Perhaps the most intriguing place name is the heart of the Melìa Ridge, today covered by a huge forest of ferns with scattered groups of beech trees: Tonnara, that is, ‘Tuna Trap’. The slopes to the west of Tonnara are called Chiusa or Chiusa Grande (‘En closure’ or ‘Great Enclosure’). Tonnara refers to the traditional Mediterranean method of catching tuna by blocking their migration route with complex systems of fixed nets, which ancient fishermen regularly practised off the coasts of southern Italy and Sicily. Tonnara would make an appropriate name for the place where the insurgents were trapped on their trek northwards.
Spartacus had failed to break out and he had taken casualties, but he had no reason to despair. Far from being trapped, he might have reasoned that he now held Crassus locked in an encounter that could destroy either one. Help, he knew, was on the way. His cavalry had not reached him yet; no doubt they were still scouring the countryside for food and supporters. Once they arrived, the horses might provide the punch to allow him to break through. Meanwhile, if Spartacus could not survive indefinitely on the Melìa Ridge, neither could Crassus.
Spartacus’s main problem was logistical: he needed to feed his army. He would find little food on the ridge. In the summer it was good grazing ground for cattle and the humidity made it rich in mushrooms. It was winter, however, so the army depended on raids down in the valleys.
Crassus’s main problem was political. Rome wanted him to crush the enemy, but Crassus preferred strangulation instead, and that took time. Spartacus increased Roman frustration by prolonging the struggle. He distracted, exasperated and delayed the enemy. As the sources say, Spartacus ‘annoyed the men in the defensive works in many ways from place to place; he constantly fell upon them unawares and threw bundles of wood into the trenches that he had set on fire, which gave the Romans nasty and difficult work’ as they hustled to put out the fires.
It was effective psychological warfare while Spartacus waited for his cavalry, but the struggle in the mountains took a toll on his own men. It was the crowning misery of months of trouble since November, when Crassus had come onto the scene. Back in the summer, when they had defeated two consuls and the governor of Cisalpine Gaul, the insurgents could never have guessed that it would come to this. Even a few weeks earlier, although things were difficult, at least they faced the possibility of escaping to Sicily. Now they were fighting for their lives in the chilly clouds of Italy’s forgotten mountains. Conditions were miserable, food was in short supply, and it would be surprising if some men weren’t deserting. The Thracian decided to shock them out of their funk.
‘He crucified a Roman prisoner in the space between the two armies,’ the sources report, ‘thereby showing to his own men the sight of what they could expect if they did not win the victory. ’ There was nothing subtle about this gesture, but it was no exaggeration. The Romans did not plan to issue pardons. They regularly crucified runaway slaves. Besides, it was an age of massacres, from Sulla’s proscription of the wealthy and his execution of thousands of prisoners of war to Mithridates’ massacre of tens of thousands of Italian traders and tax collectors in Anatolia.
Apparently Spartacus made his point. His men showed no further signs of weakness, at least none that the Romans could see. If we believe one source, the Romans blinked next, but not on the Melìa Ridge. If anything, the sight of a Roman prisoner on the cross might have stiffened their will. Rather, it was back in Rome, in the Forum, where the Roman people let their frustration spill over. Disappointed by the developing stalemate, they voted to recall Pompey from Spain where he was re-establishing order after the defeat of Sertorius.
Pompey had won the war against Sertorius in late 73 and early 72 BC. He never managed to defeat Sertorius in the field, but Pompey inflicted enough damage to cause a mutiny. Rivals emerged among the rebels and made contacts with the Romans, who encouraged their plans to assassinate the leader. Betrayed by his allies, Sertorius was murdered at a banquet in his own tent. It was the summer or autumn of 73 BC. The chief turncoat, Marcus Perperna, tried to continue the war against Rome, but some time in winter or spring 72 BC Pompey defeated him and had him executed. The rebellion in Spain was over.
The recall of Pompey was a popular act, voted in the Roman assembly. The Senate was no doubt less enthusiastic, because it meant that Pompey could march into Italy with his army intact, instead of dissolving it at the border, as commanders usually were required to do. Memories of Sulla gave a sinister tinge to Pompey’s advance. Spartacus must have worried the senators more.
