Military Historian - Barry Strauss

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Florida Times-Union
Lee Scott
February 14, 2010
“To give a historian the ultimate compliment: This should be the last book ever written about Spartacus.”

Wilmington Star-News
Ben Steelman
February 7, 2009
“...as usual, the truth is far more fascinating than the fiction. Witness the great new history “The Spartacus War” by Barry Strauss.”

La Gazetta del Mezzogiorno (Bari, Italy)
Giacomo Annibaldis
December 13, 2009
“The volume is like a novel: emotions, ambiguity, arrogance, despair,and fear take shape in its pages.” [B.S. translation]

Books & Culture: A Christian Review
Favorite Books of 2009
December 14, 2009

The Kansas City Star
January 20, 2010
Aaron Barnhart
“Excellent book”

Art and Science Book Reviews
October 3, 2009
By Thomas Neil Neubert

“The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss is a wonderful book.”

Gladiator
June 25, 1009
A conversation with historian Barry Strauss, author of a new book on Spartacus.
Interview by Donald A. Yerxa

The Post and Courier
May 31, 2009
Review by Richard Berg

“a fascinating and engrossing story, which Strauss relates with great style and energy. ‘The Spartacus War’ is highly recommended.”

Chronicle Online
May 20, 2009
Daniel Aloi
Strauss goes into battle with myths in 'The Spartacus War'

The Internet Review of Books
May, 2009
Review by Tony Williams

“masterful story-telling…deeply satisfying…. Strauss’ Spartacus will remain the standard popular history. ….a well-told reconstruction of a gripping tale.”

The Library Journal
“Strauss delivers a rousing good tale of Spartacus”

The Commercial Dispatch
May 12, 2009
Review by Rob Hardy
“Strauss’s narrative is compelling, and the excitement of the story combined with its detail make this a superb history.”

Dorothy King
May 7, 2009
“brilliant history of the war….fascinating reading….I highly recommend Barry Strauss’s account of Spartacus.”

The Australian Senior
April 1, 2009
“FORGET the Hollywood version of the gladiator. In real life they were far more ruthless. They are brought to life in the latest historical account by Barry Strauss.”

The New Criterion
May 2009
Review by Bruce Thornton
(subscription required)
"a fast-paced, gripping story....The Spartacus War exemplifies popular history at its finest."

The Christian Science Monitor
Readers' Picks
“Ancient history does not have to be boring! Barry Strauss’s latest book, The Spartacus War, is no exception to the way he informs and entertains the reader. "

The Providence Journal
March 15, 2009
Review by Sam Coale
“a great epic tale...crackling narrative...terrific.”

The Sunday Times
April 12, 2009
Review by Mary Beard

"Barry Strauss adds an ironic twist to this story of political competition...offers a racy narrative of the rebellion."

Daily Express
April 3, 2009
Review by Christopher Silvester
"This is a colourful and thrilling account that deserves the widest possible readership."

The Washington Post
Sunday April 5, 2009
Reviewed by Tom Holland

"The Spartacus War" ... has all the excitement of a thriller but none of the poetic license. Whether it is the remains of a trench system in the toe of Italy or an abandoned silver ladle or the mention of one of Spartacus's guides in "one line in a lost history book," Strauss makes every last scrap of information count. This is particularly the case when it comes to descriptions of fighting. The account of what it meant to be a gladiator, of the tactics required to be victorious and of the agony of defeat is particularly adrenaline-fueled. Spartacus's death -- not on a cross, as in Stanley Kubrick's 1960 movie, but charging the Roman general who led the campaign against him -- comes as a worthy climax to an epic that never once relaxes its tension. more

The Page 99 Test
Monday, March 30, 2009
Barry Strauss' The Spartacus War

The Capitol Tribune
March 16, 2009
Barry Strauss's New Blog and Book

A&E: Book Review
The Spartacus War follows a rebel with a cause
By JOHN STOEHR
Published 03.25.2009

Citizens of ancient Rome didn’t mind slavery. As they saw it, there were Romans, and there was everyone else. In 70 B.C., slaves comprised 20 percent of the Roman population, and included Celts, Germans, and Thracians from modern-day Bulgaria. They also included a man named Spartacus.

