The pirates whom Spartacus met on the strait originally came from Cilicia, on Anatolia’s Mediterranean coast, one of the main breeding grounds for pirates. Crete was the other. Whether Heracleo was one of the men whom Spartacus met on the strait is not known but Heracleo was a typical pirate: a commander of small, speedy ships who looked down on the Romans but not without a healthy dose of fear. After all, the usual pirate raid was not as easy as Heracleo’s Syracusan romp. Nor did every Roman governor leave the barn door as open as Verres did then; but even Verres too sometimes rose to the occasion.
Thanks to Cicero, Verres survives in venom-soaked ink. According to the orator, Verres left Sicily defenceless while blackmailing wealthy natives with trumped-up charges of stirring up slave revolt. Cicero never mentions Spartacus but refers instead to the ‘great Italian war’ or the ‘war of the Italian fugitives’, thereby downplaying the seriousness of the problem facing Verres.
Fortunately, evidence in other writers and hints in Cicero’s work itself paint a more accurate picture. Verres was probably not caught flat-footed by Spartacus’s approach towards the island. Verres knew all about the danger; indeed, one source says that the Senate extended Verres’s governorship to three years instead of the usual one in order to have him, as an experienced administrator, put Sicily on a protective footing. That did not stop Verres from looting public and private artworks and shaking down wealthy landowners, but he did keep a lid on rebellion.
Cicero’s contemporary, the historian Sallust, states flatly: ‘Gaius Verres strengthened the shores closest to Italy.’ As provincial governor, he had two legions at his disposal. Verres might have ordered them to build shore defences and establish guard posts on the coast. They no doubt sought help and local knowledge from the people of the main Sicilian city on the strait, Messana (modern Messina). It may not be coincidence that Messana was the one Sicilian city treated well by Verres, perhaps because he anticipated the danger.
Meanwhile, Verres claimed to have clamped down hard on the island’s slaves. He said that he investigated charges of trouble brewing in various places all over the island, from near Lilybaeum (modern Marsala) and Panormus (modern Palermo) in the west to Apollonia (modern San Fratello) in the north-east and Imachara (near Enna) in central Sicily. Some of these spots had been rebel strongholds in the earlier revolts. He ordered that slave suspects be arrested and tried, including farmhands, shepherds, farm managers and master herdsmen. None of this impressed Cicero, who accused Verres of being lenient when he should have been harsh and harsh when he should have been lenient. Cicero charged Verres with taking bribes to release guilty slaves and with extorting money from innocent masters whom he threatened to arrest on trumped-up charges: he planned to accuse them of slackness towards their potentially rebellious slaves. Worst of all, Verres had a man crucified in Messana as a runaway slave and spy for Spartacus when, in fact, he was a Roman citizen, as a simple enquiry could have shown. The man in question was Publius Gavius who came from either the city of Compsa (modern Conza) in Lucania or Consentia in Bruttium. A Roman citizen was exempt from the cross; even if guilty, he had the right to a lesser punishment.
Why a Roman citizen supported Spartacus is an interesting question. Was Gavius one of the ‘free men from the fields’ - that is, a poor but free person - who joined the rebellion? Was he an elite and unreconstructed anti-Roman, so dogged in his Italian nationalism as to support a rebel slave general? Or did he simply work for Spartacus in exchange for pay? We can only guess at the answer or at the possibility that Gavius was innocent.
Verres, it seems, indeed denied Gavius his rights as a citizen, but no one can unravel the rights and wrongs of Cicero’s other charges. The one sure conclusion is that some Sicilians genuinely worried about the spread of Spartacus’s revolt to the island. No surprise, since the ancients had long memories. In 72 BC many Sicilians had lived through the Second Sicilian Slave War (104- 100 BC). Thirty years before that had come the First Sicilian Slave War (135-132 BC), and now the wheel might seem to have turned ominously again. The root causes of rebellion no doubt remained. Each war, after all, had broken out against a background of abuse and humiliation of slaves and the toleration of armed gangs of slave herdsmen who eventually turned on their masters with a vengeance.
The slave uprisings had ravaged the island. Each had lasted about four years and involved tens of thousands of rebels. Each broke out in the rich farmland of the island’s interior, where gangs of rebel herdsmen played a prominent role, and spread. Each time, urban slaves joined rebels from the countryside, as did the most poverty-stricken free Sicilians.