No one, however, could have hated the recall of Pompey more than Crassus. He had wanted the war against Spartacus to build his own career, not Pompey’s. Now, he would have to share the credit for victory. Plutarch’s claim that Crassus himself wrote to the Senate and asked that Pompey be recalled sounds preposterous, therefore, but it might just be true. Maybe Crassus’s agents in Rome had sniffed the change in the political winds. Maybe they recognized the inevitability of the people’s vote, and perhaps they advised Crassus to write to the Senate and thereby to seem to be the master of events.
Crassus’s letter is supposed to have asked for the recall of another general besides Pompey, Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus. Marcus, governor of Macedonia in 72 BC, had just led a successful campaign against the Bessi, a tough Thracian people once described as ‘worse than snow’. Marcus Lucullus is not to be confused with his brother Lucius Licinius Lucullus, who was busy at the time commanding Roman troops against Mithridates in Anatolia but is better known today for his love of gastronomy - hence the adjective Lucullan. By asking for two generals to help him, Crassus downgraded Pompey’s importance.
A Machiavellian plan, but Spartacus’s next move was even more Machiavellian. Apparently he got wind that Pompey was coming. It is not difficult to imagine Roman soldiers, lining the walls, hurling taunts at the enemy: Pompey was coming and they had better watch out. Pompey had a reputation: his nickname, earned in the Sullan era, was ‘the teenage butcher’. His name might indeed have frightened some of the rebels, but Spartacus saw through it.
If Spartacus understood Pompey as a threat, he also recognized an opportunity. Pompey gave Crassus and Spartacus a common enemy. They both wanted to keep him out of the war, which would explain Spartacus’s next move: he offered Crassus a peace treaty. In particular, he offered something very Roman, which was to ask Rome to accept him into its fides. Fides is an important Latin word with a rich set of meanings. It means ‘faith’ or ‘trust’ and, in this case, ‘protection’. By accepting someone into its fides, Rome accepted a set of mutual obligations. We might call it an alliance but the Romans would not have done so, since there was no legal contract between the two parties. Instead, moral ties bound them. The Romans considered the object of their fides to be a client, not an ally; they considered themselves to be his patron.
The ties of fides could prove binding indeed. The Second Punic War (218-201 BC), for instance, the worst war in Rome’s history, began because Hannibal attacked the Spanish city of Saguntum, which had no alliance with Rome, merely a relationship of fides. However seriously Rome took a fides relationship, the man who negotiated it, usually a general, regarded it with even more importance. He became the personal patron of Rome’s client, with whom he enjoyed especially intense ties. If Crassus had accepted Spartacus’s offer, he would have become the Thracian’s patron.
Doing so would have been repugnant. Rome regarded a request for fides as a formal act of surrender, but even so, it conferred a ‘most beautiful dignity’ on the client. By accepting the Thracian into his fides, Crassus would have conceded not only Spartacus’s dignity but also Spartacus’s right to settle his men somewhere in safety. That would never do. To grant such honour to runaway slaves and gladiators was out of the question. Rome wanted Spartacus’s head, not his handshake. Crassus disdainfully ignored the offer.
Yet, what magnificent gall on Spartacus’s part the proposal was! Far from conceding defeat, he asserted his right to respect. If nothing else this tactic might have been a morale booster for his men. If he was stuck in Crassus’s trap, Spartacus did not show it. In fact, he was about to demonstrate his ability to escape, because his cavalry had finally arrived. At a guess, it was now February.
Spartacus waited for a storm. He chose a night of snow and wind. An old hand like him would have guessed that in these conditions the Roman garrison would be ‘below strength and at that time off its guard’, as one ancient source says. The sources disagree as to just how he made the attack. One writer says that he used the cavalry to spearhead the charge through the ill-maintained defences. Another says that he filled in a small part of the trenches with earth, wood and branches for his army to cross. A third writer agrees that Spartacus filled in part of the trenches but with the corpses of prisoners whom he had executed and the carcasses of cattle. On another occasion, in AD 26, a Thracian army attacked a Roman camp by filling in its trenches with bushes, fences and dead bodies, so we can imagine Spartacus using a variety of objects.
The sources disagree as well about the degree of Spartacus’s success. One writer says that he managed to extricate only one-third of his army before the Romans closed the gap again. Another insists that Spartacus got his entire army through. An ingenious scholar has tried to square the circle by saying that once Spartacus got part of his army through, Crassus had to abandon the fortifications or else he would have been caught between two threats. Hence, the other two-thirds of the army was able to escape as well. In any case, the sources cite huge numbers of rebel slaves at large in the next phase of the war; they also mention Crassus’s fear that Spartacus might now march on Rome. This suggests that, one way or another, Spartacus got most of his men out of Crassus’s net.
