The Spartacus War

Chapter 6 — The Decimator

In autumn 72 BC a new general took command of the legions. Determined to restore discipline, he revived a brutal and archaic form of punishment. Fifty Roman soldiers who ran away from battle and disgraced the legions were caught, condemned and executed by their own army. Each of them was clubbed to death by nine of his fellow legionaries, men with whom they might have changed places, since the victims were chosen by lot. Five hundred men were caught shirking their duty; one out of every ten was selected for execution, which is why the procedure is called decimation (analogous to our word ‘decimal’, that is, one-tenth). Rome’s new general wanted his men to fear him more than they feared Spartacus. His name was Marcus Licinius Crassus.

A marble bust[126] survives that is probably a portrait of Crassus; it is revealing. Stare directly and you see the picture of resolve: the skin of his face tightened, lips pursed, jaw clenched, eyebrows drawn down, neck muscles tensed. In profile, however, his jowls, a double chin and the crow’s feet around his eyes are all apparent. Not only vigour but caution and suspicion are etched into his features. The bust was found in Rome, in the family tomb of the Licinii, one of Rome’s most prominent families, but there are other copies, proof that they depict an important person. The style fits the end of the Roman Republic and the scholarly consensus is that the bust is Marcus Licinius Crassus.

Crassus took command at the order of the Senate and to the applause of the people. Bold politics, the choice made poetic justice. In his own way, Crassus resembled Spartacus. Not that Crassus wanted to overturn Rome: far from it. Like Spartacus, though, Crassus was a maverick. He wanted to rise to the top of Roman politics but he would beat his own path. Unwilling or unable to win the approval of the old nobility, Crassus courted the common people and made deals with new politicians. The optimates, literally, the best men, as Rome’s conservatives called themselves, did not approve. Given a choice, the Senate’s old guard would never have turned to a man like Crassus. Spartacus forced their hands and made Crassus the man of the hour.

Crassus came from one of Rome’s most eminent families but its lustre was no brighter than a decadent age could produce. Crassus displayed good generalship against other Romans, and great initiative in exploiting the misery of others. He was known as a man of selective vice rather than strict morality. For example, he beat a charge of seducing a Vestal virgin by proving that he was merely greedy and not impious, since he was interested in her property rather than her chastity.

In his early forties - he was born c. 115 BC - Crassus was one of Italy’s richest but least luxurious men. Frugal and severe, he felt more at home in the Rome of brick than the Rome of marble. With a private fire brigade at his disposal, he pounced on men whose houses were on fire and talked them into selling fast and cheaply before they had nothing left to sell. Yet he wouldn’t treat himself to a holiday home. It wasn’t comfort that Crassus wanted but political power, which was why he amassed wealth in the first place. A good general but no military genius like Pompey (or, later, Caesar), Crassus saw that the path to political success lay in buying votes. He doled out money, giving loans to the rich, handouts to the poor, and favours to the influential. Crassus made himself popular even though he lacked none of the scathing arrogance of the Roman nobility.

In 72 BC his popularity paid off. As best we can reconstruct it, the Senate and people agreed to award Crassus a special command against Spartacus, with virtually unlimited power (what the Romans called proconsular imperium), even though he was a private citizen. This was a rare distinction, since commands were usually reserved for office-holders. What made things even sweeter was that Pompey held a similar command in Spain against Sertorius. Pompey was Rome’s leading general and its most ambitious politician. Crassus considered Pompey his chief political rival, but now Crassus had matched him. To add to his triumph, the disgraced consuls Lentulus and Gellius were Pompey’s allies.

Crassus in command would drive his men hard. He was a tough man, but he had not had an easy life. Before his thirtieth birthday, Crassus saw his father’s severed head hanging from the speakers’ platform in the Roman forum. The proud old man had committed suicide rather than surrender to Marius when he took Rome. Crassus himself was too insignificant to be executed but two years later, in 85 BC, danger loomed as the civil war reignited, so he ran for his life.

Crassus fled all the way back to Spain. Sheltered by a family friend, he spent eight months in hiding from the pro-Marius provincial government, living in a cave. Finally, the news that the leading Marians were dead brought Crassus out and into action.

He raised an army of 2,500 men. As Crassus later said, a Roman wasn’t really rich unless he could raise his own legion. His men were picked troops, chosen from among friends and family supporters. He requisitioned ships, sailed with the men to North Africa, and tried to join forces with the anti-Marian proconsul there, Quintus Caecilius Metellus, but the two men quarrelled. Undaunted, Crassus voyaged to Greece, where he joined the leader of the anti-Marian forces, Sulla. He returned to Italy in 83 BC with Sulla and his soldiers, possibly including, ironically enough, that Roman auxiliary Spartacus. In spring 82 BC Sulla sent Crassus to raise more troops in central Italy, which Crassus did with great success. He also captured the city of Todi, where he was accused of taking the lion’s share of the spoils for himself; if true, a contrast with Spartacus’s later fairness in dividing the spoils equally.

Young Crassus had his rendezvous with destiny outside the walls of Rome, in the last of a series of bloody battles up and down the Italian peninsula. Sulla attacked the Marian forces at Rome’s Colline Gate in the north-eastern part of the city walls. The struggle commenced in the late afternoon of 1 November 82 BC and it went on into the night. The Marians pinned Sulla’s centre and left wing against the walls. Only Sulla’s right wing was victorious, but that decided the battle, because it crushed the enemy’s left wing, drove it in flight and pursued it for 2 miles. The commander of Sulla’s right wing was Crassus.

From what little we know, Sulla was the architect of victory in the Battle of the Colline Gate. Crassus merely executed the plan, but he did so with vigour and guts. It was enough to make his fortune. With Sulla triumphant, Crassus put down his sword for a decade and devoted himself to money-making and politics.

When Sulla came to power he named about 500 wealthy and prominent supporters of Marius as outlaws. The Romans called this ‘proscription’ because the names were inscribed and posted in a public list. The outlaws were hunted down and killed. Their property was confiscated and men like Crassus gobbled it up at cut-rate prices. By the time of the Spartacus War a decade later, Crassus’s portfolio included estates in the Italian countryside and real estate in the city of Rome; mines, perhaps Spanish silver mines; and large numbers of slaves, some of whom he may have rented out. Born rich, Crassus had become super-rich.

His moment came in autumn 72 BC, when Rome entrusted Crassus with a special command to fight Spartacus. Why Crassus wanted the command is no mystery. It could have made his career. Up to then, he had advanced more slowly in politics than a man of his ambition would have wished. He had served as praetor at some point, it seems, but he had not held Rome’s top office, the consulship. A special command opened the door to military glory, which would have put political pre-eminence within reach. Defeating Spartacus would have given Crassus a card to play against Pompey. Then too, Crassus had his economic interests at stake. Since he owned large, slave-run estates in southern Italy, he fitted the profile of Spartacus’s victims. Putting down the rebellion would not just bring Crassus glory but save his investments.

Nor is there any doubt why the Roman people wanted Crassus. He was victorious, popular and filthy rich. Thanks to his wealth, Crassus should have been able to pay at least some of the soldiers out of his own purse, perhaps as a long-term loan to the treasury. Rome’s military budget was already funding armies in Spain, Thrace and Asia Minor, and a navy off Crete.

Crassus had the proven ability to raise troops. The current emergency demanded a knowledgeable chief of recruitment who could fill the ranks quickly. As a former general for Sulla, moreover, Crassus should have been able to talk some of Sulla’s veterans back into service. Many of them were no longer young, but, unlike raw recruits, experienced soldiers don’t run when the enemy charges. The phrase, ‘Everyone who had a soldier’s heart, even if his body had grown old’[127], survives in one ancient source about the Spartacus war. We don’t know just what the words refer to, but how intriguing to think of them as Crassus’s recruiting slogan.

Crassus was no Alexander the Great but he knew how to fight, and had learned about unconventional insurgents in Spain, a land that had resisted Rome fiercely for two centuries.