A Thracian who fought in the Roman army, Spartacus was accepted in principle as a Roman but was exploited as a slave and gladiator. He revolted in the summer of 73 B.C. with 70 other slaves, using kitchen knives as weapons. Spartacus went on to assemble an army of 60,000 slaves that rebelled in the name of nationalism, revenge and faith. For two years, Spartacus ravaged the countryside, defeating nine Roman armies. The Republic had never been so vexed from within.

Barry Strauss, a military historian and professor of classics at Cornell University, chronicles Spartacus' legendary slave revolt in his new book, The Spartacus War. Strauss recognizes the rebellion as one of the most successful insurgencies in world history, and finds some intriguing parallels between it and the United States' War on Terror.

“It’s the story of an insurgency like ours in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Strauss says. “The great power can’t fight him, because it’s bogged down in another war. The war is a test of the great power's moral fiber. And a charismatic leader inspires men to fight using liberation theology like jihad. The similarities leap off the page."

Spartacus' run couldn’t last forever. Rebels began to crack under the strain of competing internal interests. Some wanted to sack Rome, a city even Hannibal, the infamous elephant-riding tactician from Carthage, couldn’t scratch. Spartacus wanted to go home, probably to join guerilla fighters in Thrace, according to Strauss. Eventually, the Roman senate sent a powerful general to crush the insurgency. As a warning to future rebels, 6,000 men were crucified along Italy’s main highway, the Appian Way.

The Spartacus-led insurgency significantly threatened Roman social and political order. Before Spartacus, Rome took comfort in assuming its slaves were too ethnically diverse to coalesce and mount a serious rebellion. After Spartacus, that assumption was abandoned, and gladiators were closely watched for the smallest signs of insubordination.

But something else nagged Romans long after Spartacus’ defeat. Not only did he unravel long-held assumptions about the character of slaves, but he also represented a failing of the state. Roman authors, Strauss says, later glorified Spartacus' legacy.

“Enemies were usually portrayed as monsters,” Strauss explains. “Take Hannibal. He was called untrustworthy, obsessed and bloodthirsty. But Spartacus was called patriotic.”

In other words, it was fine to enslave a German, but not a Roman, and certainly not a man like Spartacus who exemplified Roman ideals. That Spartacus was able to destablize the social and political order while undermining basic Roman tenets was among the most interesting discoveries Strauss made during his three years writing the book.

“I was personally struck by the degree to which later Roman writers presented him as a good guy,” Strauss says. “They respected him and blamed themselves for the war.”

That's unusual. Like George W. Bush, Rome rarely admitted error. But Spartacus was a natural and charismatic leader, not to mention a gladiator, the sports hero of the ancient world. He inspired his crew by appealing to its lust for revenge and sense of tribal pride, often invoking the cult of Dionysius, god of the oppressed in rural Italy.

Strauss says most Roman sources believed the revolt could have been prevented had Rome lived up to its own ideals and freed Spartacus. He should have been made an ally, Strauss says, not alienated and turned into an enemy. Spartacus posed a moral test, and Rome ultimately failed.

The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss. Simon & Schuster. $26. 288 pp.

Christianity Today
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the First Century BC
A superb chronicle of the slave rebellion led by Spartacus.
Reviewed by John Wilson
Monday, March 23, 2009
Barry Strauss
Simon & Schuster
264 pp., $26
If you had asked me not long ago what I thought of Spartacus the gladiator, who led a slave rebellion against Rome between 73 and 71 BC, my only recourse would have been to summon hazy memories of the 1960 Stanley Kubrick film, starring Kirk Douglas, which I saw not on the big screen but on TV some while after the movie's release. Thanks to Barry Strauss, I now know a good deal more about this enigmatic figure, the rebellion he led, and Rome's response. Along the way I got glimpses of the Roman world in the first century before Christ, at once familiar and utterly strange, and something like a walking tour of Roman Italy.

The Spartacus War tells a story that is both compelling in its own right and rich with implications for our present moment (not least with regard to insurgency and counterinsurgency strategy). Just as important, the book is exemplary in the way it tells this story—the construction of the narrative, the crafting of the sentences, the implicit contract between the author and his readers.

