Statue of Eunus in Enna, Sicily.

Coins bearing Eunus’s image.

I myself knew little before escaping Batiatus’s hellhole. In Thrace, we knew nothing of slaves and their rebellions in Italy or Greece. And in the ludus, planning our future escape, plotting how to get to the knives in the kitchen, left no time for history lessons. With us, while few arrive with a great deal of knowledge about the past, those who do will not go far without finding eager ears. Altogether, between the revolts that have lived on in local memories and those written about – always from the slavers’ side, the stories told around our campfires must surely be the most complete history of Rome’s slaves’ rebellions ever gathered. For us here right now this is the greatest story ever told. What follows is that part of that past that I have been able to learn.

Greeks told the first story of slave uprising – on Chios, a large island off the coast of Asia, said to be the home of the Greek poet Homer. While slaves have been taken in war for as long as anyone knows, the people of Chios are said to be the first to start actually buying and selling them. Drimakos, who led the first reb,ellion against it, himself escaped, hid successfully in a rugged forest, and became leader of a band of others who did the same. After conflict between the freed slaves and their former masters had gone on for some time, Drimakos suggested an agreement by which the ex-slaves would continue to take what they needed from the slavers’ storehouses, but would interrogate any newly arriving runaways who wished to join them and accept only those who had been mistreated. This truce held for a considerable period.

The next known revolts also occurred at Chios. By this time the Romans were enslaving so many that they had set up marketplaces to sell them, one of which was located there. Men sold there, only recently captured in battle, not yet reconciled to a life of servitude, who might have been standing watch not all that long ago, remained alert for any sign of opportunity. They twice mounted revolts – despite being chained and closely guarded at all times.

Sometime later revolts broke out around Capua, close to where we original gladiators had been held. Elsewhere in southern Italy, cattle herding slaves – generally enjoying greater freedom of movement than others – rose up, as did slaves on the island of Sardinia. Following the war with Hannibal, Carthaginian slaves and prisoners rebelled in the towns of Setia, Norba, Cerceii, and Praeneste, all in Latium, south of Rome. In Setia the slaves managed to take control until 2,000 Roman troops arrived. This revolt was sufficiently threatening to Rome that night watches were posted in neighborhoods throughout the city. It is said that those Carthaginian slaves were the first people to be crucified by Rome – once started, they have never stopped.

Shortly afterwards came a revolt in Etruria of sufficient size to require an army led by a praetor to suppress it. Frequent conflicts occurred in Brutium in southernmost Italy; Apulia, the southernmost region on the Adriatic; and Tarentum, the city on the gulf bearing its name. At one point, the Romans condemned 7,000 of those rebelling in Apulia to death, although many escaped. The fact that they were willing to forfeit the price of so many slaves tells us how many more they must have feared losing if the bonds of slavery were somehow to be broken in the region. Many of these revolts involved followers of Bacchus, whose rites and celebrations Rome later attempted to suppress entirely. Even Rome itself did not escape frequent revolts of its slaves. The first such event is said to have been led by a Sabine named Herdonius, some hundreds of years ago.

Although these events took place in times much closer to ours than to the wars of Homer’s day, the stories do still go much farther back than any of the men now telling them. However, the revolts said to be the three greatest of all have occurred within the memory of some of the oldest of living slaves, although there can be but few – if any – such men on our march. One of these three wars is our own. Both of the two that preceded it occurred on the island of Sicily, the first about sixty years ago.

Sicily is the largest island in the great sea, off the southern tip of Italy. It has long been plagued by outsiders, starting with the Phoenicians and the Greeks. Some say there could have been no worse place for an island to be located than between Carthage and Rome. Sicily was the place where the Roman disease first spread across open water. Roman troops landed there and took control of it during their wars with Carthage, at whose hands the island had previously suffered. It is said that when Rome set up its first massive public sundial some 200 years ago, it had carried it off from Sicily. Slave revolts on the island date back even to the days of Greek settlements. Hundreds of years ago, when Athens besieged the Sicilian city of Syracuse during its war with Sparta, the slaves of Syracuse rose up to demand the rights of full citizens. The Syracusan general Hermocrates suppressed this revolt by treachery, promising the rebels peace and freedom and then slaughtering their leader Sosistratus with twenty of his men when they arrived to discuss terms. Such is what the ex-slave should always expect. Further treacheries would follow.

Life on Sicily changed dramatically with the arrival of the Romans. Once they took control of the island from Carthage and drove its Sicilian supporters off their land there were huge expanses now available to the new conquerors who wasted little time in filling the island with foreign slaves acquired in tremendous numbers from their constant wars. Here too Rome may have learned from its enemies – it is said that Rome’s system of continual wars paying for themselves by the capture of slaves who will then work the land that the warriors do not was first the practice of the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius. With its influx of new slaves Rome now began exporting massive amounts of the grain that they produced. Henceforth Sicily would feed Rome – as would be the case with all of colonies that have followed. Rome’s program for the rest of the world is: You work; we eat.

They say the tremendous increase in Sicily’s slave numbers was comparable to what has happened in Campania in recent years. No one had ever seen so many slaves in one place before, in such great numbers that the Romans took to herding and branding them on their faces, like cattle. Never before had so many people been treated so badly for so long. The slaves were so numerous and the slavers so greedy that many began simply turning slaves out to herd their flocks in the hills and fields, without so much as even providing them with food or clothing – much as is now done in Campania. Left to fend for themselves, the slaves often turned to brigandage, and yet the governors sent by Rome showed little desire to repress them. It was, after all, the very Roman settlers whose support those governors relied on who had set these slaves to this life. Thus the Romans themselves had created a province riddled with places where no unarmed Roman dared set foot. But such considerations mattered little in faraway Rome, which concerned itself only with the steady supply of grain in its newly found abundance.

That was how it came to pass that the new Roman rulers of Sicily themselves sowed the seeds of the revolt that would eventually rise against them. As these freebooter slaves armed themselves and began to set upon travelers and villagers for their sustenance, they became quite accomplished at this trade. And as they encountered one another freely in the open, they began to consider whether, since they were already effectively at a permanent state of war, they might do better if, rather than setting upon random travelers, they would attack the owners of the herds, who also claimed ownership of themselves. Left to their own devices, they also came to know that Sicily’s inland areas had a large population of island natives pushed into their current locations by colonists, starting with the Greeks and continuing with the Romans, with the Carthaginians repeatedly fighting with both for control of the island. The hatred these displaced Sicilians felt toward the Romans might in some cases match or exceed that of Rome’s captives, the Roman presence serving as continual reminder of what they had lost, living in their now reduced circumstances on their own island.

Our Greek scholars tell us that when the Greeks arrived on Sicily they forced the locals into a relationship like that which the city of Sparta had once maintained with a neighboring group they called helots. The helots differed from the slaves of other Greek cities in that they were subservient not to an individual Spartan but to all Spartans. So in Sicily, there were the colonizers and those who fed the colonizers. This latter group included the natives, the slaves who herded the colonizers’ flocks, and the chained field slaves living in the ergastulae.

With conditions similarly miserable across the island, two separate revolts broke out on either side of it. When their numbers grew large enough, the rebels set about unchaining the ergastula slaves. The Romans held slaves from various nations on Sicily and the leaders of one of the rebel groups included Eunus of Syria and Achaeus of Achaea. Eunus was a diviner and magician who, while enslaved in the Sicilian city of Enna, would proclaim that the Syrian goddess Atargatis had appeared to him to inform him that he would one day be king. This he told even to his Roman master who came to find this apparently mad slave rather entertaining. The Roman even began to bring him out to show him off to the guests who might attend his dinners, where Eunus was encouraged to perform his magic and proclaim his future. The Roman would ask him to assure each of the other slavers that once he became king he would treat them with moderation. Some of the guests would give him a taste of Roman food and Eunus would tell them that he would not forget their generosity. For some time he provided a reliable source of amusement to social gatherings of the large slavers – until he didn’t, when his claims were no longer a laughing matter.

At some point, one pair of Romans named Damophilos and Megallis, apparently loathsome even beyond the norm for Romans, drove their captives past the limits of their tolerance. It turned out that while the Romans thought Eunus good fun, not everyone was taking him as a joke and some of this couple’s slaves came to him and asked if the gods would support them if they rose up and killed the Romans. Eunus responded that the gods would indeed look favorably upon such an action, and in fact they must go for it immediately and seize control of Enna, the principal city that lay near the center of the island. Quickly gathering 400 slaves, they then did just that. Enna was considered a nearly invulnerable fortress, as it sits on a plain surrounded by sheer cliffs with but a few easily defensible paths leading up to it. But it had never before been attacked from within.

This Roman couple had slaves of all kinds in great number – from branded and chained field slaves, to wolf or boar hide-clad herdsmen living wild, to young pretty boy and girl household slaves – all treated with great cruelty, as these Romans kept acquiring more, apparently pleased to no end by having so many human beings that they could do with as they chose. When the rebellion happened they and many others like them received the type of treatment they had meted out. After they were done with her, her female slaves threw Megallis off a cliff.

But the retribution was not indiscriminate. While Eunus personally killed his own former master and mistress, it is said that he was good to his word given to the specific slavers who had shown him kindness. And the daughter of Damophilos and Megallis, who had shown kindness in her life, was escorted safely to the company of relatives. However, when fighting was over, the only prisoners the ex-slaves looked to spare were those Romans skilled in making arms, who could now be put to good use in the cause of their former slaves.

The prospect of an uprising by their slaves is a particularly terrifying one to the slavers. In the Roman language, the word for slave originally meant one who has been spared from death, following a war. In today’s Rome it simply means captured for life. And certainly the slaves the Romans now buy from pirates who have stolen them from their home lands – as Rome’s thirst for slaves exceeds even the ability of its legions to supply them – have in no way been spared. Yet, from childhood the Roman learns that he is better than the slave, regardless of how the slave came to be one. This is reality, as it should and always will be. So when a situation such as in Sicily develops, the Roman faces the abyss. He realizes that when his slaves wage war on him, it is not likely that he will become one spared, as the rebelling ex-slave is at the moment probably not planning to become a slave owner himself. After all, where could he keep the Roman?

Because Eunus’s counsel to go forward with a revolt had resulted in success, the rebels did indeed make him the very king he had predicted he would be. He took the name of Antiochus, this being the name of many kings from his region of origin. He also declared that his wife would be queen. Within three days the rebels had rallied 6,000 to their ranks. Just as we would later do, at the outset they armed themselves with anything at hand – spits and fire-hardened spears, such as we had; also with the axes, hatchets, and sickles of the farms; and the slings of the herdsmen.

When the second rebel slave group formed under another leader, Kleon of Cilicia, and took the town of Acragas on the southwest coast, so little were the Romans able to conceive of the possibility of their being stripped of power that they spoke of their hope that the forces of Eunus and Kleon would fight each other rather than against the Romans. But unlike Romans, the island’s freemen did not go about waging war against just anyone. Instead, in about a month’s time Kleon’s 5,000 joined with Eunus. The Romans eventually dispatched an army of 8,000 to Sicily but it was defeated handily, the first defeat of several. The rebels overran their camps and captured various towns including Mamertium; Agrigentum, along with the surrounding countryside in the southwest; and Catana further to the south. Tauromenium, south of Messana, served as their base.

The slaves of Sicily were in quite a different position than we are. Unlike us, they felt no need to seek any other location, as they already had water between themselves and Rome. In fact, the rebels were so firmly ensconced that they set up a government similar to what some of them had known back home, even going so far as to mint their own coins bearing the image of Eunus, now called Antiochus. If there was one thing we heard amongst the stories of the Sicilian uprisings that stuck with us and motivated us it was this. In our life on the run this past year, the idea that we might be able to produce our own coins – or be able to use them if we could – was something that no one would have taken seriously. This was a level of order simply beyond our current horizon. But if it had been done once it could be done twice – hopefully even more successfully a second time.

These Sicilian rebels did not make war on the small Sicilian farmers who kept no slaves and were not their enemies, many of whom saw the slaves’ rebellion as an opportunity to strike back at the interlopers from Italy. And where the newly freed slaves generally took care to preserve the houses, the herds, and the harvests of the slavers – so as to later put them to their own uses, the poor Sicilian freeman would often loot and burn the lavish Roman villas simply out of hatred for those who flaunted the wealth created for them by Rome’s armies and the slaves they brought back.

This revolt lasted four years and the overall devastation to the island was considered to be greater even than that of the wars during which Rome took it from Carthage. It was said that the army of former slaves came to number 70,000. During and after their final defeat, many of them preferred to kill themselves rather than to once again fall into the hands of the Romans. Among that number were the guards of Eunus who cut each other’s throats rather than surrender, as well as Komas, the brother of Kleon, who held his breath while under torture, until he expired. During the Romans’ siege of Tauromenium, the rebels were said to resort to cannibalism rather than to surrender. Eventually a traitor in the group betrayed them to the Romans who tortured the survivors before throwing them off a cliff.

This occurred at the time of the second revolt at Chios and another at Delos. Uprisings occurred as well in towns along the Appian Way – Minturnae and Sinuessa, as well as in Rome itself. The numbers involved in Sinuessa ran into the thousands. There had also been another Capua uprising. Indeed the Roman praetor dispatched to fight the Sicilian rebels had previously been sent to do the same there. And the revolts extended even much farther afield. At that time, Attalus, the king of Pergamon in western Asia had declared that upon his death his kingdom was to be given to Rome. Although the gift did not extend to the city of Pergamon and other Greek cities, the Romans considered the entire region to now be theirs. Yet Aristonicus, who came to power upon the death of his brother Attalus, declared that Rome should have none of it, and would not rule their land, so long as he had anything to say about it. Never wishing to forego the benefit of more foreign land, the Romans responded to this provocation by extending to the people of Pergamon that which they consider to be most precious – Roman citizenship. Aristonicus – now called King Eumenes – went them one better, however. He proposed to create a state he called Heliopolis – City of the Sun – and all who lived there would be citizens, including those now or previously enslaved.

There was at that time a Roman philosopher named Gaius Blossius who had been friend and advisor to the Roman politician Tiberius Gracchus. While Gracchus had accepted Rome’s slavery as part of the natural order of things – as all loyal Romans do – he did contest its Senate-first-people-later order by challenging the fact that Rome’s soldiers, although they were called masters of the world, increasingly came to find themselves in the position of owning not a single clod of earth. He therefore enthusiastically embraced the planned Pergamene gift to Rome as a way to realize his land distribution ideas. After the senators assassinated Gracchus along with many of his followers, Blossius came to reconsider his situation and fled Rome to join Aristonicus in his Heliopolis venture and would later commit suicide following the defeat of Aristonicus who would himself be executed by the Romans after they had ended the war by poisoning the wells of several cities.

Revolts continued to break out – in Campania, at Nuceria, Capua, and other locations. But the largest one to occur between Eunus’s uprising and our own again took place in Sicily. This one started when the two pillars of Rome’s existence – war and slavery – came into conflict. Bithynia was an Asian Roman ally that fronted the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus, and the Black Sea. When the Romans were conducting one of their many wars in Gaul they called upon this ally to provide troops for the effort, only to have Bithynia’s king respond that he could not do so because so many of his nation’s men had been seized by Roman tax collectors and sold into slavery that there were no longer sufficient numbers available for him to fulfill Rome’s request. When confronted with this crisis, the Romans decided that the continued supply of soldiers was the more important consideration, because in the long run having sufficient numbers of soldiers to send to Gaul would ensure that Rome could bring back additional slaves sufficient to compensate for any immediate reduction in their numbers now. Rome therefore accommodated the Bithynian king by decreeing that any slave who had once lived as a free man among peoples allied with Rome was to be set free.

This was no small matter, for by this time Rome’s greed for slaves had so far exceeded even the number brought in by its routine invasions of foreign lands that the traffic from this secondary source – those seized and sold to Romans by tax collectors or pirates – had now grown to a substantial size. What followed was that the Roman governor of Sicily attempted to implement this new directive by setting hundreds of slaves free, only to quickly encounter hostility from the island’s slavers who had benefitted so greatly from the additional source of slaves that would be eliminated by this new policy turn. Since the fact was that Rome enjoyed little support on the island beyond that of these slave-owners, they were soon able to convince the governor to reverse course and restore their slaves to them. However, now that these ex-slaves had known freedom once again, it proved impossible to pour the wine back into the amphora, and the governor found a rebellion on his hands.

In time, this second group of Sicilian rebels also chose a diviner for their king, just as the first one had done. This one was named Salvius. After one battle in which they thoroughly routed the Romans, Salvius proclaimed that no Italian or Sicilian who threw down his arms would be killed. Upon hearing this, most of the Romans turned and fled, four thousand Romans were taken prisoner, and as many rebels were thus armed. When the rebels laid siege to the city of Morgantina in the south, the slavers told their remaining slaves that freedom would be theirs if they would take their masters’ side against those former slaves who were actually fighting to free them. Those who were foolish enough to accept the Romans’ offer would soon learn the ways of Rome, as the governor later rescinded their freedom and they were forced to take matters into their own hands and flee to the rebels who then came to rule the area extending to the Leontini plain to the east.

Sicily is a three-sided island. As had happened in the past revolt, a second uprising was organized by a separate group in the western part of the island around Segesta in the north and Lilybaeum on the sea. This rebel group was led by a Cilician named Athenion, another diviner made into a king. When Athenion was enslaved he had been a villicus and therefore had a keen understanding of the needs of supplying his forces. Hence, he did not accept every slave who sought to join their ranks, but directed some of them to remain where they were, continuing to manage their own households and to assist the rebels from that position by providing them with supplies from the farms they lived on. And, since he planned to be king of all of Sicily, he adopted the same policy as the previous rebels in taking great care that his forces should not wreak havoc on the island that he hoped would one day be theirs. This group laid siege to Lilybaeum, but due to the city’s location on the coast closest to Africa, they came under attack from the Mauri, who were African allies of Rome, and failed in their campaign. And, as in the first Sicilian revolt, the ex-slaves’ effort also at times contrasted with the actions of the island’s poor natives who more frequently sought greater vengeance upon their wealthy Roman neighbors.

Eventually the two rebel forces united, but soon Salvius, who by now had taken the name of the Syrian king Tryphon, jailed Athenion, suspecting that the Cilician might attempt to usurp his power. The landing of a Roman army soon caused him to recognize the need for unity and reverse that decision, however. The invaders included men from various of Rome’s allies. A contingent from Bithynia – provided by their own king’s response to Rome’s earlier request for troops – now fought to undo the edict freeing the island’s slaves, even though those slaves had been freed as a result of their own king’s complaint. But then reason has seldom proved a match for the will of a king.

