The story of Spartacus and his slave rebellion in ancient history (circa 100 BC) is famous. Stories and even movies have been made of it.
Spartacus certainly was a good general and caused the Romans a lot of trouble but was there ever any BIG plan he had?
What little I know is he ran around for a few years causing a mess until, eventually, Rome got ahold of him and ended it.
I guess what I am asking is do we know if Spartacus wanted something? Like peace for some farmland or to conquer Rome and make himself emperor or to just get out of Italy and settle down?
Was Spartacus an anarchist? No, I always thought his revolt was about being against slavery. Now someone is going to come in and claim that Roman slavery wasn’t that bad , but who really wants to be a slave to another person?
What other goal does a slave initially have to have other than being free? Killing their masters is the first goal, until Rome was defeated and freedom established there really isn’t much on your mind, its kill those bastards. Other revolutions may have goals like the Bolsheviks but some are just revolts against oppression, like the French revolution.
I think Spartacus was eventually rolling around with an army of 100,000 or more people. At that point you are not just one guy looking to escape. You can start making demands I’d think. Especially after you had stomped a few armies sent after you (which he did).
It seems that his immediate goal was to make Rome bow down and stop the institution of slavery. That would entail I believe having them stop the practice of conquering foreign lands and enslaving their people.
But I don’t know what was in his heart or what his further goals may have been, for “I am not Spartacus!”. Don’t tell me you didn’t see that one coming. I’ll let some our resident history buffs chime in now that the discussion is started and the joke response has been made.
We don’t have the collected thoughts or even speeches of Spartacus so I don’t see any way to answer this.
Classic Historians seemed divided.
He wanted his freedom and for those he led. So he was hoping to escape north.
He wanted to end slavery and/or march on Rome itself.
Whichever was true, despite successes while the legions were away in yet another Roman war. He achieved nothing long term. The biggest mystery is why he ever led his men South instead of North.
It has been years (decades) since I studied Roman History so I can well be wrong, but I really don’t think anything that would help has survived to be read by us.
I guess I am surprised a guy with an army of 100,000 that had some victories against Roman armies was just aimlessly wandering around until the next Roman army showed up.
We only have accounts of events written by his enemies and later historians, not by himself, so we can’t be certain.
He doesn’t appear to have had any big ideas about reforming society.
He certainly wanted to leave Italy with his men, perhaps to establish his own state in Sicily, where it would have been more difficult to defeat him, perhaps to disperse and let everyone go to their various homes.
He gathered together freed slaves and other people who for one reason or another were unhappy with their circumstances, and they probably had a range of different goals and opinions. I would think that he was mostly busy dealing with threats and problems as they arose, and doing the best he could at each moment, rather than having a bigger goal than leaving Italy.
Probably he went south rather than north simply because he knew would encounter less resistance in the south and might be able to get away by sea.
It wasn’t a regular disciplined army, and we don’t know how well organised it was.
Spartacus presumably had to convince and persuade his men rather than simply issuing orders. There may have been internal disagreements and power struggles. His successes would have given him a lot of prestige and authority, but his army was more like a semi-organised and semi-trained crowd.
It also seems to me fhat having such a large army presents not just logistical but strategic problems. 100,000 people need to be fed, armed, motivated, etc. ‘Wandering around’ Italy may have been more about searching for opportunities to provide for his army and keep them together.
Spartacus may have trapped himself by his own success, wielding an army too large to move quickly and too expensive to move at all without constant conflict to restock themselves with plunder.
Maybe he also tried a campaign of winning hearrs and minds, but that clashed with the need to plunder the countryside to maintain his army.
This was what they showed in the 1960 motion picture, but that script took liberties with the truth, and isn’t even faithful to the Howard Fast novel it’s based on*, let alone to what is known about Spartacus. I haven’t studied what we have on him in detail, but from what I have read of him in ancient histories he and his fellow slaves revolted and obtained some freedom. I don’t think there’s any evidence of grand plans to free all slaves in Italy, or to march on Rome. Marching on Rome would have been a disaster.
