As a Thracian, Spartacus had a heritage of making war. In particular, Thrace specialized in light infantry, horsemanship, trickery, and unconventional warfare. Homer considered the Thracians a nation of horsemen; Thucydides respected their daggers; Romans feared their polearm. Thrace had invented the peltast, the quick and mobile lightly armed infantryman who fought at close range with a knife or at a distance with a javelin. They excelled at attacking or defending hills, using hit-and-run tactics, setting ambushes, setting or dousing campfires, making opportunistic raids on heavy infantry formations, and forming up in defensive mass against cavalry. Feints, ruses, tricks, and stratagems were all chapters in the Thracian war manual. And plundering was a national habit.
Spartacus was born and raised with the Thracian way of war but as an adult he added an additional string to his bow: Roman military doctrine. He combined Thracian speed and stealth with Roman organization and discipline. Single combat and swordsmanship did double duty for him, since Romans as well as Thracians valued these practices. Gladiatorial training may have added some new tricks to his sword handling.
At Vesuvius, Spartacus put all his military wisdom to use. Because of the dramatic changes to Vesuvius in the several eruptions since 73 B.C., we cannot reconstruct the topography in detail. But the overall picture is clear.
Nowadays, “Vesuvius” actually consists of two peaks: an active crater, called the Grand Cone, and a second peak, Monte Somma, which lies across a saddle to the north. Before A.D. 79 it seems likely that the Grand Cone and Monte Somma were joined and that there was only one peak. They shared a dormant crater at the top, about a mile in diameter; its northern and eastern rims are probably today the interior walls of Monte Somma, facing the Grand Cone.
Many scholars believe that Spartacus and his men camped in this crater. The surviving interior walls of Monte Somma are steep, forbidding, pockmarked, and precipitous. They are topped by a jagged series of crests. The highest point today is 3,700 feet. The walls are covered with broom, beech, locust trees, and lichen. In Spartacus’s day they were covered with wild vines.
Nowadays often considered a nuisance plant, the wild grapevine, Vitis vinifera sylvestris, is the hero of the story. Unlike Spartacus, it was native to Italy, where it was a familiar sight. Spartacus’s rural recruits “were used to weaving branches into baskets that they used for their farm work.” This is nothing unusual for the Italian countryside; in fact until a generation or two ago, Italian country folk regularly wove baskets and containers in a similar way. We might also speculate that the sight of lava “ropes”—ropelike lava formations—on the wall of Monte Somma’s extinct crater suggested the idea of using vine ropes on the mountainside. In any case, Spartacus’s rural followers cut off the usable vines and entwined them into long and robust ropes. Wild vines tend to be longer than cultivated vines, which eased the rebels’ task. Some other form of local vegetation with thinner branches probably served to bind the vines.
We don’t know what time of day the following action took place, but dusk would have served well. The rebels let the ropes down a part of the mountain that the Romans had left unguarded because it was so steep and rocky. The soil here was crumbly and unstable. We should not think of the rebels using the vines for rappelling down the mountain. Vesuvius’s slope is not vertical, and vines are not supple or strong enough to be coiled around someone’s body. Rather, the vine ropes probably served as handholds and guide rails. One by one, the rebels climbed down—all except one last man. It was his job to stay and throw down the weapons that they had taken from their camp. The terrain was too uneven to carry weapons safely on the descent. Finally, having tossed all the arms down, the last man came down as well. Or so the sources say, but it seems more likely that a group passed the arms from man to man at the end.
We might guess that it was now nighttime. Since Thracians specialized in night attacks, Spartacus might have wanted to deploy this advantage. The fugitives had carried out their escape under the eyes of the careless Romans. Now they attacked. next