It is conventional, when writing about novels or movies, to avoid giving away too many details of the plot, lest the special pleasure of surprise that comes with a first reading or viewing be lost. History is typically a different affair, but in some cases—The Spartacus War is one—the same considerations apply. Since I'm writing in part simply to urge you to read this book, I don't want to spoil the pleasure you'll take in following the narrative the first time through. From the outset, yes, you'll have a pretty good idea what the final outcome will be, but that plays out as a sense of tragic inevitability to be held in tension with the unfolding particulars, the twists and turns of contingency. Once you have finished that first reading, I expect that many of you will do as I did: start over at the beginning and read through again with the whole arc of the narrative in your head, pausing here and there to consider scenes you raced through the first time.

What will particularly strike you? We have a sense, built from countless impressions since childhood, of a certain implacability to life in the Roman world, whether—as here—in the waning days of the Republic or in the imperial era. So this isn't new, but it is still striking, and it's epitomized in the fate of the gladiators: men who are enslaved in order to provide entertainment for others, to wound and kill or be wounded and killed. Rebelling against this fate, Spartacus magnificently embodied a human impulse that can't be limited to any one place and time.
And yet, as Strauss shows, it has been all too easy for many interpreters of the Spartacus story to obscure altogether the historical context of the rebellion in their eagerness to make a point—hence Spartacus the proto-Marxist revolutionary. Never mind that he never attempted to recruit urban slaves, that to impose Marxist priorities on the rebellion is to do violence to history.

Indeed, Strauss tell us—and he is painstaking in distinguishing what we can reasonably affirm from what we might conjecture, with some fragmentary evidence, and yet again from sheer speculation—there is good reason to believe that Spartacus was seen by many of those who followed him not merely as an uncommonly strong and intelligent leader but as a "servant of Dionysus," a holy warrior, blessed by the god. Worship of Dionysus flourished in parts of Roman Italy, and the wife or mistress of Spartacus—who was Thracian, as he was, from the region of modern-day Bulgaria—was a priestess and prophetess in the cult of Dionysus, the national deity of her native Thrace.
Christian readers may be struck by the contrast between the charismatic figure of Spartacus the holy warrior and the charismatic rabbi, Jesus. Think too of those New Testament passages about slaves obeying their masters. And yet in America we honor the memory of the revolutionaries who rebelled against Great Britain (in circumstances far less burdensome than slaves had to contend with) and we revere as our greatest president the man who led the nation in a bloody war that was in part fought over the issue of slavery.

Here and at many other points, The Spartacus War pushes us to wrestle with moral complexity. It's a great triumph that Strauss does this in a book the style of which owes as much to the "democratic prose" of the hard-boiled detective novel (as Ross Macdonald put it) and its heirs as to any school of history-writing. The sentences in The Spartacus War are lean. The narrative moves fast. Strauss neither condescends to his readers nor panders to them with the desperation of many pop historians. He writes history for adults. The result—Macdonald would approve—is profoundly democratic.

Publisher's Weekly
The Spartacus War Barry Strauss. Simon & Schuster, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4165-3205-7
No one presents the military history of the ancient world with greater insight and panache than Strauss (The Trojan War). His latest work tells the story of a slave from the Balkans, a gladiator who in 73 B.C. led an uprising of 700 gladiators that eventually attracted over 60,000 followers. Strauss depicts Spartacus as a charismatic politician, able to hold together a widely disparate coalition of Celts, Thracians, Germans and Italians. As a general, he was a master of maneuver and mobility, keeping the ponderous Romans consistently off balance. Strauss reconstructs the rebels' movements across southern Italy and their development into an army good enough to overcome Rome's legions in battle after battle. Not until Marcus Licinius Crassus was given command of Roman forces did Spartacus face an opponent who could match him. Spartacus forced a battle that resulted in complete defeat and his anonymous death. But the uprising he sparked left a permanent mark on the Roman psyche and made Spartacus himself a figure of myth as well as history, as Strauss shows at the end of this brisk, engrossing account. 8 pages of b&w illus., maps. (Mar. 17)

