The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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The Insurrection Takes Shape
The inroads of this little band, numbering at first only seventy-four
persons, but rapidly swelling by concourse from the surrounding
country, soon became so troublesome to the inhabitants
of the rich region of Campania, that these, after having vainly
attempted themselves to repel them, sought help against them
from Rome. A division of 3000 men hurriedly collected appeared
under the leadership of Clodius Glaber, and occupied the approaches
to Vesuvius with the view of starving out the slaves.
But the brigands in spite of their small number and their
defective armament had the boldness to scramble down steep declivities
and to fall upon the Roman posts; and when the wretched militia saw
the little band of desperadoes unexpectedly assail them, they took
to their heels and fled on all sides. This first success procured
for the robbers arms and increased accessions to their ranks.
Although even now a great portion of them carried nothing
but pointed clubs, the new and stronger division of the militia--
two legions under the praetor Publius Varinius--which advanced
from Rome into Campania, found them encamped almost like a regular army
in the plain. Varinius had a difficult position. His militia,
compelled to bivouac opposite the enemy, were severely weakened
by the damp autumn weather and the diseases which it engendered;
and, worse than the epidemics, cowardice and insubordination thinned
the ranks. At the very outset one of his divisions broke up entirely,
so that the fugitives did not fall back on the main corps, but went
straight home. Thereupon, when the order was given to advance
against the enemy's entrenchments and attack them, the greater
portion of the troops refused to comply with it. Nevertheless
Varinius set out with those who kept their ground against
the robber-band; but it was no longer to be found where he sought it.
It had broken up in the deepest silence and had turned to the south
towards Picentia (Vicenza near Amain), where Varinius overtook it
indeed, but could not prevent it from retiring over the Silarus
into the interior of Lucania, the chosen land of shepherds and robbers.
Varinius followed thither, and there at length the despised enemy
arrayed themselves for battle. All the circumstances
under which the combat took place were to the disadvantage
of the Romans: the soldiers, vehemently as they had demanded
battle a little before, fought ill; Varinius was completely
vanquished; his horse and the insignia of his official
dignity fell with the Roman camp itself into the enemy's hand.
The south-Italian slaves, especially the brave half-savage herdsmen,
flocked in crowds to the banner of the deliverers who had
so unexpectedly appeared; according to the most moderate estimates
the number of armed insurgents rose to 40,000 men. Campania,
just evacuated, was speedily reoccupied, and the Roman corps which was
left behind there under Gaius Thoranius, the quaestor of Varinius,
was broken and destroyed. In the whole south and south-west
of Italy the open country was in the hands of the victorious bandit-
chiefs; even considerable towns, such as Consentia in the Bruttian
country, Thurii and Metapontum in Lucania, Nola and Nuceria
in Campania, were stormed by them, and suffered all the atrocities
which victorious barbarians could inflict on defenceless civilized
men, and unshackled slaves on their former masters. That a conflict
like this should be altogether abnormal and more a massacre
than a war, was unhappily a matter of course: the masters
duly crucified every captured slave; the slaves naturally killed
their prisoners also, or with still more sarcastic retaliation
even compelled their Roman captives to slaughter each other
in gladiatorial sport; as was subsequently done with three hundred
of them at the obsequies of a robber-captain who had fallen in combat.
Great Victories of Spartacus
In Rome people were with reason apprehensive as to the destructive
conflagration which was daily spreading. It was resolved next year
(682) to send both consuls against the formidable leaders
of the gang. The praetor Quintus Arrius, a lieutenant of the consul
Lucius Gellius, actually succeeded in seizing and destroying
at Mount Garganus in Apulia the Celtic band, which under Crixus
had separated from the mass of the robber-army and was levying
contributions at its own hand. But Spartacus achieved
all the more brilliant victories in the Apennines and in northern Italy,
where first the consul Gnaeus Lentulus who had thought to surround
and capture the robbers, then his colleague Gellius and the so recently
victorious praetor Arrius, and lastly at Mutina the governor
of Cisalpine Gaul Gaius Cassius (consul 681) and the praetor Gnaeus
Manlius, one after another succumbed to his blows. The scarcely-
armed gangs of slaves were the terror of the legions; the series
of defeats recalled the first years of the Hannibalic war.