A contingent of Rome’s Lucanian allies were commanded by Cleptius, who would later lead the Lucanians in battle against Rome when the allies turned on each other – because the general follows marching orders, not reason. The rebels fortified the city of Triocala in the western part of the island, adding a surrounding wall and ditch to what was already a very favorable defensive position and constructed a palace and large marketplace within. But when the Romans approached, Athenion persuaded Tryphon that their better option was to meet them in the open field rather than to allow themselves to be besieged. This decision resulted in a rebel defeat at Scirthaea, yet they still managed to return to Triocala, and the Romans were unable to dislodge them from it.

Following the death of Tryphon, Athenion then rose to command the entire group. The rebels attacked Messana, the city on the strait dividing Sicily from Italy, while its inhabitants were holding a festival outside of the city walls, and afterwards they nearly took the city. The crisis in Sicily was so great at that time as to force Rome to reverse its traditional relationship with the island and start shipping grain to Sicily, the breadbasket that in normal circumstances fed Rome.

After their defeat, the final rebel group surrendered to Roman forces then commanded by a general known as Aquillius, a man regarded as a thief even by the Romans themselves. The Romans brought a thousand recaptured slaves to Rome, intending to set them to fighting beasts before spectacle audiences, only to have their plans thwarted when, rather than submit to this, the slaves, having somehow acquired weapons, killed one another down to their last man, their general Satyros, who then fell upon his own sword. So ended the second Sicilian war which also lasted four years. During this time the slaves of the vile silver mines of Sunium near Athens, who were known to pray for death, instead also rose up, this perhaps the most difficult uprising of them all.

Such were the stories of the revolts in Italy and Sicily. All in all, the Sicilian uprisings were conducted in a fashion very different than ours. The official belief of the Roman is that in the years following the last uprising they have so successfully and brutally repressed the island’s slaves that there remains little danger of a third revolt. Afterwards slaves in Sicily have been forbidden to own weapons of any kind. The story is told of a slave who once killed a massive boar with a spear and expected to be praised, if not rewarded – only to be crucified for having a spear in his possession. Nevertheless, that is where we had decided to make our stand – if we could only get there. We had little doubt that the mass of the island’s slaves would rise again should we arrive there in force, and given the grudges the island’s freemen hold toward the Romans, we expected that once again, rather than oppose us, many of them would see our arrival as an opportunity to wrest power from their slave-owner overlords who now control their island – the Sicilians had not been among the peoples who were granted citizenship following Rome’s recent war with its so-called allies. Certainly our successful arrival in any serious number would immediately upset Sicily’s currently existing balance of power, as the call for a third rebellion spread across the island with the speed of its slave messengers’ feet. And should we be able to bring across our entire host – an army that had defeated Roman legions – to combine with the immense number of slaves already on the island, we liked our chances of holding it against Roman assault – certainly in comparison with the prospect of continually fending them off in the open fields of Italy. At the same time, the fact that we knew all this history of Sicily made it easier to envision a land of former slaves existing there than in any other direction we might travel, past failures notwithstanding. Not least among our considerations was knowing that Sicily was a land fertile enough not only to feed itself, but much of Rome as well. We felt we could take it from there.

All of Italy now recognizes that ours is the greatest rebellion to ever have risen against Rome. In numbers we equal the revolts of Sicily – and we have managed this on the Italian mainland. The Romans are said to now be taking this so seriously that for a time they considered suspending all gladiatorial combat for the duration of the war and instead maintaining their dangerous gladiators in lockdown rather then letting them loose in public with weapons in their hands. Ultimately, however, they apparently decided that Roman life would not be worth living without bloodshed in the ring and chose not to impose such a ban. One way or the other, it seems probable that ours will be the last of the great rebellions of slaves. If we win, there will be no more need for such rebellions. Should we lose there will be no more hope for them.

We head north. Some of our number – those born into slavery in Italy – simply hope to reach someplace they’ve never been before where they will not have to die a slave. But most of us have memories of free lives once lived in Thrace, Gaul, Germany, Greece, Syria – and visions of living them once again. For many, the road north is not the direction home, but the most important thing for all of us is getting beyond Rome’s reach and that road is the shortest route to that end.

One of the places to which that road does not lead is my own home – Thrace, a land on the Aegean and Black Seas, bordering Macedonia, peopled with numerous tribes who normally live quite independently, but will follow kings if necessary to ward off an invader. I am of the Maidi, a people living along the Strymon and Axius rivers. Our largest town is Iamphorynna, but we are not in the main a city people. We Thracians have fought the Romans frequently enough that they now pay us the honor of featuring gladiators outfitted as Thracians as a regular part of their blood spectacles.

In recent times, Thrace has allied itself with Mithridates, king of Pontus, a region across the Black Sea from us. Mithridates has fought Rome for nearly these last twenty years. In the course of this he has come to know Rome as well as any of its enemies ever has – excepting its former slaves – and has concluded that behind all the reasons, the justifications, the excuses offered, the Romans really have only one simple, over-riding motive for making war upon all other nations, peoples and kings: their deep-seated desire for dominion and riches. In this he is, of course, quite correct and really everybody else knows that – except the Roman. Mithridates is said to owe his own escape during one of his wars to the fact that civil war broke out back in Rome and the army and the navy commanders Rome had sent out to fight him took different sides in that war and would not combine forces against him. Mithridates is well thought of among Rome’s slaves for his pledge to honor the freedom of any slave who would kill his Roman master – and we understand that our struggles against Rome are the same, even though great distances may separate us.

The bards tell us of an ancient kinship between Thrace and Troy that brought our ancestors to the defense of the Trojans when the Greeks launched their invasion of a thousand ships, a thousand years ago. The Greek poet Homer says that the Thracian king Rhesus arrived with a collection of some of the most feared horsemen of the day to defend Troy. The truth of that story no one living can judge, but what we do know to be true is that the Thrace of today is indeed a land of horsemen – not horsemen like the charioteers of Roman arenas who race their teams dressed up in various colors, around and around in circles, but horsemen who ride their horses in the open, out in the world.

The Romans themselves claim as founder of their city Aeneas, a Trojan warrior who escaped after his city’s fall, which by legend would make them somehow related to us Thracians, just as the Thracians were somehow related to Troy. But then the Romans also claim that the founders of their city were twin brothers who were suckled by a she-wolf. These too are tales that no one living today can know the truth of, but the children’s story seems more in keeping with what Rome has grown up to be – since one of those brothers is said to have later murdered the other. For many living in Thrace today, the flame of hatred for the Roman butcher-demagogue Sulla – who has shaped his vicious city more than any other individual since Hannibal – is daily rekindled, less by the memory of those he slew in Rome’s invasion of our land twenty years past, than by the sight of the Thracians left behind living with both of their hands cut off on his orders. He has brought Rome to the point where today no one is safe from the Romans whether they be dead or alive – not even the Romans themselves: After Sulla’s victory in the civil war, he had the corpse of his dead enemy Marius removed from its crypt, dragged through Rome, its eyes gouged out, tongue cut out, smeared with shit, and cut to pieces. Sulla arranged for his own cremation in order to eliminate the possibility of similar treatment at the hands of his enemies – it takes a Roman to know a Roman. Such is life in the city that looks down upon all others.

In ancient times, Thrace is said to have been home to both Orpheus and Sabazios. Sabazios – known also to the Greeks as Dionysus, to the Romans as Bacchus, and to others by other names – is the keeper of the vine; the god of wine and ale, of joy and ecstasy. In general, the Romans will attempt to keep their slaves away from rituals and cults at all times because they fear – and rightly so – that such things will encourage common feelings among their slaves and afford them an opportunity to communicate with each other about things that Romans may not be able to understand. But of all of the cults of the gods, it is the one devoted to these that the Romans fear most because it is they who take the deepest hold over people. When the spirit of the ecstatic gods is with them, people are liable to forget the normal order of things, or they may simply choose not to be governed by the normal order of things. In the midst of their otherwise wretched existences, slaves may forget that they are slaves and they may mingle with free men. Non-Romans may forget that Rome rules the world. Women may enter into trances. Men and women may mingle together. The Romans fear that the nocturnal Bacchantic rites endanger the reputation of their women. This concern for morality comes in a realm in which rich old men routinely buy handsome young slaves, both male and female, to satisfy their desires. As it is in all things, Rome is certainly not really concerned with the threat to morality, but only with the possible loss of control and power. My wife has been what the Romans would call a bacchante. But such activities are now forbidden in Italy, even to free Roman citizens. It has been over a hundred years now since Rome killed thousands in the southern Italian regions of Apulia and Brutium – both slave and free – for participating in the Bacchanalia, and outlawed it for the future. This came after they had discovered that the rites had thousands of devotees in Rome itself. As Rome tightened its control over all of Italy, its campaign to eliminate all competitors included not just rival cities, but anything that might divide people’s loyalties, even cults devoted to the gods. Rome allows of no oaths of allegiance to anything but Rome. Yet despite all its efforts to eliminate it we have found the spirit of Sabazios/Dionysus/Bacchus to be very much alive still in Italy’s southern regions – and it is certainly not forbidden among us.

The poets also say that Orpheus too was a Thracian, son of Oeagrus, a Thracian king, and Calliope, the Muse of the word. Throughout the world Orpheus is known as the bard of old who showed how the lyre is to be played. If this is true, then we Thracians of today are certainly his descendants, for we are a land of singers – and not of writers. Our bards still tell our tales as the Greek Homer once did. According to those songs, our land takes its name from a sorceress of old who was named Thrace. She, the original Thracian, was the daughter of the titan Oceanus and the siren Parthenope – and sister to Europa, who was beloved of Zeus. What any of this means, no one can say. But it is the story that is told.

Our Greek friends also have another strange story. They tell us that although Homer called Thrace the friend of Troy, he also named three separate Thracian contingents sent from the towns of Aenus, Ismaros, and Sestus among the thousand-ship Greek fleet that sailed against Troy. We do not today know whether it really was Thracian fighting Thracian in Illium, or whether this was one of those times when, as the Greeks like to say, “Even the mighty Homer nods.”

According to the keepers of the old legends, others who once lived in Thrace included Protagoras, philosopher from Abdera who said that he was not able to know whether or not the gods really existed; and the Ktistai, a group of philosophers, priests, and prophets who ate no animal flesh and lived apart from women.

Those are but some of the stories told about Thrace, but there’s many a Thracian among us who is only hearing them for the first time now that they are with us. And it is much the same with those who have come from other lands, for every nation has its stories and its keepers of those stories. What concerns us most at the moment though, are not the old stories but the ones that we are now creating with our revolt against Rome – and the hope that one day there will be Thracians, Gauls, Germans, and maybe even some Romans passing these stories along. Perhaps our songs will one day even be sung back in our homelands. But for now we write them down, in the event that things do not go our way and no singers among us survive to sing them.

At this time, Rome has been forced to recognize that it will no longer do to simply scorn us as low-life wretches not fit to even carry the sword of a Roman soldier – now that so many of our number actually do carry the swords of the Roman soldiers who are no longer able to do so themselves. Understanding that they must now take our threat seriously, the Romans have tasked both of their highest ranking officials, the consuls Lucius Gellius Publicola and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus – who must be very important to have so many names – as well as the next two in rank behind them, the praetors Arrius and Manlius, to take to the field themselves to lead the armies they believe will finally bring us down. We understand that dispatching all of its top officials is what Rome does when it perceives that what it faces is not just a skirmish but a danger of the highest order. They say this was the action Rome took when Hannibal marched into Italy.

Unfortunately, the Romans’ new approach did bring them some immediate success. They started out by dividing their forces just as we have, with Gellius’s army pursuing Crixus while Lentulus and Manlius followed us. Gellius found Crixus’s group in the Garganus mountains in that part of Apulia that juts into the Adriatic, launched a sudden attack, and defeated them. With our force unable to reach them in time, Crixus himself was lost, along with most of his men. Our group pressed forward north up the eastern slope of the Apennine Mountains that run the length of Italy, where we encountered Lentulus with a large army that proceeded to surround us. No doubt emboldened by the news of Gellius’s victory and thinking he had us trapped, he held back from attack, waiting to be reinforced by Gellius’s army, at which point their combined forces would presumably return Italy to its normal state. For our part, rather than wait for events to play out in that fashion, we chose to attack the Romans before their reinforcements arrived. Since they had believed themselves to hold the upper hand and would therefore be the ones to determine the moment that battle would finally be joined, when they found themselves so quickly reversed into a defensive posture they turned tail and fled the field in short order, no doubt thinking that they might redeem themselves with the anticipated arrival of Gellius’s victorious troops that would soon reverse the situation again. We ourselves had been reenforced by some survivors of Crixus’s army. The decisive factors in our succeeding – where the contingent of Crixus had not – were that we had started out with a larger force, and the fact that their defeat of Crixus had returned the Romans to their normal state of arrogance. The last thing that an army will anticipate when holding a position of presumed strategic advantage is a direct assault – particularly when the army is Roman and its opponents are mere former slaves. And nothing succeeds like success: we turned from the defeated forces of Lentulus to face the onrushing army of Gellius and routed them as well. And so great was their surprise and panic in both cases that the two armies fled in different directions, which meant it would take some time before they might regroup.

No small part of these and all of our successes were again the herders who were joining us all along the way and were able to follow the Romans’ movements far more closely than the Romans ever realized, by following routes totally invisible to them. We were often able to even move our entire force down routes unknown to the enemy whereas, while those famed Roman roads may be a wonder of the world so far as speed goes – not so for discrete movement and therefore the whereabouts of a Roman army are always obvious.

Now bolstered by the arms and supplies of these Roman legions – the best in the world, for which we thanked the Senate and people of Rome on a daily basis – we continued on north to Mutina, a city on the Via Aemilia. Mutina is one of Rome’s famous so-called allies – an ally that the Roman general Pompey laid siege to not ten years ago. There we encountered an army of 10,000 commanded by Gaius Cassius Longinus, the Roman governor of Cisalpine Gaul. The forces of Mutina were defeated again, this time not by Rome, but by Rome’s worst enemies. We understand that Rome now considers the situation the most dire it has faced since its defeat at Cannae during the second of its wars with the Carthaginians. Every Roman knew about the past revolts on Sicily. Some of them even thought that they just went to show what a bad idea it had been for Rome to take overseas colonies in the first place. But every Roman thought, “It can’t happen here – in Italy.” The current panic is only enhanced by the fact that, just as had happened in the past in Sicily, many a poor Roman has taken advantage of the opportunity that our rebellion provided for them to plunder a rich Roman – and the rich Roman has come to understand just how very many enemies he really has.

No additional Roman armies now stood between us and the Alps. And then – we stopped. With Oenomaus and now Crixus gone, I was the only survivor of the three leaders of the gladiators at the start. But this did not fundamentally alter my role. It did not make me the master of other men. It did not make me a Roman general who might decide to kill some of his own soldiers if that was what it took for him to impose his will upon his army. It did not make me a king who might seize captured wealth for myself or designate others to take it. Unlike a general or a king, I led a group of free men and women. I was their leader not because of my wealth or because of some claim that the gods wished it so; I was their leader only because they had chosen me as such. An army of men who once were slaves does not willingly choose to become an army enslaved to some new master. Unlike the Romans, our men are not stooges. I have not been chosen to make decisions on my own as to what our overall plan will be. Even if I wished to, there would be little point to my attempting to impose my judgement if it differed from the will and the thinking of the group. One thing that we have certainly learned over and over, night after night, is that all of us know far more than any one of us knows. Time had come for us all to think carefully.

So far, everything we had done had been a reaction to what the Romans did or what we anticipated they would do. We broke out of Batitatus’s ludus; sought higher ground on Vesuvius; ambushed the Romans who attempted to entrap us there; spread out to the south into a sea of farm slaves who were ready for revolt and would have prayed for the opportunity to do so – should they ever have thought there was a point to such prayer; defeated the Romans along the way; amassed a formidable force; and then turned it north to try to escape from Italy. As far as we have traveled to get to where we are, our movements have always been made under duress, with our potential day of reckoning ever on the horizon. Even when fighting paused, it was in anticipation of its resumption. While we were still, and always would be prodded by the continual necessity to seek new locations to feed and supply ourselves, we now hoped to be able to take the time needed to plan our short term movements with a longer term goal in mind. We knew that the slaves who had rebelled in Sicily were not forced to live continually on the run. Leaving Sicily was never a consideration for them. Where would they have gone? To Italy, into the lion’s den? To Carthage, a longer, more dangerous sea voyage to a similar end? From the start they always knew that Sicily would be the place where they would make their final stand – win or lose, and they went about the process of trying to create as normal an existence there as was possible. Up until our victory at Mutina [Modena], our situation had never been anything like that.

Every slave who would think to run away asks himself the questions, “Where in this world could I flee to, and who will take me in should I arrive there?” As a group we now asked that question tens of thousands of times over. Could we cross the Alps? The trek would certainly be arduous, yet armies have crossed these mountains for hundreds of years, in both directions. But those armies had a great deal of time to plan and prepare, which we did not have. They were supplied by their homelands, while we lived off the land – a proposition that would become immensely more difficult once we entered the mountains. And the most important difference was the fact that we are really something of a nation as well as an army. Despite the fact that we have been much the more nimble group than the Romans, who travel with pack animals, camp followers, slaves, slave dealers and hustlers of all sorts, the fact is that there are also entire families of ex-slaves who have fled to us. We travel with women and children and we have no quartermasters.

And if we could cross the Alps, should we cross the Alps? Even if we could make it, it would not be the case that we could expect that our fight would be over and done once we had reached the other side of the mountains. The unfortunate fact is that the Roman disease has infested the entire known world. They fight everywhere, with everyone. At the moment they have had an army in Spain these past six years led by Pompey, the man who calls himself “the great.” Today he fights an army led by Sertorius, one of Rome’s former generals who has turned against Rome, allied himself with local Spanish tribes, and fought against his former allies for the past decade. If Pompey’s army succeeds in defeating Rome’s current enemies in Spain they will certainly be on us.

But even the threat of immediately encountering yet another Roman army was not our main consideration right now. What if we were to successfully cross the mountains and defeat the Romans we encountered, or even avoid them entirely? Where would we then go? If we remained as one group, what nation would accept us all? And what if we split up? We would be heading in the right direction for Gauls and Germans to return home. But what then? If these two large groups split off from us, this division and every subsequent one would only make us more vulnerable to any further Roman forces we might encounter. And what of the Thracians, Greeks, Syrians? Crossing the Alps would not lead them in any homeward direction.

