Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History. Hugh Williams

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       Spartacus 73 BC

      Spartacus was a Roman slave and gladiator who led a rebellion against his Roman masters. He won a number of victories before being killed in battle. Since the eighteenth century his name has been used to evoke the idea of freedom.

      In Paris in 1760 a five-act tragedy called Spartacus by the lawyer and playwright Bernard-Joseph Saurin was a great popular success when it appeared at the Comédie-Française. Exactly two hundred years later, a Hollywood movie with the same title starring Kirk Douglas brought the Spartacus story to the worldwide cinema audience. The French philosopher Voltaire described the Spartacus rebellion as ‘the only just war in history’ and Karl Marx chose him as one of his heroes, calling him ‘one of the best characters in the whole of ancient history’. Lenin also described him as ‘one of the most outstanding heroes of one of the very greatest slave insurrections’, while the Communist revolutionaries in Germany during and after the First World War took the name of Spartacus as their inspiration and called themselves ‘Spartacists’. From the time of his death in battle in 71 bc until the eighteenth century, Spartacus was little more than one of history’s footnotes. But as ideas of individual liberty took hold, the Western world looked back to ancient Rome. In Spartacus it found the symbol of freedom it was looking for.

       Slavery is as old as man.

      Slavery is as old as man. In the ancient world slaves were valued in the same way as domestic animals and treated as such. The Greek philosopher Aristotle said that both slaves and animals were necessary for providing help in daily life. ‘It is clear,’ he said, ‘that there are certain people who are free and certain who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just for them, to be slaves.’ There are frequent references to slaves and slavery in the Old Testament; and many pre-colonial African countries operated systems of slavery, as did China, the countries of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Different societies had different forms of slavery and different attitudes towards it as well. But all of them had one thing in common: slaves were human beings. They had a natural sense of freedom, and would always try to escape or rebel. Even though they might sometimes be well treated, the oppressive fact of their servitude was a constant burden. They knew that any freedoms and privileges they might enjoy could be taken away from them in an instant. They had no free will and no basic human rights.

      The only way in which any such system can be maintained is through brutality. The achievements of classical antiquity may be inspiring but they were built upon a society that depended on the violence and human indignities of slavery. This acceptance of something that today we find abhorrent was regarded in the ancient world as perfectly appropriate, although in the early sixth century AD the legal code of the Eastern Roman Emperor, Justinian, recognised this conflict between the institution of slavery and its human effects. Slavery, it said, was contrary to the law of nature but was sanctioned as a legal activity.

      Much later, when most European countries had in their own countries abandoned not only slavery, but its successor serfdom too, some of them adopted it again in order to support their colonial conquests. Once they had grown used to it, they found it almost impossible to relinquish it. Even the founding fathers of the American nation, some of the greatest apostles of liberty in the history of the modern world, could not face the issue of slavery when they devised the constitution of their new country. Their inability to do so contributed eventually to the American Civil War of the 1860s and the murderous battles that killed more than 600,000 people. In 1861, at the outset of the war, the State of Missouri gave its reasons for secession in a declaration. ‘Our position,’ it announced, ‘is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest in the world. Its labour supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilisation.’ No Greek philosopher, no Roman senator or emperor, could have put it better. In Brazil, where the Portuguese introduced slavery to maintain their sugar plantations, slavery was not banned altogether until 1888, even though the country had been independent for sixty-six years. Two years earlier, Thomas Hardy published one of his most famous novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which, in the opening scene, a man auctions his wife and daughter at a country fair. His description of the event was met with horror and incredulity in late Victorian Britain but Hardy claimed that rural records showed that such activities still occurred in the English county of Dorset where his story was set. Not slavery perhaps, but not far off. Once men inure themselves against the obvious injustices of slavery and defend its use for the economic advantages they believe it brings, humanity deserts them.

       In Spartacus, the Western world found the symbol of freedom it was lookingfor.

      The economy of the Roman Republic and early Empire depended on slavery. We do not know exactly how many slaves there were, but estimates suggest that they made up a third of a total population of about six million. The main way in which people became slaves was through capture in war although traders and pirates also played their part. Natural reproduction helped maintain the numbers: a child born to a female slave was automatically enslaved, no matter who the father might have been. Slavery knew no racial or national boundaries. Anyone could become one. Slave markets flourished in towns throughout the Roman world as people went shopping for the human labour they needed to look after their homes or work their fields. Slaves involved in heavy labour were rarely set free – that was a privilege afforded to the better educated, who worked in clerical or educational jobs. At no time was this system of forced labour questioned or criticised. It did not change with the advent of Christianity. The Romans inherited slavery from the Greeks and used it as an essential part of their organisational structure until the last days of the Empire.

      Spartacus came originally from Thrace, an area covering modern southern Bulgaria, northern Greece, and northern Turkey. According to the Greek historian Plutarch, writing long after the slave rebellion, Spartacus was brave and strong and also rather more intelligent than his fellow gladiators. He had seen service in the Roman army, was later sold as a prisoner and ended up in a school for gladiators in the prosperous southern town of Capua, not far from Naples. Gladiators were one of the sex symbols of ancient Rome. They were imprisoned in communal quarters, sometimes with their wives – Spartacus was married – and forced to take part in the violent spectacles that the Romans enjoyed. They lived in a world of constant uncertainty, thrust together with others they did not know and whose languages they may not have spoken. Their lives meant nothing, except to themselves. It is not surprising that there are recorded instances of gladiators committing suicide in order to escape from their life of bloody servitude. One man slit his throat in a lavatory before he was due to fight, another pretended to fall asleep as a cart carried him into the arena and broke his neck by thrusting his head between the spokes of its wheels.

      In 73 BC Spartacus and about seventy other gladiators escaped from their school and set up a camp on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius about twenty miles away. From here they began to carry out raids on nearby properties. News of their activity spread and they began to be joined by other runaway slaves, building what seems to have been a quickly improvised dash for freedom into a significant insurrection. A military force of about 3,000 men was sent from Rome to suppress the rebellion, so we can assume the number of slaves under Spartacus’s command must have grown to a considerable size. The Roman commander, Claudius Glaber, laid siege to the slaves’ stronghold, but they escaped by climbing down the mountainside on ropes made from vines. Using what were presumably makeshift weapons they then attacked the Romans from behind and defeated them. More slaves now joined Spartacus and his men. Many of them were agricultural workers and herdsmen who were used to living in open country and were fit and strong. The slaves acquired better weapons and horses, perhaps brought to them by the new recruits. Within a few months they had formed a powerful, well-managed army capable of challenging the might of Rome.

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