Internal Dissension among the Insurgents
What might have come of it, had the national kings
from the mountains of Auvergne or of the Balkan, and not runaway
gladiatorial slaves, been at the head of the victorious bands,
it is impossible to say; as it was, the movement remained
notwithstanding its brilliant victories a rising of robbers,
and succumbed less to the superior force of its opponents than
to internal discord and the want of definite plan. The unity
in confronting the common foe, which was so remarkably conspicuous
in the earlier servile wars of Sicily, was wanting in this Italian
war--a difference probably due to the fact that, while the Sicilian
slaves found a quasi-national point of union in the common
Syrohellenism, the Italian slaves were separated into the two
bodies of Helleno-Barbarians and Celto-Germans. The rupture
between the Celtic Crixus and the Thracian Spartacus--Oenomaus had
fallen in one of the earliest conflicts--and other similar quarrels
crippled them in turning to account the successes achieved,
and procured for the Romans several important victories. But the want
of a definite plan and aim produced far more injurious effects
on the enterprise than the insubordination of the Celto-Germans.
Spartacus doubtless--to judge by the little which we learn
regarding that remarkable man--stood in this respect above his party.
Along with his strategic ability he displayed no ordinary
talent for organization, as indeed from the very outset
the uprightness, with which he presided over his band and distributed
the spoil, had directed the eyes of the multitude to him quite
as much at least as his valour. To remedy the severely felt want
of cavalry and of arms, he tried with the help of the herds of horses
seized in Lower Italy to train and discipline a cavalry, and, so soon as
he got the port of Thurii into his hands, to procure from that quarter
iron and copper, doubtless through the medium of the pirates.
But in the main matters he was unable to induce the wild hordes
whom he led to pursue any fixed ulterior aims. Gladly would
he have checked the frantic orgies of cruelty, in which the robbers
indulged on the capture of towns, and which formed the chief reason
why no Italian city voluntarily made common cause with the insurgents;
but the obedience which the bandit-chief found in the conflic
ceased with the victory, and his representations and entreaties
were in vain. After the victories obtained in the Apennine
in 682 the slave army was free to move in any direction.
Spartacus himself is said to have intended to cross the Alps,
with a view to open to himself and his followers the means of return
to their Celtic or Thracian home: if the statement is well founded,
it shows how little the conqueror overrated his successes
and his power. When his men refused so speedily to turn their backs
on the riches of Italy, Spartacus took the route for Rome, and is said
to have meditated blockading the capital. The troops, however,
showed themselves also averse to this desperate but yet methodical
enterprise; they compelled their leader, when he was desirous
to be a general, to remain a mere captain of banditti and aimlessly
to wander about Italy in search of plunder. Rome might think herself
fortunate that the matter took this turn; but even as it was,
the perplexity was great. There was a want of trained soldiers
as of experienced generals; Quintus Metellus and Gnaeus Pompeius
were employed in Spain, Marcus Lucullus in Thrace, Lucius Lucullus
in Asia Minor; and none but raw militia and, at best, mediocre
officers were available. The extraordinary supreme command
in Italy was given to the praetor Marcus Crassus, who was not
a general of much reputation, but had fought with honour under Sulla
and had at least character; and an army of eight legions, imposing
if not by its quality, at any rate by its numbers, was placed
at his disposal. The new commander-in-chief began by treating
the first division, which again threw away its arms and fled before
the banditti, with all the severity of martial law, and causing every
tenth man in it to be executed; whereupon the legions in reality
grew somewhat more manly. Spartacus, vanquished in the next
engagement, retreated and sought to reach Rhegium through Lucania.
Conflicts in the Bruttian Country
Just at that time the pirates commanded not merely the Sicilian
waters, but even the port of Syracuse;(26) with the help of their
boats Spartacus proposed to throw a corps into Sicily, where the slaves
only waited an impulse to break out a third time. The march to Rhegium
was accomplished; but the corsairs, perhaps terrified by the coastguards
established in Sicily by the praetor Gaius Verres, perhaps also bribed
by the Romans, took from Spartacus the stipulated hire without performing
the service for which it was given. Crassus meanwhile had followed
the robber-army nearly as far as the mouth, of the Crathis,
and, like Scipio before Numantia, ordered his soldiers,
seeing that they did not fight as they ought, to construct
an entrenched wall of the length of thirty-five miles,
which shut off the Bruttian peninsula from the rest of Italy,(27)
intercepted the insurgent army on the return from Rhegium,
and cut off its supplies. But in a dark winter night Spartacus
broke through the lines of the enemy, and in the spring of 683(28)
was once more in Lucania. The laborious work had thus been in vain.
