As it was with the rural peasants, the mass influx of slaves also played a dramatic role in the transformation of the urban population. Wealthy Romans purchased skilled artisans from across the Mediterranean and put them to work in the city manufacturing goods for sale. But unlike their less-skilled brethren, skilled slaves often only stayed slaves for a limited amount of time. Owners allowed a man to buy his way out of slavery and go into private business under the auspices of his former owner. These freedmen clients allowed senators to engage in the kind of commercial enterprises they were supposedly forbidden from participating in. Senators used their freedmen as legal fronts to operate apartment complexes and retail shopping stalls and engage in overseas trade. Freedmen also expedited the transformation of senatorial estates into commercial ventures, while allowing the senator’s hands to remain clean of the grubby business of business.13
Unlike the mostly rural residents of Italy, the plebs urbana lived entirely on wage labor. Work was principally in retail and trade as Rome became the great clearinghouse of imperial trade. The docks, warehouses, and shops teemed with life every single day. Slaves worked alongside wage laborers on large public works projects—aqueducts and roads—with new projects always started as old projects were completed. Since the city of Rome was a strictly cash economy and all food, lodgings, and fuel required coins, there was never desperate poverty. If you did not have money to live you either departed for the countryside or died in a back alley. Poverty was fatal.14
Politically, the plebs urbana hadn’t had a collective political identity since the now ancient Conflict of the Orders. Though the democratic Assemblies operated through the thirty-five tribes, all citizens domiciled in Rome were lumped together into just four of those tribes. So though they often outnumbered all other voters at an Assembly, they still only wielded four collective votes. But though their voting influence was limited, their very presence in the city made them a latent force in Roman politics. As the crisis over the Lex Agraria had shown, physically controlling the Assembly space was now a critical part of winning political battles. The permanent presence of the plebs urbana meant that however muted their electoral voices might be, their actual voices could be heard loud and clear, as Scipio Aemilianus discovered when they heckled him for his intemperate remarks against Tiberius Gracchus.15
As the plebs urbana again found their political voice, they discovered they could demand aspiring politicians cater to their particular needs. Land redistribution did not particularly appeal to them—they were traders, artisans, and merchants, not farmers. But what did appeal to them was the promise of a stable supply of cheap grain. Since the plebs urbana could not feed themselves, they relied on the surrounding countryside to produce the grain that kept them alive. As every budding Roman politician would learn, what the plebs urbana really wanted was food security. They were all acutely aware that the supply was susceptible to sudden shortages caused by the weather, transportation mishaps, and crop failures. Or, for example, a massive slave revolt in Sicily.16
IN THE TIME of the Gracchi, the grain that fed Rome mostly came from Sicily. Ceded by the Carthaginians in 241, Sicily was the first overseas province acquired by Rome. The incredibly fertile island was an endless bounty waiting to be harvested. Roman owners flooded in, bringing with them slaves “driven in droves like so many herds of cattle.” The working conditions on the Sicilian estates were atrocious as slaves were “vilely beaten and scourged beyond all reason.” They were also so ill-provided-for that they took up banditry to survive, preying on native Sicilians who, like their cousins in Italy, were being squeezed by growing slave estates. Complaints rained in, but there were only a handful of junior Roman magistrates to administer the whole island—as long as the profits made everyone rich, there was little reason to reform the cruel system.17
Without hope, the Sicilian slaves began plotting rebellion. The man who emerged as the principal leader was a Syrian named Eunus. Eunus arrived in Sicily as a talkative and charismatic con artist. Claiming to be a prophet and fire-breather, he charmed his masters with tales that one day he would be their king. In 135, a group of slaves approached him secretly. They wanted to kill their masters and asked the prophet Eunus for advice. Eunus said the gods favored their plot, and soon four hundred armed men put themselves under Eunus’s command. That night they attacked the city of Enna. Contrary to his jovial promises, Eunus was not benevolent in victory. He rounded up the inhabitants of Enna, separated out skilled blacksmiths, and executed the rest. When word of the massacre spread it sparked a general uprising. Within weeks, ten thousand slaves had joined the rebellion. Eunus then fulfilled his own prophecy. Placing a stolen diadem on his head, he proclaimed himself King Antiochus of Sicily.18
In the wake of Eunus’s revolt, a second revolt erupted on the other side of the island just a few weeks later. A Cilician slave named Cleon heard about Eunus’s rebellion and launched his own insurrection, attracting five thousand men to his banner. Cleon’s army then overran the southern port of Agrigentum and sacked it. There was some hope among the beleaguered Sicilians that the two slave armies would come into conflict and destroy each other—and were horrified when Cleon instead bent his knee to “King Antiochus of Sicily.” Combined, the slave armies were now unbeatable.19
Inside the Senate, the assumption was that this revolt would soon peter out, but every new batch of reinforcements sent to Sicily never came back. The Senate dispatched a praetor to bring the province back under control, and when he failed they had to send another the following year. But by now the slaves numbered some two hundred thousand and no Roman force appeared capable of defeating them. And it wasn’t just the slaves. Many of the poor Sicilian peasants had taken to raiding wealthy estates out of a mix of greed, desperation, and revenge. Anarchy reigned.20
So as the Senate dealt with the quagmire in Spain, and the sudden Gracchan Revolution, they also dealt with this ongoing Sicilian slave revolt. The Senate was frustrated by the whole affair, and were aware that out in the streets of Rome the disruption to the food supply was making the plebs urbana angry. With the rebellion still ongoing in the summer of 132—fully three years since the initial revolt—the Senate dispatched consul Publius Rupilius to Sicily. Having wrapped up his work on the anti-Gracchan tribunal, Rupilius was now off to crush yet another seditious insurrection.21
If Rupilius succeeded where other Roman commanders had failed, it was thanks to the devastation of Sicily. The insurrectionary slaves had naturally cast aside their plows, so the farms and pastures of the island went uncultivated. By the time Rupilius arrived in 132, the great breadbasket of Rome was barren. With conditions so grim, it was not hard for Rupilius to find desperate souls inside each slave-held city to open the gates in exchange for food and leniency. When the Romans arrived at Enna, Cleon led a slave army out into the field, but Cleon himself was killed in the subsequent battle and his army defeated. Rupilius then found a willing traitor to open the gates of Enna and King Antiochus fled out the back door. The King was found hiding in a cave a few days later with “his cook, his barber, the man who rubbed him in the bath and the jester at his banquets.” Rupilius tossed King Antiochus in a cell where he was consumed by lice and died. After three years, what later became known as the First Servile War was over.22