When he was around 20 in 93 BC, Crassus had seen his father Publius celebrate a triumph over the Lusitanians (Portuguese), men known as masters of irregular warfare. Publius had spent three or four years (c. 97-93 BC) as governor of Hispania Ulterior, today’s Portugal and western Spain. Young Crassus lived with his father there and he may have served on his father’s staff in that war. The details of Publius’s campaign do not survive. Since he won a triumph, he must have scored one or more successes, but we may doubt whether he matched the enemy’s speed and cunning. Against the Lusitanians the Romans rarely did.

The Lusitanians had a reputation as raiders and rustlers. Their greatest leader, Viriathus, had bedevilled the Romans with eight years of guerrilla warfare (148-139 BC). Viriathus was too shrewd to fight a pitched battle as the Romans wished. Stymied, the Romans attacked civilians in the towns that supported Viriathus and finally resorted to having him assassinated. The leaderless Lusitanians made peace, but it did not last. Again and again, the Lusitanians revolted, which led to Roman reprisals. In the decade before Publius’s governorship, for example, two Roman generals celebrated triumphs over the Lusitanians. More recently, Lusitanian light infantry and horsemen formed the core of Sertorius’s insurgency on the Spanish peninsula (80-72 BC). Both Viriathus and Sertorius excelled at speed, mobility, deception, ambush, night attacks and the other tricks of the trade of unconventional warfare.

The Lusitanians imposed slippery and devious warfare on Rome. Around the time that Publius was fighting Viriathus, Rome faced a more static conflict in the neighbouring province of Nearer Spain, Hispania Citerior. Siegecraft was the main tactic there, and endurance vied in importance with deceit. This war offered lessons in brutality for Crassus.

Publius’s colleague Titus Didius, governor of Hispania Citerior from 98 to 93 BC, spent nine months besieging a rebellious Spanish town in order to put an end to its people’s banditry. In the end, he talked the town into surrendering in return for a land grant, but once he had them in his power Didius ordered a massacre. He herded the women and children into a canyon along with the men and had them all slaughtered.

Rome’s greatest siege in Spain had taken place at Numantia. A fortified city, Numantia had fought Rome for the better part of twenty years between 154 and 133 BC. The Numantines inflicted defeat and humiliation on half a dozen Roman commanders. Finally, in 134 BC Rome entrusted the war to Scipio Aemilianus, the man who had conquered Carthage in 146 BC. Scipio first raised a new army and trained it hard. Next he cut off Numantia’s food supply. Then he encircled Numantia with a huge wall, patrolled by Roman troops stationed in seven different forts. Then, Scipio waited. Slowly, the city starved; when it reached the point of cannibalism, Numantia surrendered. Fifty survivors were paraded in Scipio’s triumph, the rest were sold into slavery. Numantia was razed and divided among its neighbours.

Scipio’s policy was as blunt as it was brutal. It had required 60,000 Roman and allied soldiers to defeat 4,000 defenders of Numantia. Even so, Crassus might have looked back to it as a model as he prepared to fight Spartacus. Like Scipio, Crassus held a special command. Like his father Publius, he faced a quick and shifty foe. To take on Spartacus in battle was to risk being outfoxed like half a dozen Roman commanders before him. Why not lead Spartacus into a trap instead, where the Romans could lay siege to him? Why not outfox the fox? Call it the Numantine solution.

It was also a classic recipe for counter-insurgency: location, isolation and eradication[128]. After finding Spartacus, Crassus had to herd him into a place where the Roman could cut Spartacus off from support and supplies. Then Crassus could kill him.

Executing the plan required thorough knowledge of southern Italy’s terrain. Luckily Crassus possessed just that. In 90 BC his father Publius, back in Italy, had taken on Rome’s rebel allies by fighting a battle in Lucania. In his mid-twenties at the time, Crassus is likely to have fought alongside him. Although Publius lost the battle, Crassus learned about the land. Crassus’s Lucanian connections extended to the city of Heraclea, where his father had granted Roman citizenship to an important resident. South of Lucania lay Bruttium, another province in which Crassus had a hand, since he had grabbed an estate there from a Marian after Sulla’s victory in 82 BC.

Crassus took over command from the consuls Gellius and Lentulus either in late summer or early autumn 72 BC. By November or thereabouts[129] they were back in Rome presiding over Senate meetings. According to one source[130], an angry Senate had stripped them of their command but not their office. Another possibility is that the consuls made a deal to step down voluntarily in exchange for support from Crassus for their campaign to be chosen censors - in other words, they agreed to be kicked upstairs.

The two consuls proved to be better legislators than generals. They passed a law enabling commanders to reward conspicuous bravery with Roman citizenship. Crassus’s new legionaries were already Roman citizens, but the troops in Cisalpine Gaul were not. The new law gave them an incentive for valour if Spartacus returned.

Crassus raised six new legions: about 30,000 men. He commanded them as well as the remaining troops of the four legions previously commanded by Gellius and Lentulus: perhaps another 16,000 men. Crassus, then, counted around 45,000 legionaries. This was an enormous army, about the same size as the army that Caesar would later use to conquer Gaul. It was more than twice as large as any force that the Romans had sent out yet against Spartacus. If Spartacus had about 60,000 men, then he continued to outnumber the Romans, but that probably did not bother Crassus unduly. Roman military doctrine emphasized quality over quantity, and Romans often went into battle outnumbered, especially against those considered barbarians. Besides, Crassus had no intention of doing battle against Spartacus until he had first worn the Thracian down.

Meanwhile, the appointment of Crassus energized the war effort. Many elite Romans, especially his friends and allies, joined to fight for the hero of the Colline Gate. Crassus drew his supporters from the rank and file of the Senate rather than its leadership. The names of five of his officers in the Spartacus War are known: Quintus Marcius Rufus, Mummius, Caius Pomptinus, Lucius Quinctius and Cnaeus Tremellius Scrofa. L. Quinctius came from a humble background, while Q. Marcius Rufus and C. Pomptinus both belonged to families that, as far as we know, had not held office before. Cn. Tremellius Scrofa came from a just-miss family: it had produced six Roman praetors but no consuls.

Only Mummius had a famous name. One Lucius Mummius Achaicus had been consul in 146 BC and sacker of Corinth; we don’t know, however, if Crassus’s officer Mummius came from the same branch of the family. Even if the blood of Achaicus flowed in the veins of this Mummius, it did not carry the great ancestor’s talent. Mummius embarrassed Crassus with a great mistake at the campaign’s start.

Once again the Roman army marched south. At Eburum (modern Eboli), the Picentini Mountains look like tabletops, rising in an abrupt sweep from the plain. It was here, we might imagine, beside these hills, that Crassus’s men laid out their camp. Eburum lay on the Via Annia, from which Crassus could control the valley of the Silarus River and the passes into Lucania. It was the key to Picentia, which was, in turn, the doorway between Campania and Lucania. Picentia stood at the edge of civilization, as it were. South of it lay Spartacus country, too mountainous and rugged for Crassus’s new army to cross through safely. Picentia made an excellent base because the rich territory between Salernum and Paestum was fertile enough to feed Crassus’s men - today it produces Italy’s most famous mozzarella - and wide enough to allow them to train.

Spartacus, for his part, seems to have moved northwards from Thurii into north-western Lucania, perhaps back into the fertile Campus Atinas, where his men had rampaged a year earlier. It was harvest time again, as it had been during their attack the year before, and food would have drawn Spartacus’s men there. In addition, the Campus Atinas offered other advantages to a shrewd commander like Spartacus: it was a good spot for his army to intimidate Crassus while his scouts inspected the new Roman forces. Crassus, meanwhile, put the pressure on as well. He sent two legions to circle around Spartacus and follow him. Their route, for example, might have taken them north into the valley of the Upper Silarus (modern Sele) River, then eastwards and back south into the territory of Volcei (modern Buccino). This route bypassed the Via Annia while following well-beaten and relatively level paths.

