One ancient source gives credit elsewhere: Cicero. The orator praised Marcus Crassus, ‘that bravest of men, whose courage and good judgment saw to it that the fugitives were not able to tie rafts together and cross the Strait’. Cicero speaks of a great effort made to stop the rebels from crossing. He offers no details, however. Did Crassus attack Spartacus on the beach? Spartacus had cavalry to defend his position; Crassus’s behaviour in the next month shows reluctance to take Spartacus head-on.
Besides, the circumstances of Cicero’s comments raise suspicion. He made them in 70 BC while prosecuting Verres for alleged misbehaviour as governor of Sicily. Cicero aimed all his rhetorical power at Verres, ridiculing the governor’s arrogance for claiming the credit for stopping Spartacus. Cicero won the case and Verres was ruined, but what if Verres was right? The weight of the evidence says that he did as much as any Roman to win the battle of the strait by deploying his forces opposite the most advantageous point for crossing the water.
In fact, it is hard not to suspect Crassus of actually encouraging Spartacus to try to cross the strait. Crassus surely was in contact with Verres and knew of the governor’s efforts to stop the rebels from landing on the island. Scouting reports that the enemy was building rafts might not have worried Crassus, given the season. All in all, Crassus might have been confident that Spartacus would fail.
Crassus would not have wanted to risk attacking the rebels on the strait. The narrow coastal strip offered little room for the pitched battle that he desired. Besides, if challenged, Spartacus would send his men into the hills rather than agree to fight such a battle. His cavalry would harass the Romans, while his infantry would lay ambushes in the many hills and gullies of the region. On top of all that, it was winter, and no time for fighting. Rather than risk such engagements, Crassus had a different plan: to squeeze the rebels between the strait and the mountains.
Spartacus had no choice now but to retreat. No doubt the need to leave Italy was clearer than ever but the Strait of Messina would not be the exit. The Thracian would have to come up with a new strategy. That, however, lay in the future; at the moment, his priority was feeding the army. There was food about a dozen miles to the south, in the city of Regium, but the town was walled and no doubt well defended. The next easiest alternative was to head north on the Via Annia, but the Romans surely had that road well blocked. So Spartacus and his followers took the least desirable escape route and climbed into the Aspromonte Mountains.
If any of Spartacus’s marching men turned and watched the sun disappear behind Sicily’s hills, we do not know. But if they did, they might have paused and thought about what might have been.
8
The Fisherman
I
t was a winter morning in the mountains, 3,000 feet above sea level, in early 71 BC. Normally it was silent here in winter, when even the herdsmen have left for lower ground. On this day, however, on a ridge about half a mile wide, two armies were about to meet. In one, tens of thousands of rebels stood in their ranks, weapons ready, and, we might imagine, hearts warmed by wine, ears impatient for the command to have their mouths let loose the roar that signals the start of their charge. The Roman army was not surprised; its scouts had watched the enemy from a series of signal towers.
The Romans waited behind a defensive network of deep trenches lined with sharpened poles, wooden palisades and, as an obstacle in the forefront, an embankment topped by a dry-stone wall at least 25 feet high. The Romans’ positions closed off three sides of the ridge, blocking even the mule paths by which the rebels might have outflanked them. The Romans had left only the southern approach open, forcing the attackers to charge at them from that direction. As they advanced, the rebels were funnelled into a narrow space. Like a fisherman who drives big fish into his nets, Crassus had set his trap well.
Suddenly, the Roman counter-attack began, a torrent of arrows and acorn-shaped lead missiles, forged in field furnaces nearby by the methodical defenders. The barrage blunted the rebels’ charge. Many of the attackers reached the fortifications but, although they fought ferociously, they could not break through. Eventually, Spartacus’s men had no choice but to run away or die.
It was a good day for Rome and it had just begun. The rebels would attack again in the evening and once again they would fail. Afterwards the Romans claimed an immense body count, saying that 12,000 dead insurgents cost Rome only 3 dead and 7 wounded. Ancient battles often produced lopsided casualty rates but this sounds like propaganda. Uncertainty is frustrating to the historian but it is best to be clear: both these figures and the very details of the engagement are speculative. Indeed, our knowledge of the events in this chapter is unusually tentative, and for several reasons. The sources contradict each other even more than usual. Perhaps that is not surprising in the case of events that took place in the dead of winter, deep in the mountains of a remote corner of Italy.