And then what would any of us find if we did arrive home? The Romans work tirelessly at developing client governments run by locals who become traitors to their own people. Rome promises them that if they can deliver their people’s annual tribute payment to Rome, they too can participate in Rome’s glory – meaning that their leaders may share in Rome’s stolen riches. Would we make an arduous journey only to encounter Rome’s puppets at the end? And then there were those among us who were born into Roman slavery. Did they want to return to ancestral homelands that they themselves had never actually known, where people spoke in tongues they did not know? And beyond all of this, even, lay the question of how we would live. Over this period of time that we have been gathered together, we have been continually on the move, not merely to survive the Romans, but to survive hunger. We do not have our own farms. We do not have our own stores of food. We must continually move to find them. This would not change simply because there was no longer a Roman army in pursuit. We have grown so large that we now require enormous amounts of food. Who was about to welcome us to live off of their land?

For most of our number, this was the most difficult decision they faced since the day they had decided to seize their own freedom. Had we wings to fly, we would have long since flown from this monstrous land. But the longer we considered the matter, the more doubt emerged about the wisdom of continuing our march north. And yet, after so many had died in order to get us here, where we at last had the option of leaving Italy behind, would we now decide that their sacrifice had all been for naught? And what was the alternative?

The answer to that question was Sicily. The island of Sicily was home to none of us, yet the more we talked, the more our people came to prefer our chances of taking and holding it over our prospects in crossing the Alps and then heading off to no certain destination. And so we turned on our heels and changed course back to the south.

If we surprised even ourselves by our own decision to reverse direction, we surely surprised the Romans even more. At all times we have known more of the Romans’ plans than they have known of ours, since the traffic between the two sides goes only in one direction. Rome’s slaves come to join us in order to become free; once free, none choose to leave us to become slaves again and – at best – be branded or collared as a runaway and perhaps have his head half-shaven, so that his history may be obvious even from a distance. When one of ours does not return to us at the end of the day, it is because he has been killed or captured by the Romans. And if that has happened, when he is tortured he will know that it will benefit him nothing to tell the Romans anything helpful to their cause. Each night that we sleep rough, we at least do so with the confidence that no one is now on his way planning to tell our enemies of our plans and preparations. And although the slave owner may sleep in a comfortable bed each night, he does not sleep comfortably in it, because he does not have the same confidence. This consideration was a major factor in our decision to reject Roman deserters. The Roman soldier is a mercenary who has usually joined the army as a last resort, knowing no other way to make a living. The Roman soldier who would desert to us could never be trusted not to later betray us. If things go badly he will be eager to search for another option. Now that we are on the rise, he may start to think that we might be proving the better option. But as soon as he thought that Rome’s strength grew, he would be hustling back to tell them everything that he knew – before they killed him for his treason. At best such men would be a continual source of mistrust within the group and at worst a cause for mayhem. We will never accept them.

As we turned around and returned south, the pace of the arrival of messengers and household slaves quickened. And with them the news of both what Rome’s rulers were saying in public – and what they said behind the walls of their own homes. The closer we got, the more intense the stories of the terror spreading throughout Rome grew – the name of Hannibal said to be now on every tongue. And if anything, from what we hear what is happening now may frighten today’s Romans even more than the events of those times frightened their ancestors. To this day, Rome remains shaken to the core by the fact that Roman army actually fought Roman army ten years ago and the city itself was twice taken in battle between them. All that the Romans had thought solid for hundreds of years – since the days that the wolf suckled their twin ancestors – had now turned to sand. And that war between Romans has never really ended, but has carried on with Marius’s man Sertorius fighting Sulla’s man Pompey in Spain, where the story is told of the soldier on one side falling upon his own sword after finding that the dead enemy whose corpse he was stripping after a battle was his own brother – all in a day’s war for a Roman. At the same time, Rome is immersed in its third war with Mithridates in Bithynia. And now us – an enemy within Italy itself, coming from within their very households.

We understand that something that particularly worries the Romans is the fact that we don’t suffer from one major vulnerability that past enemies fighting Rome within Italy always had. Where the Carthaginians lacked easy access to reinforcements – a major factor in Rome’s adoption of its ultimately successful strategy of delay – the Romans looked upon our potential reinforcements every day right on their own farms – and even in their own kitchens. Likewise, the manner in which Rome ultimately dealt with the Hannibal threat can provide it with little guidance in dealing with us, since the only way they managed to rid themselves of the Carthaginians was by sending an army to attack their homeland and forcing them to return to defend it, a tactic that cannot be employed in the case of an enemy that possesses no homeland to attack, which – much as we might wish it were otherwise – is what we are And so the past offers no real precedent to suggest a particular strategy to employ against us.

Both those who know Rome’s history and those who come to us from within Roman houses tell us that the spectre of the Carthaginian of old still haunts the great city. A hundred years later, Roman mothers still warn their children that if they don’t obey, Hannibal will get them. Yet despite the fear and loathing that the memory of the Punic invasion still inspires, Rome today carries something of Hannibal both within its walls and within its hearts. They say that Rome first started to grow into the massive city that it is today was when great numbers of peasants started scurrying there in flight from the Carthaginians during their years camped in the Italian peninsula. And it also almost seems as if after Carthage’s fall, Rome felt under obligation to take on the burden of not only continuing to spread the misery that it had already been spreading across the world for some time, but of increasing its efforts so as to replace the miseries that Carthage would no longer be imposing. In the process of growing to be the largest city in the world, the Romans have also become the world’s great takers. Not only do they follow up a military victory by having their newly captured slaves carry off anything of value that can be moved back to Rome, but they will take things that cannot be moved as well. Rome’s glory has never rested on any claim that it is the source of great ideas. It is more than happy to follow the lead of the Greeks in this area, and in a uniquely Roman way – by importing Greek slaves to teach the ideas of the Greeks to its children. There can be little question but that Rome’s great admiration for Greece, and for Athens in particular, comes from the fact that this Greek city had become a center where slavery came to be seen as not only a normal, but an essential part of its daily life and activity. The famous Greek philosopher Aristotle said that the most important element of a household is good slaves. They also say that during the war between Athens and Sparta, 20,000 Athenian slaves took the opportunity to escape that great center of learning, leaving so many Athenian households without their most important parts.

Unfortunately things are not such that both sides can lose a war, but the better outcome of their three wars would have been if Carthage and Rome had both ceased to exist rather than just the one. Instead, the evils of the two have lived on in the survivor. So frequently did Carthage mount people on the cross that they are said to have crucified the admiral of their fleet for his failure in the first war they lost to Rome. Never so proud as to reject an idea simply because they had not thought of it first, once the Romans saw that this method of execution would inflict even greater pain than the methods they had been previously employing, they have taken to crucifixion so fully that one might think that they actually had invented it. And certainly they have added that special Roman touch – they are known to even crucify men who have already killed themselves – because these men had presumed to usurp Rome’s exclusive right to kill them. And today’s Roman is warmed by the knowledge that his citizenship guarantees that he will never be raised on a cross, that ignominious death being reserved for barbarians. Such comfort was unknown in Carthage. The practice has become such an important part of Roman life that it is said that there are even Romans who wear nails that have been used in crucifixions around their neck to ward off evil spirits. And we can be sure that should the Romans come upon a practice even more terrible, they will not be too proud to adopt it as well.

Hannibal was also known to force Roman prisoners to fight one another – just as the Romans do with gladiators. This practice was not unknown to Rome at this time, but it was only after Hannibal’s time that it truly became the delight of the Roman masses – the thrill of the kill, without the danger. And Hannibal forced Romans to fight elephants as well. Afterwards, here too, Rome has gone on to do it bigger and better. They say the first animals the Romans killed in their shows were indeed the elephants – perhaps because they had been weapons used against them. This entertainment once reserved for the soldiers of Carthage, Rome now shares with all its people, and their armies search the entire known world over for any manner of strange animal to bring home to set to fighting prisoners, criminals, or even its professionals – its venatores.

Hannibal would never conquer Rome, but in the end it may be that its greatest enemy left a more lasting impact on it than any of its own leaders. Even the Romans thought him outstanding in his cruelty. How cruel? So cruel, the Romans claim, that the slaves themselves volunteered to fight against him. Cruelty is a quality that Rome much admires. And the practices that Hannibal and the Carthaginians introduced to it have lived on in Rome, even as Carthage has not. We might say that Hannibal gave Rome its greatest gift – he taught it how to truly celebrate death. The rest of the world faces death when it must; Rome looks upon it as frequently as possible.

Given the magnitude of the unexpected setback that we had dealt the Romans in defeating both of their consular armies, the great fear in Rome is that we have become so confident of our own strength that we now intend to march on the city itself. Romans have long considered their city impregnable. The last foreigners to breach its walls were the Gauls who sacked it three hundred years ago – even Hannibal did not attempt it. But given that Rome’s former allies came so close during their war with them and the fact that competing Roman armies have actually battled on its streets, its people no longer think an invasion impossible. And within that general fear now lies the special fear of the possible enemy within. Having recently witnessed the heads of members of both factions in their civil war alternately displayed on the point of a spear within the city walls, as well as the execution of thousands of Roman prisoners by Romans, with thousands more killed on the order of their own leader Sulla, they now ask – If Roman citizens did that to each other, what then might our slaves do to us? They wonder where would the loyalties of the Cornelii – the 10,000 slaves of his proscribed enemies that Sulla freed to promote his agenda – lie in the event of an attack by us. Reports tell us that Rome has gone so far as to set night watches, although bravado nonetheless still runs high as Romans tell one another that it would be nothing but insanity on our part to attempt a direct attack on Rome, so insane that even a band of stupid lazy slaves would have to realize that ... wouldn’t they? We heard that there was even the occasional brash voice raised expressing the hope that we might be so foolhardy as to try it, in which case they could be done with us once and for all. We also heard that the closer we approached Rome, the softer such voices grew. When the arrivals from Rome are asked to describe the situation there, the words that frequently come to their lips are: universal fear.

In actuality, they had little to worry about in this regard. An assault on Rome was not in our plans. Certainly there were those eager to do so, just as there were those among us who, instead of waiting for all Rome’s slaves to free themselves would rather have marched directly upon every one of Italy’s immense farms and freed them from their ergastulae ourselves. But most recognized the danger of losing everything by trying to extend too far. We did have to pass by Rome, however, in order to reach our immediate goal of returning to the mountains above Thurii, a port at the mouth of the Crathis River between Lucania and Brutium, an area long known as a center of anti-Roman sentiment – dating back to the days when Rome suppressed the followers of Bacchus and Orpheus in that area – that had proven hospitable to us when we passed through previously. There we hope to procure the metals we need to more adequately arm our men. To get to it there were still many battles in front of us. In the mean time, the two consuls have reunited and rallied their joint forces to fighting us in Picenium, fearing that if they did not stop us we would march on Rome. Our defeat of their armies has converted many who did not believe before into believers now. Fear rippled through the ranks of the slavers while massive numbers rallied to ours during our sojourn in the north, more than replacing the numbers lost in the defeat at Gargarus. Our success continued against yet another army, this one commanded by the praetor Gnaeus Manlius and the proconsul Cassius. As these defeats have shaken Rome’s belief in its solidity and superiority, the number of deserters making their way to us have increased. We reject them as ever.

Finally reached my Holy Grail today: the recently discovered wall Crassus ordered built to contain the Spartacus rebels in the toe of Italy.

With the Carabiniero (is that the singular?) who led me to the wall.

Some who join us will experience war for the first time in battle against the most experienced military force in the world. Most will come without weapons. But none will arrive without motivation; there has probably never been an army that has known its enemy better than ours.

In the usual course of things, when armies clash the reason that the individual soldier is there will generally either lie in events that have occurred – or are said to have occurred – between others in the past, or on the basis of fear of what an enemy might do in the future. And the soldier in such a war may go forth thinking it a glorious thing. With us, there is not a one who does not personally know our enemy; there is no one who has not personally suffered at the hand of our enemy. No one comes to us seeking glory in battle or expecting reward if they survive. There are no illusions about our fate if we should fail. And there is no one who does not despise and detest Rome every waking moment.

The Romans have become a people for whom war is a way of life. I know of no other of their kind. And, as war has become Rome’s master, the time has passed when it could still rely upon the man who would set his plow down for a time in order to go off to fight – as is the case with normal nations. Today Rome’s permanent state of war requires the service of permanent soldiers, men who themselves have no other occupation to put before that of war. And so as time has passed, Rome found itself with no choice but to take responsibility for the lives of its now full-time professional soldiers. But even full-time soldiers cannot fight forever, and since the Romans apparently still feel that they cannot simply stop feeding them, as they can when slaves reach the end of their useful years – since this would make future recruiting difficult – their responsibility to those who survive now extends even past their years in the legions.

But where the Roman soldier of the past would return to his farm annually – at least until the point where a richer farmer relieved him of his land, the Roman legionary will now generally come from the ranks of those who have no farm – the sons and grandsons of the farmers who lost their land to wealthier Romans. And as their numbers have grown, so has the question of where they would go, should they last through twenty straight years of killing time. As Rome has become a warrior state and military leaders have increasingly come to the fore, they’ve set new Roman policy in regard to its soldiers. Organized spoil-sharing following foreign conquest has long been the Roman way, but their recent warlord Marius began the practice of rewarding soldiers with some of the conquered land itself as a place for them to live afterwards, a development that has only deepened the resentment of Rome’s past enemies.

We recognize that even though Rome may now hold all of Italy in its sway, there is still an underlying hatred towards it festering in the places that it has waged war upon in recent years – particularly among those that have seen their lands given to the Roman soldiers who suppressed them. Generally, their relationship with Rome will be one of convenience and coercion rather than one of respect; certainly it is not one of love. Rome seeks the same relationship with the rest of the world that it enjoys with its slaves, and just as is the case with the slave, if one of its allies saw an opportunity to rid itself of Rome, it would do so still. The real difference between Rome’s so-called allies and any of the other nations it has conquered is simply that where the conquered nation must send annual tribute in the form of grain to feed the great city’s layabouts, the ally must send its soldiers to march forth side by side with Rome’s own, to conduct the wars that will result in even greater tribute directed toward Rome. Those who know the past tell us that ever since the defeat of Carthage, the Romans have treated the rest of Italy as if it rightfully belongs to them, and expect their allies to feel it a privilege that Rome looks upon them in that way. With this in mind, while we have never expected any city to come over to the side of former slaves – as some did to the Carthaginians – we have always attempted to avoid needlessly adding to the ranks of our active enemies by unnecessarily antagonizing the poor Italian who still farmed his own land and did not rely upon slaves to do his work for him. Likewise, while our days were spent foraging for any available food, along with any portable valuables that we might trade for weaponry, we saw no value in simply laying the countryside to waste, despite the fact that it can be quite difficult to convince the former slave – often arriving still bearing the marks of chains and beatings – to pass up any opportunity to devastate the people of this cruel land. Over time, however, as word of our size and successes has spread we now regularly find the large farms already abandoned and the slavers long since cleared out when we arrive, so situations offering the opportunity for retribution will occur less frequently

At the same time, this indelible bitterness toward the slave owner has meant that although we are, and likely always will remain an under-trained and poorly armed army, while the Roman soldier might come to question the reason for his being there, this will never be a question on our side of the ditch. Fighting ex-slaves offers little prospect of glory for the Roman soldier. Win or lose, there will be no triumphal march through the streets of Rome at the end; no poet will write an ode to his glorious campaign. And while we have to scrounge for food, everyone understands that all will share in it equally when we do find it, whereas the Roman soldier knows that within the same legion camp where the poor man fends for himself, the officers will dine on meals from a finer menu, prepared and served by slaves. While the common soldier eats sitting on the ground – or perhaps even standing – like slaves or children, not like free Roman men – his commanders will drink good wine, eating fresh fish while reclining on couches, just as they would at home. Indeed it is said that Hannibal took the city of Tarentum at sunset because he knew the wine would be freely flowing in the Roman commander’s tent and he would be too befuddled to organize an effective resistance.

The armies that Rome sends against us believe themselves superior to the rest of the world. In that, they are not unusual. All peoples have their own gods and their own stories about how special their gods are and how important their gods are to their victories and how important their victories are to their gods, since there must be some reason – real or imagined – to justify their soldiers risking their lives. But in this we, like the slaves who revolted in Sicily, differ from these other armies. We do certainly value the life of the former slave over that of the slave-owner or the soldier who serves the slave-owner, but we do not value the life of the Thracian over the German, or the Gaul over the Greek. And so we do not honor the gods of the Thracian over the gods of the German, or those of the Gaul – and for the gods of the Romans we care nothing at all. Individuals in our group may have their individual gods – and for all we know we may even have the support of all of the gods, excepting those of the Romans. But our revolt relies on none of them.

Now, wherever we go we quickly become the masters of all we see. What we hear is that there are a lot of Romans calling us the greatest threat since Hannibal and noting the parallels between his campaign and ours, even down to the very locations of battle. We have taken the towns of Nola, which Hannibal failed to take in three tries and which had also held out against Sulla; and Nuceria, which did fall to Hannibal, and was also taken in Rome’s war with its allies; as well as Paestum, the ancient Greek city on the Gulf of Salerno. None of this, of course changes the basic reality that our very existence remains a day-to-day proposition and will always be so until we find a way to be finally be free of the Romans. We move in continual search for food for our swelling ranks – south to Consentia in Brutium, a town that changed hands several times in the war against Hannibal; Thurii on the Tarentine Gulf, also taken by Hannibal; Metapontum, the first Italian city to defect to the Carthaginians and the place to which the philosopher Pythagoras is said to have once fled.

All the while, we know we will never match the Romans sword for sword, spear for spear, shield for shield. Where Rome has factories manned by slaves to produce their weapons, we make our own, out under the open sky - or take them from the Romans. You’ll find some of our ranks armed with an axe, a sickle, a pitchfork. Nothing slapdash on the Roman side, though. The Roman soldier arrives with cooking gear, food, weapons, armor, and the tools to set up his camp – accompanied by a provision train. The say that some of Rome’s enemies have even surrendered after merely observing the scale of its army’s encampment. We at least do have the advantage of knowing beforehand what the Roman soldier knows and know what the Roman soldier does. A very good number of us have already faced the them on the battlefield, while others have been previously brought along to Rome’s battlefields as slaves. Some were even Roman auxiliaries. We’ve seen it all before: First they will hurl their javelins. Then they will charge our line. If they reach us, they will slam us with their shields. When they use their swords, they will thrust, not slash. We act accordingly. As for us, the Romans face an army that neither they, nor anyone else has ever seen before. We are making this up as we go along.

As of late, we have tamed wild horses to create a cavalry, both in anticipation of future battles and in service of broadening our foraging range; and have grown sufficiently large to consider it wise to divide our number, with a group of mostly Gauls and Germans led by Crixus now operating separately. Remaining close enough to quickly regroup together when the Romans reappear requires even greater advance awareness of their positions, so we make the best of any advantage in knowledge of the local terrain that local newcomers bring, something which may allow our less heavily burdened people to scramble paths that a Roman army might never make it through – if it even knew of them. And when we do travel in the open, the famed roads that Rome’s slaves built for the benefit of Rome’s armies will work just as well in allowing us – some the sons of the slaves who built those roads – to move even more quickly than the army of the sons of the slavers whose slaves built those roads.

