The Warrior's Manifesto. Daniel Modell
by the Romans and pressed into death-reeking arenas for the amusement of elites who elevated themselves above others. The elites could do what they would with lesser peoples. They were Romans.
For Spartacus, life as a slave began in the ludus of Lentulus Batiatus at Capua. Existence was harsh in the ludus. To prepare for combat whose end was death to amuse spectators often meant death along the way.
Spartacus yearned for the freedom into which he was born, the freedom wrested from him by a Roman sword. As a skilled strategist burning with life, he hungered for an opportunity to shatter chains. When it tapped, Spartacus seized the day and slashed through his masters to the world beyond their cages. Other gladiators joined. They fought as warriors would, with whatever they could find: kitchen implements, training tools, bare hands. “Furor arma ministrat”2—rage finds its weapons. Some imagine him rallying his fellow gladiators with these words:
If ye are beasts, then stand here like fat oxen, waiting for the butcher’s knife! If ye are men, follow me! Strike down yon guard, gain the mountain passes, and there do bloody work, as did your sires at old Thermopylæ! Is Sparta dead? Is the old Grecian spirit frozen in your veins, that you do crouch and cower like a belabored hound beneath his master’s lash? O comrades! warriors! Thracians! if we must fight, let us fight for ourselves! If we must slaughter, let us slaughter our oppressors! If we must die, let it be under the clear sky, by the bright waters, in noble, honorable battle!3
Slaves overthrew slave masters. Spartacus prevailed.
Rome sent Praetor Gaius Claudius Glaber to quell the rebellion. He pinned them on Mount Vesuvius and pursued victory by attrition. But Spartacus was a bold and unorthodox tactical thinker. He scaled down a side of the mountain along plaited vines with a small group of about seventy comrades, outflanked the Romans, and attacked from behind, dispatching the much larger Roman militia, including Glaber, to its end.4
Slaves throughout the empire allowed the hope of a once silent word to touch their lips: freedom. They flocked to join Spartacus in thousands. He made an army of them.
Spartacus outwitted, outmaneuvered, and routed legions under command of Publius Varinius. Varinius surrounded the encampment of the rebels. Spartacus posted stakes at regular intervals around its periphery. To the stakes he affixed corpses decked in soldiers’ garb, nailing weapons to their hands as he lit fires throughout the camp. The impression from a distance was that of a bustling and well-garrisoned space. Varinius, thus deceived, delayed attack.5 In the meantime, Spartacus slipped the camp with his army by night, wheeling on the duped Varinius from a better position and destroying his legions.
The Romans clung to the orthodoxy that they were unassailable, that the slave rebellion was but a nuisance. Rome continued to underestimate the will and determination of the rebels—and the leadership and savvy of Spartacus. Its haughtiness was paid in blood. Spartacus defeated legions commanded by Lentulus and Gellius in turn. Each triumph shattered the prevailing dogma that Rome was ineluctable master of the world. Here was a ragtag clutch of disorganized slaves, largely untrained, thought inferior by birth but trim in heart and sharp in will, defying the mightiest power of the day, fighting finally for themselves rather than for the pleasure of others. Other slaves saw it. Rome shuddered in due course.
Finally, when Spartacus choked Rome with its illusions and showed that greatness is not a function of place or birth or class or position, the Senate hurled the full might of Rome against him. Marcus Licinius Crassus, rich, ambitious, and cruel, undertook command of eight battle-hardened legions to defeat the rebellion. To turn in battle under his command meant death. The weight of resources, numbers, and organization was crushing.
Spartacus shifted tactics. Small raids marked by speed and savagery harried Crassus but could not defeat him. Patiently, methodically, Crassus at length maneuvered the rebels into pitched battle and succeeded where others had failed. He defeated the rebels in a desperate and brutal last stand. A strategic thinker as incisive as Spartacus knew its denouement. Finally, he had no delusions about the end of what he started. Rome was, after all, Rome. He might have fled. But where to run when Rome was everywhere? So, he fought.
Though killed on the battlefield, Rome never claimed his body. His men, the men he led, the men who bled with him, the men who breathed but briefly the free air with him, would not yield his body to the abuse of Roman cruelty. He disappeared as he had appeared—in nameless mystery.
Some academics debate his motives and question whether he opposed slavery. This is theorizing among clouds. Spartacus did not, it is true, publish position papers. He was a warrior and otherwise occupied. In any case, outside ivory towers, actions speak. Spartacus fought for his own freedom against those who enslaved him. He fought for the freedom of his brothers in the ludus against those who enslaved them. He fought with seventy thousand slaves who flocked to him against their oppressors. Among warriors, there is no debate. He fought for freedom. And when the fell clutch of circumstance exacted his fall, he fought as a free man against tyranny, the terms of death his own, an equal adversary on the battlefield. This was his message: in battle, the pretension of status counts for nothing. Where the final arbiter is blood, skill, and will, the “inferior” Thracian was the equal of the “superior” Roman, whatever the outcome. This was a warrior, his final battle fought in the teeth of defeat to seize deeper victory, for the warrior does not always fight to prevail in particular battles. Sometimes the warrior fights for a broader principle, for a future yet unwritten, to reshape thinking, to change the world. He at times fights just to show that it is possible. The unchallenged dogma of the day proclaimed that Rome was and would always be unquestioned ruler of the world. Submission and tribute were the lot of the remainder. Spartacus defied dogma, questioning the unquestioned. History scarcely remembers Crassus, still less Glaber, and less still Batiatus—except as footnotes to the warrior whose true name remains a mystery. Who won the war, then?
Spartacus did not fight under the banner of any nation. He did not sport fine uniforms. He did not fight for the gods. His tactics were heterodox. His army defied traditional structure. He fought, but not for mere brawling. He wished to be free. This, then, is a warrior: one who takes up arms by choice for an ideal, deeply embraced, suppressed or threatened by violence.
This is the what of the warrior.
We bow down before no man.
—Spartan heralds to Xerxes at Susa, HERODOTUS, Histories, 7.136
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time or war where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
—THOMAS HOBBES, Leviathan, chapter 13
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