Rome responded slowly and badly each time. After several humiliating defeats in the first revolt, the consul Publius Rupilius laid siege to the two main rebel cities and found a traitor to open the gates in both. Then he engaged in mopping-up operations around the island. After a series of incompetent generals failed to put down the second rebellion, the consul Manius Aquilius rose to the occasion. He killed the rebel king in single combat, which would have won him Rome’s highest military honour had his opponent been a free man and not a slave.
Now another rebel, Spartacus, was waiting for the pirates. Their swift ships would carry him across the strait to break the chains of Sicily’s slaves. Ancient Sicily teemed with agricultural wealth, its soil much more fertile than Bruttium’s. As the hungry rebels watched the sun set behind Sicily’s hills night after night, and then saw its after-glow shining in the clouds, they might have dreamed of a new life on the island. The pirates could provide that, but, naturally, they presented a bill for their services. Any losses, should the Romans fight them at sea, would be expensive to replace. The pirates also demanded payment in advance. Spartacus apparently understood this, and he gave them gifts. ‘Gift’ was a flexible word in the ancient vocabulary, meaning, among other things, bribes.
The plan was that the pirates would ferry 2,000 men across to Sicily. This represented just a small portion of Spartacus’s army but it was probably the best he could do under the circumstances. Pirate ships were small and could not carry large numbers of men. The 2,000 could serve as an advance party. Assuming they had been carefully chosen, they would have been elite fighters, skilled at stealth and able to make contact with Sicilian slaves. As soon as they had established a base, they could bring more men over from Italy. Meanwhile, the bulk of Spartacus’s army could go to ground in Bruttium’s hills.
But it was not to be. As the sources state succinctly, ‘Once the Cilicians had made an agreement with him [Spartacus] and taken gifts, they tricked him and sailed off.’ Had Verres or Crassus been in touch with the pirates and outbid Spartacus? Did a dawning awareness of Rome’s military might scare off men like Heracleo despite their sympathy for the rebels? Or did the pirates simply behave like pirates?
In any case, they left. Spartacus’s Sicilian expedition seemed to be over before it had begun. Yet, once again, the Thracian displayed his strength of character. He neither despaired nor panicked but, rather, changed tactics with seeming effortlessness. His followers might have been less calm. If ever Spartacus needed his Thracian lady to inspire their faith, it was now.
Between Sicily and the Italian mainland lies one of the world’s more dramatic and dangerous bodies of water because of its fast current and treacherous rip tides. ‘The narrowness of the passage,’ writes the Greek historian Thucydides, ‘and the strength of the current that pours in from the vast Tyrrhenian and Sicilian mains, have rightly given it a bad reputation.’ The Strait of Messina is about 19 miles long. Some 9 miles at its widest, the strait is narrowest at its northern end, on the Italian side, at a narrow piece of land called Cape Caenys (the modern Punta Pezzo), in the modern city of Villa San Giovanni. Here, where the strait is not quite 2 miles wide, you can almost feel Spartacus’s frustration.
Looking across the strait from Cape Caenys, a person might have read the fortune of the rebellion in the landscape. Sicily lies ahead, seemingly close enough to touch. To the north sits the island’s Land’s End, Cape Pelorus (modern Peloro), a narrow, low-lying spit of soil. A mile or so south-east of the cape the mountains of Sicily begin to rise gently, like a body slowly waking up. They climb in stately measure ever southwards towards Mount Aetna (modern Etna), the great volcano that stands just out of sight.
A harsher landscape lies to the onlooker’s rear. At Cape Caenys, the last stretch of the Apennines tumbles down to the sea, in step-like ridges cut by gullies and crossed by zigzag roads. Above, a massive hill rises like a closed fist. Travelling only about a mile, the land rises sharply from sea level to 2,000 feet. These are the foothills of the Aspromonte Mountains (modern name). Aspromonte means ‘Harsh Mountains’ or ‘White Mountains’, the latter referring to snow or perhaps to bare rock. It was hostile terrain, in either case.
