment to fight the rebels, Arrius would surely work hard for the victory needed to advance his career.

Even so, the Roman government ought to have been able to do better. Spartacus was too big a threat to give the job to anyone less than an expert general. But Rome faced the crisis with mediocri ties. It had happened surprisingly often in the past, in spite of serious threats such as Hannibal.

Either in Rome or in the field the Romans got the news that the insurgents had divided. Lentulus’s assignment was to deal directly with Spartacus, while Gellius would attack Crixus first and then join the campaign against Spartacus. Lentulus had the much tougher job so we might imagine that he planned to nip at Spartacus’s heels, while avoiding battle until Gellius arrived. As it turned out, Gellius came with a dose of good news: the first Roman victory of the war.

With Arrius’s assistance, Gellius crushed Crixus’s army. The struggle took place in Apulia near Mount Garganus (modern Gargano). Sometimes called the spur of Italy, Mount Garganus could be dubbed the sore thumb. It juts into the Adriatic about 90 miles north of Barium (modern Bari). It is not a peak but a rugged and thickly forested peninsula, attached oddly to Apulia’s undulating countryside. The rocky heights of the Garganus peninsula reach 3,500 feet, its limestone terrain pockmarked by caves, and in Roman times the area was famous for its oak forests. In short, the Garganus was natural guerrilla country.

Mount Garganus would have made a good base for rallying the slaves of Apulia to revolt. The region’s slave shepherds had risen up against Rome before, so the rebel cry might have fallen on ready ears. If things ended up badly, an escape route by sea beckoned. At the end of the Garganus promontory are several harbours, should the rebels have sought help from pirates, as they would shortly afterwards. But Crixus failed to use these natural features to his advantage.

The Romans outgeneralled Crixus: they took him by surprise. The rolling hill country beside the Garganus promontory was well stocked with farms, no doubt tempting Crixus to sally out on a plundering raid. Perhaps this is where the Romans caught him. Or perhaps they trapped him in an upland meadow on the promontory itself.

It was typical for a consul’s army to consist of two legions. The ‘paper’ strength of a legion in the first century BC was 6,200 men; the real strength was about 5,000 men. That is, when the legion was newly formed; in time, after losing men in combat or to illness or desertion, a legion’s strength was probably around 4,000 men. When a consul took office and raised an army of two legions, therefore, it probably comprised some 10,000 men. A legion was only as strong as the sub-units into which it was divided. The basic tactical unit of the legion was the cohort. Each legion consisted of ten cohorts, nominally of 480 men each; each cohort comprised six centuries, nominally of 80 men each. Light-armed troops and cavalrymen added to a legion’s numbers.

The commander of each legion was called a legate. Below him stood six junior officers called military tribunes. Cato’s brother Caepio was a military tribune in one of Gellius’s two legions; Cato no doubt served on his staff. The lowest rank of officer was a centurion, commander of a century. The centurions were often the unsung heroes of the legion, because small-group leadership can make or break an army.

These armies consisted almost entirely of infantrymen, with only small groups of cavalry, light-armed or specialist troops. They were inexperienced and far from the best Rome had, but they were much better armed than the insurgents, and they could be far more confident about food and housing.

We know next to nothing about the battle. In the absence of evidence of creativity on the part of Gellius or Arrius, we might expect that they lined up their army by the book. Each legion was deployed in a three-line formation, with four cohorts (a paper strength of 1,920 men) in the front line and three cohorts (a paper strength of 1,440 men) in each of the two rear lines. The insurgents probably had to organize themselves more hastily. Given their reputation as horsemen, the Celts should have possessed a good cavalry, but might have lacked time to deploy it properly, and the Romans might have outnumbered it.

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[103]. 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’[104] 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’[105]: 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[106]. 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[107]. 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.

However 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[108]. Another says that the Romans abandoned the field in great confusion[109]. Another says that Spartacus ‘thoroughly destroyed’[110] 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’[111]. 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[112].

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[113]. 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,’[114] 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’[115]. Spartacus was ‘elated by his victories’[116], 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[117], ‘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.

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’[118]. 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[119] 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[120]. In addition to the soldiers there was an unknowable number of civilians: women, children and perhaps even old men.

The showdown between Spartacus and the joint consular army took place in Picenum, in north-central Italy. Once again, details are lacking. But the sources state that this was a pitched battle. Evidently his string of successes gave Spartacus the confidence to fight the Romans on their own terms. A vignette survives from either this or the earlier battle fought by the consul Lentulus; which one is uncertain. The report is as follows: ‘And at the same time Lentulus [left] an elevated position which he had defended with a double battle-line and at the cost of many of his men, when from out of the soldiers’ kit bags, officers’[121] cloaks began to catch the eye and selected cohorts began to be discernible.’