Crassus entrusted command of the two legions to Mummius. According to one source[131], these were the legions formerly under Gellius and Lentulus, and not the new units raised by Crassus. Crassus gave explicit orders: Mummius was to follow Spartacus closely but not to fight, not even in a skirmish. Evidently, the plan was to pressure Spartacus without risking a defeat against his battle-hardened troops. Unfortunately, instead of obeying orders, Mummius took advantage of the first good chance to join battle. Perhaps he occupied the high ground or perhaps his scouts said that the enemy had its guard down. In any case, Mummius lost. As the sources put it: ‘Many of his men fell, and many saved themselves by dropping their weapons and fleeing.’[132] In the ancient world, dropping one’s weapons to save one’s life earned a man great shame: it practically defined cowardice. The fugitive soldiers slunk back in disgrace to the Roman camp in Picentia.

If the Romans had stood firm in close order, they would have formed a wall against which the enemy charge might have broken. Instead, the Romans obligingly turned and ran. For the rebels, it was barbarian warfare at its best.

Crassus planned to turn the fiasco into what is nowadays called a teaching moment. No more defeatism: that was the rule of the new imperator. He began by treating Mummius harshly - precisely how is not known. Next, Crassus had new weapons issued to the men who had thrown theirs away, but only on the condition that they formally promised not to lose them again. Then he struck.

Crassus chose the first 500 runaways to have returned to his camp - ‘tremblers’[133], to use the old Spartan term employed by Plutarch to describe these men. These 500 soldiers perhaps belonged to one legionary cohort (battalion). Crassus divided the 500 men into 50 groups of 10 men each, and had one man chosen by lot from each group. These fifty men were forced to undergo decimation.

Decimation was an ancient Roman military punishment that had fallen out of use, but now Crassus revived it. The tenth of the 500 runaways who had been chosen by lot were clubbed to death by the other nine-tenths. Crassus, it seems, revived decimation with a vengeance. In historical times, the norm for decimation seems to have been five, eight or twenty men; Crassus had chosen fifty.

According to traditional procedure, the executioners survived but were forced to camp outside the defences of the main camp. There they were fed barley instead of wheat like animals. The sources don’t tell us how long Crassus’s men underwent this disgrace. It was a symbolic humiliation but also dangerous, since they were left unprotected and exposed to rebel raids.

Crassus had defined himself in his men’s eyes. As one ancient source says[134], he had made himself more fearful than the enemy. It was a high standard of military discipline, equal to that set centuries before by a Spartan mercenary general[135]. The act of decimation probably took attention away from Spartacus and focused it on Crassus. Perhaps now someone remembered that Crassus’s grandfather had earned the nickname Agelastus, ‘he who does not laugh’. Stickler or tyrant, Crassus was indisputably in charge.

Perhaps to underline that point, Crassus now took the offensive. He led his men out against the enemy. Spartacus retreated southwards through Lucania. One of our sources[136] implies that Spartacus and his high command reached this decision on their own, without a blow being struck. Apparently they had taken Crassus’s measure and concluded that they could not match him. Better to draw the Romans into the mountains of Lucania than to risk fighting them on the Picentine plain.

But it is hard to imagine Spartacus persuading his huge army simply to give up after their victory over Mummius. Besides, it would have taken nearly supernatural foresight to gauge the change in the Roman army. Surely the rebels had to bleed first before they awakened. That brings us to a different source[137] and a more plausible account, at least more plausible in parts.

In this version, Crassus’s army quickly encountered a detachment of about 10,000 men from Spartacus’s army, camping on their own. Just what the men were doing is unclear; perhaps they had been sent to follow the Romans, perhaps they had gone off in search of supplies, or perhaps they represent yet another factional split in the rebels’ camp. In any case, the Romans attacked them. With their vast numerical superiority, Crassus’s men won a great victory. The sources say that they killed two-thirds of the enemy and took only 900 prisoners. The numbers strain credulity but if they are true, they suggest that the rebels had guts. No one seems to have run away.

It was a big defeat for the insurgency, the biggest since the death of Crixus. Worse still, the Romans now had a commander who could keep up the pressure. Crassus then turned on the main rebel force. We might guess that the two armies met somewhere in northern Lucania. Spartacus commanded the rebels, while Crassus led the Romans. According to the sources, these two great generals met in battle for the first time. High drama, but unfortunately the sources are stingy. After crushing the enemy detachment, Crassus marched on Spartacus ‘with contempt’[138]. Crassus ‘defeated him and pursued him vigourously in flight’[139]. Another source says[140]: ‘Finally… Licinius Crassus saved the Romans’ honour; the enemy . . . were beaten by him and fled and sought refuge in the tip of Italy.’

This reads like the stuff of official reports. But no one as cagey as Crassus would have then treated Spartacus with contempt. Furthermore, if Crassus won a splendid victory over Spartacus’s entire army, it is impossible to explain Crassus’s next move, which was to hold back and try to cut off Spartacus’s force, rather than to engage it in battle.

More likely, Crassus and Spartacus fought a skirmish. It did not lead to a major defeat but it was enough to make the point: Crassus had built a new Roman army. What Spartacus had warned his men all along was now coming true. The men had spirit but Spartacus knew the odds. He understood Rome’s overwhelming superiority in pitched battle. Earlier Roman soldiers had turned and fled but Crassus’s men would fight. Against previous Roman commanders there had always been room for ambushes and other tricks. Crassus, however, would not be easily fooled. In addition to the fact of defeat, Spartacus’s scouts might have discovered other evidence of the changes that Crassus had brought. They might have noticed, for instance, that unlike the earlier legions they had scouted, Crassus’s men marched in good order and that they did not dare engage in undisciplined foraging or looting. These Romans knew how to fight. It was better to draw them deeper into the Lucanian hills than to risk a battle on the plains.

Besides, Spartacus, we might imagine, was still looking for a way out. The rise of Crassus offered a golden opportunity. His men had preferred taking their chances against Lentulus and Gellius to undertaking a passage over the Alps. Faced with Crassus, however, they might have been willing to reassess matters.

So Spartacus led his men towards the other exit from the Italian peninsula. He marched them to the sea. Assuming they had enough of a head start on the enemy, they could have taken the Via Annia southwards towards the city of Regium. Down the road they went, past the cities of Atina, Nerulum, Cosentia and Terina until they finally reached the Tyrrhenian Sea.

As it hugs the mountainside near Italy’s southern tip, the road turns a bend and presents the traveller with a sudden panorama below: Sicily, rising majestically in the hazy blue sea. Only the narrow Strait of Messina separates Sicily from the Italian mainland. Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean, yet two of its three sides are visible from this point. An ancient traveller might have stood in wonder at the thought of the wealth and fertility that lay before him on the island.

Sicily was Rome’s first overseas province and remained its most important. Famous in antiquity for its fertile soil, the island provided much of Rome’s grain; it was rich in cattle as well. Lush and abundant, Sicily was a great prize. It fed the legions, and Spartacus might have reasoned that it could also feed his men. Then too, Sicily had long been a goal of Italy’s runaway slaves, who sought refuge there. In addition, the island seemed ripe for subversion. By stirring up the embers of the slave revolts that had convulsed the island a generation before, Spartacus could threaten Rome’s food supply and further shake the pillars of the social order. By transferring his men there from Italy he could save them from Crassus, but perhaps only temporarily. Since it surely occurred to Spartacus that Crassus could follow him across the strait, it might also have crossed his mind that Sicily would serve as just a temporary base. But it might give him a respite to find ships and move on, perhaps to North Africa, which lies only 90 miles southwest of the Sicilian coast.

So Spartacus and his men might have reasoned when they reached the vicinity of Regium in late 72 BC. All they had to do was cross a narrow body of water.

