.jpg)
Recommended Reading
The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) (printed in The Tablet 2009)
In the spring of 70BC the road between Rome and Capua was lined with crucified slaves, the final remnant of Spartacus' rebellion. It was probably, as Barry Strauss says, "the largest mass crucifixion of the ancient world" and it marked the end of the consul Crassus' mopping up operation. Spartacus himself had already died fighting in a desperate bid to engage the consul in single combat in the battle of river Silarus. It was a death in the heroic mould - not the Christ-like martyrdom depicted so memorably in the Kubrick film. The Roman victory, though hard won, felt inglorious. In killing slaves the Romans were destroying their own property. Crassus had to make do with flutes instead of trumpets in his ovation - an inferior form of triumph. It was, as Strauss declares in a fit of rhetorical vehemence for which you can scarcely blame him, "the heyday of exploitation, ... the zenith of misery and the nadir of freedom". Spartacus was the ultimate underdog. The Romans viewed slaves and especially gladiators as such degraded riff raff that even when the runaways amounted to 100,000 strong and presented the greatest threat to Rome since Hannibal they were reluctant to dignify them with the name of Enemy or the activity of quashing them with the name of War.
Spartacus had served at one time as an auxiliary with the Roman army. He understood the importance of training and discipline. He avoided pitched battle and his success in guerrilla tactics turned a gang of 74 gladiators armed with skewers and cleavers into a formidable army. Thracians were great cavalrymen and renowned for lopping off heads at one stroke. The Celtic giants ran into battle yodelling horribly with their hair in chalky spikes. Scornful but surprised, the Romans ran like rabbits. The turning point in the three year war was the appointment of Crassus as consul. To stiffen resolve he reintroduced the ancient punishment of decimation, which involved one out of every batch of ten men being flogged to death by his colleagues - the best remedy for cowardice ever devised.
It’s refreshing, sometimes, to hate the Romans as they deserve; to forget Horace and hot baths and the Pax Romana and remember instead the heroes of the resistance who left only the barest outlines of themselves. The written sources of the Spartacus story are thin and mostly contemptuous. It is only in Plutarch, whom serious classicists often disregard but who sowed so many seeds in poetic minds, that we glimpse what inspired subsequent generations. He wrote that Spartacus “not only had a great spirit and great physical strength, but was, much more than one would expect from his condition, most intelligent and cultured, being more like a Greek than a Thracian.” Unusually for that time he tried to curb excesses of rape and pillage and shared the spoils of war equally among his men. No wonder Karl Marx pronounced him “the best character in ancient history” and a "better general than Garibaldi". In Strauss' view, “neither firebrand nor idealist, the real Spartacus wanted to mix hope with prudence.” He probably just wanted to get back home to Thrace. The great enigma is the retreat of the slave army back to southern Italy after they had set eyes on the Alps, beyond which lay freedom. Not all Spartacus’ charisma could deter his followers, apparently, from their short-sighted pursuit of plunder and revenge.
Besides drawing on every possible written source, Barry Strauss has performed wonders of detective work with other evidence, such as bones, flint heads, Pompeian frescos, and even place names of buried Calabrian hamlets. He has marched up and down hills, sniffed the herbs, and tasted the local mozzarella in his efforts to reconstruct the progress of the slaves up and down the peninsula. It makes for a vivid racy narrative with some fine evocations of the South Italian landscape. He is perhaps a little optimistic in claiming it is also a "love story". Spartacus’ wife, "a priestess of Dionysus" escaped with him, and no doubt helped to mark him as a man of destiny, but the "Thracian lady" chapter is inevitably disappointing. We press our feverish brows against a blacked-out window. Only a novelist, a musician or Hollywood can breathe life into these dry bones - and happily they did. But for a historian, it's heavy weather.
Noonie Minogue
10/4/09
