W038 Spartacus and the Third Servile War

A breakout from a gladiatorial establishment at Capua developed into a revolt capable of defeating Roman forces and moving through much of Italy. Spartacus, Crixus and other leaders commanded groups whose size, composition and aims changed. The surviving elite accounts do not provide direct access to a single agreed rebel program.

Crassus rebuilt the Roman military response and sought to contain the rebels in the south. The eventual destruction of the main forces was followed by exemplary mass punishment. Pompey's return from Spain allowed him to claim a share in finishing the war, feeding the political competition between Roman commanders.

Command, forces and military problem

Extended campaign study

The account below develops the operations and their interpretation. Reported numbers and reconstructed tactical details retain the uncertainties described in the dossier.

Spartacus (73–71 BC)

The servile war that terrified Italy while Sertorius died in Spain began with perhaps seventy men and kitchen knives. In 73 BC a group of gladiators broke out of the training-school of Lentulus Batiatus at Capua — Thracians, Celts, and Germans of the categories the schools bought in bulk — seized a wagonload of gladiatorial weapons on the road, and fortified themselves on Vesuvius, in the crater country then wild and unregarded.

Their elected leaders were the Celts Crixus and Oenomaus and the Thracian Spartacus — a man, the sources agree across their hostility, of un-slavelike stamp: he had served Rome as an auxiliary before enslavement, and Plutarch adds both the Greek judgment that he was more Hellene than his fortune and the wife's prophecy, the serpent found coiled about his sleeping face and read as a sign of great and terrible power. The first force sent against the mountain — three thousand hasty levies under the praetor Claudius Glaber, who sealed the single descending path and proposed to starve the runaways out — was destroyed by the war's signature stroke: the gladiators plaited ladders from the wild vines of the crater, descended the sheer face Glaber had not troubled to watch, and took the siege camp from behind at night.

The campaign of 72 broke the Republic's complacency in a single season. The insurgent leadership split along its permanent fault: Crixus with the Celto-Germanic contingent, intent on plunder and Italy, was caught and destroyed at Monte Gargano by the consul Gellius; Spartacus, whose consistent strategy — the sources are unanimous on the intent while marveling at it — was escape northward over the Alps to disperse his people to their homelands, defeated first Lentulus's consular army in the Apennines, then Gellius's, then the proconsul of Cisalpine Gaul at Mutina with ten fresh legions' worth of provincial troops; and at some point in this sequence he honored Crixus's shade with funeral games in the Roman manner, compelling three hundred Roman prisoners to fight as gladiators about the pyre — the war's mirror held up to its makers. Rome, both consuls beaten in one year, suspended the consular command and conferred the war by extraordinary appointment on Marcus Licinius Crassus, praetorian, proscription-rich, and possessed of the one qualification the emergency wanted: he would spend. He raised six new legions on his own credit to add to the consular remnants; and he opened his command by reviving, upon the first cohorts that broke and ran, the punishment of decimation — the beaten unit divided into tens, the lots drawn, the tenth man clubbed to death by his nine messmates before the assembled army — administered, Appian's figure, upon some four thousand men, with the result the tradition records in a sentence: Crassus's soldiers came to fear their general more than the enemy.

The war's last winter compressed into the toe of Italy. Spartacus, marching south with a design on Sicily — where the embers of the previous servile wars still smoked, and whose seizure would have transformed the rebellion — was cheated by the Cilician pirates who took his fee for a crossing and sailed; and Crassus sealed the Bregantine peninsula behind him with the engineering stroke of the war: a ditch and wall across the entire isthmus, sea to sea — three hundred stadia, some thirty-five Roman miles, fifteen feet of depth and breadth with the rampart above — garrisoned along its length. The blockade winter starved the servile army until, in a night of snow and storm, Spartacus filled a section of the ditch with earth, brush, and — Appian adds — the bodies of prisoners and cattle, and threw a third of his force across before the line could close; the remainder followed in the confusion, and the war was loose again in Lucania. But it was now a pursuit. Rome, with the fine impartiality of its ruling class toward its commanders, had summoned Pompey home from Spain and Lucullus's brother from Macedonia to finish the war Crassus had paid for — news that drove both armies, hunter and hunted alike, toward immediate decision: the insurgent detachment under Castus and Cannicus was annihilated at Cantenna in the war's second-bloodiest field (the eagle-standards and fasces of five defeated Roman armies were recovered in their camp); and in the spring of 71, on the upper Silarus, Spartacus turned his last army about and gave Crassus the pitched battle both required. Before it, brought his horse, he killed it before the standards — saying, in the tradition's unimprovable sentence, that if he won he would have his pick of horses from the enemy, and if he lost he would need none — and died attempting to cut his way to Crassus himself, taking two centurions with him, unyielding, in Appian's words, and surrounded; his body was never identified among the field's tens of thousands. Crassus crucified six thousand prisoners along the Via Appia from Capua to the gates of Rome, one cross every forty yards or so of the hundred and twenty miles, and left them; and Pompey, arriving from Spain in time to destroy five thousand fugitives of the breakout in the north, wrote to the Senate the letter Crassus never forgave — that Crassus had beaten the slaves in open battle, but he, Pompey, had ended the war by the roots. The two rivals, each declining to disband his army, camped outside the city through the elections and took the joint consulship of 70 BC as the price of demobilization — and spent it, these two heirs of Sulla, dismantling their patron's constitution: the tribunate restored to full power, the censorship revived to purge the Senate, the juries split three ways among the orders.

Outcome and critical assessment

Result and caution: the revolt was suppressed, with immense human cost. The rebels' exact intended destination, internal divisions and reasons for changes of direction remain disputed. This was not a general campaign to abolish slavery across the Roman world, nor should the absence of such a surviving program diminish the significance of resistance to enslavement.

Historical record: IR-V, chapter 5; Appian, Civil Wars 1; Plutarch, Crassus.