Atrocitology - Matthew White

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the Roman governor of Sicily, Publius Licinius Nerva, established a court to hear claims. He proved too efficient for his own good. After he had freed about eight hundred wrongly enslaved people, the local planters bullied him into dropping the issue. The governor backed down and told any plaintiffs who still had cases pending that they would have to remain slaves. They rose in rebellion instead.

      The rebel slave Salvius took control of the uprising under the new name Tryphon. By sheer numerical superiority, the slaves quickly took over most of the large country estates. Most towns shut their gates in time and remained Roman; however, the rebels kept food from reaching the towns, and famine followed.

      The governor had only unskilled militia at his disposal, and these were beaten outside the town of Morgantia. The town itself was saved from capture only when the Romans offered freedom to any town slaves who helped defend the walls.

      Needing more men, the governor came to an agreement with one of the bandit gangs that ranged freely in the mountains—a pardon for the bandits in exchange for crushing the slaves—but this too failed to break the rebellion.

      By now Sicily had two slave rebellions, and the two leaders, Salvius of the interior and Athenion in the west, agreed to rule jointly. Soon after, 14,000 Roman veterans arrived from the mainland. Although outnumbered, they beat the combined slave armies by superior discipline, but the Roman general did not press his advantage and the slaves escaped into the mountains. The general was replaced for his failure, but the next year, his replacement was himself replaced for doing no better. Finally a third general, the consul Manius Aquillius, wiped out the slave armies in two years of hard combat. Manius Aquillius also personally killed the enemy commander, Athenion, face-to-face in the middle of the battle—a rare feat in history.3

       Third Servile War (73–71 BCE)

      You’ve heard of this one.

      Spartacus was born in Thrace (now Bulgaria) and served in the Roman army until he deserted and turned to banditry. After being caught, he was sold to the gladiatorial school in Capua. There he was put through the customarily brutal training until he and about seventy of his fellow gladiators escaped into the countryside.

      His band quickly grew to a thousand escaped slaves and knocked back the first Roman legion sent to punish them. Then they camped in the natural fortress formed by the dormant volcanic crater of Vesuvius. When a new Roman legion cornered Spartacus in this hideout, his army slid down a sheer cliff face on ropes made from vines. Then Spartacus snuck around and attacked his besiegers. The Romans had unwisely camped in a narrow defile, and without either the time or space to properly deploy, they were badly bloodied by Spartacus and his army.

      Convinced now of the gravity of the uprising, the Roman Senate sent four legions to crush the rebels. Spartacus headed north, hoping to escape from Italy over the Alps, where his followers would split up to make their separate ways home; however, his army preferred to stay and loot Italy, so Spartacus turned south again and raped and murdered his way back down the peninsula. He beat every Roman contingent that went against him. With each victory, Spartacus gathered more weapons to arm his followers, who now numbered in the tens of thousands.

      Spartacus eventually arrived at the very tip of Italy, where he planned to cross over to Sicily and detach that island from the Roman Empire. He had negotiated with pirates to ferry his army in exchange for allowing them to use the Sicilian ports, but at the last minute the pirates backed out of the deal, stranding the gladiators on the mainland. Meanwhile, the Roman war effort came under the command of Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome, who financed a new army. Crassus built a massive wall across the toe of Italy, which his 32,000 troops occupied, to hold the 100,000 rebels in the south and starve them through the winter.

      Spartacus crucified a random Roman prisoner in front of his army to remind his men of the horrible fate that awaited them if they lost, and then they tried to break through the wall. This failed. He tried again, but only one-third of the rebels escaped with Spartacus. The rest were left behind to be leisurely wiped out by the Romans whenever they got around to it.

      His forces now seriously weakened, Spartacus was harried up and down southern Italy while his army was whittled away. A second Roman general, Pompey, arrived to steal the glory from his political enemy Crassus. Going into his last battle with little hope of success, Spartacus slit the throat of his horse, declaring that if he lost, he wouldn’t need a horse, and if he won, he’d have his pick of the finest horse in Rome.

      The gladiator army stood for one last battle and was swept off the field by Crassus, but Pompey took all of the credit by getting in the way of the rebels’ retreat and slaughtering them as they fled. Six thousand prisoners were nailed to crosses up and down the Appian Way, the highway connecting Rome with southeast Italy, to die slowly, their bodies rotting down to scattered bones as a warning to other disgruntled slaves. Spartacus probably wasn’t among them. He was never heard from again, but his body was likely among the tens of thousands piled up on the battlefield.4

       What’s Next?

      After dealing with all of the Slave Wars together, we will jump back a bit to catch up on what’s been happening elsewhere in the Roman Empire.

      For the next few chapters, our path will diverge from mainstream history. We have entered an era of Roman history when the wars themselves are less important than who’s fighting them. During the last few generations of the Roman Republic, ambitious Roman generals will kill hundreds of thousands of foreigners simply to raise their own public profile. Most modern historians of Rome follow the political ups and downs of these generals at Rome rather than their military ups and downs on the frontier. We, on the other hand, will be looking more at the hundreds of thousands of foreigners who were killed to make Rome great.

WAR OF THE ALLIES

      Death toll: 300,0001

      Rank: 96

      Type: ethnic civil war

      Broad dividing line: Romans vs. Italians

      Time frame: 91–88 BCE

      Location: Italy

      Traditional translation of the name: Social War (bellum sociale)

      Who usually gets the most blame: Romans

      Another damn: rebellion against Rome

      THE PEOPLES OF CENTRAL ITALY HAD FOUGHT AS ALLIES OF THE ROMANS IN their wars of conquest, supplying as much as half of the manpower in their armies, but all of the power and the glory of the conquests went to the City of Rome. Allied officers serving in Roman armies were subject to draconian Roman punishments without the right of appeal that Roman citizens had. Roman magistrates passing through allied towns exercised dictatorial authority, and only citizens of Rome had any say in Roman policy or protection from Roman power. So the Italian allies petitioned to be recognized as citizens. They found an ally in Marcus Livius Drusus, a Roman tribune who argued their case in city politics, but every time the vote came up, the Senate shot it down. When Drusus was assassinated as part of the cutthroat politics of the city, the Italian allies abandoned the cooperative approach and went to plan B. Eight tribes, notably the Samnites and Marsi, set up a rival republic (“Italia”) with its capital in the town of Corfinium, east of Rome.

      Rome immediately mobilized its army to put a stop to this. With enemies in all directions, the two Roman consuls in 90 BCE split the 150,000-man army and headed off separately. Publius Rutilius Lupus went north, Lucius Julius Caesar south. In the north, Rutilius bungled several battles and was eventually killed, but his adviser, the veteran general and alpha Roman of the era, Gaius

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