Crassus began to despair of accomplishing his task and demanded
that the senate should for his support recall to Italy the armies
stationed in Macedonia under Marcus Lucullus and in Hither Spain
under Gnaeus Pompeius.
Disruption of the Rebels and Their Subjugation
This extreme step however was not needed; the disunion and the arrogance
of the robber-bands sufficed again to frustrate their successes.
Once more the Celts and Germans broke off from the league of which
the Thracian was the head and soul, in order that, under leaders
of their own nation Gannicus and Castus, they might separately
fall victims to the sword of the Romans. Once, at the Lucanian
lake the opportune appearance of Spartacus saved them,
and thereupon they pitched their camp near to his; nevertheless
Crassus succeeded in giving employment to Spartacus by means
of the cavalry, and meanwhile surrounded the Celtic bands and compelled
them to a separate engagement, in which the whole body--numbering
it is said 12,300 combatants--fell fighting bravely all on the spot
and with their wounds in front. Spartacus then attempted to throw
himself with his division into the mountains round Petelia (near
Strongoli in Calabria), and signally defeated the Roman vanguard,
which followed his retreat But this victory proved more injurious
to the victor than to the vanquished. Intoxicated by success,
the robbers refused to retreat farther, and compelled their general
to lead them through Lucania towards Apulia to face the last decisive
struggle. Before the battle Spartacus stabbed his horse:
as in prosperity and adversity he had faithfully kept by his men,
he now by that act showed them that the issue for him and for all
was victory or death. In the battle also he fought with the courage
of a lion; two centurions fell by his hand; wounded and on his knees
he still wielded his spear against the advancing foes.
Thus the great robber-captain and with him the best of his comrades
died the death of free men and of honourable soldiers (683).
After the dearly-bought victory the troops who had achieved it,
and those of Pompeius that had meanwhile after conquering the Sertorians
arrived from Spain, instituted throughout Apulia and Lucania a manhunt,
such as there had never been before, to crush out the last sparks
of the mighty conflagration. Although in the southern districts,
where for instance the little town of Tempsa was seized in 683
by a gang of robbers, and in Etruria, which was severely affected
by Sulla's evictions, there was by no means as yet a real public
tranquillity, peace was officially considered as re-established
in Italy. At least the disgracefully lost eagles were recovered--
after the victory over the Celts alone five of them were brought
in; and along the road from Capua to Rome the six thousand crosses
bearing captured slaves testified to the re-establishment of order,
and to the renewed victory of acknowledged law over its living
property that had rebelled.
The Government of the Restoration as a Whole
Let us look back on the events which fill up the ten years
of the Sullan restoration. No one of the movements, external
or internal, which occurred during this period--neither the insurrection
of Lepidus, nor the enterprises of the Spanish emigrants, nor the wars
in Thrace and Macedonia and in Asia Minor, nor the risings
of the pirates and the slaves--constituted of itself a mighty danger
necessarily affecting the vital sinews of the nation; and yet
the state had in all these struggles well-nigh fought for its
very existence. The reason was that the tasks were everywhere
left unperformed, so long as they might still have been performed
with ease; the neglect of the simplest precautionary measures produced
the most dreadful mischiefs and misfortunes, and transformed
dependent classes and impotent kings into antagonists on a footing
of equality. The democracy and the servile insurrection
were doubtless subdued; but such as the victories were, the victor
was neither inwardly elevated nor outwardly strengthened by them.
It was no credit to Rome, that the two most celebrated generals
of the government party had during a struggle of eight years marked
by more defeats than victories failed to master the insurgent chief
Sertorius and his Spanish guerillas, and that it was only
the dagger of his friends that decided the Sertorian war in favour
of the legitimate government. As to the slaves, it was far less
an honour to have conquered them than a disgrace to have confronted
them in equal strife for years. Little more than a century had
elapsed since the Hannibalic war; it must have brought a blush
to the cheek of the honourable Roman, when he reflected
on the fearfully rapid decline of the nation since that great age.