Chapter 7 — The Pirate

As their ships drew near to Syracuse, capital of the Roman province of Sicily, the helmsmen took their bearings from the rays of sunlight reflected off the golden shield on the front of the Temple of Athena - that is, if the corrupt Roman governor, Gaius Verres, hadn’t already looted it. If he had, well, never mind, men like these, who knew how to ride the rough winter waves, could find their own way to one of the most famous cities in the ancient world. They travelled in four fast ships, small, sleek and stripped for action. They tended to stay clear of Roman naval harbours but today they were at ease. The night before they had run a squadron of the Roman fleet ashore about 20 miles to the south and had lit the night sky with their flames. They were pirates, captained by a man named Heracleo[141].

That day they sailed into the turquoise waters of Syracuse’s Great Harbour, perhaps admiring the marble buildings of the old city to starboard. They sailed right up to the quays. There they held water and, before the astonished and terrified eyes of the townspeople - watching from a safe distance - they waved wild palm roots. It was the visual equivalent of blowing a raspberry. The pirates had captured the roots the day before from the Roman fleet. Roman sailors normally ate grain, not wild palm roots, but Verres, it seems, had sent his ships out undermanned, underfed and poorly led. By waving the roots, Heracleo and his men taunted the Romans with their incompetence and shame. Then the victorious pirates sailed out of the harbour.

The details, like most involving Verres, may be exaggerated. The source is Cicero, who successfully prosecuted Verres for extortion in 70 BC and then laid it on thick when he published his speeches. Yet if the scene in Syracuse was extraordinary, the sight of pirates wasn’t. Pirates were the hijackers and kidnappers of the ancient world and this was their heyday.

For a moment in late 72 BC Heracleo or men like him held Spartacus’s fate in their hands. Pirate ships could carry the rebels across the Strait of Messina where they could reap all the strategic advantages offered by Sicily. What is more, the pirates might have done so with gusto, since they shared a common enemy in Rome. Driven to the toe of the Italian boot by a Roman army, Spartacus came up with possibly his most daring and ambitious move yet.

Pirates had terrorized the coast of Italy since 75 BC and other parts of the Mediterranean for decades before that. They captured Roman celebrities: two praetors in their purple togas; Mark Antony’s aunt; and, most famous of all, Julius Caesar. He was kidnapped as a young man around 75 BC and held for forty days until he was ransomed. He then returned with a force of marines, rounded up his former captors, and had them crucified - just as he had promised them he would.

From a distance of centuries the pirates excite our admiration, but these pirates were no Robin Hoods. Their primary source of income lay in the slave trade. At first, the Romans had been silent partners who were glad to buy free people from the eastern provinces snatched up by pirate slave traders. Eventually, the complaints of Roman friends and neighbours grew too loud. Beginning in 102 BC, the Senate sent commanders out to suppress the pirates, but they had little success.

Spartacus surely knew much of this. Perhaps he also knew that after Rome turned on them, the pirates turned on Rome; they fought for Mithridates in the East and for Sertorius in the West. It made sense for Spartacus to seek help from them now, at the end of 72 BC, as he and his men camped on the Italian side of the Strait of Messina. The rebels sat within sight of Sicily on a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea. Having reached the strait, the insurgents had travelled practically the entire length of the Italian peninsula, from the foothills of the Alps southwards. But they had come to the end of the line.

It was, moreover, winter. Southern Italy does indeed have winter. The west coast, facing the Tyrrhenian Sea, suffers harsher conditions than the east coast, on the Ionian Sea; the rebels in Bruttium would have missed the mild winter around Thurii. Along the strait, the average temperatures in December and January range between 48 and 58 degrees Fahrenheit; rain is common and it can be windy. Some days the turbulent sea sends waves crashing against the shore of the strait. The mountains climb up rapidly from the coast; in the higher elevations, it snows. It was a difficult time of year to travel or fight, making the pirates’ navigational experience especially valuable.

The pirates whom Spartacus met on the strait originally came from Cilicia, on Anatolia’s Mediterranean coast, one of the main breeding grounds for pirates. Crete was the other. Whether Heracleo was one of the men whom Spartacus met on the strait is not known but Heracleo was a typical pirate: a commander of small, speedy ships who looked down on the Romans but not without a healthy dose of fear. After all, the usual pirate raid was not as easy as Heracleo’s Syracusan romp. Nor did every Roman governor leave the barn door as open as Verres did then; but even Verres too sometimes rose to the occasion.

Thanks to Cicero, Verres survives in venom-soaked ink. According to the orator, Verres left Sicily defenceless while blackmailing wealthy natives with trumped-up charges of stirring up slave revolt. Cicero never mentions Spartacus but refers instead to the ‘great Italian war’[142] or the ‘war of the Italian fugitives’[143], thereby downplaying the seriousness of the problem facing Verres.

Fortunately, evidence in other writers and hints in Cicero’s work itself paint a more accurate picture. Verres was probably not caught flat-footed by Spartacus’s approach towards the island. Verres knew all about the danger; indeed, one source says that the Senate extended Verres’s governorship to three years[144] instead of the usual one in order to have him, as an experienced administrator, put Sicily on a protective footing. That did not stop Verres from looting public and private artworks and shaking down wealthy landowners, but he did keep a lid on rebellion.

Cicero’s contemporary, the historian Sallust, states flatly: ‘Gaius Verres strengthened the shores closest to Italy.’[145] As provincial governor, he had two legions at his disposal. Verres might have ordered them to build shore defences and establish guard posts on the coast. They no doubt sought help and local knowledge from the people of the main Sicilian city on the strait, Messana (modern Messina). It may not be coincidence that Messana was the one Sicilian city treated well by Verres, perhaps because he anticipated the danger.

Meanwhile, Verres claimed to have clamped down hard on the island’s slaves. He said that he investigated charges of trouble brewing in various places all over the island, from near Lilybaeum (modern Marsala) and Panormus (modern Palermo) in the west to Apollonia (modern San Fratello) in the north-east and Imachara (near Enna) in central Sicily. Some of these spots had been rebel strongholds in the earlier revolts. He ordered that slave suspects be arrested and tried, including farmhands, shepherds, farm managers and master herdsmen. None of this impressed Cicero, who accused Verres of being lenient when he should have been harsh and harsh when he should have been lenient. Cicero charged Verres with taking bribes to release guilty slaves and with extorting money from innocent masters whom he threatened to arrest on trumped-up charges: he planned to accuse them of slackness towards their potentially rebellious slaves. Worst of all, Verres had a man crucified in Messana as a runaway slave and spy for Spartacus when, in fact, he was a Roman citizen, as a simple enquiry could have shown. The man in question was Publius Gavius who came from either the city of Compsa (modern Conza) in Lucania or Consentia in Bruttium. A Roman citizen was exempt from the cross; even if guilty, he had the right to a lesser punishment.

Why a Roman citizen supported Spartacus is an interesting question. Was Gavius one of the ‘free men from the fields’ - that is, a poor but free person - who joined the rebellion? Was he an elite and unreconstructed anti-Roman, so dogged in his Italian nationalism as to support a rebel slave general? Or did he simply work for Spartacus in exchange for pay? We can only guess at the answer or at the possibility that Gavius was innocent.

Verres, it seems, indeed denied Gavius his rights as a citizen, but no one can unravel the rights and wrongs of Cicero’s other charges. The one sure conclusion is that some Sicilians genuinely worried about the spread of Spartacus’s revolt to the island. No surprise, since the ancients had long memories. In 72 BC many Sicilians had lived through the Second Sicilian Slave War (104- 100 BC). Thirty years before that had come the First Sicilian Slave War (135-132 BC), and now the wheel might seem to have turned ominously again. The root causes of rebellion no doubt remained. Each war, after all, had broken out against a background of abuse and humiliation of slaves and the toleration of armed gangs of slave herdsmen who eventually turned on their masters with a vengeance.

The slave uprisings had ravaged the island. Each had lasted about four years and involved tens of thousands of rebels. Each broke out in the rich farmland of the island’s interior, where gangs of rebel herdsmen played a prominent role, and spread. Each time, urban slaves joined rebels from the countryside, as did the most poverty-stricken free Sicilians.