While those roads are famously solid and well built, the relations between Rome itself and the people who live along them are not. In the War of the Allies, the Pompeiians killed every single Roman within their walls, and the Romans responded by laying siege to the city. During their war, Hannibal and the Carthaginians remained in Italy for full fifteen years during which time the Romans could not succeed in driving them out because although the Carthaginians were reinforced from Carthage but once, their cause was embraced by Spaniards, Celts, Ligurians, Greeks and even other Italians eager to bring down Rome. So while wealthy Romans love to summer in Campania and enjoy the easy life there untroubled by the din, the chaos, and the high prices of Rome, many of them hold those who live in that region the year round in contempt. This contempt, of course, is mutual – as will generally be the case between cities and nations. And because many slave owners will speak as freely in the presence of his slave as he might speak in the presence of his horse, many a former slave arrives with word of Campanians who find themselves unable to suppress a certain pleasure at hearing of the latest misfortunes to befall Roman troops.

This, of course, is nothing more than a guilty pleasure on their part, for when it comes down to a matter of where they understand their interests to lie, the current and former slavers of Campania most assuredly count themselves among our enemies. Furthermore, they even see themselves as victims, suffering at our hands because we have unjustly separated them from their property, that is, separated them from their slaves, along with the food that their slaves have grown for them and the houses they have built for them. But so far as the rest of Campania goes, things are not so clear cut. To be sure, the Campanians who are neither slaves nor slavers most definitely do consider themselves to be above a mob of former slaves such as us. They have, after all, even recently been accepted into the fold as Roman citizens. But many who now hold the same rights as Romans are old enough to remember that it took a war with Rome to get those rights. In fact, it seems that the only thing that allows that part of Italy that is not Rome to march off to war side by side with Rome each year is that the rest of Italy must hate every other people in the world even more than it hates Rome. But those wars have come at a high price for the poorer Campanian.

The compulsion to wage war that has long possessed Rome has only grown the stronger since Rome has turned to the use of men who have no way to keep eating but going to war or living off the dole. These professional soldiers who spend their working life in the army must always have wars to fight because paying them not to fight would be a waste of Rome’s resources. In recent years, this compulsion has reached the point that, when the Romans have lacked sufficient enemies elsewhere, they have turned to war not just on their long standing Italian allies, but even on each other. Living with Rome is like living near a volcano that may erupt at any time. As the most important man in today’s Rome has come to be the military leader, whoever feeds and arms the Roman soldier commands his allegiance. When one military leader makes an enemy of another, then Roman soldier will fight Roman soldier. So there is one aspect of the battle against us that is quite useful for the Romans – we offer an opportunity for war that requires neither leaving Italy nor fighting a so-called ally – or another Roman. What has not been convenient or comfortable for them, however, has been the fear that we would attack Rome itself, a fear that had not previously been widespread since the Carthaginians marched through the Alps.

In Rome, war is a business, killing a sport, and everything can be bought. The business is not conducted merely by the army, but runs throughout the entire society, with businessmen eagerly awaiting news of the next departure of the legions that will provide them an opportunity to sell them the equipment and provisions they will need to protect the great city from the barbarians living hundreds of miles away who are said to somehow threaten it. Jugurtha, the king of the African nation of Numidia who warred with Rome thirty years ago, once said that Rome was a city for sale that would perish if it only could find a buyer. Of course, there has never been such a buyer and there could never be a buyer to meet Rome’s price simply because to do so a king or a nation would need to steal more from the rest of the world than Rome does – a situation that Rome exists to prevent. Although it controls so much of the world, Rome has become disconnected from it. Life means one thing there and quite another thing everywhere else. In the normal world, men become soldiers when there is war. That war may be a good idea or a bad idea; a necessity or a foolish venture; it may be lost or won, but afterwards the survivors who are not taken as prisoners will return to their homes to take up the lives they used to know, as best they can. This is not the case only in Rome whose soldiers return to preparing for the next war. Rome conducts war the way other peoples plow their land - annually. This has worked so well for Rome that it has generals grown so rich that they can now hire armies on their own.

Rome today has reached the point where the only activities considered suitable for a proper Roman are eating, drinking, pissing, shitting, fornicating, and killing. All other work is considered best performed by slaves – and they would surely have slaves piss and shit for them if only they could. The most admired of Romans – that is, the richest – not only will perform no labor of their own, but they will not even oversee the work of those who do; they will have slaves to do that for them. Meanwhile, for the Roman rabble who drift in from the countryside, the government will provide cheap grain each month. They say there are now more such people living off of the government dole in Rome itself than there are people living in all of Capua, the second greatest of Italy’s cities.

We experience a continuous barrage of new information and new opinions about these and all other things, arriving with new voices on a daily basis. There is continual debate over what we should do and continual speculation about what the Romans will likely do. Everywhere one hears stories of the horrors and outrages experienced at their hands; memories of lives once lived in other lands; hopes of somehow returning. Has there ever before been an army such as ours, where in one circle you may hear a Greek singing the songs of their ancient poets, in another the tales of Gaul, in another a priestess – such as my wife – incanting the rites of Sabazios, in another those of the Greek god, Dionysius, another the Roman god Bacchus – and gods from all the places from which Rome has stolen our people? Here – the latest news from Rome; there – the word on the street in Capua. All of this on any one given night.

For the most part, the record I write tells of the events of our days of constant struggle – here we fought this Roman army and there we fought another. But this is not the whole of it. Our lives today are by no means limited to the hardships and the struggles. Nowhere can the feeling of freedom burn stronger than in the breast in which it was once lost and now is found – every night a celebration of the life of the free that most of us had no good reason to expect we would ever see again. This too is something those who come after us should also know. Every one of us had been the victim of the greatest crime that can be visited upon a living human – being transformed from a person into a property. This is a truth that many former slaves will freely acknowledge they did not really understand until they themselves were enslaved. If the reader has been fortunate enough in life that such a thing has never been done to him, he may have difficulty in imagining or understanding the experience. Many among us have also been physically maimed – perhaps a limb broken by an owner in a moment of anger. This everyone can understand. Taking back one’s freedom, as we have, is much like no longer having to walk with a limp in the leg that the Roman has broken in his anger at his property. It is a type of second birth. Every moment afterwards is a moment of exultation. When one is surrounded by hundreds of people sharing it, then thousands, and myriads, one feels no doubt as to the rightness of our course – for all the hardships it has brought us, and all that may come.

On nights when some of our foragers come upon an abandoned villa with a large storage of wine, some of our number who were born into slavery in Italy may taste real wine for the first time, having previously drunk only the inferior lora that is made for slaves. And at such times everyone may be in for a grand night of particularly good tale telling. At this, there are none other who can tell tales like the former house slaves. Although they are relatively few among us, they are always sure to gather a crowd as they outdo one another with the stories they will tell about the ludicrous things the Romans would make them do, and the ludicrous things they’ve seen Romans themselves do. In their slave days some would accompany the Roman to the public baths bearing his ointments, his bathing oils, his fresh clothing, and whatever else might please him. They would wipe the sweat and oil off of him there; they would dry him of the filthy bath water; they would read to him. Some have lived in households where the slaves would all be outfitted uniformly so that everyone might know them as the property of one particularly great Roman or the other. Some speak of eels kept as pets and fed by hand. Some swear they’ve seen monkeys sitting at Roman dinner tables.

Many of the favorite stories concern what the Romans do and eat at those dinners – even the dinners without monkeys. At the high society events, the Romans eat not standing or sitting, but on couches – three on each, waiting for the slaves to bring their food and drink as they attempt to impress one another with their intelligence and their wit. They are so immersed in their efforts at this, that they will require slaves to wash and dry their hands between courses – lest they forget what they were talking about save hould they had to perform these tasks themselves. Sometimes one of the guests will bring along an uninvited friend. This friend will sit on the floor by the feet of the one who brought him along and attempt to be especially clever, so as to make himself welcome. Throughout the evening, the diners will toss their scraps and bones on the floor for the slaves to pick up afterwards. So much do the Romans value that particular custom that there are some who have even had their floors tiled with pictures of the scraps that will be dropped during their banquets.

Above all, though, it was those who had slaved in the Romans’ kitchens who could command the biggest laughs. One would describe preparing sow’s udders stuffed with giant snails from Africa, with the snails first fattened on milk. And did we know that if the rich Roman wishes to eat flavored snow in the summer he will send a slave to the mountains to fetch him that snow? Or that sow’s vulva is a particular delicacy in the better Roman households? Would you perhaps care to dine on mice, or maybe snails fed on wine? Maybe you’d like meats and spices boiled inside a cow or pig’s stomach, or its lung? Romans do.

Birds seemed to be at the top of the Romans’ menu. It appears that the Romans strive to out-do one another as to who can serve the strangest bird to his guests. They will eat them in all sizes and shapes – cranes – large birds with long legs and necks; flamingoes – another long-legged, long-necked bird that is orange in color; parrots – multi-colored birds that can speak words; tiny songbirds of all kinds. And peacocks – large walking birds with immense tails of colors that no one could quite describe, which are even raised on farms; the Romans especially relish eating their brains. And the tongues! Above all the Romans delight in eating the tongues of some of these birds. Some of the dinner birds were still on the wing – the Romans are even known to stuff a roasted boar with live birds. Some said that the Roman will eat the heart and the trunk of the elephant, if given the chance. Naturally those who had never seen such things would continuously question whether those telling these tales of the city could actually be speaking the truth. And I will say here that while I have sworn to the truth of everything I tell, we were never entirely certain that some of these former city slaves weren’t having us on with their kitchen and dinner tales of Roman nights of gluttony.

The fact is that although all of our people hated Rome much more keenly than any others could, since every single one of us had suffered for the knowing of them, they could nonetheless never hear enough about this demented land and its detested people – the unthinkably grotesque viciousness of things unheard of in any normal part of the world. The hope of living to tell these stories to others who might never be forced to witness such things themselves was reason enough to continue our struggle, even though our people knew full well that if they were they fortunate enough to tell those tales, their listeners might simply refuse to believe that it was anything but the wine talking.

Those who had never been to Rome were always eager to hear of the stories of the city itself. Here too, people often did not know what to believe. It is thought that never before have so many people lived in one place; never before have so many people been gathered without land to farm or forest to hunt. This was generally known, but few of us had previously understood that much of the city’s rabble were actually men who had lost their farms as a result of fighting the same wars that brought our people to Italy to work the very lands that many of these returned soldiers would have to give up. This before they would travel the same famous well-paved roads they’d once marched in the splendor of legionary columns with horns blaring, but now holding whatever bit of coin they’d manage to cadge in exchange for the land they had not been able to keep up – their lives spared in war, but not their livelihood.

For the most part these men who previously knew only farming, hunting, or herding – and war – found themselves adrift in Rome. Those with a few sesterces still in their pouch might manage to set up some sort of shop. Most would find, however, that every third person they encountered on the streets of Rome appeared to be a slave and so their situation would be much like that which they left behind, as one of those slaves would likely be performing much the sort of work they might have thought to do themselves when they arrived in the city – and, of course, at a more favorable price. They will find the bakeries and food shops largely run on the labor of slaves and therefore many would be hard put to make enough money to live a life better than that of the slave should they try to open such an operation themselves. Whatever they do, there will be some slave owner who tries to do it for less with slave labor. And if they hadn’t already known, they will learn now that for the wealthy Romans who run the city, work is a shameful thing that is rightly left to slaves; the only truly honorable way for a proper Roman to live is by virtue of what he owns. He may rent out property that he owns to a poorer Roman who may run a shop on his land, but usually he will live by the sweat of his slave. No slave, no glory. For the arriving masses of these now less-than-honorable Romans, there was the inexpensive corn – and the blood and suffering of the spectacles.

All of this will be funded by Rome’s conquests – the annual tribute paid by the nations Rome has conquered. Romans themselves pay no taxes to their government, except in time of emergency. Instead it is the farmers of the rest of the world whose tribute keeps the daily bread on the tables of the masses that have thronged to the mighty city. And on the holidays, some wealthy Roman may sponsor the spectacle of a public animal kill, and some of the less-than-noble Roman masses will have meat on the table on those days.

When there is the time to do so, our people may spend night on night trying to comprehend both the vastness of the wealth the Romans have stolen from the rest of the world – and the ends to which they have put it. They simply could not get enough of these stories. Were the Romans simply mad? Was there something in the water in their famous aqueducts? An entire people with lives based on constant war? Masses of people who will turn out, in numbers far larger than the villages we came from, simply to watch bloodshed. Was this what happened when so many people lived in such a small area? One story would top the other. It was only through hearing tale piled upon tale that we came to understand the immensity of the horror and the degradation that is Rome today. Where that Roman once said,“Carthago delenda est!” we now said, “Rome must be destroyed” – in all of the world’s tongues but Latin.

Truth be told though, we also came to understand that it was not entirely clear what it meant to speak of Rome or Romans – certainly not for us, and probably not for those called Romans either. It was the war against its Italian allies that first filled Rome with refugees from areas still allied with Rome hat found themselves under attack by former allies now fighting against Rome. Afterwards, as a means of settling the conflict, Rome offered its citizenship to those of the friends-turned-enemies who would lay down their arms and become friends once again. Henceforth, Rome would recognize any freeman living on the Roman side of the Po River as a citizen of Rome. This meant Roman armies might now include men who had borne arms against them in the past – but when one wishes to pursue continuous conflict, such accommodations must be made. So today, the so-called Roman soldier who marches against us may never have seen Rome. It also may happen that the first time the so-called Roman soldier approaches Rome is when he is ordered to march upon it – if such is what his general has ordered – as Rome’s then ruler Sulla did ten years ago. All of this may be a matter of only slight concern to the soldier, however, since the so-called Roman soldier who has never actually even seen Rome obviously cannot have an actual loyalty to Rome. He who pays his wage calls his tune – his loyalty is to his paymaster. The greater the prospects for looting that a Roman general appears to offer his soldiers, the greater his soldiers’ loyalty to him will be. An army of professional soldiers must always have a war to fight. And as recent years have shown, the enemy no longer need even be foreign, so today, every foreign enemy counts as something of a godsend for Rome – better they should fight barbarians than one another.

We, however, are far from a godsend for the legionary himself. Not only is there little glory to be had in a war against slaves, but there’s no land to be had, and little booty either – other than the gold and silver we kept in common to exchange for more useful materials – and even if this were captured, it was not likely to go to the common soldier. Nor would this war offer one of the principal benefits of the usual Roman war – the possibility of acquiring slaves. In most wars, if they won and the general was generous, Roman soldiers might return home with a slave they hadn’t owned before – maybe more than one. Not here, where, if we lose, all not killed are considered to already be someone else’s property. And it was not just a matter of the new slaves the Roman soldier would not acquire, but there was also the problem of the slaves he might already have. War and slavery being so much the Romulus and Remus of Roman life, some of their soldiers who might own slaves – and many of their officers – will bring them off to war with them, to help carry their load, cook for them, or do whatever else they wish them to do. But bringing a slave along to assist in a war against rebelling former slaves runs a great risk. Over time, every slave in Italy has imagined himself running away with us and pondered just if and how he might be able to pull such an escape off. Among the many reasons that might prevent a slave from joining us, one is certainly the danger involved in making his way to us. But should the slave-owning soldier choose to bring his slave along for a shield bearer or the like, he may well solve that problem for that slave, who may soon become his former-slave. After all, what safer way to approach the rebels than in the company of a Roman legion? Bad enough that the Roman should risk his life fighting lowly slaves, without also risking one of the glories of the Roman life – the owning of one of them. Short of death, could there be a worse outcome for a Roman legionary?

Lately we find not just slaves wanting to join us. In the midst of their dispiriting encounters with us, a number of the Roman soldiers have themselves deserted the Roman cause and asked to come over to our side. Now that many of us have learned something of the history of Rome and Italy, this has come as less of a surprise than it once would have, knowing that our enemy’s ranks may include veterans who have actually fought against Rome and possibly even against one another in the past. But from the very beginning we have decided that no deserting Roman soldier would ever be allowed among us.

Some arrivals recounted the talk on some of the richest of Roman spreads, lamenting the fact of today’s Rome no longer being the Rome when the Roman soldier was a real Roman, who showed up – when war was necessary to defend his city – replete with his own armor and weapons, and was therefore not about to be led by the nose by some general who could take that away from him. At the same time, these sitting-on-top-of-the-world Romans knew full well that their ponderous wealth depended precisely upon this perpetual war machine that their Senate had created – and their generals now ran.

Couriers, travelers’ attendants, household runaways from Rome – these were always centers of attention upon their arrival with the latest of Roman natterings and news. What was the gossip on Rome’s next move? What was the effect of all this on the local slaves? Where to send foraging parties? And even those with no news to tell might still have a previously unheard story of life in this strangest place on earth, where there were so many people that they were forced to live on top of each other in tall buildings; where men might piss in great urns in front of shops – fullers shops they called them – where they would then use that urine to clean your clothing; where if shit dropped from the sky onto your head you should not immediately curse the bird that dropped it, but rather first pause a moment to take the measure of its size and weight before you knew whether it was a fowl that you should blame, or the Roman who had tossed it out of his house from thirty feet up, not wanting to take the time to make the trip down to the vat under the staircase or to the local dung heap. It was the filthiest, foulest smelling place in the world, they would say, with pools of ill-smelling water standing in the streets and signs on houses that warned the passer-by – “Shitter, keep it in until you pass this place.” It was a place where there are said to be as many statues as there are men on the street – most of them carried back by slaves from the lands where they were made; a place where more of the people that you saw would be diseased than in any other place not stricken by plague; where you might well encounter a dog walking about with a hand in its mouth – or a dog or even a vulture waiting patiently for a beggar to come to final rest on the street before moving in to pick the carcass.

And of course they told the particulars of Roman slavery in their own lives. Those who’d read the Greek philosophers used to tell us what those men of old had written of slavery – of the one who said that in the life of the slave there was no such thing as leisure; and the one who wrote that the slave’s existence is said to be so miserable that death must be a relief to them. Of course, few of these philosophers had been slaves and few of our people had been philosophers. But nothing else that those Greeks said struck harder than that one bit of philosophy adopted by the Roman which every slave has heard: that it was pointless for slaves to hate their lives as slaves, because doing so would only make them miserable – and yet it would make them no less a slave. And that had been true – up until now.