Besides, for Romans, the domestic political stakes were almost as high as the military ones. Crassus had gambled everything on a defensive line in the mountains. The massive fortifications symbolized the man who had made his fortune in real estate. He would defeat Spartacus by out-building him. Some said that Crassus gave his men the construction job just to keep them busy during winter, the off-season for warfare. That sounds like false modesty. Crassus cared too much about his command to fill it with make-work projects. He knew that the campaign in Bruttium would make or break him.
Crassus wanted to defeat Spartacus, but if he couldn’t, he had to control the way the story was told to the Roman public. To do so, he needed influential friends, and surely he obtained them. A man who could buy armies could afford the rewards that would cement friendships. We might suspect the hand of his publicists, for example, in the assertion in the sources that the Romans had got their courage back thanks only to Crassus’s policy of decimation. The campaign in Bruttium proved to be intensely controversial. We will never know precisely what happened there, but we can pick our way cautiously through the evidence.
In spite of exaggerated casualty figures, a Roman victory that day is a reasonable assumption. The Romans had earned success. Crassus and his men had spent weeks if not a month or two preparing a killing field. The Romans could have ended the rebellion that very day if they hadn’t faced a general of the Thracian’s skill. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
For Spartacus the story began on the day he marched his men from the Strait of Messina towards the Aspromonte Mountains. He had to feed his army, which meant going inland on raids and in pursuit of new supporters. This was herding country, known for its cows, sheep and swine. It was terrain for hunting hare and boar. As the rebels travelled north-eastwards from the strait over the highland Plains of Aspromonte they probably got some of what they wanted by charming slave herdsmen - and the rest they took. Wherever they went, the rebels ravaged the countryside.
Archaeology may provide evidence of the damage they did. About 25 miles north of Cape Caenys, in an olive grove near the Tyrrhenian Sea, a treasure recently turned up. There, buried and protected by two large slabs of stone, lay a clay lamp and a group of silver objects: pitchers, cups, a ladle, a teaspoon and a medallion with a bust of Medusa. A graffito may refer to the name of a wealthy Roman landowning family. The objects date to the period c. 100-75 BC and it is tempting to associate them with Spartacus. They were buried in an isolated spot in ancient times, far from the centre of the nearest town. Perhaps a landowner buried them to keep them from the rebels or a rebel might have buried them himself after looting them.
Having turned away from the coastal highway, Spartacus headed for another road located in the centre of Bruttium, about equidistant from the Tyrrhenian and Ionian coasts. Migrants over the centuries had travelled down this road from the Serre Mountains (modern name) to the north, and with good reason. The road takes advantage of a remarkable landscape, a ridge high up on the crest of the Aspromonte Mountains. From a distance, it looks like a tabletop in the clouds. As a traveller comes onto the plateau, it is as if they have stepped onto an isthmus. Today called the Dossone della Melìa, that is, the Melìa Ridge, it lies between 3,000 and 4,000 feet above sea level. The ancient highway ran along the ridge on a north-south axis. In the eighteenth century it was called the Via Grande or ‘Great Way’; the modern road follows its path. Adding to the ridge’s strategic importance, roads branched from it eastwards and westwards, via high, mountain passes (c. 3,000 feet high), to the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas.
The city of Locris sat at the eastern end of the lateral road, on the Ionian Sea. A former Greek colony, Locris had long been firmly in the Roman orbit. At the western end of the lateral road the Plain of Metauros (modern Gióia Tauro) stretched along the Tyrrhenian Sea. Exceptionally rich, the plain was known for its olives and grapevines. Crassus’s fortifications cut it off from Spartacus and his raiders.