Rome responded slowly and badly each time. After several humiliating defeats in the first revolt, the consul Publius Rupilius laid siege to the two main rebel cities and found a traitor to open the gates in both. Then he engaged in mopping-up operations around the island. After a series of incompetent generals failed to put down the second rebellion, the consul Manius Aquilius rose to the occasion. He killed the rebel king in single combat, which would have won him Rome’s highest military honour had his opponent been a free man and not a slave.

Now another rebel, Spartacus, was waiting for the pirates. Their swift ships would carry him across the strait to break the chains of Sicily’s slaves. Ancient Sicily teemed with agricultural wealth, its soil much more fertile than Bruttium’s. As the hungry rebels watched the sun set behind Sicily’s hills night after night, and then saw its after-glow shining in the clouds, they might have dreamed of a new life on the island. The pirates could provide that, but, naturally, they presented a bill for their services. Any losses, should the Romans fight them at sea, would be expensive to replace. The pirates also demanded payment in advance. Spartacus apparently understood this, and he gave them gifts. ‘Gift’ was a flexible word in the ancient vocabulary, meaning, among other things, bribes.

The plan was that the pirates would ferry 2,000 men across to Sicily. This represented just a small portion of Spartacus’s army but it was probably the best he could do under the circumstances. Pirate ships were small and could not carry large numbers of men. The 2,000 could serve as an advance party. Assuming they had been carefully chosen, they would have been elite fighters, skilled at stealth and able to make contact with Sicilian slaves. As soon as they had established a base, they could bring more men over from Italy. Meanwhile, the bulk of Spartacus’s army could go to ground in Bruttium’s hills.

But it was not to be. As the sources state succinctly, ‘Once the Cilicians had made an agreement with him [Spartacus] and taken gifts, they tricked him and sailed off.’[146] Had Verres or Crassus been in touch with the pirates and outbid Spartacus? Did a dawning awareness of Rome’s military might scare off men like Heracleo despite their sympathy for the rebels? Or did the pirates simply behave like pirates?

In any case, they left. Spartacus’s Sicilian expedition seemed to be over before it had begun. Yet, once again, the Thracian displayed his strength of character. He neither despaired nor panicked but, rather, changed tactics with seeming effortlessness. His followers might have been less calm. If ever Spartacus needed his Thracian lady to inspire their faith, it was now.

Between Sicily and the Italian mainland lies one of the world’s more dramatic and dangerous bodies of water because of its fast current and treacherous rip tides. ‘The narrowness of the passage,’[147] writes the Greek historian Thucydides, ‘and the strength of the current that pours in from the vast Tyrrhenian and Sicilian mains, have rightly given it a bad reputation.’ The Strait of Messina is about 19 miles long. Some 9 miles at its widest, the strait is narrowest at its northern end, on the Italian side, at a narrow piece of land called Cape Caenys (the modern Punta Pezzo), in the modern city of Villa San Giovanni. Here, where the strait is not quite 2 miles wide, you can almost feel Spartacus’s frustration.

Looking across the strait from Cape Caenys, a person might have read the fortune of the rebellion in the landscape. Sicily lies ahead, seemingly close enough to touch. To the north sits the island’s Land’s End, Cape Pelorus (modern Peloro), a narrow, low-lying spit of soil. A mile or so south-east of the cape the mountains of Sicily begin to rise gently, like a body slowly waking up. They climb in stately measure ever southwards towards Mount Aetna (modern Etna), the great volcano that stands just out of sight.

A harsher landscape lies to the onlooker’s rear. At Cape Caenys, the last stretch of the Apennines tumbles down to the sea, in step-like ridges cut by gullies and crossed by zigzag roads. Above, a massive hill rises like a closed fist. Travelling only about a mile, the land rises sharply from sea level to 2,000 feet. These are the foothills of the Aspromonte Mountains (modern name). Aspromonte means ‘Harsh Mountains’ or ‘White Mountains’, the latter referring to snow or perhaps to bare rock. It was hostile terrain, in either case.

The Via Annia from Capua reached the Strait of Messina about 3 miles south of the narrows at Cape Caenys, at the ancient Statio ad Statuam (modern Catona). The favourable current made this the crossing-place of choice in ancient times. Nowadays, there is an hourly car ferry to Sicily nearby. Rowboats too cross the strait here, while in summer swimmers race across. But swimming was out of the question for men who would emerge on the Sicilian shore naked and dripping and into the arms of Verres’s soldiers, if they would emerge at all. An inexpert swimmer might find it rough going. A current of 6 knots or more (depending on the tides) flows through the strait, often accompanied by sudden waves and whirlpools. Besides, it was not summer but winter, when the grey-green water of the strait is too cold for swimming.

The ancients personified the dangerous seas of the strait by the myth of Scylla and Charybdis. Charybdis was a sea monster whose huge mouth swallowed and spat out water, creating killer whirlpools. Scylla was a dog-like beast that sat on a huge rock on the other side of a strait and killed passing sailors. According to myth only the greatest of helmsmen could pick his way between Scylla and Charybdis. The Greeks and Romans placed these two creatures in the Strait of Messina. The real strait posed more manageable challenges, which Spartacus decided to face. He told the men to build rafts.

The decision to construct rafts was risky but rational. If it was not easy to cross the strait by raft, neither was it impossible. Legend says that the prehistoric settlers of the island, the Sicels[148], did so. Thucydides, a Greek historian and hard-nosed ex-admiral, considered this tradition credible, as long as the Sicels had waited for the wind to die down before making the crossing. More recently, a Roman general and consul had managed the crossing by rafts. Lucius Caecilius Metellus, victor in a battle in Sicily against Carthage, came to Messana in 250 BC in order to go over the strait back to Italy. He had captured 120 elephants from the enemy and he wanted to bring these exotic imports back to Rome to march them in his triumphal parade. An ancient writer explains how Metellus ferried them across the strait:

Spartacus’s men used what look like similar raft-building techniques, maybe as a result of recruiting local helpers. The fish-rich waters of the strait surely employed many boat-builders. A contemporary source describes the rebels’ rafts: ‘When they placed large, wide-mouthed jars under the beams, they tied them together with vine branches or strips of hide.’[150]

Building rafts required finding jars, timber, vine branches and strips of hide, and that would have taken foraging in turn. Houses, shops, cellars, warehouses, farms and forests might all have been scoured for supplies. It seems unlikely that the rebels did this at their leisure or with their full attention. Some of their manpower had to be devoted to finding food and the rest had to handle security, in the event of a raid by Crassus.

Where Spartacus launched his rafts is not known. The currents favoured the ferry crossing at the Statio ad Statuam, but the Romans knew that, and they surely lined the opposite shore. Cape Caenys offered a narrower crossing[151] and perhaps a chance to surprise the enemy on the beach in Sicily. The dangerous currents there would have made departure risky, but Spartacus was a risk-taker. A launch from Cape Caenys would help explain what happened next, but of course it is not possible to be certain. An ancient source picks up the story: ‘They tried to launch rafts of beams and large, wide-mouthed jugs tied together with brush and branches in the very swift waters of the strait - in vain.’[152] And: ‘The entangled rafts were hindering the provision of help.’[153]

Nature, it seems, kept the rebels from crossing. In the fast and shifting currents the rafts got caught on each other, and no one was able to repair that tangle. They must have lost boats and provisions and maybe some men drowned too. Metellus had done better, but he no doubt chose the least dangerous place to cross the channel. He enjoyed superior logistical support than Spartacus and could get more experienced helmsmen. Few if any of the rebels had experience steering ships, but they might have persuaded or forced locals to help. Besides, Metellus might have crossed in summer or, if not, he could have waited for a day of good conditions to make the crossing, a luxury surely denied to Spartacus.

Spartacus’s attempt to cross the strait failed. He now had to turn his army around to force his way back through Roman Italy. The opposing general whom he would face, Crassus, had worked wonders with his legions but he had not yet turned them into a force that could hunt down and destroy Spartacus’s army. On the contrary, it seems that Crassus had done nothing to stop Spartacus at the strait. Instead, he held back and left the job to Verres. The governor of Sicily either had Neptune on his side or good strategy.