The Campanians are said to have started this depraved custom hundreds of years ago following a war with the Samnites, a people of the Apennine mountains, when they forced their captives to fight one another. At first these spectacles served as entertainment for banquets held in the honor of recently deceased men of wealth. The Romans, allied with Campania in that war, supposedly looked down on this whole war game thing at first – perhaps because they hadn’t thought it up themselves. Today, however, no place is more closely identified with gladatorial spectacles than Rome where the man of wealth will sponsor them to further his ambition for high office or military command, there being no better way to persuade Romans to think well of you than to provide them with bloodshed – on your denarius.

Rome is a city whose senators may murder one another in broad daylight and whose generals may turn their armies against it. So, despite the fact that Romans throng to the arena to see gladiators by day, come nightfall they will generally be marched out of the city in chains – or buried – lest their presence add to the dangers of its nights. Yet the wealthiest of Romans nevertheless build their summer homes where the greatest number of gladiators are housed – in Campania. The villas on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea are said to be the most splendid in the world. The ready availability of the slave slaughter spectacle only heightens the pleasure of being far removed from the teeming, foul-smelling crowds of the smoky, sweaty city. In Pompeii they are building an amphitheater they say will be large enough to hold 20,000 people for the spectacles – greater than the number who live in that city.

These death games are what unite the people of Roman Italy – rich or poor. Villa-owner and slum-dweller, those who dine on peacock’s brains and those who feed from the public corn trough – every Roman likes to watch someone die. Rome’s legions have brought their swords to every direction – Africa, Asia, Europe, so that now no Roman need travel to any of these places to experience mortal combat, but may instead watch it but a short distance from home and then return for dinner afterwards – and perhaps, if they are fortunate, even bearing some meat fresh from slaughter in the arena – unbloodied and unharmed, flush with the glow of Rome’s grandeur – all with no danger of any proper Roman coming to harm in the process.

The spectacles and the constant wars that make them possible have become one in the Roman mind, so that gladiators are now decked out in the armor and weapons of the various enemies of Rome and the crowds see what appear to be Gaulish, German, Thracian soldiers going down. At first, all gladiators were called Samnites because of the spectacle’s origin, but today the Samnites are friends, not enemies of Rome, so it won’t do for gladiators bearing their armor to appear in the arena – for the moment. They say that it was at the point that Samnites became friends of Rome that gladiators bearing Thracian armor were introduced. Although the crowd might prefer to see a gladiator outfitted in Roman gear dispatching one of the barbarians, this can never be, since if the battle happening in front of the crowd was real, this would also create the possibility of a barbarian appearing to kill a legionary – a sight no Roman of high ambition would wish to ever be connected with. There can be only one direction for death to travel between Rome and its slaves.

As it goes with everything else in Rome, there is also money to be made from the spectacle and there are men available to carry out its every detail – for their price. When the best Romans wish to entertain the people, it will not do for they themselves to have anything to do with lanistas like Batiatus. For just as the prostitute and the gladiator are the lowliest of the slaves, the lanistas are reckoned among the basest of Romans – along with pimps and actors, some of whom may go so low as to play even the role of a slave on the stage. The rich man or the priest will not lower themselves by talking to such men, instead the patron of the games will pay a man called an editor handsomely to produce the show and it is he who will undertake the distasteful work of dealing with the lanista and such other lowlife as may be required.

In the high quality spectacle, nothing will be left to chance, no expense will be spared. To ensure that the crowd will see a proper show, the editor employs a lorarius, the man hired to whip the gladiator into action should he show insufficient desire to fight. The lorarius will also perform that service at the animal slaughters that precede the gladiatorial combat. Another operative, the rudis, will also be engaged to carry a staff to direct the gladiators or separate them, as the situation may call for – there may even be more than one of them if the sponsor has an especially fat pouch. A red hot iron will be kept at the ready to prod the gladiators, should the need arise. If a gladiator is downed and there is any question as to whether he is feigning death, the iron will also be used to ascertain that he is not simply trying to cheat the patron – and the audience – of any further violence for which the patron has paid his money. And should even this test leave doubt as to whether the gladiator is in actuality shirking his duty to fight, his throat will be slit, so that the audience may return to their homes with no doubt that they have witnessed the real thing. After each event is done, men known as ministri, will rake the bloodied sand before the next one starts.

As the spectacle has grown to be a routine and expected part of Roman life, it has become ever more difficult for the sponsor to impress the crowds. Another new war is always to be welcomed because a new enemy may add to the variety of types of gladiators on display. But even that may not be enough, as the Roman becomes bored with the same old style of killing and hungers to see something new. To that end, the lanistas have conjured up gladiators that look like no soldiers the world has ever seen. There are, for instance, the paegniarii – old men, cripples, dwarves, hunchbacks, men missing an arm or a leg who have mock fights with the wooden swords used in gladiator training. And they will even send gladiators into the ring who wear helmets with no eye holes and yet may even be astride horses. The blind combatant is known as an andabata and will provide great amusement for the Romans as a pair of them swing their swords wildly, with attendants pushing them toward each other. Why should a Roman audience not have a chance to laugh while they are at the games? Life is brief. This particular entertainment has become such a regular part of Roman life that when two Romans enter into a senseless dispute they are said to be fighting like andabatae. And really, what are Rome’s legions but andabatae led in one or another direction to swing their swords wildly at men they don’t know, for reasons that lie in the minds of others? By rights there should be an andabata at the head of every Roman legion on the march.

Romans will come to the arenas to watch the slaughter for many different reasons. Even experienced Roman soldiers are encouraged to visit the spectacles when they are not invading another land, in order that they may keep killing close in their hearts and perhaps even learn a thing or two that may improve their technique. New soldiers who have not yet ever been to war are encouraged to come so that they may grow more at ease in the midst of carnage. Veterans of past wars may come to recall their legion years; some maybe wishing they were there again, others thanking the gods that they’re not. Men who never served in the army may come to see what they missed. Some may find sadness in having never had the opportunity to venture to foreign lands, meet the people there, and kill them; others may think it just as well. Roman women who are fortunate enough never to witness war may get their closest look at something like it absent the risk of being ravaged, reminded of how much better they have it than the women of the lands Rome makes war on – and that it is Rome’s legions that make for the difference in their lots in life.

Visitors to Rome will be made well aware of the gladiatorial combat even if they do not choose to attend, as they will encounter street hustlers offering them programs telling them which gladiators will fight on which day. For a small price the visitor may even learn the numbers of previous bouts that the combatants have survived. Perhaps he might wish to wager on who will bleed and who will die; that can be done. It is even possible that he may cross paths with gladiators themselves without ever entering an arena. In Rome today, the greatest of the personages about town – which is to say, the wealthiest – will often be judged so by the number of slaves accompanying them in their travels about the city. And nothing speaks greatness in more eloquent Latin than a little army of gladiators serving as one’s bodyguard. Should the visitor be invited into a Roman home, he may learn that Romans like to think about the blood and carnage of the ring even when they cannot be there, so much that they will adorn their houses with images of gladiators painted on the walls or made from stones of various colors that are laid on the floors, or even on lamps or flasks. The Romans’ obsession with the gladiator runs so deep that it is said that there are some who will even attempt to drink the blood of one who has fallen, going so far as to suck it from the wound itself, believing it to be a cure for epilepsy: The cure for what ails the Roman: the blood of a non-Roman. Few stories ever met with greater disbelief in our camps than this one; and yet there were many among us who swore that they knew it to be true because they had seen it with their own eyes. And should a downed gladiator survive with his innards exposed, a Roman doctor may take this as an opportunity to increase his knowledge of the human body in a manner much superior to studying the man after he is dead.

If the traveler will stay long enough, he may even start to see the gladiators appearing in his dreams at night, as they do to the Romans. He may then visit one of Rome’s interpreters of dreams who will explain their meaning to him – for a fee. In houses of great wealth even a slave may have his dreams interpreted. After all, the slave’s dreams are also the property of the Roman – and they might affect him. They say that if a slave dreams of dancing it means that he will be flogged. Such interpretations are not taken very seriously, however, since the slave whose dream does not include dancing is generally equally likely to be flogged. Nor is the Roman fascination with the gladiator confined to the slave owner districts; even in the parts of Rome where the proletarians don’t paint their walls or tile their floors, the visitor may find the name of someone’s favorite gladiator scrawled on the walls of buildings. They say none leave Rome without being impressed by the great city’s size, its opulence – and its viciousness.

While this staged combat was first performed in mockery of defeated enemies, it became an honored Roman tradition once they realized that this practice could transform the drudgery of routine executions into events that would bring joy to the Roman people. And while the actual gladiator remains the meanest of men in the eyes of proper Romans – who would only allow one into their house in their dreams – or on their wall or floor – things have reached the point where gladiators are now even employed in the training of Rome’s soldiers, sharpening their skills for conquering new lands, so that they may bring back new tribute, booty, and slaves – some of whom will become the gladiators of tomorrow.

When it came to telling tales of the atrocities of Rome around our campfires, we who had once been sentenced to the ring could – of course and unfortunately – more than hold our own, not just in speaking of our experience but of the other things we have seen. Yet it was only with our mingling and coming to know one another’s stories that we came to understand the true depth of Rome’s depravity. The Romans inscribe their great buildings with the words Senatus Populusque Romanus – the senate and people of Rome. Our Latin speakers say the better choice might be Omne quod movetur interfice – Kill anything that moves – for that appears to be the one idea that brings all of Rome together. Although the Rome senate and its people may come to disagree on many things, this is never one of them. Even we who once were gladiators had not seen or known of all of the varieties of killing that are employed to keep the Roman smiling.

There is another very popular form of Roman spectacle called a venatio. For this they will fill arenas with animals of all types – hares, goats, deer, boars, bulls, dogs, horses, asses, rabbits, foxes, wolves – all to be killed for the enjoyment of the throngs of screaming Romans, who may afterwards thrash about with one another attempting to grab some dead meat to bring home for their dinner. Since most Romans have moved off the land and into tall buildings in the city where they may lay about much of the day, all of this slaughter is designed to remind them of how it was that their much honored ancestors once lived – and to remember where meat comes from. And no matter what it might be that you would wish to kill, there will be a Roman available to do the job. Archers are employed to shoot the animals. The specialists in animal slaughter are called venatores, another only-in-Rome trade. Trees may even be planted and mounds of earth brought in to refresh the memory of the Roman audience as to what an actual hunt was like, since in Rome today hunting is work only fit for slaves. On special occasions the onlookers may even be allowed to join in the kill. And there are other such festivals. One day a year it will be the dogs howling in pain as they are impaled on pitchforks to remind Rome of the day hundreds of years past when the dogs remained silent as the Gauls approached to sack the city. Many a slave who has not previously loved dogs will come to do so when he learns this piece of Roman history. On another day all of the fish caught in the Tiber will be thrown into a fire – live.

Some of the most remarkable stories were told by people who had never been outside of Italy in their lives, yet were able to describe the widest variety of animals from all over the known world, animals that most had never even heard of – and never even suspected could exist. The Romans will gather giant animals that people have never seen before such as long nosed, huge eared elephants. And fierce ones – bears and giant cats: lions, tigers, leopards; water-going crocodiles – giant lizards with sharp teeth, and ostriches, giant long-necked and long-legged birds that run rather than fly. All of these the Romans brought from great distances, all to be killed for the entertainment of their people. Sometimes the animals are made to fight one another. They may bind a bull and an elephant together with chains and stab them with spears to make them attack each other. When it comes to the Romans’ taste in misery, it appears to know no bounds. Expendable slaves may be used to train the fiercer beasts to attack humans in later performances. They say that if an animal exists anywhere in this world, the Romans will develop their own special way of killing it. And in this area they even did Hannibal one better – not only do they bring elephants from Africa, but they also import Africans to kill the elephants. Only the best for a Roman audience; the Roman deserves to see his elephants killed an expert.

The idea of the arena games – another of their names for the public slaughter – is to demonstrate that Rome’s dominion extends not only to all of the world’s other peoples, but to all of the earth’s other creatures as well. Who else has the ability to publicly kill their enemies, their criminals, or the most ferocious beasts, any time they wish to – and all in the same day? So, in the end, there really was no contradiction for them between yesterday’s ideal realm of yeoman farmer soldiers and the realities of today’s Rome – where some say that as much as one day in every six may be devoted to such spectacles: Yesterday’s wars made today’s spectacles possible.

The largest of these will start with the venationes, followed by executions of criminals or enemies of Rome – sometimes staged to enact Roman myths – and finally gladiatorial combat. In some arenas, a huge cloth may be spread above the heads of the entire crowd to shield them from the sun and perfumed water may be sprayed over the crowd to cover the smells of the animals and the smells of death – the Roman who attends the festival should be able to enjoy the kill without having to experience its less pleasant aspects. Music may be performed during crucial moments. Spectators will make bets as to the outcome.

Former house slaves told of how the Romans will prattle on about the high quality and variety of the bloodletting they have seen. One might have seen men ripped matched apart by chariot teams or by pulleys and weights. Another might speak of the stake driven through the back of the head and emerging from the mouth of the condemned man, or the one placed upon an iron seat to be heated until his flesh burns, or the man wearing the tunic that will be set on fire; and on and on. The range of death available to the audience surely cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Yes, the people organizing these events could be every bit as creative as children making up the rules to their own little games. The rich Roman will say that these events are put on for the entertainment and education of the poor. But their slaves knew otherwise. After a full day of experiencing the pleasures of agony and death, we might only wish that the Roman would take the final step of the experience and kill himself. Unfortunately too few do so, but these days we have gathered considerable numbers dedicated to leading the Roman through that final step.

They say that the recent Roman warlord Sulla once had a hundred maned lions killed in the arena and that the Romans have killed so many of them that they are now becoming hard to find in their native lands. And it is not just the hope for fresh meat or the fascination with strange creatures that brings the Romans to these spectacles. In fact these games appear to satisfy a deep need the Romans have to experience cruelty. We heard stories of entire arenas of Romans screaming with glee watching the agonies of foxes with flaming torches tied to their backs. Most everyone knew how miserable the Roman could be from our personal experiences, yet still the stories of their organized cruelty would shock some, and after hearing one of these stories following the other, it became hard to imagine Romans ever acting any differently. So, in the end, another story that many people wound up finding very hard to believe was that of a crowd that once turned against the organizer of an elephant slaughter when the suffering of these obviously intelligent animals became too much for even Romans to bear looking at. Among us there were few who thought it possible that a Roman crowd could feel sympathy for any creature other than a fellow Roman – and obviously not even for all of them.

On one day, the Romans might throw their own deserters to lions or bears to be mauled. On another day, they might bring elephants in to crush them. Or prisoners might be sent to fight fierce animals. For these purposes the Romans have their bestiarii, men who will train those animals and even fight them themselves. This custom is said to date back to the capture of elephants from the Carthaginians in Sicily during the first war between the two. For today’s spectacles, the animals are first trapped and starved into submission in the provinces, then transported to Rome. At times when combat was not imminent, this pursuit could be a major project for a Roman army abroad; it provided their commanders with something to keep the troops busy. But by now, the most enterprising of the bestiarii have been able to provide the animals at lower cost by bringing them back, breeding them as they would sheep – and feeding them the flesh of human corpses, the idea being that this would keep them wild and develop in them a taste for more. Here we have yet another job known only to Rome.

The sight of Romans marching slaves from north of the Black Sea into ports on the Aegean was an all too familiar one in Thrace. From there they were shipped to Rome – a journey they say that might take three months. We also understood that there were some Thracians who would capture and sell members of other tribes – and later learned that Gauls did the same. And yet, with all that I had not understood just how widespread Rome’s slave trade really was. The road through Thrace was but one of many slave roads that lead to Rome. There are more slaves in Italy than we could have even imagined back in Thrace. Slaves are used to run the entire society – in the fields, the mills, the workshops, the markets, the houses, the temples. Were every one of those slaves one day to disappear, Rome would immediately no longer be the Rome that is famed around the world: that Rome would collapse overnight. But while the rest of the world may not understand this very well, absolutely everyone in Rome and Italy does.

I myself was in Rome only long enough to be stripped naked at a slave market, have a sign hung round my neck describing the facts about me that a buyer might want to know, have my testicles checked to see if they were intact, and to jump about to demonstrate how agile I was – and then sold. I had little time to learn much more about what went on there, but in our camps we have men who had been forced to work at the markets where the rest of us were sold, others who have read what the Romans have written about those markets, and even some who have actually written those reports. Among them all they could describe every detail of what went on there and just what the Roman buyer will consider important before he purchases someone: What flaws does he have? Is he left handed? Is he a bed wetter? Does he stutter? Does he have swollen tonsils? If it’s a woman, is she barren, or too tight for sexual intercourse? Has she given birth to stillborn babies? Does she menstruate twice a month, or not at all? A deaf slave may actually cost more because he is useful in situations when the Roman holds conversations that he does not want to be overheard.

Rome considers the proper functioning of its slave labor markets essential to the operations of the entirety of its society and assigns high officials to that task. But the selling of slaves is one thing, their treatment after their sale quite another – in which the state does not take an interest. There was no official assigned to the running of the ludus to which I was taken. Men like Batiatus who own gladiators and operate the ludi are actually scorned by Rome’s other slavers. Romans do not, however, scorn the spectacles where these gladiators will fight. Likewise, although the slave trade is as important to Rome as its famous aqueducts and roads, Rome also scorns the traders who brings those slaves to market, even though the slave dealers do not themselves capture any slaves, but profit only from the trading of them – overcharging and cheating the honest Roman – as the slave’s buyer will see it. The proper Roman prefers not to associate with any who remind him that Rome is, in reality, no longer the nation of hardworking free farmers that it remains in their imagination – even though those proper Romans will not themselves spend a single day picking olives or sowing seed. Anything that gives the lie to the myth of the noble Roman is not to be tolerated in the wealthiest districts.

Nonetheless, come market day, flocks of Romans will descend upon these markets to consort with these less-than-reputable vendors in search of man or woman to buy if the price is right – meaning less expensive than raising the child of the female already in their possession. The more troops Rome sent to its last war, the better the deal they may find. The buyer wanting herdsmen will look for Ilyrians and Thracians; if for grape or olive field workers, then Syrians and Greeks. Slaves considered particularly desirable due to strength, beauty, skills, or learning may command much greater prices from those who have the money to pay them. One is said to have paid 700,000 sesterces to acquire a Greek tutor for his children – a sum that could pay a thousand Roman soldiers for a year. Such Romans may well pay more for a pretty boy than for a sturdy ploughman. They may also buy dwarves and deformed slaves to show off to their guests as entertainment. A black slave might be bought as a rarity. And twins – particularly if they are strong, and might be used as twin litter bearers.