Kirkus Reviews
Advance Clippings
1/1/09 issue
Strauss, Barry
THE SPARTACUS WAR
A swift-moving, accessible chronicle of the insurgency against ancient Rome led by the charismatic slave leader Spartacus.
Strauss (History and Classics/Cornell Univ.; The Trojan War, 2006, etc.) demonstrates a good educator’s ability to marshal ample academic material and present it palatably to the general reader and student of history. Quoting often from early sources such as Plutarch, Appian and Cicero, he begins with the big picture. At a time when Rome was fighting wars on all fronts—against Mithridates in Greece and Thrace, against the rogue Roman general Sertorius in Spain and against the pirates off the coast of Crete—a gladiator named Spartacus engineered a prison breakout of 74 men in 73 BCE. That group grew into a rebel army within a year. Originally from Thrace, the former Roman auxiliary was revered and feared for his brutality, yet Strauss demonstrates that Spartacus was no “hothead,” but rather a disciplined, skillful tactician who had learned well from training among the Romans. Moreover, he had the prophecy of a certain “Thracian lady” on his side, a priestess of Dionysus who served as his consort and messenger. From their barracks in Capua, where they revolted against their handler Vatia, the ragtag gang consisting of warlike Thracians, Celts and Germans moved down the Campanian plain to Mount Vesuvius, then to the Ionian Sea and back to Mount Garganus, picking up recruits and raiding nearby farms. Yet instead of escaping through the Alps when they had the chance, Spartacus and his army turned back south. They were thwarted from crossing the Strait of Messina and eventually defeated at Oliveto Citra by the fierce Roman general Crassus, who celebrated by crucifying 6,000 rebels. Hubris, perhaps, proved the rebel’s downfall, yet Strauss colorfully illustrates the making of the durable Spartacus myth.
Graphic, adrenaline-pumping history.

History Book Club
The Spartacus War
Review by Thomas R. Martin. Spartacus frightened the Romans more than any other rebel before in their history. Born in the wild northern region of Thrace, he had been trained to fight to the death as a gladiator. He did not happen upon this dangerous profession by his own free choice: as punishment for alleged crimes, he had been sold into slavery to perform for the enjoyment of Rome’s bloodthirsty crowds. Previously, he had lived as a free man—he had actually even served in an auxiliary unit of Rome’s army. This insider’s knowledge of Roman military practices made Spartacus especially dangerous when in 73 BC he engineered a breakout of gladiators from their prison-like training camp in southern Italy. Under ordinary circumstances, a slave rebellion on this scale would have been little more than an annoyance to the Roman authorities and easily suppressed. But Spartacus was not ordinary, and neither was his war—he rallied a large army of his own from the countryside and kept Rome on edge for years. And this is no ordinary book about Spartacus, either. Barry Strauss unfolds Spartacus’ story in a narrative that certainly does justice to the events of the war and wrestles skillfully with the challenges that the incomplete ancient sources present to our understanding of what actually happened and why. But this is far from all: he expands this history with descriptions of fascinating aspects of Roman life, society and politics during this eventful period, when the Roman Republic was cracking apart after four hundred years of expansion. The weight of a gladiator’s shield, the look of the landscape, the fury of battle—Strauss weaves all this and much more into his account, which reads with the ease of a novel, while constructing historical interpretations that deserve serious consideration. His central point that Spartacus was a leader of extraordinary personal magnetism and intelligence cannot be disputed. Defeating Roman consular armies called for generalship of the highest order, and maintaining unity in a force of escaped slaves and other angry and desperate rebels required masterly skills of persuasion and inspiration. Strauss, however, suggests that Spartacus’ charisma was literal—that in fact his followers and admirers regarded him as a divinity sent to bring them salvation here and now. Moreover, even in defeat Spartacus retained his symbolic power. Indeed, after death he remained a revered symbol for the downtrodden of their desire for liberation. At the same time, those Roman leaders who claimed credit for the hard-fought success in the war benefited from Spartacus’ reputation, vaunting themselves as victors over Rome’s most terrifying enemy and as saviors of the social order that kept Romans free and slaves enslaved. Strauss culminates his argument with the suggestion that Spartacus indirectly made it possible for Augustus to become the first Roman emperor, as he inherited his father’s glory for having helped mop up the rebellion. These are bold claims that historians will debate energetically, I predict. This lively and imaginative book makes it possible for any interested reader to see what the fight will be about, while enjoying a spirited guide to the unparalleled phenomenon that was Spartacus.