One ancient source gives credit elsewhere: Cicero. The orator praised Marcus Crassus, ‘that bravest of men, whose courage and good judgment saw to it that the fugitives were not able to tie rafts together and cross the Strait’[154]. Cicero speaks of a great effort made to stop the rebels from crossing. He offers no details, however. Did Crassus attack Spartacus on the beach? Spartacus had cavalry to defend his position; Crassus’s behaviour in the next month shows reluctance to take Spartacus head-on.

Besides, the circumstances of Cicero’s comments raise suspicion. He made them in 70 BC while prosecuting Verres for alleged misbehaviour as governor of Sicily. Cicero aimed all his rhetorical power at Verres, ridiculing the governor’s arrogance for claiming the credit for stopping Spartacus. Cicero won the case and Verres was ruined, but what if Verres was right? The weight of the evidence says that he did as much as any Roman to win the battle of the strait by deploying his forces opposite the most advantageous point for crossing the water.

In fact, it is hard not to suspect Crassus of actually encouraging Spartacus to try to cross the strait. Crassus surely was in contact with Verres and knew of the governor’s efforts to stop the rebels from landing on the island. Scouting reports that the enemy was building rafts might not have worried Crassus, given the season. All in all, Crassus might have been confident that Spartacus would fail.

Crassus would not have wanted to risk attacking the rebels on the strait. The narrow coastal strip offered little room for the pitched battle that he desired. Besides, if challenged, Spartacus would send his men into the hills rather than agree to fight such a battle. His cavalry would harass the Romans, while his infantry would lay ambushes in the many hills and gullies of the region. On top of all that, it was winter, and no time for fighting. Rather than risk such engagements, Crassus had a different plan: to squeeze the rebels between the strait and the mountains.

Spartacus had no choice now but to retreat. No doubt the need to leave Italy was clearer than ever but the Strait of Messina would not be the exit. The Thracian would have to come up with a new strategy. That, however, lay in the future; at the moment, his priority was feeding the army. There was food about a dozen miles to the south, in the city of Regium, but the town was walled and no doubt well defended. The next easiest alternative was to head north on the Via Annia, but the Romans surely had that road well blocked. So Spartacus and his followers took the least desirable escape route and climbed into the Aspromonte Mountains.

If any of Spartacus’s marching men turned and watched the sun disappear behind Sicily’s hills, we do not know. But if they did, they might have paused and thought about what might have been.

Chapter 8 — The Fisherman

It was a winter morning in the mountains, 3,000 feet above sea level, in early 71 BC. Normally it was silent here in winter, when even the herdsmen have left for lower ground. On this day, however, on a ridge about half a mile wide, two armies were about to meet. In one, tens of thousands of rebels stood in their ranks, weapons ready, and, we might imagine, hearts warmed by wine, ears impatient for the command to have their mouths let loose the roar that signals the start of their charge. The Roman army was not surprised; its scouts had watched the enemy from a series of signal towers.

The Romans waited behind a defensive network of deep trenches lined with sharpened poles, wooden palisades and, as an obstacle in the forefront, an embankment topped by a dry-stone wall at least 25 feet high[159]. The Romans’ positions closed off three sides of the ridge, blocking even the mule paths by which the rebels might have outflanked them. The Romans had left only the southern approach open, forcing the attackers to charge at them from that direction. As they advanced, the rebels were funnelled into a narrow space. Like a fisherman who drives big fish into his nets, Crassus had set his trap well.

Suddenly, the Roman counter-attack began, a torrent of arrows and acorn-shaped lead missiles, forged in field furnaces nearby by the methodical defenders. The barrage blunted the rebels’ charge. Many of the attackers reached the fortifications but, although they fought ferociously, they could not break through. Eventually, Spartacus’s men had no choice but to run away or die.

It was a good day for Rome and it had just begun. The rebels would attack again in the evening and once again they would fail. Afterwards the Romans claimed an immense body count[155], saying that 12,000 dead insurgents cost Rome only 3 dead and 7 wounded. Ancient battles often produced lopsided casualty rates but this sounds like propaganda. Uncertainty is frustrating to the historian but it is best to be clear: both these figures and the very details of the engagement are speculative. Indeed, our knowledge of the events in this chapter is unusually tentative, and for several reasons. The sources contradict each other even more than usual. Perhaps that is not surprising in the case of events that took place in the dead of winter, deep in the mountains of a remote corner of Italy.

Besides, for Romans, the domestic political stakes were almost as high as the military ones. Crassus had gambled everything on a defensive line in the mountains. The massive fortifications symbolized the man who had made his fortune in real estate. He would defeat Spartacus by out-building him. Some said that Crassus gave his men the construction job just to keep them busy during winter, the off-season for warfare. That sounds like false modesty. Crassus cared too much about his command to fill it with make-work projects. He knew that the campaign in Bruttium would make or break him.

Crassus wanted to defeat Spartacus, but if he couldn’t, he had to control the way the story was told to the Roman public. To do so, he needed influential friends, and surely he obtained them. A man who could buy armies could afford the rewards that would cement friendships. We might suspect the hand of his publicists, for example, in the assertion in the sources that the Romans had got their courage back[156] thanks only to Crassus’s policy of decimation. The campaign in Bruttium proved to be intensely controversial. We will never know precisely what happened there, but we can pick our way cautiously through the evidence.

In spite of exaggerated casualty figures, a Roman victory that day is a reasonable assumption. The Romans had earned success. Crassus and his men had spent weeks if not a month or two preparing a killing field. The Romans could have ended the rebellion that very day if they hadn’t faced a general of the Thracian’s skill. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

For Spartacus the story began on the day he marched his men from the Strait of Messina towards the Aspromonte Mountains. He had to feed his army, which meant going inland on raids and in pursuit of new supporters. This was herding country, known for its cows, sheep and swine. It was terrain for hunting hare and boar. As the rebels travelled north-eastwards from the strait over the highland Plains of Aspromonte they probably got some of what they wanted by charming slave herdsmen - and the rest they took. Wherever they went, the rebels ravaged the countryside.

Archaeology may provide evidence of the damage they did. About 25 miles north of Cape Caenys, in an olive grove near the Tyrrhenian Sea, a treasure recently turned up. There, buried and protected by two large slabs of stone, lay a clay lamp and a group of silver objects: pitchers, cups, a ladle, a teaspoon and a medallion with a bust of Medusa. A graffito may refer to the name of a wealthy Roman landowning family. The objects date to the period c. 100-75 BC and it is tempting to associate them with Spartacus. They were buried in an isolated spot in ancient times, far from the centre of the nearest town. Perhaps a landowner buried them to keep them from the rebels or a rebel might have buried them himself after looting them.

Having turned away from the coastal highway, Spartacus headed for another road located in the centre of Bruttium, about equidistant from the Tyrrhenian and Ionian coasts. Migrants over the centuries had travelled down this road from the Serre Mountains (modern name) to the north, and with good reason. The road takes advantage of a remarkable landscape, a ridge high up on the crest of the Aspromonte Mountains. From a distance, it looks like a tabletop in the clouds. As a traveller comes onto the plateau, it is as if they have stepped onto an isthmus. Today called the Dossone della Melìa, that is, the Melìa Ridge, it lies between 3,000 and 4,000 feet above sea level. The ancient highway ran along the ridge on a north-south axis. In the eighteenth century it was called the Via Grande or ‘Great Way’; the modern road follows its path. Adding to the ridge’s strategic importance, roads branched from it eastwards and westwards, via high, mountain passes (c. 3,000 feet high), to the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas.

The city of Locris sat at the eastern end of the lateral road, on the Ionian Sea. A former Greek colony, Locris had long been firmly in the Roman orbit. At the western end of the lateral road the Plain of Metauros (modern Gióia Tauro) stretched along the Tyrrhenian Sea. Exceptionally rich, the plain was known for its olives and grapevines. Crassus’s fortifications cut it off from Spartacus and his raiders.

