SERVILE WAR. SPARTACUS. M. LICINIUS CRASSUS.
Pompey was now made consul: he was the favourite of the people, as it was expected that he would restore the tribuneship. In no other way can I account for this enthusiasm. It might indeed much rather have been felt for Cæsar, whose nature was such that no worthy hearted man could come near him without loving him, even as Cicero in truth was always fond of him: it is a very noble want of the people, that it longs so often to find an object for its enthusiasm. Pompey had not yet been invested with any curule dignity; notwithstanding which, he was consul with Crassus, a man with whom he was at that time on such ill terms, that the Romans trembled lest the two foes should take up arms against each other. But at the urgent entreaties of the senate they made up their quarrel, and both of them behaved like honourable men; for during nineteen years afterwards they never were really enemies again, and they sometimes even appeared to be very good friends.
Crassus had gained his importance as the conqueror of Spartacus. About three[117] years after Sylla’s death, Spartacus, a Thracian, had with forty, others say with seventy-four gladiators, broken out of a barrack of gladiators at Capua. There is a house at Pompeii which is very like a barrack, with rooms in which arms were found, and which has therefore been called the soldiers’ quarters. The very fact that there should have been a garrison at Pompeii, seemed to me quite incredible; but on closer examination, I recognised the arms as being of the same description as those described by Livy as having been in use among the Samnites, which were afterwards adopted by the Campanians, and then by the gladiators; there is therefore no doubt but that it was a ludus gladiatorius, which we must thus suppose to have been a building of this kind, in which the gladiators were shut up at night. The number of the gladiators had gone on increasing; as the rage for them among the Romans had daily become greater, and such games were the surest means by which the men of rank could make themselves popular.
Spartacus, after having broken out, escaped with his followers to mount Vesuvius: he must have been a very great man, and would undoubtedly have proved himself to be one in any other position. The volcano had at that time quite burnt out: there was on it an old tumbled-down crater very difficult of access, in which they hid themselves, and whither immense crowds of slaves, of which there were then great numbers in Italy, ran to join them. Spartacus at first formed a band of robbers; and when troops were sent to surround and take him, he gave them the slip, and defeated the Romans with much loss on their side. By this means, the slaves began to be provided with good arms; hitherto they had made their own weapons themselves, as well as they could. Spartacus now proclaimed the freedom of the slaves. Lower Italy was in those days either altogether lying waste, or it was overrun by slaves, all of whom forthwith hastened to him: the freemen had so much dwindled since the devastations of Sylla, that there was no one at hand to check the insurrection. It is strange that among the slaves Germans also are positively mentioned: of these there cannot now have been many from the Teutones; they must have come thither from the Gauls by commercium. The leaders ruled with dictatorial power; Spartacus was a Thracian, Crixus and Oenomaus were Gauls. The war lasted until the third year. Two consular, and three prætorian armies were utterly routed; a great number of towns like Nola, Grumentum, Thurii, very likely also Compsa in the country of the Hirpinians, were taken and sacked with the atrocious cruelty which might have been looked for in a horde of bandits; we know but the smallest part of these horrors. Crassus defeated them in the third year. They had large forges for making arms, and did not shrink from the mighty thought of conquering the greater part of Italy, not to speak of destroying Rome itself. Rome would have been obliged to concentrate her power from all quarters, had not quarrels arisen among the rebels themselves, owing to which they split into three different bodies, each of which was hostile to the others; thus Crassus was enabled to defeat them one by one. Near Petilia in Lucania, he gained the last decisive victory; and he followed it up with the same cruelty which the German princes displayed after the Peasants’ War in the sixteenth century. Every where prisoners were seen speared, hung up mangled on the highways, and tortured to death. The devastations of southern Italy have indeed never been so completely repaired, as to restore it to the same condition as that to which it had reached before the Marsian war; yet I fully believe, that even its present wretched state is better, and that its inhabitants are more numerous, than in the most prosperous times under the emperors. The free population was quite rooted out, the towns were laid waste, and the few places which are mentioned of Lucania in the itineraries, were hardly anything else but posting stages; the whole country moreover was turned into large estates which were used for the breeding of cattle, especially of horses. The number of monuments which one finds of the towns of that period, is incredibly small.