But so far as the average humans who come to be sold in a Roman market, the purchaser considers them tools that think, a level above the ox, as the ox is a level above the axe. Although the slave will be the more complicated of their properties, their treatment in Roman custom is the equivalent to the selling of an ox or a horse – as is the reimbursement due the Roman, should his slave be injured or killed. Just as horses may be considered defective if they are lame, diseased, or if their tongue has been cut out, this is the rule with slaves as well and the potential buyer has the right to know these things in advance. And should the slave have a past habit of running away, it too must be made known to the buyer – if that has not already been made obvious by branding or collaring. A troublesome slave is of much lesser value. The buyer has the right to expect that he gets what he pays for and Rome’s officials will back him up. And with the thinking tools, additional notices must be given beyond what is required for non-thinking tools. Since the enslaved so frequently prefer death to their current life, the slave market will now require the dealer to inform the buyer if a slave has attempted suicide in the past, committed an act Rome deems punishable by death, or if he has previously been sentenced to entertain an audience by fighting a beast.

Since Romans will acquire slaves to do every single thing for them – up to the limits of their wealth – when it comes to any matter concerning Roman life, you are bound to find someone around one of our campfires who knew it or did it, whether it is building their houses, farming their lands, educating their children, or cooking their food. No one can say how many slaves there are in Rome or in the whole of Italy today. Some say one out of every three people living there may be a slave. That same proportion forms the very ideal of the Roman household – husband, wife, and slave, although many have a great deal more than the one and many have none. Our historians tell us that at one point the slavers considered requiring all slaves to dress in uniform fashion, so that their inferior status was easily distinguished. But when the Roman sets out to buy his daily bread, it is probable that a slave will have baked it, along with the lower quality bread the slave will eat – any part of the better bread the slave may manage to cadge for himself being regarded as theft. And when the Roman takes his clothing to be cleaned at the fullery, slaves will likely do the job. Slaves will sell him things in all manner of shops. They manage the insulae – the tall dwellings that many of the less noble Romans inhabit – where they are porters, sweepers, water carriers, who will be passed along with the property should it be sold or inherited. They will build the fishing ships, load them, catch fish from them, and unload them – everything but eat the fish for the Roman. And so on throughout the Roman’s day. So in the end, the slave’s overwhelming presence throughout Roman society ultimately caused the slavers to decide against uniform dress for them. Desirable as it might be to provide the common Roman with constant affirmation that he stands above so many of those around him, it would at the same time allow slaves to immediately recognize each other and create situations that might make the Roman uncomfortable as he realized just how outnumbered by slaves he might be at any moment – and knowing that the slaves could see that just as well. After all, in the end, the entire purpose of having slaves was to make the Roman feel comfortable, so while an individual slave owner might choose to be ostentatious and parade the evidence of how many slaves he was wealthy enough to own, Rome as a whole decided against constant display of the underpinnings of its existence.

Overall, the stories that former slaves shared gave little cause to question the general understanding that, on the whole, the field slave had it worse than the house slave – much worse. Yet, there was one aspect of the house slave’s life that many a field slave could not have dealt with – indeed some had been sent off to the fields for this very reason that it did not sit well with them. The first obligation of the house slave is to agree with the master in all things – especially in the matter of how generous he was to them. It was said that there are Romans so wealthy as to have a slave whose primary function is to do just that – repeatedly assure the master of just what a fine person he really is. And yet can there be a Roman foolish enough not to understand that all of his slaves, and all of his neighbor’s slaves would immediately be his enemies if they thought that somehow the tables could be turned? In reality, the slave-owner does think about this far more than he lets on. While he generally cares little of what the slave hears or thinks, this is the one great exception – the unspoken fear that underlies Roman society, the subject that may on occasion even cause the slaver to lower his voice in the presence of the slave. Likewise these days even the normally loud Roman, given to blathering on about those glories of Rome’s history that have made them the great people they believe themselves to be today, may now speak in more hushed tone when discussing uprisings of years past – and especially, the one of the moment.

In recent times, if no one knew just how many slaves there really were in Italy at any point, the one thing of which they could be certain was that there were fewer than there would be next year – although this has become uncertain today. Some say the Romans once enslaved 150,000 in a single day at the end of their third war with the Macedonians. Some say that 10,000 slaves were sold in a single day on Delos – an island situated between Greece and Asia which the Greeks considered a sacred place before the Romans converted it to a slave market to handle enormous numbers of slaves they took in their wars with Carthage and Corinth. It reached the point where if Rome had recently had a particularly fruitful war you might even be able to come by a slave for less than the price of a horse or ox. Later Delos would also prove to be a convenient spot for pirates to sell the bodies they kidnaped. In today’s Rome the man who does not own a slave is the man who cannot afford the price of one. He need not travel to Delos or somewhere over the sea to buy one. They will be available at the local market that may also sell animals, clothing, tools, jewelry, and the like. As with everything else in Rome, the gathering of slaves is a business – three, actually.

Trailing every Roman legion you will find the slave merchants ready to buy when they can get a good deal. But the legions are not the only option for acquiring a slave. The children of the poor – abandoned by parents who cannot feed them, and left exposed to the cold, hunger, and dogs at the public dump – provide an entirely separate source for the dealer or would-be slave owner to pick up and raise; or the parents may even sell them directly. In some cases the Roman slave owner may even expose the female child of one of his slaves when he does not have women’s work sufficient to justify the costs of raising her – the exposed child perhaps becoming an option for another Roman who may not have the up-front price for a grown slave. In more recent times, Asia has become a particularly fruitful source for such children. Following the immense tribute burdens that Rome’s future dictator Sulla imposed after his war there, Roman tax gatherers now routinely gather the children up and ship them off to Rome.

The third of Rome’s slave channels is the pirates who will raid coastal towns and kidnap the locals, knowing they can sell them in Rome. Although Romans claim that they do not enslave free men of peoples with whom they are not at war, the fact of the matter is that when it suits its purposes Rome reserves the right to enslave anyone from a land with which Rome has neither treaty nor understanding. Although the Romans call these same pirates the scourge of the seas who must be eliminated, they are quite willing to believe any story the pirate will tell about how he has acquired the slaves he offers for sale – when the price is right. When it came down to a choice of believing a pirate who told him that those he offered for sale had always been slaves, or believing the captives who claimed they had always been freemen until captured by the pirates, there were few slave dealers who would return home without the slaves – if the price was right. In Rome the right price will always trump the truth. While the respectable Roman would never invite the pirate, slave dealer, or any other such low life to dinner, he does not hesitate to invite his proper friends to a dinner served by the slave that one of these deplorables has sold him.

And then there are those who will grow their own slaves, breeding them like dogs or mules. Although the Roman slave is unable to marry – a further restriction upon their slaves beyond those imposed by the Greeks and Carthaginians, they tell us – the household slaves may be allowed or directed to create families. A female slave may be given to a male – which also will make it less likely that those slaves will attempt escape. And the children will serve as a type of hostage to ensure the slave’s good behavior. Or the slave owner may choose the option of fathering his new slaves himself. And much as he may attempt to soothe his wife’s anger at such an arrangement by reminding her that any new slaves thus produced would also be at her service, the female slave who is the object of such attention can expect that it will be she, and not the slaver, who will bear the brunt of the wife’s displeasure over the situation.

But in the end, so far as these other sources of slaves go, none can match war. More slaves and cheaper. And the cheaper the slaves are, the easier to replace and the less care the Roman must give to the ones he already has. He can allow them less rest, work them harder, replace them sooner – and perhaps feed them for a shorter time.

Slaves perform so much of Rome’s work that it is far easier to say what slaves don’t do for Rome rather than what they do: Slaves don’t conduct Rome’s wars – nothing much else is missing from their list of possible duties. Some of them are considered the property not of any individual, but of the Roman senate and people. Anything about Rome that is called great and famous is built by this group of slaves: The grand public buildings and monuments, the roads that the Roman army marches, the aqueducts that bring waters from the mountains to Rome. These public slaves may also be hired out to individual Romans for their own private purposes. Today, however, many of those who used to attend to Rome’s public purposes are now tending to their own private purposes, as we have now reached the point where as soon as we arrive in a new location we become the rulers of the land. And when the slavers themselves flee, nothing stands in the way of us unchaining those left behind.

Slaves sentenced to work in the Roman household will live under the eyes and the roofs of the Romans and be subject to their every whim and mood. Whereas in rural situations the Roman will consider it advantageous for his slaves not to know Latin, so as not to provide a common language to those who may otherwise be divided by differing native tongues, in the household they will likely be required to know or learn Latin, particularly if their tasks involve contact outside the household, and their facility in the language may increase their value or even enhance an owner’s prestige. Most of the women and children will be among this group. In the small household, the slaves will do pretty much anything the Romans do not want to do themselves. They may cook and clean the house. They may midwife the birth of children they will later tend to. They may shop, make clothing, clean that clothing and perform any number of other household tasks.

We learned of Roman households with over 500 slaves, one was even said to have 4,000. In the homes of the very rich Romans, slaves may inhabit houses of fabulous wealth by day, yet they may live in the most miserable of conditions by night. Some Romans assign slaves to keep track of the other slaves they own and, if need be, tell the slaver the name of his two-legged properties. They have slaves who will remove their shoes for them so that they themselves may use that time to think about more important things. Some of these Romans who travel about the city with a large number of slaves may include a nomenclator, one assigned to inform the Roman of the names of the other important Romans he will encounter when they are out and about in public. They have litter bearers who bring the Romans to and from their houses. And whereas the single slave in the small household may perform fifty different tasks, the households with masses of slaves may have fifty different slaves each one holding a separate job, including functions simply unknown to those unfamiliar with the Roman world and the wealth that its slaves have created for it. Here an individual slave may be assigned the maintenance of the silverware or he may be put in charge of the care of the slavers’ garments – perhaps not even all of them, but only the purple ones or the silken ones. Individual slaves may be assigned to jobs such as folder of clothing, polisher of furniture, weigher of wool, setter of pearls, issuer of invitations, screener of guests, dresser of hair, masseur, bed chamber attendant. They may be placed in charge of pictures, perfumes, oils. They could be assigned to be victimarii, whose job it is to lead the oxen, pigs, or sheep to sacrificial slaughter. The issuing of these very particular jobs is done so as to encourage a sense of individual responsibility among the slaves. The Roman is very concerned with personal responsibility – for slaves. There are slaves who specialize in dressing the Roman in his toga. So many Romans require assistance in dressing themselves that there is even a special name for the slaves who perform this task: they are known as vestiplici. If the Roman’s wealth is vast enough, he may even employ a silentarius, a slave whose duty it is to keep the other slaves quiet, allowing the Roman to think only the purest and most important of Roman thoughts – perhaps how to acquire even more slaves. He may designate one to be the atrevevius, who will guard the atrium and tell the other slaves what to do. They say that one fat Roman employed a slave to remind him not to eat too much. It may also amuse the wealthy Roman to keep some crippled slaves around the house and to bring them out at dinner parties so that they may amuse his guests with their deformities. The reader may not immediately believe that all of this can be true. And neither did most of us, but those who had seen such things assured us that it was so.

When the numbers grow too large, some slaves will be placed in charge of overseeing the work of their fellow slaves; on the farms this person is called a villicus. On many of the large farms, these villici had developed Roman minds inside of slave bodies and worked to set as many of the other slaves at odds with each other as possible in order to create mistrust and rivalry – Thracian against Gaul, and so forth – in the hope that they may become aggrieved more with one another than with the Roman. But whenever a villicus has decided to throw his lot in with us – as many have done – we are always grateful for the knowledge they bring with them: they know where everything is. Slaves may even be employed as torturers, others as actors or musicians. They may do the work of operating a business, as the Roman considers such work beneath him. The Roman believes that respectable wealth comes from owning, not from doing. Slaves will be fowlers, ditchers, potters, muleteers, metal workers. They may be barbers, although there are apparently many Romans who think it wiser never to allow a slave to hold a razor near their throat.

The Roman also plays a game with the household slave that is largely unknown to the field slave. He may give the slave bits of money – which the Roman can take back at any time – and even allow the slave to hope to buy back his own freedom, perhaps at age 30 or so – knowing that by that time the slave will have lived through most of his productive years, and the Roman can then use the price the older slave has paid for his freedom to buy a younger, more productive one, while the Roman will no longer bear the responsibility of feeding, clothing, and housing – or disposing of the older one. As one of the Romans the others consider wise in such matters has said, no useless slaves should be fed in the household. In some cases slaves might only be freed after they have produced children to replace themselves, while the expenses of the older slave are again removed from the Roman’s budget.

Slaves work as cobblers, sculptors, footmen. Literate slaves may be readers, writers, translators. The Roman who wishes to appear particularly cultured and possesses wealth sufficient to do so may even buy a slave to recite the words of Homer or Hesiod upon the master’s command, aiming thereby to impress the guests at his dinner parties with the host’s sophistication and good taste. The hope is that they will assume that if the slave is smart, so must be the man who would buy him. Of course, the Roman who buys a Greek for that purpose may resent the fact that it is the Greek who is actually the more learned – and the slave may suffer for this.

At the Romans’ banquets, slaves will carve the meat and serve the food and wine that they will not be allowed to eat or drink – that is, unless the master is feeling particularly generous on that day. They will not speak a word, unless a Roman demands they do so. They will remove the guests’ shoes, clean up their vomit – the slave may even have to hold the Roman up while he vomits and the drunk may wipe his hands on the slave’s hair afterwards, empty the chamber pots, and put the Roman’s shoes back on. One may be given the task of simply observing the dinner crowd for the purpose of later telling the host what the guests said or did during the course of the evening. If the Roman becomes too decrepit with age, a slave may even clean his teeth for him – with urine, as is the Roman custom. The wealthy Roman may choose to be waited on by naked female slaves. He may choose to beat his slave so as to serve as a warning to his own son.

Some slaves are sold for their beauty, particularly young boys. They will be available, male and female both, for their owner’s pleasure, required to fulfill any sexual demand the Roman may make. Some young slaves will be made houseboys who will have their beards plucked – so that they will continue to appear boyish as long as possible – and may be dressed as women at the master’s feasts. Some slaves may even be the object of the mistress’s desire. Any children born to a slave may be either kept and raised as slaves, or left exposed to die, or perhaps be raised as the slave of another – all as the Roman sees fit. The greater demand for male labor will make the boys more likely to be kept. The Roman may castrate you if he sees fit, or kill you – even as he may kill his own son.

As the degradation of the house slave is generally not as severe as that of the gladiator or the silver miner, the house slave’s owner believes that his slave is a fortunate one who should be grateful for that good fortune. Indeed, some slaves can spend their days listening to Romans telling them just how lucky they are to be slave to that particular Roman – and not of some other less generous or broad minded a Roman. And it is true that the household slave will be less likely to be visibly maimed than the others, for a Roman household has appearances to maintain and a visitor might be upset by the sight of a slave with a branded face greeting him at the door or serving him at the table. Nor would a black and blue footman look good in the Roman senate’s chamber. But the house slave does labor under the disadvantage of living under the eye of the owner and weathering whatever outbursts this involves. Rome has doctors who will advise the slave owner who has injured his hand when punching his slave in the head that in the future he ought to spare his hands – they will particularly warn against punching him in the teeth – and instead make better use of the whip. A new whip can be bought, a Roman hand cannot. Indeed, the owner may choose to flog the slave, as he sees fit. Or break his leg, if he sees fit. The scars and limps in our camps testified to the kicking that some angry Roman had chosen to inflict upon his property.

As a slave, you exist for and at the Roman’s pleasure. Should you happen to break a goblet and upset the Roman with the sound of breaking glass, he might have you thrown into a pool of lampreys to be eaten by fish. Likewise he might choose to have you killed at a banquet to impress a prostitute. You might be nailed to the mast of a ship because you ate a bird the master didn’t want you to eat, even though that bird was supposedly your own. All of these and many more stories of what has happened to slaves were shared at our night fires. You are the Roman’s property and the house slave is never allowed to forget that. Fortunately occurrences such as these are relatively rare because not that many Romans feel themselves rich enough to just waste a slave like that. But the Roman might also arrive home from dinner at the house of another Roman and decide to trade you for a piece of furniture he admired at his host’s. Eyes had seen all of these things. Every day that the slave has not been treated in that fashion was a good day for the slave – on this the Romans all agree. But even the slave whose job it is to take the slaver’s side against his fellow slaves holds in common with them the fact that his life is not his own. If the Roman believes that his slave should not sleep too long because the slave’s rest is a waste of the slaver’s investment and he therefore should be working at any time that he is not sleeping, such will be that slave’s life. A clever Roman saying has it that a slave is the hell of the cudgel – the slave’s body being the place where cudgels go to die.

Should the slave grow old or sick and unable to work as he once did, the Roman will consider himself a wise man should he be able to sell that slave while there is still a buyer. Otherwise he may decide to simply stop feeding him. In Rome itself he may perhaps take his old slave to a certain island in the Tiber River that is known for this purpose and leave him there to die, out of sight. He may then put the money he would otherwise have spent on feeding the old slave toward the purchase of a new one. Outside of Rome, some other island may do just as well. Or the Roman may dump him at some shrine to Asclepius, their god of healing – while of course reserving the right to take the slave back should the god deign to actually heal him.

The Roman will call the slave by any name that pleases him, whether or not it is the name that the slave arrived with. He particularly likes to give out Greek names, because they make the slave sound more expensive. He will try to make the slave worship Rome’s gods – which are for the most part the Greek gods given new names – and forget his own. If your Roman is called Marcus, you will be called Marcipor, Marcus’s boy. The child who is born into slavery will only ever know the name and the gods that the Romans give him. Should the Roman die, the slave will be passed on to his son along with the rest of his property. And if there is a family of slaves and a number of heirs of the slave owner, that family of slaves may find itself divided among the heirs – a fear that all slave families live with.

In many of the larger houses, Romans hire painters to decorate their walls with pictures of things not as they are in reality, but as they are in the mind of the Roman. So if slaves should appear on one of those walls they will be of smaller size than the Romans – a reminder to them of the ways things are in Rome, as if they could ever forget.

Should a slave kill a Roman, all slaves who were within earshot of the deed, or even anywhere in the household may be tortured for information and then executed for failing to stop the killing. In fact the same is true if the Roman killed himself and the slave might have prevented it. If the slave is thought to have conspired against his master he may be buried alive. Slaves may be crucified – if the family deems it worthwhile to spend the money to pay for the procedure. They are sometimes spared this most gruesome of deaths when the dead man’s heir does not wish to diminish his inheritance by paying the executioner’s fee. The story is told of how during one of Rome’s wars against itself, Sulla put out a death order for his predecessor Marius and eleven of his associates. Only one of them, named Sulpicius, was captured, when his whereabouts were betrayed by his slave. Sulpicius was executed. Afterwards, his slave was first granted his freedom for his service in providing this valuable information about the enemy, and then thrown to his death from Rome’s execution site – known as the Tarpeian Rock – for his betrayal of his master.

