When Slaves Go Roman, There's Trouble

In Brief

Slave rebellions suck, especially for the slaves, because they usually lose. Curiously, this year the slaves in Gladiator rebel onscreen at the same time African-Americans celebrate emancipation (in the Texas holiday of Juneteenth). Of course, real slave rebellions never get far. Not convinced? Just ask Roman gladiator Spartacus.

Party On

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The News

6/18/2000 Ridley Scott's Gladiator movie, Juneteenth holidays in 2000 got History House thinking about slaves throughout history.

This week, we've got human bondage galore. Here at History House's home base in Texas, it's Juneteenth, a celebration of the American slaves' emancipation in 1865. Curiously, it coincides with the box-office success of Gladiator, which is ripped off from another slave rebellion: that of the Roman Spartacus. As such, we are uniquely situated to consider the insurrection of enslaved persons.

In the torturous history of forced servitude, slave rebellions have pretty much been inevitable. That's not to say they enjoy a hundred-percent success rate. For example, American black slaves under Nat Turner fomented a small rebellion in 1831 that got swiftly quashed and its perpetrators sent to the gallows. Nasty ends were also metered out to a lot of other black folks who really had nothing to do in what you'd call "overzealous personnel management practice". In 1800 another rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser was thwarted by a large thunderstorm; the subsequent flooding made travel impossible.[1] They too met the business end of a rope or a rifle or something else unpleasant, because all the white folks were jittery. The honkies had a pretty good reason, too[2] -- a 1791 slave rebellion in Santo Domingo (Haiti) killed thousands of people and eventually led to freedom, and, in the southern United States, such things simply wouldn't do. Recall that, despite the occasional brutal beating, this was a culture of seersucker and petticoats, and privileged inhabitants thereof didn't care for unrest. Besides, it was necessary to stop any and all rebellions immediately, otherwise slaves in other areas might get ideas.

This was ancient Rome's problem, and it came in the name of a dude named Spartacus. The story of this slave revolt was fictionalized in 1951 by Howard Fast, made into a pretty famous movie in 1960, and unrepentingly ripped off in the 2000 movie Gladiator. For those not wanting to get lost in Kirk Douglas' howling chin dimple onscreen, Spartacus was a combatant getting his PhD in smackdowns at a gladiatorial school run by Gnaeus Lentulus Batiatus. One early summer day in 73 BC, the upstart was able to consolidate the gladiators at the school and, with knives stolen from the kitchen, overthrew his captors. On their way out the band bumped into a weapons caravan, and they obligingly helped themselves to the booty, because cookware alone does not a rebellion make. Spartacus and his crew became renowned in Rome for their bold banditry, and they swiftly vanquished half a Roman legion (3,000 men).

Word traveled fast, and slaves from all over were fleeing their masters and joining the army, which got so big (40-90,000, depending who you ask) the Roman government decided that they couldn't keep thinking slaves were weak-kneed milquetoasts and sent two full armies (40,000 men), which Spartacus slaughtered. To make matters worse, he made 300 Roman survivors fight one another in gladiatorial combat, which completely outraged Rome.

Now paranoid about a slave invasion,[3] Rome opened up the can of whupass by unleashing General Marcus Licinius Crassus, known for his employment of the old-school practice of decimating errant subordinates.[4] Spartacus, who tried to book passage off Italy to start his own slave-nation, was double-crossed by pirates. Crassus caught up with him, and the absurdly huge Roman force put the rebellion to the sword. Rome crucified the survivors (6,000 of them) on the great Roman highway, the Appian Way. For the better part of a week, if you were headed to Rome, you had to walk past these poor guys quivering and drooling and dying, and, since there were 6,000 of them, you probably spent a full day walking through them. Yuck!

Of course, the story doesn't end there. Howard Fast, who cobbled together the original novelization from the slimmest of historical records, wrote it as a not-too-thinly-veiled propaganda piece for Communism: slaves of the affluent rise up and take control over the means of production, etc.[5] Indeed, Fast was one of the first American political prisoners; he ticked off the House Un-American Committee at some point and got mired for two years. That his book was made into a movie so soon after that era is remarkable and courageous, but we here at History House have another question: why didn't he pick a successful rebellion, like Toussant L'Ouverture's in Haiti in 1791? Just asking.

In the meantime, households all over the American South will be celebrating the emancipation of American slaves in 1865 (June 19th, to be exact; that's when word got down here. Yes, we know Lincoln's proclamation proper was in 1862. Mass communication back then wasn't so hot back then). Such festivities are usually your garden-variety Americana, involving barbecue and parades and such. It's a little more civil than your garden-variety Romana, wherein the freed slaves made their captors fight one another in gladiatorial combat. Of course, given the opportunity, that probably would have happened in the American south in the 1860s.

Footnotes

1. We figure slaveowners proudly announced that this meant God was on their side.
2. Let us be the first to say that the slaves also had plenty of reasons to be jittery with the situation at hand.
3. It is generally believed that Spartacus, knowing full well he had no siege engines with which to attack a walled city like Rome, initially felt invading was futile. He eventually changed his mind, but never quite got there.
4. "Decimate" really means kill one in ten of the offending screwups.
5. It is known that the real Spartacus banned the use of gold and silver at his camp, for example, and these revelations sparked the interest of later Marxists.

 
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