Spartacus: The Leader of the Roman Slaves. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1962
The Roman Empire, which came into existence as a result of the phenomenally rapid expansion of the Italian metropolis in the second century BC, represented the final and most advanced political form taken by classical society. The three Punic Wars, waged between Rome and Carthage during the third century BC for supremacy over the Mediterranean basin, were the decisive turning point – military, economic and political – in the evolution of the classical world. After the definite victory of Rome in this long drawn-out struggle, the whole of the Mediterranean civilisation – the ‘world’ of classical geography – came under the sway of the Roman state.
The Second Punic War, from 222 to 201 BC, in which the great Carthaginian general Hannibal led the struggle against Rome, represented in classical society what the Napoleonic Wars represented in more modern times, the decisive turning-point in the evolution of the Empire of England, the modern Rome. Hannibal, the greatest tactician in military annals, was the prototype of Napoleon, the greatest strategist in the history of war. But in the case of Rome against Carthage, unlike that of England against Napoleonic France, it was the military Empire of Rome that ultimately defeated the thalassocracy of Carthage.
Whosoever controlled the Mediterranean, the ‘Great Sea’ of antiquity, controlled the entire classical civilisation that had arisen upon its shores. Accordingly, for the rest of antiquity, classical society was synonymous with its Roman protector.
The eagles of Rome flew over the centres of classical civic life. The magic letters ‘SPQR’ (Senatus populusque Romanus – the Senate and People of Rome) henceforth were emblazoned in haughty defiance over the portals of the ancient civilisation right down to the hour of its final collapse, when, ravaged by social decay and bled white by economic exhaustion, the tottering structure crashed helpless at the feet of the northern barbarians.
In the centuries immediately prior to the Christian era, this last calamity still lay in the remote future. For these centuries, in particular the second century BC, were precisely those that witnessed the rise of Rome to ‘world’ power. In quick succession, the centres of Mediterranean civilisation were overrun by the ‘ever-victorious’ legions of Rome and brought beneath the yoke of the Italian Republic. By the end of the miraculous century of Roman expansion which followed upon the victory over Hannibal and Carthage in 202 BC, nothing but subjugated provinces and client vassal-states confronted the all-powerful Republic. The ‘glittering prize’ of world power, vacant since the premature demise of Alexander the Great, two centuries earlier (323 BC), had been won by the superior force and strategic ability of the Roman war-machine.
What were the motives which animated this ancient imperialism? Rome and Carthage had fought to the finish for world supremacy and Rome’s was the ultimate prize. What did it signify? In general, it can be stated that the imperialist wars of antiquity were fought primarily for land and for slaves to cultivate land.
Just as modern imperialist wars are primarily wars for trade and capitalist surplus investment in a pre-eminently commercial era, so ancient imperialist enterprises were fought out in a predominantly agrarian economy for land and its human ‘instruments of production’. Viewed from this historically correct angle, the wars of aggression fought by the slave empires of antiquity were equally land-ramps and man-hunting expeditions. And the wars of Rome, the greatest of all these ancient slave empires, fit most closely into the above categories.
It is true that commercial and even financial considerations were not entirely lacking, to give a superficial resemblance between the aggressive enterprises of ancient and of modern imperialism. We have not forgotten that merchant and usurious capital played their part, albeit a subordinate one, in the processes of classical economy. But, in the main, the distinction is as stated above.
When, therefore, we strip the startling conquests that effectually constituted ‘the grandeur that was Rome’ of the high-sounding phraseology with which sycophantic historians have seen fit to disguise them, we observe, beneath these euphemisms, that in reality the Roman conquests were glorified land-ramps and man-hunts, in the course of which Rome not only conquered the most fertile regions and populous civic centres of the ancient world, but, concurrently, sold up their conquered population.
Just as modern slave-hunters have depopulated and ‘civilised’ Africa, so the ancient Romans ‘made a desert and called it peace’, in the poignant words used by the mordant and disillusioned Roman historian Tacitus to describe the real procedure of his countrymen. In the ancient case, also, ‘white ivory’ (slaves!) was plentiful and cheap during the maximum era of Roman expansion between the conquest of Carthage by Scipio and the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar (202-49 BC).
The net effect of these gigantic man-hunts upon the hitherto static economy of antiquity was catastrophic and far-reaching – in the most literal sense, revolutionary. During this golden age of the slave trade, it was not uncommon for 10,000 slaves to change hands in a single day in the great slave market on the Aegean island of Delos, that ancient ‘Zanzibar’ of the traffic in human flesh. The slave-trader followed the victorious eagles like a human vulture – and not in vain! The greater Roman victories brought in staggering totals: 150,000 is the probable computation of the enslaved citizens of the Greek commercial metropolis of Corinth. Carthage, Rome’s vanquished rival, brought in perhaps an even greater number. Whilst, at the other end of the Mediterranean, the influx of Spaniards, Gauls and Sardinians periodically created ancient crises of ‘overproduction’, in which the bottom was knocked out of the market and prices sagged and sank in a manner today reserved fortunately for inanimate articles of exchange. It must, of course, be remembered that the population of the agrarian society of antiquity was much less than that of modern industrial society. Exact estimates are difficult to come by, but it is unlikely that the Roman Empire supported more than about sixty million people.