The Via Annia from Capua reached the Strait of Messina about 3 miles south of the narrows at Cape Caenys, at the ancient Statio ad Statuam (modern Catona). The favourable current made this the crossing-place of choice in ancient times. Nowadays, there is an hourly car ferry to Sicily nearby. Rowboats too cross the strait here, while in summer swimmers race across. But swimming was out of the question for men who would emerge on the Sicilian shore naked and dripping and into the arms of Verres’s soldiers, if they would emerge at all. An inexpert swimmer might find it rough going. A current of 6 knots or more (depending on the tides) flows through the strait, often accompanied by sudden waves and whirlpools. Besides, it was not summer but winter, when the grey-green water of the strait is too cold for swimming.
The ancients personified the dangerous seas of the strait by the myth of Scylla and Charybdis. Charybdis was a sea monster whose huge mouth swallowed and spat out water, creating killer whirlpools. Scylla was a dog-like beast that sat on a huge rock on the other side of a strait and killed passing sailors. According to myth only the greatest of helmsmen could pick his way between Scylla and Charybdis. The Greeks and Romans placed these two creatures in the Strait of Messina. The real strait posed more manageable challenges, which Spartacus decided to face. He told the men to build rafts.
The decision to construct rafts was risky but rational. If it was not easy to cross the strait by raft, neither was it impossible. Legend says that the prehistoric settlers of the island, the Sicels, did so. Thucydides, a Greek historian and hard-nosed ex-admiral, considered this tradition credible, as long as the Sicels had waited for the wind to die down before making the crossing. More recently, a Roman general and consul had managed the crossing by rafts. Lucius Caecilius Metellus, victor in a battle in Sicily against Carthage, came to Messana in 250 BC in order to go over the strait back to Italy. He had captured 120 elephants from the enemy and he wanted to bring these exotic imports back to Rome to march them in his triumphal parade. An ancient writer explains how Metellus ferried them across the strait:
A number of huge jars, separated by wooden stays, were fastened together in such a way that they could neither break apart nor yet strike together; then this framework was spanned by beams, and on top of all earth and brush were placed, and the surface was fenced in round about, so that it presented somewhat the appearance of a farmyard. The beasts were then put on board this raft and were ferried across without knowing that they were moving on the water.
Spartacus’s men used what look like similar raft-building techniques, maybe as a result of recruiting local helpers. The fish-rich waters of the strait surely employed many boat-builders. A contemporary source describes the rebels’ rafts: ‘When they placed large, wide-mouthed jars under the beams, they tied them together with vine branches or strips of hide.’
Building rafts required finding jars, timber, vine branches and strips of hide, and that would have taken foraging in turn. Houses, shops, cellars, warehouses, farms and forests might all have been scoured for supplies. It seems unlikely that the rebels did this at their leisure or with their full attention. Some of their manpower had to be devoted to finding food and the rest had to handle security, in the event of a raid by Crassus.
Where Spartacus launched his rafts is not known. The currents favoured the ferry crossing at the Statio ad Statuam, but the Romans knew that, and they surely lined the opposite shore. Cape Caenys offered a narrower crossing and perhaps a chance to surprise the enemy on the beach in Sicily. The dangerous currents there would have made departure risky, but Spartacus was a risk-taker. A launch from Cape Caenys would help explain what happened next, but of course it is not possible to be certain. An ancient source picks up the story: ‘They tried to launch rafts of beams and large, wide-mouthed jugs tied together with brush and branches in the very swift waters of the strait - in vain.’ And: ‘The entangled rafts were hindering the provision of help.’
Nature, it seems, kept the rebels from crossing. In the fast and shifting currents the rafts got caught on each other, and no one was able to repair that tangle. They must have lost boats and provisions and maybe some men drowned too. Metellus had done better, but he no doubt chose the least dangerous place to cross the channel. He enjoyed superior logistical support than Spartacus and could get more experienced helmsmen. Few if any of the rebels had experience steering ships, but they might have persuaded or forced locals to help. Besides, Metellus might have crossed in summer or, if not, he could have waited for a day of good conditions to make the crossing, a luxury surely denied to Spartacus.
Spartacus’s attempt to cross the strait failed. He now had to turn his army around to force his way back through Roman Italy. The opposing general whom he would face, Crassus, had worked wonders with his legions but he had not yet turned them into a force that could hunt down and destroy Spartacus’s army. On the contrary, it seems that Crassus had done nothing to stop Spartacus at the strait. Instead, he held back and left the job to Verres. The governor of Sicily either had Neptune on his side or good strategy.