The Spartacus War, Ch. 3

What had happened is this: Crixus was in favor of attacking Varinius, while Spartacus wanted to avoid battle. That was a tactical difference, but a deeper, strategic disagreement divided them. Crixus wanted to widen the war in Italy. He wanted more loot, more revenge and, no doubt, more power. Spartacus did not think that the rebels were winning. In fact, in his opinion, the men were now in mortal danger. Their movements were aimless and ad hoc. Sooner or later the Romans would cut them off and wipe them out. To be safe, they needed to leave as quickly as possible.

And go where? Crixus might have asked. Spartacus wanted to take the army north to the Alps, where they would split up and head back to their respective homelands, be they in Thrace or the Celtic lands. Parts of Thrace and most of Gaul were still free. Gladiators, runaway slaves, and free Italians could all live there beyond the long arm of Rome.

It was an inspiring plan, and one that a follower of Dionysus might have relished: the Greeks, at any rate, believed that the god had traveled through the high and rugged Hindu Kush mountains (located between today’s Afghanistan and Pakistan). Some even said Dionysus had been born there. Surely, the god would lead his follower Spartacus over the Alps.

It was, others no doubt replied, an impossible dream. But what was the alternative? The Alps were not easy to cross but they were not impassable, either. Hannibal had proven that. The Roman legions, however, were another matter. Spartacus knew the Roman army well, and he doubted the rebels’ ability to defeat the Romans in a regular battle. If the rebels could not defeat a second-rate force like Varinius’s, what would happen when the armies in Spain and the East came home, and the rebels had to fight veteran legions?

Spartacus understood the difference between guerrilla and conventional warfare. Guerrillas cannot defeat a conventional army by military means; they can only frustrate it. As long as the conventional army retains its will to fight, it will win in the end. And it was impossible to imagine the Romans losing their will in Italy. Eventually, the Romans would wipe out the rebels.

Spartacus was right but he was outvoted. He had only a small number of supporters, “a few farseeing people, men of liberal minds and nobility,” as one Roman writer puts it. Crixus had behind him the majority of his fellow Celts as well as the majority of the Germans. Many of the Celts and Germans had been born in Italy, being the children of prisoners of war from 102 and 101 B.C. “Going home” might not have meant as much to them as it did to Spartacus. “Home” was Italy.

But a Roman writer gives Crixus’s supporters lesser motives:

Some of them stupidly put their trust in the masses of new recruits flooding in and in their own fierce spirit, others were disgracefully heedless of their fatherland, and most of them had a naturally slavish temperament that longed for nothing except booty and bloodshed.

These comments are bigoted but they are not entirely inaccurate. From Thrace to Gaul, barbarian warfare put a premium on the acquisition of loot. It brought only limited wealth, since much of the booty was consecrated to the gods, but cattle, gold, and women were the coin of the realm, and Italy teemed with all three.

And military logic favored some of Crixus’s points. After all, a reasonable person might have argued that if the rebels turned north now, they would have Varinius on their tail, and eventually he would force a battle. A reasonable person might also have pointed out the difficulty of crossing the Alps in autumn. The rebels would have to sit in northern Italy and fight off the Romans until the following spring, when they could
go over the mountains again. Northern Italy was neither as rich nor as warm as the south. Why not build a base under the southern sun? After all, the Roman armies in Spain and Asia Minor were not likely to come back to Italy soon.

From the operational point of view, Spartacus was probably wrong. It was safer to defeat Varinius before heading north. But strategically, Spartacus was right. The rebels had to leave Italy, if not today or the next day then soon. And eventually they had to cross the Alps. Spartacus was unable to win his case, but he did a signal service to his people even so: he held the army together.

Spartacus and his supporters might have quit. They might have worked their way quietly northward, avoiding Roman roads, and headed for the Alps. Or they might have used their loot to buy or bribe their way onto a boat heading east. But Spartacus was an armed prophet and did not want to be a general without an army. Dionysus’s
chosen one was not about to slink off.

The quarrel was settled by a compromise. As Crixus wanted, the fugitives would continue plundering and they would fight Varinius. But as Spartacus wanted, they would not fight him yet. Instead they would prepare carefully for the coming battle. It was inevitable, Spartacus said, that Varinius would rebuild his army. In preparation, the rebels needed to increase the number and quality of their troops. They needed elite recruits; the closest thing to that, Spartacus
suggested, was to find shepherds. In order to find them, the rebel army would have to head into more open country, someplace more suited to grazing. In other words, they would have to go south into Italy’s pasturelands.

Spartacus knew what he was doing. Roman herdsmen were slaves, tough, hardy, and independent. They were fighters, as they had to be in order to survive in the wild, where wolves and bandits were routine and bears were not unknown. Slave shepherds had made up the core of the great Sicilian Slave Wars. Herders had sustained the Lusitanian (Portuguese) rebel Viriathus in his eight years of guerrilla war against the Roman conquerors (147–139 B.C.) The current Roman rebel in Spain, Sertorius, drew many of his supporters from shepherds as well.

Spartacus knew one other thing, too: the margin of error. The Romans could afford bad generals and defeated armies. In fact, Roman history was littered with failure, from the Allia to the Caudine Forks to Cannae. The Romans could lose many battles as long as they won the last battle. And Rome’s ironclad political system and profound population resources gave it the will and the manpower to go the distance.

The rebels had no room for mistakes. Spartacus knew that his men were good but also that they had been lucky. Roman incompetence allowed them the luxury of going on raids instead of drilling soldiers, of arguing with each other instead of fighting the enemy.

Rome could throw away praetors. The rebels needed a leader.

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