It goes without saying that the cheaper and more plentiful the human commodity, the more callous and brutal was the treatment accorded to the human chattel. And never previously had either slaves been so cheap or their treatment been so brutal. The two phenomena were not to be experienced again in such prolific abundance until the palmy days of the African slave trade, 2000 years later, and of the ‘middle passage’ across the Atlantic to the slave markets of the West Indies, where a similar superabundance was to produce a similarly brutal disregard of the human chattel.
Roman commercial slavery, which crowded its human tools into its vast latifundia (landed domains) and its insanitary ergastula (underground slave barracks), or into its mining death-traps, where, according to the ancient historian Diodorus Siculus, the average expectation of life was about three months, was an altogether different and far harsher species of servitude than the easy-going domestic servitude of the Greeks, or even the feudal serfdom of the ancient priest-kings of the Orient. The great historian Theodore Mommsen, in his History of the Roman Republic, [1] has stigmatised this hideous mass of misery upon which the grandeur of Rome was inseparably founded as the most hideous orgy of human suffering that the world is ever likely to have known. And there is every reason to accept such a judgement.
It is a major curse of slavery that it corrupts the slave-owner and his society equally with the slave himself. This hideous cancer, both political and moral in its ultimate effects, poisoned and distorted beyond all recognition the Roman society which experienced its effects during the period of ‘the primary accumulation’ of capital, including capital in slaves, that accompanied the great era of Roman conquest, which transformed the rustic republic of primitive Latin farmers into the dominant imperialism in the Mediterranean. Free, as well as servile labour, felt the effect of this staggering transformation.
In the place of the free land-holding peasantry that had formed the backbone of the tenacious resistance against which both the wealth of Carthage and the genius of Hannibal had dashed themselves in vain in the Punic Wars – which we again recall were the decisive imperialist wars of antiquity – the Italian countryside was parcelled up into vast latifundia owned by absentee landlords and tilled exclusively by slave labour supplied by the unceasing wars of conquest. The erstwhile free peasants were driven to the towns to become paupers, living precariously on ‘bread and circuses’, the original dole. Whilst the monopoly of the land and of the means of production continually accelerated.
So bad had the position become by the end of the second century BC that the would-be reformer, the tribune Tiberius Gracchus, declared in a public speech that ‘the wild beasts have their lairs and the birds their nests; but the Roman people have not a foot of land they can call their own. Conquerors of the earth, the earth itself denies them food and shelter.’
If this statement was demagogic rhetoric, it corresponded closely enough to the facts to rouse an instant and enthusiastic response and to inspire a formidable popular agitation, which found eventual expression in a murderous series of civil wars that lasted for practically a century, from the agitation of the Gracchi (133-121 BC) down to the final victory of the military dictatorship of the Caesars, the ‘Fascist’ era of the ancient world (49-30 BC).
During this century of civil wars, numerous attempts were made by democratic reformers to break up the big estates and to recreate a land-holding peasantry, such as had been the backbone of the Roman state at an earlier and simpler stage of its existence. Needless to say, in an agrarian society in which land was the basis both of wealth and political power, such attempts were fiercely resisted by the big land-monopolists who dominated the Senate and formed a close corporation, a ruling oligarchy, who mismanaged the affairs of the state for their own profit right down to the victory of Caesar. The two Gracchi, Tiberius and Caius, and other reformers, were murdered by the armed thugs of this decadent plutocracy.
It must, however, be borne in mind that the above agitation, which has attracted the virtually exclusive attention of orthodox Roman historians, when they describe the social question in these times, had nothing in common with the aims of the slave insurrections that I am about to describe. In fact, one of the arguments put forward by land-reformers of the type of the Gracchi was, precisely, that a free peasantry would prove a bulwark against slave revolt. The whole agitation was an internal affair of the free, that is, legally privileged classes. To all free Romans, rich and poor alike, the slave was a common enemy, since they all lived off his exploitation. In this last respect, Karl Kautsky has made an apt comparison with the British Labour imperialists of his day, who were similarly hostile to the enslaved colonial masses, the slave class of the British Empire!
In a society rent, as was that of antiquity, by fierce class antagonism, only two permanent solutions are possible: either the lowest class can ‘shake off its chains’ and remodel society in its own interests on a basis freed from exploitation – in antiquity this could only have resulted from a victorious slave insurrection: or the state (’the executive committee of the ruling class’) must become strong enough to assume a permanent dictatorship that will restore and regulate by force an unstable social equilibrium. This last method, which was the method of Caesarism in antiquity and is the identical method of Fascism today, finally triumphed with Julius and Augustus Caesar at the end of a century of more or less permanent civil war. When the revolt of the slaves had failed, there was nothing for it but permanent dictatorship or permanent chaos.
First, however, Roman society was subjected to the violent incidence of the first method. Not only did free society carry on a bitter class war over the division of wealth which was produced mainly by slaves, but the self-same era witnessed an entire sequence of slave insurrections which aimed, in practice at least, to abolish the very basis of servile economy. The insurrection of Spartacus, which formed the impressive conclusion of this sequence, cannot be understood apart from its predecessors and their common historic background.
I propose, accordingly, to direct a glance at the chain of servile wars which preceded the great insurrection under Spartacus.
1. Theodore Mommsen, History of Rome (Bentley, London, 1862).