To the Romans, a gladiator was not just an athlete or even a warrior: he was holy. And he was sexy. Whenever they went to the games the Romans took a walk on the wild side. The beasts were supposed to growl back at them; it made a better show. But Spartacus did more than growl. Like many a pro athlete, Spartacus was feared for the same reason he was adored: he was dangerous. Yet once he left the arena, a gladiator seemed almost harmless, even if he had taken up arms in revolt.
If this
seems hard to understand, think of Spartacus as an athlete who rejected
the love of his fans. We can forgive an athlete who misbehaves but not
one who snubs us. Once Spartacus and his seventy-three companions left
their barracks, they were no longer gladiators but runaway gladiators.
In Roman eyes, they had shrunk from a fight, hence they were moral lepers:cowardly,
effeminate, and degenerate. They had sunk from the glory of the arena
to the shame of banditry. Spartacus could
have been the pride of Rome; instead, it seemed, he was back where he
began, a barbarian. From the Roman point of view, his men were not soldiers
but runaway slaves, fugitivi. No wonderthe Senate had little fear of him—at
first.
Two other things are likely to have kept the Romans from making a bigger push against Spartacus: ambition and greed. Glory was the oxygen of Roman politics but there was little to be won in a police action against criminals. A slave war, says one Roman, “had a humble and unworthy name.” Plunder might have served as consolation, but that was out of the question. All Italians south of the Po Valley were Roman citizens. Roman soldiers couldn’t plunder their own country.
Because they were responding to a tumultus (emergency), the Romans did not hold an ordinary levy of troops on the Campus Martius (Field of Mars) outside the city. Instead they probably instructed Glaber to do what Roman commanders often did in an emergency: to recruit troops on the road, as he marched south.
Glaber’s troops were probably not the best that Rome had, not by a long shot. Those were already fighting in Spain and in the East, where there were plenty of spoils and laurels to be won and top generals to lead the men. Italy had not been stripped of its good soldiers: Sulla’s veterans, for example, represented a source of experienced troops. Sullan veterans were to be found at Pompeii as well as at Abella, and outside Capua, among other places. But they were not likely to sign up to help some nobody slap a few slaves back into irons. Glaber had to take what he could get.
So Glaber’s army was probably no more than a militia. And yet no Roman army on the march was easily forgotten. The flash of mail armor and bronze or iron helmets as a long line of soldiers went by captured the eye. The clatter of the supply carts and the lowing of the oxen that drew them filled the air. And then there were the individual soldiers.
A standard-bearer, surrounded by trumpeters, carried the legion’s symbol, a silver eagle on a standard (that is, shaft). Every century (a unit of 100 men originally, but by the Late Republic a unit of eighty men) also had its own standard, a spear decorated with disks and wreaths, carried by a standard-bearer in colorful dress: his helmet was decorated with an animal skin.
Meanwhile, six men called lictors marched in front of the praetor. Lictors served as attendants to all Rome’s high-ranking officials. They were strong men; each carried the fasces, a bundle of rods tied with ribbons and symbolizing the power to command. Outside the city limits of Rome, the fasces were wrapped around an ax, signifying the power of life and death.
And so they marched, the praetor and his men, following the rebels to Vesuvius. They made camp, probably at the foot of the mountain. Glaber decided not to attack the enemy, who was on the summit. This may seem overly cautious, but the terrain favored the defenders. Only one road led up the mountain and it was too rough and narrow to deploy a legion. It was no place to test his new army. Instead Glaber decided to seal in the enemy and starve him out. He posted guards on the road to prevent a breakout.
It was not an imaginative or a self-confident plan but it might have worked, as long as the Romans had kept their guard up. Instead they handed the initiative to Spartacus. He decided to attack the Roman camp. Like any commander, Spartacus drew on his experience to put together a plan of battle. Rich and complex, that experience would serve him well, both at Vesuvius and later. next