I’ll have to come clean with all of you: I really don’t know as much about Spartacus as I should. My excuse for not knowing much about this slave revolt is that a couple of years ago I got intrigued by the other major slave war in antiquity, the revolts in Sicily between 129-121 BCE. Strangely, even though those slave wars were more successful than Spartacus’ revolt (simply the duration of the revolt demonstrates that), these slave wars are generally less well known.
This discrepancy is mainly the result of the sources in which these wars are recorded. Initially the only surviving historian who commented on the Sicilian slave wars was Diodorus Siculus (Siculus, by the way, is simply Latin for ‘Sicilian’). However, we don’t have direct access to Diodorus’ account of the slave wars: we can only read what other writers summarized of Diodorus’ original history.
Anyway back to Spartacus. The main surviving source for the account of Spartacus’ revolt is Plutarch’s Life of Crassus. Unlike Diodorus, Plutarch is a respected ancient author, who write across a variety of genres, including biography, essays and philosophical dialogues.
I’m interested in how Plutarch and Diodorus write about these slave revolts because ancient historians (and to some extent ancient biographers) are very interested in describing war as a time of reversals: the free become enslaved and the enslaved become free. In this blog I’ve already mentioned how in times of war ancient states would sometimes offer freedom to slave for help with fighting. A related phenomenon is slaves fighting for their own freedom.
Which brings me to the topic of this post. Plutarch never describes Spartacus as a freedman. Instead he is a slave, indeed, one of the worst kinds of slaves in the ancient world: a fugitive. Despite raising an army that won a victory against the Romans, Spartacus remained in Plutarch’s eyes a runaway slave. This emphasis is intriguing, since Plutarch does have some sympathy for Spartacus, since his courage is praiseworthy.
This discrepancy is mainly the result of the sources in which these wars are recorded. Initially the only surviving historian who commented on the Sicilian slave wars was Diodorus Siculus (Siculus, by the way, is simply Latin for ‘Sicilian’). However, we don’t have direct access to Diodorus’ account of the slave wars: we can only read what other writers summarized of Diodorus’ original history.
Anyway back to Spartacus. The main surviving source for the account of Spartacus’ revolt is Plutarch’s Life of Crassus. Unlike Diodorus, Plutarch is a respected ancient author, who write across a variety of genres, including biography, essays and philosophical dialogues.
I’m interested in how Plutarch and Diodorus write about these slave revolts because ancient historians (and to some extent ancient biographers) are very interested in describing war as a time of reversals: the free become enslaved and the enslaved become free. In this blog I’ve already mentioned how in times of war ancient states would sometimes offer freedom to slave for help with fighting. A related phenomenon is slaves fighting for their own freedom.
Which brings me to the topic of this post. Plutarch never describes Spartacus as a freedman. Instead he is a slave, indeed, one of the worst kinds of slaves in the ancient world: a fugitive. Despite raising an army that won a victory against the Romans, Spartacus remained in Plutarch’s eyes a runaway slave. This emphasis is intriguing, since Plutarch does have some sympathy for Spartacus, since his courage is praiseworthy.