Whoever controlled the Melìa Ridge controlled the crossroads of southernmost Italy. No wonder that Crassus chose to make his stand here. The sources say that the nature of the terrain[157] suggested to Crassus the plan to block off the peninsula. The Locrians might well have provided detailed intelligence about the lie of the land. The heart of Crassus’s fortifications stood on the Melìa Ridge near the modern highway 111, which runs on an east-west line about 50 miles north-east of Regium (by modern roads). Here the Italian peninsula is only about 35 miles wide from sea to sea. Plutarch writes that Crassus built his wall across the peninsula for a length of 300 stades[158], i.e. about 35 modern miles. That is an exaggeration; in fact, the main section of the Romans’ defensive works covered only half a mile. But Plutarch is right in implying that Crassus effectively blocked off the entire 35-mile width of the peninsula.

As Spartacus proceeded northwards, his scouts warned him of trouble ahead. The Thracian is said to have responded with scorn, no doubt sceptical that the Romans could stop him in what amounted to his natural habitat, the mountains. Many scholars seem to feel about the same. They doubt that the Romans made their stand here. Great engineers though they were, not even the Romans could have found it easy to build a 35-mile-long walled trench - through the mountains, no less. Besides, if Crassus had cut off Spartacus about 50 miles north-east of Regium, he would have left the rebels in control of a large territory to the south, about 1,000 square miles in size, roughly equivalent to the American state of Rhode Island or the English county of Hampshire. One might well ask, left to rule such a kingdom, why would Spartacus need to leave?

Some historians turn Crassus’s plan into a modest project: no 35-mile-long set of fortifications, no willingness to give up 1,000 square miles to the enemy. In their view, Crassus went toe to toe with Spartacus from the outset by marching ever southwards, practically up to Spartacus’s camp on the strait. The Romans fortified the ravines in the steep hills above the coast to cut the rebels off, no more than a mile or two away. The result was a short line of fortifications, no more than a mile or so long. While his men were negotiating with pirates and building rafts, Spartacus could see the Romans nearby, practically breathing down his neck.

But Spartacus is unlikely to have sat back and let Crassus corner him. In order to build his trap, Crassus would have had to work far from his enemy’s eyes, not under his nose. So, while Spartacus camped on the coast, Crassus’s men were dozens of miles away and 3,000 feet higher up in the hills.

Yes, an instant 35-mile-long defensive system strains credulity but only if we fail to take into account the lie of the land. In fact, most of the 35-mile width of the peninsula is impassable, so it required little fortification. East of the Melìa Ridge the land dips down towards the Ionian Sea via a series of rocky glens, while west of the ridge there lie vast and impenetrable gorges. The only places that could be easily travelled were the two coastal strips and the Melìa Ridge, the latter only about half a mile wide. Since the Romans occupied the coasts and since Spartacus took readily to the mountains, Crassus could reasonably expect to block him on the ridge.

The 1,000 square miles behind Spartacus were no gift. The territory in question is poor, mountainous and largely infertile, unlike Sicily and its abundance. Nor was it harvest season. The rebels would have found it difficult to live off this land for long. It is not surprising to read in the ancient sources that Spartacus’s men were beginning to run out of food, nor that one reason that Crassus decided to build the fortifications was precisely to deprive the enemy of supplies.

Archaeological evidence tends to support this scenario, although it doesn’t prove it. On the Melìa Ridge there are a series of old trenches and walls, and in the hills nearby are the ruins of three lead-smelting furnaces whose internal walls are sprinkled with lead oxide. Without scientific archaeological excavation, these sites cannot be securely dated. But they do fit the description in the sources of a system of trenches - while also casting well-founded doubt on Plutarch’s claim that the Romans cut a trench from sea to sea[160]. In addition, the ruins have been surveyed by a local historian in southern Italy, an amateur who, as often happens, knows the terrain better than the professionals. The opening paragraphs of this chapter follow his plausible if still unproven reconstruction.

The origin of place names is notoriously difficult to pin down, but, even so, several places in and around the Melìa Ridge have evocative names. A section of the ridge is known as the Plains of Marco, leading down into Marco’s Ridge (Marcus Licinius Crassus?); to the west there is a town of Scrofario (Crassus’s lieutenant, Scrofa?); to the east are the hamlets of Case Romano and Contrada Romano (‘Roman Houses’, ‘Roman Neighbourhood’) and a place called Torre lo schiavo (‘The Slave’s Tower’).

Perhaps the most intriguing place name is the heart of the Melìa Ridge, today covered by a huge forest of ferns with scattered groups of beech trees: Tonnara, that is, ‘Tuna Trap’. The slopes to the west of Tonnara are called Chiusa or Chiusa Grande (‘En closure’ or ‘Great Enclosure’). Tonnara refers to the traditional Mediterranean method of catching tuna by blocking their migration route with complex systems of fixed nets, which ancient fishermen regularly practised off the coasts of southern Italy and Sicily. Tonnara would make an appropriate name for the place where the insurgents were trapped on their trek northwards.

Spartacus had failed to break out and he had taken casualties, but he had no reason to despair. Far from being trapped, he might have reasoned that he now held Crassus locked in an encounter that could destroy either one. Help, he knew, was on the way. His cavalry had not reached him yet; no doubt they were still scouring the countryside for food and supporters. Once they arrived, the horses might provide the punch to allow him to break through. Meanwhile, if Spartacus could not survive indefinitely on the Melìa Ridge, neither could Crassus.

Spartacus’s main problem was logistical: he needed to feed his army. He would find little food on the ridge. In the summer it was good grazing ground for cattle and the humidity made it rich in mushrooms. It was winter, however, so the army depended on raids down in the valleys.

Crassus’s main problem was political. Rome wanted him to crush the enemy, but Crassus preferred strangulation instead, and that took time. Spartacus increased Roman frustration by prolonging the struggle. He distracted, exasperated and delayed the enemy. As the sources say, Spartacus ‘annoyed the men in the defensive works in many ways from place to place; he constantly fell upon them unawares and threw bundles of wood into the trenches that he had set on fire, which gave the Romans nasty and difficult work’[161] as they hustled to put out the fires.

It was effective psychological warfare while Spartacus waited for his cavalry, but the struggle in the mountains took a toll on his own men. It was the crowning misery of months of trouble since November, when Crassus had come onto the scene. Back in the summer, when they had defeated two consuls and the governor of Cisalpine Gaul, the insurgents could never have guessed that it would come to this. Even a few weeks earlier, although things were difficult, at least they faced the possibility of escaping to Sicily. Now they were fighting for their lives in the chilly clouds of Italy’s forgotten mountains. Conditions were miserable, food was in short supply, and it would be surprising if some men weren’t deserting. The Thracian decided to shock them out of their funk.

‘He crucified a Roman prisoner in the space between the two armies,’[162] the sources report, ‘thereby showing to his own men the sight of what they could expect if they did not win the victory. ’ There was nothing subtle about this gesture, but it was no exaggeration. The Romans did not plan to issue pardons. They regularly crucified runaway slaves. Besides, it was an age of massacres, from Sulla’s proscription of the wealthy and his execution of thousands of prisoners of war to Mithridates’ massacre of tens of thousands of Italian traders and tax collectors in Anatolia.

Apparently Spartacus made his point. His men showed no further signs of weakness, at least none that the Romans could see. If we believe one source, the Romans blinked next, but not on the Melìa Ridge. If anything, the sight of a Roman prisoner on the cross might have stiffened their will. Rather, it was back in Rome, in the Forum, where the Roman people let their frustration spill over[163]. Disappointed by the developing stalemate, they voted to recall Pompey from Spain where he was re-establishing order after the defeat of Sertorius.

Pompey had won the war against Sertorius in late 73 and early 72 BC. He never managed to defeat Sertorius in the field, but Pompey inflicted enough damage to cause a mutiny. Rivals emerged among the rebels and made contacts with the Romans, who encouraged their plans to assassinate the leader. Betrayed by his allies, Sertorius was murdered at a banquet in his own tent. It was the summer or autumn of 73 BC. The chief turncoat, Marcus Perperna, tried to continue the war against Rome, but some time in winter or spring 72 BC Pompey defeated him and had him executed. The rebellion in Spain was over.