In Rome, the only value placed upon the life of a slave is the price that was paid for him. The Romans have established elaborate proceedings to settle disputes between their citizens, well beyond what one will find in most nations, but no Roman can be brought before these famous Roman courts for breaking a promise made to a slave. In Rome’s law such a promise holds no greater weight than failing to give a treat promised to one’s dog. If a Roman should cohabit with a slave, the Roman will lose possession of any children he has and himself be sentenced to slavery. A slave who is caught in the act with the wife of a Roman may be killed on the spot.

Among the most miserable of fates that may befall a slave is to be sentenced to the silver mine. The rare slave who makes it out of there alive – perhaps to be made a gladiator instead – will tell you that the silver miner would prefer death to life in the mine and that most of them will soon see that wish realized, as they will be worked to death within a few months – if they are not first crushed in a mine collapse – without ever again seeing any light but that of a torch. Which makes the rising of the silver miners of Attica at the time of the second revolt in Sicily the most impressive of slave uprisings.

The greatest number, though, will be sentenced to work on the farms that have grown immense in the course of Rome’s everlasting wars, as wealthy Romans acquired the lands of so many small farmers sent off to fight those wars while at the same time acquiring the slaves those wars produced to work those farms – in numbers greater now than any ever previously known. And nowhere has this growth been more widespread than in Campania – where our uprising began. They say such a large change of ownership of farmland has happened once before in Italy, on Sicily – the site of the two great rebellions before ours – when Rome took control of the island from Carthage and Romans seized the lands of the Sicilians who had sided with its enemy.

The field slaves on these huge farms that the Romans call latifundia will generally be shackled and branded as property. They will eat the rancid grain that Romans will not eat, along with the heads and hooves of animals – food that they will share with the dogs. They will sleep chained in the ergastula. Some will work in the vineyards, tending the grapes used to make the wine they will not be allowed to drink. Some will plough the fields to grow the crops from which the Romans will feed them the gleanings. Some will tend chickens, goats, oxen, sheep. They may catch birds or cut hay. Some will dig the ditches to build the roads that will allow Roman armies to march forth more quickly and to return more quickly – with new slaves. Some will walk in circles the livelong day, covered in the white dust of flour, turning a mill wheel in the dark. Most of them will be worked to death under the whip within a decade. The women among them may spin cloth or make cheese or clothing. There are so many slaves on the latifundia that they will be treated worse there than the animals, which only makes sense to the Roman who may have paid more for the animal than the slave. At the same time, the ever increasing numbers of slaves gathering in the fields, together with poor Roman hired hands, has been making rich Romans ever more nervous about what they might get up to at harvest time. Today this is much more than just a worry.

Although the rich and the poor fight incessantly in Rome, seemingly over all things, there is one they don’t argue. They are all of one mind about the situation and treatment of slaves. They say that around the time of the first Sicilian uprising, a Roman official named Tiberius Gracchus took up the cause of the small Italian farmers who were losing their lands to large wealthy landowners who would from then on work it with slaves. This was actually a course of events that Rome’s policy of never-ending war pretty much guaranteed, since it was Rome’s freemen who had to leave their farms to go off to fight and die in those wars while its slaves, exempt from military service, did not. And yet, no matter the level of hostilities between Rome’s rich and poor, all of this would bring no questioning of Rome’s endless wars, since all Roman boats, big and small, rose equally on the waters of the prosperity made possible by the slaves these wars brought. The senate mob who represented the great landowners made quick work of this Gracchus. Seeing no need to waste their time with the complicated processes of their famed courts, they simply clubbed him to death and threw his body in the river.

A decade later came another Gracchus, the younger brother Gaius – otherwise known for his effort to clear out the Roman Forum to afford better views of the gladiator matches held there – who took up the same cause. He met the same fate, in this case along with thousands of his followers. Since that time, Rome’s poor citizens – largely those dispossessed farmers and their descendants – have remembered the Gracchi brothers as the greatest of advocates of their cause. But never has the sympathy of the Gracchi, their followers, or their admirers in any way extended to those slaves forced to do the work on the land that the rich Roman took from the poor Roman. The only lesson that the elder Gracchus brother drew from the great Sicilian slave uprising of his day was that slaves were not loyal to their masters – and might even pose a threat to them. It did not take a rebellion to learn this; any Roman idiot already knew it. All slaves are enemies – the Romans say so themselves all the time. The Roman only has to go to the theater to hear actors – often slaves themselves – crack jokes about it.

The slave holds no vote in the Roman senate and simply does not figure in its decisions. The Gracchi could gain nothing from slaves politically and therefore owed them nothing. The importance of slaves was like their images in the paintings on the walls of the rich Romans’ houses – smaller than life. They say that the name of the Gracchi’s own father is carved in stone in Rome along with the claim that he once killed or captured 80,000 Sardinians. A great auction of Sardinians followed. The Roman will still occasionally recall what was said of that event: “Sardinians for sale, one more worthless than another.” The only concern that the Gracchi sons held for slaves was the fear that maybe Rome was now suffering from having acquired too much of a good thing.

The history that Romans tell of themselves leaps from a children’s tale of a pair of wolf-children to the stories of one great man after another. But there are no great men in Rome. The slave will find no friend anywhere among the Romans. The Greek teachers among us tell us that there are learned Romans who hold forth that it is only the body that can be enslaved and that the only freedom that truly matters is the freedom of the spirit. And when the Roman is inspired by such deep thoughts and wishes to write them down, he will first order his slave to fetch him his writing implements. More than likely this slave will then have to listen to the Roman lecture him about the need to free his own spirit. No slave would ever speak or write such foolishness – except, of course, as ordered to do so by his free-in-spirit master. We have heard that there are a few who do actually think differently and admire a long-ago Greek named Epicurus and that in their circles slave and Roman, men and women may mingle. But they are very few, so few that no one really seems to have met any of them.

Such things we learn from the former house slaves who are relatively few among us. In attempting to join us the house slave faces the prospect of setting forth, sometimes from behind city walls, into an unknown, unsheltered countryside. Knowing that we are continually on the move, any slave has to be prepared both to fight the Romans and feed himself off the land. He is well advised to come armed, if possible, as weapons are always hard to come by. Knowing that most of the liberation army headed his way were escaping harsher fates than his own, the house slave will measure his current situation against his chances in setting off on a road that will lead to either freedom or death. And so not every slave will join us, although all wish for our success. And the fact is that there is only so large that we can grow and still be able to feed everyone.

Unlike the house slave, so far as we gladiators went, life in the ludus gave no one cause to hesitate in fleeing. Although the Roman values their services very highly, he deems gladiators and prostitutes the meanest of human beings. The prostitute serves the Roman not wealthy enough to own slaves; the wealthy Roman does not have to leave the house for those purposes. The life of the prostitute is known throughout the world, but that of the gladiator is not. The rest of the world is happily ignorant of such things.

Up until now, every day has been one of fight or flight, or preparing for fight or flight; every night was one spent thinking, talking, arguing about fight or flight. Never time to rest; never time to think beyond tomorrow. Immediately after our breakout we found ourselves at the center of a whirlpool of runaways growing vaster by the day, quickly exceeding by far anything that any of us previously living in chains in Batiatus’s ludus could ever have thought possible. We can offer no one a home, and we certainly cannot guarantee safety in the long run. Anyone who joins us does not know where his next meal will come from. He is not certain where he may sleep during the coming night, but he does know there will be no roof over his head. And that describes what success looks like for us. Failure will look like nothing at all.

Each day that we endure alive and unchained is one more than anyone once thought possible. During their enslavement, a few of the former town slaves who joined us had experienced moments of make-believe freedom, as it is the custom among some slave owners to allow their slaves to play Roman-for-a-day once a year. Some had even hoped one day to be freed, if it should suit the Roman. But the field slaves who had lived in chains and slept in dungeons and who make up most of our number had never been part of such games. Since the beginning of their enslavement they’d never known a day when they could even pretend to be free. Like the herdsmen, they knew they would never be set free. They had understood that they would simply be worked to death. And they certainly had no interest in playing any Roman games now.

Still, not everyone who might have wanted to rush to freedom felt able to join us. Among the slaves of Italy maybe one in four is a woman and the idea of a woman escaping to join a rebel band of slaves inside Italy will be a very daunting prospect in the best of circumstances, and nearly impossible if there are children. And yet there are women – such as my wife – among us. You may also find a similar hesitance to escape among the men that the Romans have allowed to marry – but those who were allowed to do so were few. For most of the chain-gangers on the farms this was just never a possibility, and an entire urban slave family was unlikely to cast itself into the wild. Such families as we would encounter were usually those of the unchained and free-roaming herders.

We were, however, often well served by certain slaves who had stayed behind and were able to direct our foraging parties to the locations where the Romans had hidden food and valuables. The food we would share; the riches we would hold in common for the group’s purposes. The amount of wealth left behind by the slave holders grew to be considerable, as did the number of their former slaves who had seen and perhaps even handled gold, silver and jewelry that until recently might have purchased their lives many times over. But difficult as it may have been to let these treasures pass through their hands without holding onto them as some kind of payment for their stolen lives, our group’s agreement has never wavered in this regard – we rose or fell as one. Sometimes those who stayed behind might even show us or tip us off to where the master himself was hidden. But for the most part these now former-masters fled as quickly as they were able, although they generally found their travel to be plodding compared to that to which they had grown accustomed, and they were able to bring along far less with them than they had in the past – now that they suddenly found themselves without the services of slaves to organize their flight, pack, and carry everything for them.

Two things that we always knew for sure were that the Romans would send ever larger armies against us and that our own numbers would grow as well. So whatever else the future might hold for us, it was a certainty that every encounter would be greater and harder fought than the one before. After our descent from Vesuvius onto the Roman camp, we went overnight from being still something of a gladiatorial band on the run to something of a makeshift, ever-on-the-move nation of the ex-slaves of Campania. And now that we have left Campania and defeated an army sent from Rome in the neighboring province of Lucania, we have become even more than that – a source of hope to countless numbers. But while we had no doubt that people would continue to flock to us, our ability to feed and arm them all was always a question. The Romans had slaves and entire vassal states to provide for them; we had not. No home fires burned for us.

Yet, difficult as it would be to survive a winter unprovisioned, with the defeat of this second army, we at least knew we would not likely be attacked until spring and with our survival seemingly guaranteed until then we could afford to make the question of just how we might obtain our food, clothing, shelter, and arms our primary concern. We also had time to consider the enormity of the venture that we have cast ourselves into. What do we think is possible? Where should we go – or try to go? Do we all stay together?

Chained gladiators planning an escape in Capua had no thoughts of feeding hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. Even thinking about how we would feed ourselves if we succeeded in getting out would have been getting ahead of ourselves. We weren’t making plans for arraying battle lines against Roman legions. Talk like that would have been the barking of madmen, a diversion from the only task that mattered at that moment – plotting our breakout, in itself a venture that few would have considered likely to succeed. Now we think of little else but these things.

All of the thousands joining us bring their stories with them, along with stories of those left behind and those who came before. We are always in short supply of many things, but knowledge, stories, opinions are not among them. We have had the opportunity to learn far more about Rome and Romans than most of us would ever have wanted to know.

It is always the case that the slave knows the master’s mind far better than the master knows the slave’s. So far as Rome and Roman Italy goes, when slave and Roman meet, it is only the Roman’s thoughts that matter, because it is only the Roman’s actions that matter. What the Roman thinks is what will determine the course of the lives of both of them, while the slave’s concerns will likely have little impact on the lives of either, as the slave has no rights that the Roman is bound to respect. And the fact is that, for his part, the slave will generally prefer that the Roman not know what is in his mind – and is more pleased still if the Roman takes no interest at all in what he might be thinking.

The richest of the Romans have so many slaves to do their bidding that they have their entire day available to talk to and about one another. To be a wealthy Roman is to live a life of listening to a continual tale of just how grand you – and your city – are. And if you are a reader you may read such things in the writing of those who make their living by pleasing and praising the richest of the Romans. All of this we know because when their house slaves are not cleaning up their vomit or picking up the food they have tossed to the floor at their great dinners, they hear everything else that comes out of their mouths, and what one slave hears, all of the household’s others will soon hear as well. But since the slave for the most part will have little opportunity or interest in discussing his thoughts with the Roman, when the Roman discusses ideas with the Greek tutor that he has bought he considers that slave to be distinctly different from most of his other slaves whom he believes seldom think about much of anything at all.

The slave, on the other hand – particularly the house slave – has no choice but to know the master’s life thoroughly since he is tasked with so much of it. The slave who grows up in slavery is expected to start being of use to the Roman from about the age of five. Slaves shop for the Romans in their markets. They prepare and serve their meals. Slaves raise the Romans’ children. Slaves work the Romans’ baths. Slaves walk in and out of the Romans’ bedroom, their presence no more noted when the master and mistress have sex than if a dog had strayed in. Slaves remember the things the Romans are unable, or can’t be bothered to remember. Members of the Roman senate – who routinely make the decisions to dispatch armies to despoil the rest of world – will often not know exactly what it is they’re about to say to their fellow senators until they read the words a slave has written for them. As a group, the ex-slaves who threw in with us knew all of Italy’s trades, all of Italy’s customs, and all of Italy’s secrets.

In Roman Italy the delivery of messages is generally the work of slaves. History has recorded the story and the name of the Greek soldier Pheidippides who ran the twenty-five miles from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens in order to report the victory of the Greek army over the Persians. Rome’s slave messengers are routinely required to run distances greater than that in a single day – and no one records their names. However, this task does at least give the messenger considerably more freedom of movement than most other slaves will ever experience. For at least those nights when he is delivering messages over long distances he will likely not be locked up or chained. And in these days of our revolt, there is many a messenger who sets out having decided that he has now spent his last night locked up and will deliver his former master’s final message to us rather than to its intended recipient. So in the course of our fight we have often learned the latest news from Rome before the Capuans did, and likewise have known what Capua thinks before the Romans do. In these situations we have been grateful for the fact that the slave owners consider us little more than two-legged tools, even as they’ve had to come to grips with the fear that nowadays assigning a message to a slave might amount to turning potentially useful information over into the hands of their enemy. In the past, if a slave courier disclosed information to anyone other than its intended recipient, the owner might well decide to break that slave’s legs. Now he wonders if the consequences of misdelivered information might include his legs being the ones that are broken – or worse.

Romans are said to believe that I must previously have served in some type of auxiliary role to their Roman military – for otherwise how could ex-slaves defeat Rome without having first learned military tactics from the best – Rome itself? It is also said that some in Rome believe me to be a Greek. This is supposed to be in some sense a mark of respect in that Greeks may be the only people the Romans respect other than themselves, so much so that the Romans read the words of the Greeks, rewrite what they’ve read in Latin, and then call those words their own. It is a mark of status for the wealthy Roman who wishes to raise smart children to purchase a Greek tutor for them. The richest of them may even send their sons to Greece to be educated there. It is said that the majority of Rome’s senate will actually understand the Greek who addresses them in his own tongue – although they will still require that his words be translated into Latin.

Calling me Greek serves as some kind of an explanation for something they have always believed impossible – the defeat of their armies at the hands of those they despise as beneath them. Some of them seem to have decided that the only way this could happen is if this band of barbarians was led by one who was not a barbarian – a Greek. Those Greeks among us who once tutored the children of the Romans and know the history of their own homeland have noted the turnabout of events such that Athens, where slaves were once a commonplace – as they are in Rome today, has now itself become a prized source of Roman slaves. Rome has always wished to model itself on the Athens of old and it has done so in this aspect – although it has outdone its model in severity, in that Athenian custom did not allow the Athenian to kill the slave at his own pleasure which Romans may do. Nor did the Athenians enslave other Greek speakers, whereas the Romans will enslave people no matter what language they speak including their own, or even if they are mute and speak no language at all – although those will generally come at a lesser price. As it is often said, in Rome money alone rules and everything else is subordinate to it, so the Roman way of honoring the Athenians of old is by buying one of the Athenians of today.

What is true, however, is that I have most certainly benefitted from the presence of those Greeks among us who have tutored their last future slave owner, sung their last song to the drunks at a Roman banquet, written their last speech to make a Roman appear more intelligent than he actually was. Much of what you read here indeed comes from what we have learned from them. Yet, as renowned as Greece may be for its philosophers and its schools, no Greek academy could ever have surpassed what you may find any evening around our campfires – where the knowledges of the peoples of the world run into one another. While our people naturally camp with people they can speak with, none of them will consider any of those peoples that they cannot understand to be their enemy, or something less than them – a situation previously imagined only in tales of some past golden age. Here all of Rome’s efforts to keep their slaves divided have come to naught – any past hostilities between the nations we were taken from now rendered meaningless. And let it be said that even the teachers are taught. The once-enslaved Greek teacher will now question the wisdom of their philosopher Aristotle’s belief that some are marked out for subjection from the hour of their birth, while others for rule. We have none of the books of the great library of Alexandria in Egypt, but when I speak of things I have not seen with my own eyes, it is from these gatherings of people – whose collective knowledge surpasses that of all the libraries of the world – that I have learned of them.

While we confront the most organized, disciplined army in the world, men with no other purpose to their lives than to wage war, who will be paid to pursue us – in ever increasing numbers, what we do have going for us is a sense of purpose unknown to the Roman soldier who lives in fear of his commander, hoping to survive twenty years of war and get a piece of land if he makes it to the end. All men under arms naturally fear death. They also fear the life of slavery they may face if they survive a defeat. But we have already been there and survived to throw off our chains, and become the freest army in the world. No one joins us with any intention of ever again becoming anyone’s slave. In Rome there are three groups of people who may be beaten: slaves, criminals, and Roman soldiers. There is no one among us who has undertaken this risk with any intention of being treated like the Roman soldier, who may even be beaten to death at the whim of his commander and would himself kill his own tent-mate if ordered to do so by that commander. We are the true army of the free, fighting one that is not. The society of slaveholders has not understood such things to be even possible – a major factor in its poor performance in battle.

Of all of the ex-slaves who join us, those we welcome most enthusiastically are the ones arriving with branded faces or metal collars around their necks. The collars usually bear the letters TMQF, the abbreviation of tene me quia fugio, or hold onto me because I run away, in the Romans’ language. The brands may likewise mark the slave as a runaway or a thief. Yes, the Roman who has stolen the slave’s entire life from him thinks nothing of branding that slave as a thief should he succeed in recovering something the Roman has himself stolen from him or some other slave. These are the most resolute of men who have previously attempted to take back their lives even before there was a rebel army for them to join, have suffered mightily for that effort, and yet have dared to do so a second time – this time successfully. Now in good company, the collars will be removed – chains as well, in some cases – and put to good use. Our metal workers will recast them into weapons to fight the Romans – just as we do with the shackles of the ergastula. These are invaluable men bearing our precious metals – the metals that our campaign needs. For those who have lived in chains and arrive bearing their marks, the day they have finally faded from their bodies will be a sort of day of rebirth – the first day of life free again from these signs of servitude. For others that day may come when they are now no longer “black and blue like a slave,” as the Romans like to say – in their humorous moments. The scars on the backs of many – and on the stomachs of some, inflicted when the Roman could no longer find an unflogged spot on the back – will of course never go away. Nor will the memories of being called mastigia – someone who deserves a whipping, in the Romans’ language – fade. Instead those memories will drive them on.