Then the Italian slaves stood like a wall against the veterans
of Hannibal; now the Italian militia were scattered like chaff before
the bludgeons of their runaway serfs. Then every plain captain
acted in case of need as general, and fought often without success,
but always with honour; now it was difficult to find among
all the officers of rank a leader of even ordinary efficiency.
Then the government preferred to take the last farmer from the plough
rather than forgo the acquisition of Spain and Greece; now they were
on the eve of again abandoning both regions long since acquired,
merely that they might be able to defend themselves against
the insurgent slaves at home. Spartacus too as well as Hannibal
had traversed Italy with an army from the Po to the Sicilian straits,
beaten both consuls, and threatened Rome with blockade;
the enterprise which had needed the greatest general of antiquity
to conduct it against the Rome of former days could be undertaken
against the Rome of the present by a daring captain of banditti.
Was there any wonder that no fresh life sprang out of such victories
over insurgents and robber-chiefs?
The external wars, however, had produced a result still less
gratifying. It is true that the Thraco-Macedonian war had yielded
a result not directly unfavourable, although far from corresponding
to the considerable expenditure of men and money. In the wars
in Asia Minor and with the pirates on the other hand, the government
had exhibited utter failure. The former ended with the loss
of the whole conquests made in eight bloody campaigns, the latter
with the total driving of the Romans from "their own sea." Once Rome,
fully conscious of the irresistibleness of her power by land,
had transferred her superiority also to the other element;
now the mighty state was powerless at sea and, as it seemed,
on the point of also losing its dominion at least over the Asiatic
continent. The material benefits which a state exists to confer--
security of frontier, undisturbed peaceful intercourse, legal protection,
and regulated administration--began all of them to vanish for the whole
of the nations united in the Roman state; the gods of blessing
seemed all to have mounted up to Olympus and to have left
the miserable earth at the mercy of the officially called or volunteer
plunderers and tormentors. Nor was this decay of the state felt
as a public misfortune merely perhaps by such as had political rights
and public spirit; the insurrection of the proletariate,
and the brigandage and piracy which remind us of the times
of the Neapolitan Ferdinands, carried the sense of this decay
into the remotest valley and the humblest hut of Italy, and made
every one who pursued trade and commerce, or who bought
even a bushel of wheat, feel it as a personal calamity.
If inquiry was made as to the authors of this dreadful and unexampled
misery, it was not difficult to lay the blame of it with good
reason on many. The slaveholders whose heart was in their
money-bags, the insubordinate soldiers, the generals cowardly,
incapable, or foolhardy, the demagogues of the market-place mostly
pursuing a mistaken aim, bore their share of the blame; or,
to speak more truly, who was there that did not share in it?
It was instinctively felt that this misery, this disgrace, this disorder
were too colossal to be the work of any one man. As the greatness
of the Roman commonwealth was the work not of prominent individuals,
but rather of a soundly-organized burgess-body, so the decay
of this mighty structure was the result not of the destructive genius
of individuals, but of a general disorganization. The great majority
of the burgesses were good for nothing, and every rotten stone
in the building helped to bring about the ruin of the whole; the whole
nation suffered for what was the whole nation's fault. It was unjust
to hold the government, as the ultimate tangible organ of the state,
responsible for all its curable and incurable diseases; but it certainly
was true that the government contributed after a very grave fashion
to the general culpability. In the Asiatic war, for example,
where no individual of the ruling lords conspicuously failed,
and Lucullus, in a military point of view at least, behaved with ability
and even glory, it was all the more clear that the blame of failure lay
in the system and in the government as such--primarily, so far
as that war was concerned, in the remissness with which Cappadocia
and Syria were at first abandoned, and in the awkward position
of the able general with reference to a governing college incapable
of any energetic resolution. In maritime police likewise
the true idea which the senate had taken up as to a general hunting
out of the pirates was first spoilt by it in the execution
and then totally dropped, in order to revert to the old foolish system
of sending legions against the coursers of the sea. The expeditions
of Servilius and Marcius to Cilicia, and of Metellus to Crete,
were undertaken on this system; and in accordance with it Triarius
had the island of Delos surrounded by a wall for protection against
the pirates. Such attempts to secure the dominion of the seas remind
us of that Persian great-king, who ordered the sea to be scourged
with rods to make it subject to him. Doubtless therefore
the nation had good reason for laying the blame of its failure
primarily on the government of the restoration. A similar misrule
had indeed always come along with the re-establishment
of the oligarchy, after the fall of the Gracchi as after that
of Marius and Saturninus; yet never before had it shown such violence
and at the same time such laxity, never had it previously emerged
so corrupt and pernicious. But, when a government cannot govern,
it ceases to be legitimate, and whoever has the power has also
the right to overthrow it. It is, no doubt, unhappily true
that an incapable and flagitious government may for a long period trample
under foot the welfare and honour of the land, before the men are
found who are able and willing to wield against that government
the formidable weapons of its own forging, and to evoke out of
the moral revolt of the good and the distress of the many the revolution
which is in such a case legitimate. But if the game attempted
with the fortunes of nations may be a merry one and may be played
perhaps for a long time without molestation, it is a treacherous
game, which in its own time entraps the players; and no one then
blames the axe, if it is laid to the root of the tree that bears
such fruits. For the Roman oligarchy this time had now come.