The recall of Pompey was a popular act, voted in the Roman assembly. The Senate was no doubt less enthusiastic, because it meant that Pompey could march into Italy with his army intact, instead of dissolving it at the border, as commanders usually were required to do. Memories of Sulla gave a sinister tinge to Pompey’s advance. Spartacus must have worried the senators more.

No one, however, could have hated the recall of Pompey more than Crassus. He had wanted the war against Spartacus to build his own career, not Pompey’s. Now, he would have to share the credit for victory. Plutarch’s claim that Crassus himself wrote to the Senate[164] and asked that Pompey be recalled sounds preposterous, therefore, but it might just be true. Maybe Crassus’s agents in Rome had sniffed the change in the political winds. Maybe they recognized the inevitability of the people’s vote, and perhaps they advised Crassus to write to the Senate and thereby to seem to be the master of events.

Crassus’s letter is supposed to have asked for the recall of another general besides Pompey, Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus. Marcus, governor of Macedonia in 72 BC, had just led a successful campaign against the Bessi, a tough Thracian people once described as ‘worse than snow’[165]. Marcus Lucullus[166] is not to be confused with his brother Lucius Licinius Lucullus, who was busy at the time commanding Roman troops against Mithridates in Anatolia but is better known today for his love of gastronomy - hence the adjective Lucullan. By asking for two generals to help him, Crassus downgraded Pompey’s importance.

A Machiavellian plan, but Spartacus’s next move was even more Machiavellian. Apparently he got wind that Pompey was coming. It is not difficult to imagine Roman soldiers, lining the walls, hurling taunts at the enemy: Pompey was coming and they had better watch out. Pompey had a reputation: his nickname, earned in the Sullan era, was ‘the teenage butcher’[167]. His name might indeed have frightened some of the rebels, but Spartacus saw through it.

If Spartacus understood Pompey as a threat, he also recognized an opportunity. Pompey gave Crassus and Spartacus a common enemy. They both wanted to keep him out of the war, which would explain Spartacus’s next move: he offered Crassus a peace treaty. In particular, he offered something very Roman, which was to ask Rome to accept him into its fides[168]. Fides is an important Latin word with a rich set of meanings. It means ‘faith’ or ‘trust’ and, in this case, ‘protection’. By accepting someone into its fides, Rome accepted a set of mutual obligations. We might call it an alliance but the Romans would not have done so, since there was no legal contract between the two parties. Instead, moral ties bound them. The Romans considered the object of their fides to be a client, not an ally; they considered themselves to be his patron.

The ties of fides could prove binding indeed. The Second Punic War (218-201 BC), for instance, the worst war in Rome’s history, began because Hannibal attacked the Spanish city of Saguntum, which had no alliance with Rome, merely a relationship of fides. However seriously Rome took a fides relationship, the man who negotiated it, usually a general, regarded it with even more importance. He became the personal patron of Rome’s client, with whom he enjoyed especially intense ties. If Crassus had accepted Spartacus’s offer, he would have become the Thracian’s patron.

Doing so would have been repugnant. Rome regarded a request for fides as a formal act of surrender, but even so, it conferred a ‘most beautiful dignity’[169] on the client. By accepting the Thracian into his fides, Crassus would have conceded not only Spartacus’s dignity but also Spartacus’s right to settle his men somewhere in safety. That would never do. To grant such honour to runaway slaves and gladiators was out of the question. Rome wanted Spartacus’s head, not his handshake. Crassus disdainfully ignored the offer.

Yet, what magnificent gall on Spartacus’s part the proposal was! Far from conceding defeat, he asserted his right to respect. If nothing else this tactic might have been a morale booster for his men. If he was stuck in Crassus’s trap, Spartacus did not show it. In fact, he was about to demonstrate his ability to escape, because his cavalry had finally arrived. At a guess, it was now February.

Spartacus waited for a storm. He chose a night of snow and wind. An old hand like him would have guessed that in these conditions the Roman garrison would be ‘below strength and at that time off its guard’[170], as one ancient source says. The sources disagree as to just how he made the attack. One writer says that he used the cavalry to spearhead the charge through the ill-maintained defences. Another says that he filled in a small part of the trenches with earth, wood and branches for his army to cross. A third writer agrees that Spartacus filled in part of the trenches but with the corpses of prisoners whom he had executed and the carcasses of cattle. On another occasion, in AD 26[171], a Thracian army attacked a Roman camp by filling in its trenches with bushes, fences and dead bodies, so we can imagine Spartacus using a variety of objects.

The sources disagree as well about the degree of Spartacus’s success. One writer says that he managed to extricate only one-third of his army before the Romans closed the gap again. Another insists that Spartacus got his entire army through. An ingenious scholar has tried to square the circle by saying that once Spartacus got part of his army through, Crassus had to abandon the fortifications or else he would have been caught between two threats. Hence, the other two-thirds of the army was able to escape as well. In any case, the sources cite huge numbers of rebel slaves at large in the next phase of the war; they also mention Crassus’s fear that Spartacus might now march on Rome. This suggests that, one way or another, Spartacus got most of his men out of Crassus’s net.

Crassus had gambled and failed. Spartacus had paid a price in blood but he had broken free. It was a tremendous victory for the slaves and a bitter defeat for the Romans. There was nothing for the Romans now but to abandon the defences they had worked so hard to build and to return to the pursuit. Once again, Spartacus had forced a campaign of manoeuvre and mobility, at which he excelled.

Spartacus displayed his mastery of the art of tactics. Breaking through fixed defences is often difficult, particularly against defenders as good at fortifications as the Romans. Spartacus, therefore, had reason for pride after his breakout but not for false hope. With Crassus behind him and Pompey expected to appear, the rebels continued to enjoy poor strategic prospects. Now, as always, Spartacus had only one reasonable goal: leaving Italy. But how? The Alps had overwhelmed them and the sea had betrayed them. Spartacus might think of finding new and trustworthy pirates somewhere. He might even contemplate persuading the army to march back north and give the Alpine passes another try. But not now; surely his battered people needed rest. That reasoning, at any rate, might explain the statement in the sources that his goal now was Samnium[172].

Samnium is a region of the south-central Apennines, lying north and north-east of Capua. It was famously rugged and anti-Roman. Sulla’s army had destroyed Samnium’s elite military manpower at the Battle of the Colline Gate in 82 BC, so Samnium could offer Spartacus little support from its free population. With the help of local slaves, however, the rebels might have carved out a retreat in Samnium’s remote hills. Perhaps they had already found assistance there in their march northwards in spring 72 BC. Spartacus’s knowledge of Samnium might even have dated back to his days in the house of Vatia in Capua. So Spartacus led his army northwards through Bruttium and back into Lucania, heading for Samnium.

But it was not to be. The rebel army broke up again. As one source says, ‘they began to disagree among themselves.’[173] As before, the split had an ethnic component. A large contingent of Celts and Germans decided to go off on their own. Their leaders were named Castus and Cannicus (or Gannicus). The sources put the group at well over 30,000 men but the figures are, at best, educated guesses. It is not clear if all the Celts and Germans in the rebellion joined them, nor do we know if any other nationalities chose the splinter group.

In any case, we needn’t conclude that the split was just a matter of tribal politics. A reasonable person might have argued that Spartacus had failed and needed to be replaced; his Sicilian strategy, it could have been said, had wasted valuable time and lives. If he had saved the army on the Melìa Ridge, he had also brought it there in the first place. According to the sources, before he learned about the break-up, Crassus was afraid that Spartacus was leading his men towards Rome again. This may be just what Castus and Cannicus wanted to do. Dreaming of storming the enemy’s citadel, perhaps they scorned the idea of retreating to Samnium.

So, for the second time, the rebel army broke in two. Crassus surely took heart.