Harry Sidebottom’s latest novel, The Burning Road, is set in Sicily during a revolt of enslaved people against the Roman Empire. He wonders why there were so few such uprisings during the many centuries of Roman rule – and why we’ve only heard of the one led by Spartacus.
“I am Spartacus!” At first in ones and twos, then in groups, across the dusty hillsides the captured slaves get to their feet and shout: “I am Spartacus!” It is one of the most emotive scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s film. Everyone has heard of Spartacus. Yet very few could name the leader of another slave revolt against Rome.
The fame of Spartacus is deep rooted in modern culture. Garibaldi, reunifying Italy, liked to be compared to Spartacus. Karl Marx saw the gladiator as a true representative of the proletariat – and that accounts for all those football teams and factories across the Soviet Union called Spartak.
The West saw the phenomenal success of a novel by Howard Fast (1951), that inspired the Kubrick film (1960). More recently there have been the STARZ television series and the novels of Ben Kane. In the shadow of the influence of Spartacus the afterlife of the leaders of the other two great slave revolts has withered to nothing.
The other two great slave revolts: that is surprising. Consider the long duration of Roman history. Let’s take two conventional and convenient dates: 753BC, when later Romans thought the city was founded, and AD476, when the last emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed.
Over a millennium – 1,229 years, counting inclusively like a Roman – and there were just three large scale revolts: the first Sicilian (140/135?–132BC), the second Sicilian (104–101BC), and Spartacus (73–71BC). The condition of slaves did not improve, so why just three revolts?
The events of the big three allow us to argue backwards to see the preconditions necessary for the outbreak of a servile war. First, there had to be a charismatic leader. Eunus, the leader of the first Sicilian, was a magician. Among his tricks was breathing fire from his mouth. Salvius, the leader of the second Sicilian, was a diviner, who was thought to know the will of the gods. And Spartacus, well he was Spartacus.
The next necessity was a specific act of cruelty, beyond the pale even by Roman standards. The catalyst of the first Sicilian uprising was the outrageous behaviour of a slave owning husband and wife. The couple, Damophilos and Megallis, competed in mistreatment. Their slaves were whipped, shackled, branded, starved, and left without clothes.
Yet there must have been many charismatic slaves among all those hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, over that length of time. (And let’s not even venture into the minefield of estimating the number of the unfree!). Similarly, acts of vicious inhumanity would not have been uncommon. Further preconditions were necessary.
A slave army needed manpower. It called for an enormous number of first-generation enslaved people, not yet broken to servitude. But that alone was not sufficient. They had to have something from their previous life in common: a shared ethnicity, or at least a language. The heart of Spartacus’s force were Gauls and Thracians. The majority of those in the two Sicilian insurrections were from the eastern Mediterranean: Cilicians and Syrians. They had Greek as a lingua franca.
Yet another interlocking factor had to be added: slaves still accustomed to bearing arms and to violence even in their new unfree state. Spartacus and his initial handful of followers were gladiators. To start with they armed themselves with kitchen implements. Having broken out of their barracks, they had the good fortune to hijack a shipment of weapons.
Shepherds were the first recruits in both the Sicilian uprisings. Shepherds were always hard to control. Transhumance – driving the flocks up into the hills for summer grazing, and down to the lowlands for the winter – meant they travelled great distances; dozens, sometimes hundreds of miles.
The herds had to be defended from wild animals, brigands, other shepherds (late Roman law codes saw brigands and shepherds as interchangeable), and from the sedentary populations through whom they moved.
Perhaps something else can be teased out of the last point: psychological independence. A slave in a chain gang can be told what to do by an overseer. That was not the case with a gladiator on the sands of the arena, or a shepherd confronted by bandits in a remote mountain pass.
Why were there just three huge revolts, all between 140/135BC and 71BC; a span of only 70 years in over a millennium? In the last two centuries BC the Roman empire was expanding exponentially. Vast numbers of slaves flooded into Italy and Sicily. Previous localised Roman war making had not enslaved enough to trigger a massive uprising. Similarly in the first three centuries AD expansion was sporadic and on a smaller scale, and from the fourth century the empire was fighting to survive.
Yet this line of argument leaves a gap. From 71BC to AD14 Rome continued its rapid and wide conquests, but there were no huge insurrections. It could be that was a legacy of Spartacus. Two thousand of his supporters were crucified along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome. Perhaps that hideous image was passed down through the next three generations of the servile community; a grim reminder of the futility of revolt.
The Burning Road, my new novel, was inspired by a brief report in an ancient source of a slave uprising on Sicily during the reign of Gallienus in the AD260s.
To flesh it out and to give it plausibility all the factors just discussed had to be recreated. A charismatic leader and a sadistic owner were easy to imagine, but the revolt also needed to be put in a wider context.
In AD260 Gallienus had won a major battle at Milan against the Germanic confederation known as the Alamanni. Thousands of warriors would have been captured. It is quite likely that many of them could have been sent to work on the huge landed estates of Sicily. If some of those Alamanni warriors were made shepherds, everything fell into place.
Read more about The Burning Road.
Harry looks at Why the Roman Empire grew so big in his 2020 Historia feature.
Find out which Harry’s favourite historical books for castaways are in his Desert Island Books.
You may also enjoy these features linked to Roman history:
A game of gods: religion in a changing Roman world by Simon Turney and Gordon Doherty
LJ Trafford’s features, Sex in Ancient Rome and Gladiator sweat and leech hair dye; how to survive in Ancient Rome
She Wolves, Night Moths and Tomb Whores by Elizabeth Storrs
Simon Turney’s review of Nero: the man behind the myth
Anthony Riches asks Did Roman Soldiers Suffer PTSD?
And the HWA’s collection of short stories, Rubicon
Still from (a parody of) Spartacus: thanks to Ethan Klobucar on YouTube
Spartacus film poster: Wikimedia
Roman collared slaves, marble relief from Izmir, Turkey, cAD200: Collection of the Ashmolean Museum via Wikimedia
Roman mosaic showing slaves performing agricultural tasks: Wikimedia
Bronze statuette of a Suebi captive, first to third century AD: Wikimedia