The Pontic-Armenian war and the affair of the pirates became
the proximate causes of the overthrow of the Sullan constitution
and of the establishment of a revolutionary military dictatorship.
Chapter III
The Fall of the Oligarchy and the Rule of Pompeius
Continued Subsistence of the Sullan Constitution
The Sullan constitution still stood unshaken. The assault,
which Lepidus and Sertorius had ventured to make on it,
had been repulsed with little loss. The government had neglected,
it is true, to finish the half-completed building in the energetic
spirit of its author. It is characteristic of the government,
that it neither distributed the lands which Sulla had destined
for allotment but had not yet parcelled out, nor directly abandoned
the claim to them, but tolerated the former owners in provisional
possession without regulating their title, and indeed even allowed
various still undistributed tracts of Sullan domain-land to be
arbitrarily taken possession of by individuals according
to the old system of occupation, which was de jure and de facto
set aside by the Gracchan reforms.(1) Whatever in the Sullan enactments
was indifferent or inconvenient for the Optimates, was without scruple
ignored or cancelled; for instance, the sentences under which whole
communities were deprived of the right of citizenship, the prohibition
against conjoining the new farms, and several of the privileges
conferred by Sulla on particular communities--of course, without
giving back to the communities the sums paid for these exemptions.
But though these violations of the ordinances of Sulla by the government
itself contributed to shake the foundations of his structure,
the Sempronian laws were substantially abolished and remained so.
Attacks of the Democracy
Corn-Laws
Attempts to Restore the Tribunician Power
There was no lack, indeed, of men who had in view the re-establishment
of the Gracchan constitution, or of projects to attain piecemeal
in the way of constitutional reform what Lepidus and Sertorius
had attempted by the path of revolution. The government
had already under the pressure of the agitation of Lepidus
immediately after the death of Sulla consented to a limited revival
of the largesses of grain (676); and it did, moreover,
what it could to satisfy the proletariate of the capital in regard
to this vital question. When, notwithstanding those distributions,
the high price of grain occasioned chiefly by piracy produced
so oppressive a dearth in Rome as to lead to a violent tumult
in the streets in 679, extraordinary purchases of Sicilian grain
on account of the government relieved for the time the most severe
distress; and a corn-law brought in by the consuls of 681 regulated
for the future the purchases of Sicilian grain and furnished
the government, although at the expense of the provincials,
with better means of obviating similar evils. But the less material
points of difference also--the restoration of the tribunician power
in its old compass, and the setting aside of the senatorial tribunals--
ceased not to form subjects of popular agitation; and in their
case the government offered more decided resistance. The dispute
regarding the tribunician magistracy was opened as early as 678,
immediately after the defeat of Lepidus, by the tribune of the people
Lucius Sicinius, perhaps a descendant of the man of the same
name who had first filled this office more than four hundred years
before; but it failed before the resistance offered to it
by the active consul Gaius Curio. In 680 Lucius Quinctius resumed
the agitation, but was induced by the authority of the consul Lucius
Lucullus to desist from his purpose. The matter was taken up
in the following year with greater zeal by Gaius Licinius Macer, who--
in a way characteristic of the period--carried his literary studies
into public life, and, just as he had read in the Annals,
counselled the burgesses to refuse the conscription.