Crassus had gambled and failed. Spartacus had paid a price in blood but he had broken free. It was a tremendous victory for the slaves and a bitter defeat for the Romans. There was nothing for the Romans now but to abandon the defences they had worked so hard to build and to return to the pursuit. Once again, Spartacus had forced a campaign of manoeuvre and mobility, at which he excelled.
Spartacus displayed his mastery of the art of tactics. Breaking through fixed defences is often difficult, particularly against defenders as good at fortifications as the Romans. Spartacus, therefore, had reason for pride after his breakout but not for false hope. With Crassus behind him and Pompey expected to appear, the rebels continued to enjoy poor strategic prospects. Now, as always, Spartacus had only one reasonable goal: leaving Italy. But how? The Alps had overwhelmed them and the sea had betrayed them. Spartacus might think of finding new and trustworthy pirates somewhere. He might even contemplate persuading the army to march back north and give the Alpine passes another try. But not now; surely his battered people needed rest. That reasoning, at any rate, might explain the statement in the sources that his goal now was Samnium.
Samnium is a region of the south-central Apennines, lying north and north-east of Capua. It was famously rugged and anti-Roman. Sulla’s army had destroyed Samnium’s elite military manpower at the Battle of the Colline Gate in 82 BC, so Samnium could offer Spartacus little support from its free population. With the help of local slaves, however, the rebels might have carved out a retreat in Samnium’s remote hills. Perhaps they had already found assistance there in their march northwards in spring 72 BC. Spartacus’s knowledge of Samnium might even have dated back to his days in the house of Vatia in Capua. So Spartacus led his army northwards through Bruttium and back into Lucania, heading for Samnium.
But it was not to be. The rebel army broke up again. As one source says, ‘they began to disagree among themselves.’ As before, the split had an ethnic component. A large contingent of Celts and Germans decided to go off on their own. Their leaders were named Castus and Cannicus (or Gannicus). The sources put the group at well over 30,000 men but the figures are, at best, educated guesses. It is not clear if all the Celts and Germans in the rebellion joined them, nor do we know if any other nationalities chose the splinter group.
In any case, we needn’t conclude that the split was just a matter of tribal politics. A reasonable person might have argued that Spartacus had failed and needed to be replaced; his Sicilian strategy, it could have been said, had wasted valuable time and lives. If he had saved the army on the Melìa Ridge, he had also brought it there in the first place. According to the sources, before he learned about the break-up, Crassus was afraid that Spartacus was leading his men towards Rome again. This may be just what Castus and Cannicus wanted to do. Dreaming of storming the enemy’s citadel, perhaps they scorned the idea of retreating to Samnium.
So, for the second time, the rebel army broke in two. Crassus surely took heart.
TO THE DEATH
9
The Celtic Women
I
t was just before dawn and the light was still dim. In approximately March 71 BC in the hills of northern Lucania, the two women probably felt a chill in the air as they climbed the mountainside. Budding branches alternated with green-clad pines, and there might even have been some snow on the peak. The women were Celts, members of the breakaway army of rebel slaves led by Castus and Cannicus. Privacy is a rare luxury in an army on the move. This morning, though, they had needed to get away from the crowd in order to carry out monthly rituals. They might have been druids, and privacy, a sacred grove and precision in timing were essential elements of Celtic religion.
The nature of their rite is unclear. Celtic rituals were legion; as Caesar wrote: ‘the whole of the Gallic people is passionately devoted to matters of religion.’ Celtic women commonly met in small groups to call on the gods. ‘The magic of women’ galvanized many in Celtic society. As for the two women on the mountain, Sallust says that they were ‘fulfilling their monthly things’. Some scholars take this as a reference to menstruation, while others consider it a reference to the phases of the moon, pointing out that the Celtic religion paid close attention to the calendar. (The moon is still visible in pre-dawn light.) Plutarch says that the women were ‘sacrificing on behalf of the enemies’ (i.e. Rome’s enemies - that is, the women’s own soldiers). These possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Many religions connect the menstrual and lunar cycles, and many communities link their success with women’s fertility.