Whoever controlled the Melìa Ridge controlled the crossroads of southernmost Italy. No wonder that Crassus chose to make his stand here. The sources say that the nature of the terrain suggested to Crassus the plan to block off the peninsula. The Locrians might well have provided detailed intelligence about the lie of the land. The heart of Crassus’s fortifications stood on the Melìa Ridge near the modern highway 111, which runs on an east-west line about 50 miles north-east of Regium (by modern roads). Here the Italian peninsula is only about 35 miles wide from sea to sea. Plutarch writes that Crassus built his wall across the peninsula for a length of 300 stades, i.e. about 35 modern miles. That is an exaggeration; in fact, the main section of the Romans’ defensive works covered only half a mile. But Plutarch is right in implying that Crassus effectively blocked off the entire 35-mile width of the peninsula.
As Spartacus proceeded northwards, his scouts warned him of trouble ahead. The Thracian is said to have responded with scorn, no doubt sceptical that the Romans could stop him in what amounted to his natural habitat, the mountains. Many scholars seem to feel about the same. They doubt that the Romans made their stand here. Great engineers though they were, not even the Romans could have found it easy to build a 35-mile-long walled trench - through the mountains, no less. Besides, if Crassus had cut off Spartacus about 50 miles north-east of Regium, he would have left the rebels in control of a large territory to the south, about 1,000 square miles in size, roughly equivalent to the American state of Rhode Island or the English county of Hampshire. One might well ask, left to rule such a kingdom, why would Spartacus need to leave?
Some historians turn Crassus’s plan into a modest project: no 35-mile-long set of fortifications, no willingness to give up 1,000 square miles to the enemy. In their view, Crassus went toe to toe with Spartacus from the outset by marching ever southwards, practically up to Spartacus’s camp on the strait. The Romans fortified the ravines in the steep hills above the coast to cut the rebels off, no more than a mile or two away. The result was a short line of fortifications, no more than a mile or so long. While his men were negotiating with pirates and building rafts, Spartacus could see the Romans nearby, practically breathing down his neck.
But Spartacus is unlikely to have sat back and let Crassus corner him. In order to build his trap, Crassus would have had to work far from his enemy’s eyes, not under his nose. So, while Spartacus camped on the coast, Crassus’s men were dozens of miles away and 3,000 feet higher up in the hills.
Yes, an instant 35-mile-long defensive system strains credulity but only if we fail to take into account the lie of the land. In fact, most of the 35-mile width of the peninsula is impassable, so it required little fortification. East of the Melìa Ridge the land dips down towards the Ionian Sea via a series of rocky glens, while west of the ridge there lie vast and impenetrable gorges. The only places that could be easily travelled were the two coastal strips and the Melìa Ridge, the latter only about half a mile wide. Since the Romans occupied the coasts and since Spartacus took readily to the mountains, Crassus could reasonably expect to block him on the ridge.
The 1,000 square miles behind Spartacus were no gift. The territory in question is poor, mountainous and largely infertile, unlike Sicily and its abundance. Nor was it harvest season. The rebels would have found it difficult to live off this land for long. It is not surprising to read in the ancient sources that Spartacus’s men were beginning to run out of food, nor that one reason that Crassus decided to build the fortifications was precisely to deprive the enemy of supplies.
Archaeological evidence tends to support this scenario, although it doesn’t prove it. On the Melìa Ridge there are a series of old trenches and walls, and in the hills nearby are the ruins of three lead-smelting furnaces whose internal walls are sprinkled with lead oxide. Without scientific archaeological excavation, these sites cannot be securely dated. But they do fit the description in the sources of a system of trenches - while also casting well-founded doubt on Plutarch’s claim that the Romans cut a trench from sea to sea. In addition, the ruins have been surveyed by a local historian in southern Italy, an amateur who, as often happens, knows the terrain better than the professionals. The opening paragraphs of this chapter follow his plausible if still unproven reconstruction.
The origin of place names is notoriously difficult to pin down, but, even so, several places in and around the Melìa Ridge have evocative names. A section of the ridge is known as the Plains of Marco, leading down into Marco’s Ridge (Marcus Licinius Crassus?); to the west there is a town of Scrofario (Crassus’s lieutenant, Scrofa?); to the east are the hamlets of Case Romano and Contrada Romano (‘Roman Houses’, ‘Roman Neighbourhood’) and a place called Torre lo schiavo (‘The Slave’s Tower’).