That seems to mean that Lentulus took up a defensive position on a hill, where he divided his troops into multiple lines. Caesar would do something similar in Gaul. Although they had to attack uphill, the enemy inflicted heavy casualties on Lentulus’s men. Apparently, Lentulus called for help, but he didn’t ride off until it became clear that the reinforcements were nearby. Or so this fragmentary sentence might be reconstructed.

The brief sentence speaks volumes about the conditions of ancient battle. Isolated on a hill, Lentulus had to rely on the naked eye to see the legion coming to his aid. The legion didn’t appear all at once but as a patchwork. First, the purple cloaks of the commanders appeared, then a few separate cohorts became visible. The phrase ‘out of the soldiers’ kit bags’ should mean that the reinforcements were marching near where Lentulus’s men had left their baggage.

The scene shows the insurgents at their best. They isolated an enemy unit. They executed the difficult manoeuvre of attacking uphill, a move in which their lighter armour increased their mobility. Although the rebels did not destroy Lentulus’s men before reinforcements arrived, they inflicted heavy losses. Presumably Lentulus expected the reinforcements to defeat the enemy, but that did not happen. Either the rebels on the hill remained strong enough to turn on the reinforcements and overpower them or Spartacus sent fresh troops against the reinforcements, which would speak well of his command and control of the battlefield.

The Romans lost the battle and, once again, they ran from the field. Spartacus had reason to be pleased. But he also had cause to re-evaluate the attack on Rome. As one ancient account says: ‘he changed his mind about going to Rome, because his forces were not appropriate for the operation nor was his whole army prepared as soldiers should be (since no city was fighting with him, but only slaves and deserters and the rabble).’[122]

Rome’s stone walls were over 13 feet thick and in places over 30 feet high. The circuit of walls ran for nearly 7 miles and enclosed 1,000 acres. Spartacus had no siege engines nor experts to man them. He had few if any soldiers with experience of laying siege to a city or taking a city by assault.

Nor had Spartacus’s experience of battle in 72 BC been entirely encouraging. He had won every engagement, but his colleague Crixus’s army had been destroyed and Crixus was dead, The Romans, meanwhile, refused to accept defeat. No matter how hard Spartacus hit the Romans, they kept coming back. There was no reason to doubt but that they would return. It was far more prudent to prepare for the next battle than to open a new front that was unlikely to bring success. And so the army returned to southern Italy, probably to Thurii.

There the insurgents had yet another encounter with a Roman army, possibly under the propraetor Manlius. They defeated the Romans and reaped a rich load of booty. It was a happy end to their journey, yet the men had reason to wonder just what they had achieved.

They had made a punishing trip of about 1,200 miles, which could hardly have taken them less than four or five months, considering the marching rates of ancient armies and the time needed to stop, forage and fight. They had fought four battles, mourned their colleagues’ defeat in a fifth, and amassed loot. They had buried old comrades and attracted new ones.

They might glory in their status as the dominant army in Italy. It was an astonishing truth that most would have ascribed to the gods and perhaps, above all, to Dionysus. Yet the rebels were only as strong as their ability to beat Rome’s next army. That army was sure to come, even if vain rebels and pessimistic Romans both failed to see it in the distance.

By summer’s end, Italy had seen two big stories in 72 BC. One was Spartacus’s Long March and the other was Rome’s disgrace. A rabble in arms had defeated a regular army.

One of the few to have served with distinction was Cato - but he also served with disdain. At the year’s end, Cato’s commander offered him a military honour, such as a crown, a neck ornament, a golden armband or one of the other decorations handed out to Rome’s best legionaries. Cato, however, refused. Family pride might have balked at accepting honours amid military disgrace.

Cato’s great-grandfather, Cato the Censor, had once sneered at a commander who awarded his soldiers crowns just for digging ditches or sinking wells[123] - prizes, the Censor said, that would have required at least the burning of an enemy’s camp back when Rome had standards. Cato’s uncle Drusus had once rejected honours himself, no doubt aware of the malicious remark[124] that they would have dwarfed the man who wore them. Malice might have come Cato’s way too if he had received honours while his brother did not, and the sources make no mention of honours for Caepio.

Few Romans could have bemoaned the nation’s defeats more than Cato. Austere, public-spirited and uncompromising, he lived for virtue. Most Roman politicians, including his allies, eventually fell short of Cato’s lofty standards. Cicero, a friend who felt Cato’s sting, once wrote in exasperation that Cato thought he was living in Plato’s Republic instead of the sewer of Romulus[125]. In 72 BC Cato had abundant reasons to be displeased.