Crassus, faced with a threat like Pompey, appears to have reevaluated his strategy. Immense though his own prestige was, it remained half in the shadows. Now was the time to move into the full glare of public approbation. Crassus was no Cethegus. He knew perfectly well that power without glory would always be limited, especially in competition with a rival such as Pompey. He needed a smashing victory of his own, and fast. But where? And against whom? Suitable enemies were in frustratingly short supply.
And then suddenly, like a storm out of the blue, his opportunity arrived.
The Shadow of the Gladiator
That midsummer of 73 there was a breakout from a gladiatorial school in Campania. Like shellfish and luxury accommodation, such schools had become increasingly big business in the region. Gladiators were very much a home-grown speciality. Long before the arrival of Rome on the scene, tombs across Campania and Samnium had been the settings for duels between armed warriors, staged in honour of the spirits of the ever-thirsty dead. Even as the rituals of blood-spilling began to be commercialised by a growing Roman interest in them, gladiators continued to dress in the style of Samnite warriors, complete with brimmed helmets and ungainly, bobbing crests. As time went by, and Samnite independence faded into history, so the appearance of these fighters came to seem ever more exotic – like that of animals preserved from extinction in a zoo.
To the Romans themselves, the whiff of the foreign that clung to gladiatorial combat was always a crucial part of its appeal. As the Republic’s wars became ever more distant from Italy, so it was feared that the martial character of the people might start to fade. In 105 BC the consuls who laid on Rome’s first publicly sponsored games did so with the specific aim of giving the mob a taste of barbarian combat. This was why gladiators were never armed like legionaries, but always in the grotesque manner of the Republic’s enemies – if not Samnites, then Thracians or Gauls. Yet this spectacle of savagery, staged in the Forum, the very heart of Rome, inspired emotions of admiration as well as loathing and contempt. The upper classes might like to pretend that the games existed for the benefit of the plebs, but the example of a gladiator’s courage could affect anyone. ‘Even when they have been felled, let alone when they are still standing and fighting, they never disgrace themselves,’ enthused the sophisticated Cicero. ‘And suppose a gladiator has been brought to the ground, when do you ever see one twist his neck away after he has been ordered to extend it for the deathblow?’35 Here, in the gesture of a vanquished foreign slave, was the embodiment of everything that the Romans most admired.
Distorted though the reflection may have been, the gladiator held up a mirror to the watching crowd. He enabled the Romans to witness the consequence of their addiction to glory in its rawest, most extreme and most debased form. The difference between a senator campaigning for the consulship and a gladiator fighting for his life was only one of degree. A Roman was brought up to thrill to the spectacle of both. In a society such as the Republic, fascination with the violence of the arena came naturally. The more excessive its gore-spattered theatricality, the more the Romans found themselves craving it. But the carnage also served them as a deadly warning. Gladiatorial combat was evidence of what might happen once the spirit of competition was given free rein, once men started to fight each other not as Romans, bound by the restraints of custom and obligation, but as brutes. Blood on the sand, corpses dragged away on hooks. Should the frameworks of the Republic collapse, as they had almost done during the years of civil war, then such might be the fate of everyone, citizen as well as slave.
Here, then, was another reason why the training schools tended to be concentrated in Campania, at a safe distance from Rome. The Romans could recognise the savagery in the soul of the gladiator and feared to have it harboured it in their midst. In the summer of 73, even though the number on the run was well below a hundred, the Romans still sent a praetor to deal with them, along with an army of three thousand men. The fugitives having taken refuge on the slopes of Vesuvius, the Romans settled down to starve them out. Gladiators, however, knew all about lunging at an opponent’s weak spot. Finding the slopes of the volcano covered with wild vines, they wove ladders out of the tendrils, then descended a precipice and attacked the Romans in the rear. The camp was captured, the legionaries routed. The gladiators were immediately joined by further runaways. Leg irons were melted down and forged into swords. Wild horses were captured and trained, a cavalry unit formed. Spilling out across Campania, the slaves began to pillage a region only just starting to recover from Sulla’s depredations. Nola was besieged yet again, and looted. Two further Roman armies were routed. Another praetor’s camp was stormed. His fasces were captured, and even his horse.
What had begun as a makeshift guerrilla force was now forming itself into a huge and disciplined army of some 120,000 men. Credit for this belonged to the leader of the original break-out, a Thracian named Spartacus. Before his enslavement he had served the Romans as a mercenary, and combined the physique of a gladiator with shrewdness and sophistication. He recognised that if the rebels stayed in Italy, it would be only a matter of time before their outraged masters annihilated them, so in the spring of 72 he and his army began to head for the Alps. They were pursued by Gellius Publicola, the humorist whose joking at the expense of Athenian philosophers had so amused his friends years before, and who had just been elected to the consulship. Before he could engage with Spartacus, however, the slaves met with the Roman forces stationed to guard the northern frontier, and destroyed them. The route over the Alps, and to freedom, now stood wide open. But the slaves refused to take it. Instead, meeting and brushing aside Gellius’ army, they retraced their steps southwards, back towards the heartlands of their masters and everything they had previously been attempting to escape.
The Romans were perplexed by this volte face. One explanation they offered for it was overconfidence: ‘the slaves were stupid, and foolishly laid too much confidence in the huge numbers who were flocking to join their force’.36 In fact, it would have been hard for the rebels not to have been overwhelmed by the discovery of just how many other slaves there were in Italy. Human beings were not the least significant portion of the wealth to have been plundered by the Republic during its wars of conquest. The single market established by Roman supremacy had enabled captives to be moved around the Mediterranean as easily as any other form of merchandise, and the result had been a vast boom in the slave trade, a transplanting of populations without precedent in history. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, had been uprooted from their homelands and brought to the centre of the empire, there to toil for their new masters. Even the poorest citizen might own a slave. In rich households the labour glut obliged slave-owners to think up ever more exotic jobs for their purchases to specialise in, whether dusting portrait busts, writing invitations or attending to purple clothes. By their very nature, of course, such tasks were recherché. The work of most slaves was infinitely more crushing. This was particularly the case in the countryside, where conditions were at their worst. Gangs were bought wholesale, branded and shackled, then set to labour from dawn until dusk. At night they would be locked up in huge, crowded barracks. Not a shred of privacy or dignity was permitted them. They were fed the barest minimum required to keep them alive. Exhaustion was remedied by the whip, while insubordination would be handled by private contractors who specialised in the torture – and sometimes execution – of uppity slaves. The crippled or prematurely aged could expect to be cast aside, like diseased cattle or shattered wine jars. It hardly mattered to their masters whether they survived or starved. After all, as Roman agriculturalists liked to remind their readers, there was no point in wasting money on useless tools.