Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (39 page)

To turn to slave wars is to face two different phenomena: rebellions

by chattel slaves and rebellions by communal serfs. Communal serfs in

revolt had the advantage of common nationality and local roots going

back generations. They were more likely than chattel slaves to have

served in the masters’ army or navy, usually only as servants or rowers

but sometimes as soldiers.2 Representing as they did a potential sword

in the masters’ side, serfs had a chance of attracting support from the

masters’ enemies abroad. As rebels, chattel slaves had all the corre-

sponding disadvantages: heterogeneity, alienation, relative lack of mili-

tary experience, and the unlikelihood of gaining foreign aid. They did,

however, enjoy one big advantage over communal serfs: surprise. The

rarity of revolts by chattel slaves sometimes lulled masters into letting

down their guard. The lower status of chattel slaves probably tended

to help them as well, because it left the masters unenthusiastic about

waging war against so “unworthy” and ostensibly so weak an enemy.

Revolts by communal serfs were not unusual in classical Greece. Ac-

cording to Aristotle, the
penestai
(communal slaves) of Thessaly and

Sparta’s helots often revolted.3 We know little about Thessaly and a

fair amount about Sparta. Various ancient writers detail the security

Slave Wars of Greece and Rome 187

measures that Sparta took against helot revolt, from locking their doors

(and taking off their shield straps while on campaign) to declaring war

against the helots annually to unleashing eighteen- to twenty-year-old

Spartan military trainees in helot country. It was Messenia’s rather than

Laconia’s helots who represented the major threat. They rose around

670 BC in a shadowy revolt known as the Second Messenian War (the

first Messenian War, ca. 735 BC, marks the Spartan conquest of Mes-

senia) and in a slightly better documented uprising known as the Third

Messenian War from around 464 to 455 BC.4

The Third Messenian War ended in ca. 455, when Sparta granted the

rebels a safe-conduct to leave their stronghold; Athens, Sparta’s rival,

settled them in the city of Naupactus on the northern shore of the Co-

rinthian Gulf, a strategic naval base. In 425 Athens established a fort at

Pylos, on the coast of Messenia, and used Messenians from Naupactus

to raid the territory and encourage helot escapees. In 424 and 413 Ath-

ens set up other bases in Spartan territory in order to encourage helot

desertion. Full freedom for the Messenian helots awaited the invasion

of the Peloponnesus by the Boeotian army in 369, which liberated Mes-

senia and reestablished Messene as the capital of an independent city-

state after roughly 350 years of Spartan control.

Compared to revolts by communal serfs, revolts by chattel slaves

were rare. Greek history affords only three certain examples of such

revolts: one on the island of Chios, led by a certain Drimacus, prob-

ably in the third century BC; another in Athens, Delos, and elsewhere

around 135–134 BC; and a third in Athens around 104–100 BC. Much more

common in Greek history was the phenomenon of states or rebels who

offered freedom to chattel slaves in exchange for their support, much

as Athens offered freedom to Spartan helots during the Peloponnesian

War. During the last years of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC.), for

instance, more than 20,000 Athenian slaves escaped to the Pelopon-

nesian fort at Decelea in the hills on Athens’s northern border.5 The

Spartans, who set up the fort, were only taking revenge for Athenian

assistance to rebellion on the part of Sparta’s Messenian helots. By

the way, some of the Athenian runaways seem to have gone from the

frying pan to the fire, since apparently some of them were “bought

cheaply” by Thebans across the border from Athens.6

188 Strauss

Other examples of rebels or states that promised to free slaves in-

clude what seems to have been an attempted coup d’état by one

Sosistratus in Syracuse in 415–413 BC; offers of freedom to slaves in anti-

Roman wars by Syracuse in 214, by the Achaean League in 146, and by

Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus in 86 and again in 65 BC; a nationalist

revolt against Rome in Macedon by Andriscus in 149–148 BC that seems

to have had some slave support; and a similar uprising in Anatolia by

Aristonicus of Pergamum in 133–129 BC.

To turn to Roman history, the sources for revolts by chattel slaves

are somewhat better, although still hardly rich. We hear of uprisings

from the earliest days of the republic, but the first reliable report is

of a slave rebellion in central Italy in 198 BC, a revolt of enslaved Car-

thaginian prisoners of war, captured during the recently ended Second

Punic War (218–201 BC). Several other slave insurrections in southern

Italy (and in one case, central Italy) in the 180s and around 104 BC are

recorded. Several of these were revolts of herdsmen, in some cases

possibly inspired by ecstatic religious rituals. Some of these incidents

involved thousands of rebels, but they were dwarfed by what followed.

Huge slave insurrections, each involving many tens of thousands of

rebels, broke out first in Sicily and then in Italy between 140 and 70 BC.

They were the First and Second Sicilian Slave Wars (respectively 135–132

and 104–100 BC) and Spartacus’s rebellion (73–71 BC). These were the

greatest slave wars of the ancient world; indeed, they rank among the

major slave revolts of history. They took place within a space of sev-

enty years and within a relatively small geographic area—even smaller,

if one considers that Spartacus tried to spread his revolt from southern

Italy to Sicily. Spaced about twenty to thirty years apart, they repre-

sented roughly three generations of revolt.7

Exaggerated in their significance by Marxist scholars and dwarfed

in most “bourgeois” accounts of the late republic by other events, the

great Roman slave wars were genuinely important. Rome’s failure to

suppress the first Sicilian revolt contributed to the sense of military

crisis that spurred the reforms of Tiberius Gracchus, which in turn

began the Roman revolution.8 Rome’s inability to stop Spartacus ad-

vanced the careers of the career generals who represented the greatest

threat to the republic. By rendering the countryside unsafe, rebel slaves

Slave Wars of Greece and Rome 189

contributed to the sense of insecurity that made Romans ready to turn

the state over to the Caesars.