There has been a TV series now, so we can have a different interpretation of Spartacus. I also recommend Arthur Koestler’s book The Gladiators for a very different take on the story than Fast’s.
*Yup – that Howard Fast, probably more famous for historical novels set in America. Although early in his career he was a noted science fiction author.
Modern movies about Spartacus kind of give an exaggerated account of how much we know about it. Roman historians and writers have given us some documentary history of Spartacus’ slave revolt, but these were exclusively written from the Roman side. If anything about Spartacus rebellion was intended to cast a negative light on Roman society, you can be assured that would not have been written down and recorded for future generations. Until quite recently historians were not expected to be unbiased and entirely truthful, they would have been expected to glorify Rome and its leaders of the time. The only reason we ever have critical information is because Rome was always ruled (in both Republican and Imperials times) by shifting factions of power, as one went out, another came in, and trashing the previous guys in writing was not uncommon.
Using a little logical extrapolation it is probably the case that Spartacus didn’t maintain a 100k standing army the entire time he was active. I’m guessing it seasonally ebbed and flowed, and I suspect there were times when much of the army was scattered about in smaller bands “living off the land”, which probably entailed significant banditry.
I think the historical claim has been he went South to continue acts of banditry, which is why some wonder if he genuinely wanted out of Italy at all or was just content to be a bandit king living in the mountains of Italia. It could be he realized he needed out of Italy intellectually but he couldn’t figure out how to move all his people logistically, and the area of Italy he was in was rich for plunder, the further North he had gone and eventually over the alps either into Gaul or to wherever. We aren’t even quite sure of Spartacus’ origin, and I think there’s some belief that the name Spartacus wasn’t his birth name. I’ve heard he may have come from Illyria (modern day Croatian coast and inland to where modern day Bosnia is) or Thracia (roughly modern day Bulgaria.) These regions were not well settled at the time to support a big army of 100,000 so at some point Spartacus forces would have to disperse and I imagine working out the particulars of that would be rough, with some factions wanting to keep plundering the Italian countryside.
It is, but Hannibal was a general of an army from another empire, he ultimately sought to secure Rome’s complete capitulation. His issue was he couldn’t take Rome itself, so he sought to isolate and weaken Rome by converting other Italian cities to Carthaginian allegiance (at the point of a sword.) This worked, but frequently only as long as Hannibal was in the immediate vicinity, so despite having swept aside the Roman armies lead against him in Italy he was continually frustrated in achieving total victory. The idea that Spartacus rabble of slaves could have sacked Rome of this era is even more ludicrous.
That’s really not the case. Roman historians were often extremely critical of Rome itself, and not only factions they disagreed with.
Livy strongly condemns the Third Punic War, and regards it as a totally unjust war provoked by Rome. He puts Hannibal’s case in the Second Punic War strongly, with powerful speeches denouncing Rome.
Sallust strongly praises Catiline’s courage and military ability, and that of his rag-tag army, including ex-slaves (in some respects similar to that of Spartacus).
Caesar doesn’t hesitate to mention examples of cowardice and incompetence in his own army, and gives great praise at times to the Gauls.
Tacitus’ own father-in-law, Agricola, conquered northern Britain, but Tacitus doesn’t hesitate to put a powerful anti-Roman speech with good points in the mouth of a British chieftain. “They plunder, slaughter, and steal, and falsely call this Empire; they make a wasteland, and call it peace.”
Virgil’s Eclogues pain a vivid picture of the suffering of ordinary poor people during the Civil Wars.
Roman historians tend to go into great and lengthy detail analysing Roman defeats, and spend only a fraction of the time praising Roman victories.
The idea that Roman historians were expected to praise Rome simply doesn’t hold up. Rome was a very self-critical society in many ways.
I think this is what Rome thought when they sent their first few armies after Spartacus and got really scared when that “rabble” thoroughly whipped those armies.
I’ll let some our resident history buffs chime in now that the discussion is started and the joke response has been made.