Neither the timing nor the location of the great slave wars was an

accident. Between 300 and 100 BC, a new slave economy emerged in

Roman Italy and Sicily. Fueled by its military conquests around the

Mediterranean, Rome flooded Italy with nonfree labor. By the first

century BC there were an estimated 1–1.5 million slaves on the penin-

sula, constituting perhaps about 20 percent of the people of Italy. A

large percentage of those slaves had been taken from freedom. The

sources of slaves were Roman commanders, local entrepreneurs and

slave traders, and pirates. The last group proliferated in the eastern

Mediterranean around 100 BC and entered slave trading in a big way.

Just as criminal cartels today move drugs across international boundar-

ies, pirates moved people—innocent victims of kidnapping who were

sold as slaves.

Although some of Rome’s slaves engaged in urban pursuits, most

were employed in agriculture, where large-scale enterprises predomi-

nated. The two main units of agricultural production were farms and

ranches, both staffed by slaves. Sicily and southern Italy, especially

Campania, were the main centers of slave agriculture. The countryside

in these regions teemed with slaves.

Rome inadvertently set the stage for rebellion by breaking all the

rules. It combined mass exploitation with scant attention to security.

Although ancient writers from Plato and Aristotle to Varro and Colu-

mella warned against concentrating slaves of the same nationality, the

Romans dumped huge numbers of slaves from the eastern Mediter-

ranean together. Although they came from various countries, most of

them spoke a common language, Greek. The Romans also permitted

large concentrations of Thracians and Celts, for example, in the gladi-

atorial barracks where Spartacus’s revolt was hatched. Spartacus was

Thracian and his two co-leaders, Crixus and Oenomaus, were Celts.

By the same token, the policing of slaves was inadequate. Public

police forces were primitive or nonexistent. Farm slaves faced a fairly

strict security regimen of chains and barracks, but things were differ-

ent on the ranches. Herders of cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats were left

free to drive their herds from pasture to pasture. They moved from the

190 Strauss

highlands in the summer to the plains in the winter. Their knowledge

of the backcountry made them experts at hiding from the authorities.

Because of the danger of bandits, bears, and boars, slave herdsmen

were allowed to carry arms. Many slaves knew how to use weapons

well, since many were prisoners of war who had been trained in for-

eign armies. Spartacus, for example, had served as an auxiliary in the

Roman army (that is, he fought in an allied unit, probably as a cavalry-

man) before he somehow ran afoul of the law and ended up as a slave.

No doubt other slaves had gained experience as speakers or organizers

in public life during their experience of freedom. Slave bailiffs too had

organizational skills, and some of them joined the rebels. Athenion,

for example, one of the leaders of the Second Sicilian Revolt, was an

ex-bailiff.

Left to find their own food for themselves, some Sicilian slave herds-

men formed gangs and turned to banditry. By concentrating slaves of

the same nationality or language, many of them former soldiers, and

giving them relative freedom and even weapons, as well as access to

mountain hideaways, Rome was playing with fire.

Readers might anticipate finding antislavery ideology as fueling an-

cient slave revolts. Modern movements such as abolitionism and the

earlier struggle to abolish the slave trade, as well as the American Civil

War and, above all, the Marxist appropriation of Spartacus as a symbol

of proletarian revolution, have all created this expectation. As several

scholars have pointed out, however, that ideology is lacking in the case

of almost all ancient slave revolts. We hear of a few people who op-

posed slavery in principle. They include Greek philosophers (only one

of whom, the little-known Alcidamas, is named by the sources), per-

haps two Jewish fringe groups, at least one Christian Church father,

Gregory of Nyssa, and perhaps certain Christian heretical groups.

Other wise, we know of no doctrine of abolitionism, either among free

citizens or among slaves.9

Naturally, rebel slaves sought their freedom. The slaves who re-

belled in the First Sicilian War complained of harsh and humiliating

treatment. The Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of the revolt were the

slave owners Damophilus of Enna and his wife Metallis (or Megallis) of

Enna, whose cruel punishments fueled the outbreak of slave violence.

Slave Wars of Greece and Rome 191

Damophilus owned huge cattle ranches and was known for his vulgar

display of his wealth; Metallis had a reputation for abusing her maids

with great brutality. When once approached by naked slaves in need

of clothes, Damophilus told them to steal cloaks from travelers, a “let-

them-eat-cake” remark if there ever was one.10 When the revolution

came, husband and wife were captured in the countryside and dragged

bound and chained to Enna, where they were displayed before a crowd

in the theater. Damophilos was killed there, without trial; Metallis

was tortured by her female slaves and thrown off a cliff. Their teenage

daughter, however, was spared because she had always treated slaves

humanely.

If the first war arose from excessive punishment, the Second Sicilian

Slave War emerged from false hope incited by the Romans. In response

to a complaint by an important ally in Anatolia, the Romans decided to

offer freedom to kidnapped slaves. The first hearings by the governor in

Sicily liberated several hundred slaves, but then rich Sicilian slave own-

ers used their influence to stop the process. Inadvertently, they spurred

another major servile insurrection.

To turn to another example, when Spartacus and his followers in

73 BC broke out of the gladiators’ barracks where they were enslaved,

they did so, according to one author, having decided “to run a risk for

freedom instead of being on display for spectators.”11 Liberty and dig-

nity motivated them, according to this account, but we hear nothing

of a more general desire to free all slaves. Nor, it seems, did they try.