As we anticipate and plan for the battles of the next season, the need to feed our great and growing numbers continues unabated and when our foraging efforts grow slim our entire group has no choice but to up and move and consider our options of spreading over a broader area, or even splitting into two groups. Meanwhile in the matter of arming ourselves, we have not lacked for any skill – we have blacksmiths capable of fashioning a weapon for a former slave, but our undertaking requires far greater quantities of swords, daggers, shields, shot, armor than can be made from old chains or collars. Therefore we continually seek out merchants willing to take the risk of dealing with a rebel army. In the normal life of the Roman merchant, a denarius is a denarius no matter its source. And as the slavers flee upon our approach, we have certainly accumulated large amounts of treasure from their great farms that is worth a substantial number of denarii. But at the same time, an army of former slaves encamped within Italy and able to trade such treasure is anything but a normal situation. Under the current circumstances, any merchant will weigh the coin and valuables we can offer against the possibility of eventual retribution from Rome. The general disdain in which the great city is held, along with the up-and-down history its relations with this region, do at least weigh in our favor. Any iron and copper mongers willing to sell the materials our blacksmiths require in order to forge weapons are welcome in our camps; dealers of gold and silver are not. We trade the gold, the silver, and the jewels that the slavers leave behind or hide when they leave; we buy none.

These slavers’ baubles, when we find them, do not become the property of any one of us. We hold no festivities at which any of our people would wear jewelry; ornaments are of no help in battle; gold and silver cannot be fashioned into sword or shield. We do not send slaves into the houses we have captured to haul off the statues that the departed or dead slavers have themselves stolen from some other nation. Where would we put them? At our first opportunity, we will trade the rich man’s treasures that are easily portable. Jewels for spear points is a deal many a merchant will not resist. Perhaps one day some who are now among us may indeed grow rich and cover themselves in ornaments. But they will never do so unless we first escape from this gods-forsaken land. With no one in our camps possessing silver or gold, there is no one worrying that someone will steal his silver or gold – or any other belongings; our situation simply does not allow for fighting over things that are of no use. We may well ultimately be defeated, but it will not be due to falling victim to the Roman disease of unending love of possession – the same love of possession that attracts the dealers who will trade us arms and metals in exchange for the sparkly things we have accumulated, so that they may sell them back to some other Roman. We have no disputes over how to divide the plunder among our number. Since the moment we broke out it has been clear that we were in this as one – as true today as at the start.

At the end of every day that our band of former slaves survives living off the land we have lived one more day of freedom than we would have otherwise known. Regardless of our final fate – victory or defeat – one reason that this book you read exists is so that you who come after us may know that in our lives now there is also much more than battle and struggle, there is the exhilaration that each and every one of us experiences around our campfires, each and every night. No one loves freedom more than one who has lost and found it again. The day we had just lived was a victory in itself – slaves reacquiring what was taken from slaves. But still the slavers in our vicinity are fortunate: We will not hunt them down and massacre every one of them for failing to surrender soon enough – as a Roman army might. Nor will we be extracting annual shipments of grain from them from here on out, things the locals here already know through their past experience with their supposed Roman allies. And indeed among those who live on the edges of the towns Rome dominates, there are some who will actually join us. But in the towns themselves the fear of Rome remains too strong and allying with former slaves is a step too far for them to take. When living under Roman rule even the Italian who does not have slaves will generally hope that he will have them in the future. But to ally with us would require them to not only give up that hope, but to do something even more difficult for them – to recognize that the slave owner is not superior to the slave – the belief that is the basis of the lives of freemen living under Rome’s dominion.

It’s hard getting competent help these days, ya know.)

On Vesuvius

Soon enough came the next Roman army – this one all the way from Rome itself and far larger than the local outfit from Capua. There were thousands of them this time. And, unlike the first group, this one had the advantage of knowing that they might actually have a fight on their hands – or at the least they had good reason to know that. But at the same time – with word of our breakout, our first victory, and our encampment on Vesuvius spreading in all directions – there were now also far more of us than there were on the day we escaped from Batiatus’s ludus. And while we gladiators knew well enough where Vesuvius was – as did everyone else in the area – we had been captive strangers to this region and knew little more about the mountain than its location. But as the local slaves arrived, our ranks soon filled with men who knew the terrain of this countryside far better than any army just arrived from Rome was going to know it. The advantage in this aspect had now swung to us, and due to the fact that our presence in any area immediately prompts a flood of new runaways, it is an advantage that we have maintained throughout the course of our struggle. Additionally, since it will often not occur to a Roman to worry about what he says in front of a slave, our new arrivals were always updating us on everything the Roman slave masters were saying – about us, about what they thought Rome would do, and about what they thought Rome should do – right up until the day that those slaves had left.

Our new informants told us that this new army was commanded by a Gaius Claudius Glaber who held the position of praetor, the second highest level of Roman official, just below their two consuls. Upon their arrival, Glaber’s men opted to stop at the base of the mountain. There is but one narrow road leading up Vesuvius so they presumably reasoned that an uphill fight in an unknown terrain where they might well face ambush was to be avoided if a better alternative existed, and chose to set up their camp on the road itself. As we had no other route by which to supply ourselves, they could wait until hunger forced us down the Vesuvius road straight into their midst, presumably in starving bedraggled condition. Although these were certainly not the typical circumstances under which a Roman army operated, their plan was still only a variation of standard Roman procedure: siege, starvation, slaughter. We had a different plan. No one who had escaped Capua planned to die of hunger. The Romans had chained, fed and trained us for one purpose: to fight. We would not disappoint our former masters now.

The cause of the Romans’ confidence in their strategy was the mountain’s ruggedness, there being only the one road up due to the sharp incline of its sheer faces. But many of the first slaves to join us were herdsmen and shepherds, men sent off to pastures in the hills for long periods of time. Often living as families and in frequent contact with free men, they live lives closer to those of free men than any other Roman slaves. This offers them two immense benefits: they may spend their summer months without looking at a single Roman face; and they know things about the hills that others don’t – including the Romans themselves who claim to own those hills. And like slaves in other situations, they also come to master all of the handicrafts of the region, since it is they and not the slave owners who will perform all these daily tasks of living. As a result of all this, we were able to devise and execute a plan that went well beyond the imagining of any soldier who had just arrived from Rome thinking to easily exterminate some piddling little slave nuisance. The men who knew the slopes now set us to the task of fashioning the branches of the mountain’s willow trees into ropes and ladders which we planned to use to scale a cliff known to them, but not visible from the road on which the Romans sat. This cliff was so sheer that even if the Romans should see it, they would almost certainly not think it possible that this could be our exit route, as we intended it to be.

Since Roman soldiers are continually about the endeavor of invading one country or another, they have developed routines for every part of their invasions. One of their routines is setting up their camp according to the same plan no matter where they go. One of their military officers, known as a tribune, will be sent ahead to plot it out before the rest of the army even arrives. A ditch is dug, a rampart is built from the soil dug from the ditch, sharpened stakes are then driven into the ground; there will be four gates. The general’s tent will always be in the same place, as will be those of the 12 tribunes. So while the soldier may not even know the name of the people whose land he stands in, he will immediately know where to pitch his tent once he spots the location of the general’s standard. Even if this army encamped on Vesuvius might not be exactly a proper Roman legion and might not include all of these officials, knowing the Romans’ custom we now enjoyed the advantage of knowing how to attack them most efficiently, since we already knew just how to find everything – once we pierced their camp’s perimeter, a possibility not provided for in their planning. We let the Romans settle in, thinking they knew the lay of the land, while we waited for the right night to lower our ropes and ladders and clamber down the unobserved cliff, led by those who really did know the lay of the land. On that night, most of our men scrambled down with those remaining up top dropping all of our arms to them before making their own descent. It was we who had the Romans right where we wanted them – and not the other way around, as they presumed.

So it turned out that while the Romans thought that they knew our location just as well as we knew theirs, such was not the case, and the first time they laid eyes on us was with the sleep still in them. We did indeed walk right into their midst, just as they had planned. We did not come down from up on the mountain, however, but rather, after circling the mountain’s base, we arrived from the same direction as they had. It is the Roman custom that guards who fail to alert their camp of an attack will be beaten to death by their comrades. That night, we spared the Romans who were on guard duty the indignity of execution at the hands of their own, while also relieving their would-have-been executioners of the duty of carrying out this distasteful task. The slave is always forced to do the work that the Roman does not wish to do, but this was the rare moment when Rome’s former slaves were only too happy to pay their former masters the favor of performing a task that would have been most unpleasant for a Roman to carry out. Likewise we would henceforth again put to good use the top-of-the-line military equipment they had carried with them all the way from Rome and for which they would have no further need. And that was not all. No one prepares for war like the Romans. Not only do they travel with livestock and a supply of grain, but they even bring along the millstones to grind that grain. Slaves of course will be the ones to tend to the animals and haul those stores. And so, here as in every other case when we were able to overrun the Romans, what slaves had carried into their camp, former slaves carried out – and often they were the same people.

With word of this second defeat of a Roman army – and an army not thrown together from local farm boys, but sent directly from Rome – spreading through the region, combined with our having come back down from Vesuvius, the steady stream of arrivals grew to a river. But since slaves are rarely allowed access to weapons, most would arrive unarmed. It would always be easier for us to find men willing to fight than it would be acquire the weapons to enable them to do so. So we hailed Gaius Claudius Glaber and his men for their generosity in providing us with their weapons – Ave atque vale, as the Romans say in their tongue. And all the while we knew that the slaves whose work had produced these weapons would be delighted if they were to know of this rare good end to which their labor had come. At the same time, the people of Campania were asking themselves how all this could be happening to the conqueror and commander of all nations – as Rome likes to call itself.

There was one notable exception to the general rule that Rome’s slaves were unarmed. The herdsmen and shepherds who spent their days and nights away from Romans were largely left to fend for themselves. These men, whom the Romans call pastores, must be capable of handling whatever perils the hills may present. They are often set forth with little more than the flock itself, with food, clothing and shelter left to them to devise. They will contest with wild animals over their flock. They will encounter runaway slaves. Some will turn to brigandage. They will encounter freemen who have lost their farms, some of whom may also turn to brigandage. At night, the slaver himself would surely not set foot alone in those hills where there are so many dangerous men and beasts. The wealthier the landowner gets, the more land and animals he owns, the more pastores he will need to put up there in the hills – a necessary but nevertheless worrisome evil for the Roman. As the former house slaves would tell us, the Campanian landowner has always been nervous about the fact that his slaves were running around the mountains on their own but, since he is hardly about to leave his comfortable bed to sleep out in the open with his sheep, he has somehow managed to live with this fear. Such was the price of being rich and Roman. And the rich Roman slept even more uneasily lately, knowing that at that very moment the hills were alive with people who not only hated him, but planned to act on that hatred – and that it was not just his own former slaves who were under arms. Now his troubled dreams had come true.

All of this meant that when the pastores would decide to join us, it was a simple matter for them to do so. And unlike the field slave who might arrive shackle in hand, the pastores generally would arrive with weapons of some sort that they had fashioned themselves or otherwise acquired in order to defend themselves from both the animals and the robbers they might encounter. In normal circumstances they would hide these weapons from the Romans, as they have been known to crucify a slave for the mere possession of a spear – better, the Roman thinks, to lose a slave than to risk a citizen. But these herdsmen and shepherds who joined us now were definitely planning to show the Romans their weapons, and they made for formidable opponents. From here on out it would still be the case that when a Roman saw one of these herdsman with a weapon someone would indeed die – only now the one who died might well be the Roman.

The free herdsmen who joined us lived much the same life as the slaves who tended the flocks of the rich Romans and were often every bit as poor. Some who joined us had once even been small farmers called upon to fight the wars that brought Rome its wealth, only to see their land fall into the hands of Romans who had grown fat off those wars while sitting back in Rome. These herdsmen were the ones who had opted not to go to Rome to live off the graces of the Roman senate, but chose to stay in the region of their birth, as they watched the Campania of small farmers turning into the Campania of rich Romans with hands that never touched the soil, yet lived like the gods in their villas on the Gulf of Naples. In many cases their hatred of Romans might seem to match that of any slave. Some owned their own flocks, others worked for the newcomers from Rome, but since it was they and not the Roman slavers who spent their nights out in the hills with those flocks, these mountain men also brought with them a knowledge of every hill and valley that surpassed not only that of those who had owned the great flocks and those hills, but often that even of the former slave who might have done the same work as they did, but whom the Romans had brought to Campania from somewhere else. No better scouts could be hoped for. So long as such men continued to join us, not only could the soldiers sent by Rome not match our knowledge of these areas, but neither could the Roman landowners. When it came to the vitals of knowing where to find food and firewood – and eventually fodder and pasture land, when we were able to field a cavalry – we could always feel certain that our knowledge was at least as good as the enemy’s.

However, the vast majority of our ranks came neither from herdsmen, nor house slaves, nor gladiators. They were field slaves, who unlike the free roaming herdsmen, might live their entire lives chained together by day in the fields of grape vines or olive trees, and by night in the ergastulae – the dug-out, roofed pits in which the Romans imprison their field slaves. And if the chains did not make the Roman slaver feel secure enough in regard to these men that he considered his property, he might brand them as well. There was the occasional Roman who thought himself quite the enlightened master if he so much as spoke with his field slaves – and perhaps even allowed them to joke with him, but even that was the exception. These field slaves were virtually all men – with the exception of a few women who may be kept as breeders – and the only one who will generally be allowed to have a wife will be the one who is made overseer to the rest, whom the Romans call a villicus. Apart from these individuals, the lives of the field slaves were much like those of gladiators, except that the Romans would use them up more slowly. In these times, the great farms of Campania were absolutely dependent upon the labor of such slaves. And yet when harvest comes, the great numbers of slaves gathered in the fields also trouble the mind of the Roman who fears that when so many slaves get together, they might start not just thinking about freedom, but even talking about it – and maybe even doing something about it. Now this fear too was realized – our arrival in an area would always create an immediate labor shortage. When these men broke their chains they were seldom able to bring actual weapons, but they did know where the farm implements were stored and eventually many of those tools laid many a Roman to rest in the fields he had stolen. Likewise, as the Roman slave owners always fear, it is true that every one of them has an enemy within his own household and those who left the Romans’ households behind were always able to point us exactly to where we would find the food stores we needed to keep our ever-mounting numbers alive. Yet however hungry we might get, there was one source of food that most ex-slaves would hesitate to touch – the roadside inns whose reputations were such that it was said that the stews might contain bits of recent guests who had been murdered there. No ex-slave wished a Roman to be the cause of his death – not even the Roman who had done him the great favor of having previously died.

At the same time, while the ex-slaves of the region may have spent their recent days largely confined by chains, they often carry considerable knowledge of the local history in their heads. We soon came to understand that Campania is always ripe for revolt. Even before the first of the great Sicilian slave uprisings that most of us were learning of for the first time, there had been smaller outbreaks in Capua and Nuceria – another town thirty miles distant from Capua; and then again there were uprisings twenty years ago; and now ours. For the slave holder of the region the fear of an uprising was a constant fact of life, but we also learned that the history of revolt in the region went even beyond that. While we had at first been quite surprised at and suspicious of freemen actually choosing to take the side of former slaves in rebellion against Rome, we also learned that Campania has not known any great love for Rome since before any living memory and the feeling has been mutual. The Romans particularly looked down upon the Capuans because they thought Capua a town of easy pleasures and the Capuans themselves to be a soft people. And yet, over time it seems the Romans have come not just to appreciate, but of late to even crave the ease of the life of Campania – far away as it is from the noise, the crowds, the stench, the disease so widespread in Rome itself that the Roman will often send even slave children to the countryside to protect their investment by keeping them at a distance from the dangers of Rome – a place where the people of means would never step outside at night without their bodyguards. It is said that the Capuans respect the Romans for the dominance they have achieved, but they do not admire them, and the Romans admire the sweet life the Capuans live, but do not respect them.

The scholars say that when Hannibal crossed the sea from Carthage to Spain and then crossed the Alps and invaded Italy from the north, the Carthaginians inflicted a defeat on the Romans at Cannae that was so massive and dramatic that Capua switched its allegiance from Rome to Carthage, going so far as to allow the Carthaginians to winter there. In fact the Carthaginians are said to have enjoyed the easy life of Capua so well that Romans came to call Capua Hannibal’s Cannae, in that his army appeared to have lost their military edge afterwards. In any event, Capua’s defection was of such significance that it brought along other cities with it and thereby allowed the Carthaginians to conduct campaigns out of Capua against still other cities. In all, this brought 30,000 additional infantry and 4,000 cavalry to the Carthaginian cause. Although these events are now a hundred years in the past, the resentment has lingered. The locals still talk of the Capuans sold into slavery in Rome – even wealthy Capuans – after the city had gone over to Hannibal before Rome’s ultimate triumph. Since that time the Romans have acted as if all Italy was by rights theirs. And there are also many living who recall that it has not yet been twenty years since the tension of mutual respect/disrespect between the two cities passed beyond its usual bounds and Rome came to wage war on Capua as well as on many other of Rome’s supposed allies in this area. As part of the settlement of that war the people of these towns are now recognized as Roman citizens. Capuans of long memory may not think all that much of that honor.

The region’s current arrangement with Rome is that when Rome goes to war Campanian troops must follow. As the pace of those wars increase, the Campanian small farmers continuously drafted into Rome’s service find it ever more difficult to maintain their farms. And as they fail, there will always be a rich-and-getting-richer Roman landowner ready to buy that land for a small price. From then on, it will be the rich Roman’s slaves that work what was previously the poor Campanian’s land. And since those slaves will not be drafted for Rome’s wars, the new Roman owners’ farms will not fail, regardless of how many wars the great city wages – even if those farms are poorly run because their owners spend most of their time in Rome or on the coast. On top of that, the Roman general Sulla – a man known and hated all too well in Thrace – took Rome’s war against its former allies as an opportunity to settle the veterans of 23 legions, some 100,000 men, on the lands of the towns that opposed him, hoping to ensure a more positive feeling toward Rome among the local populace. If Rome couldn’t win the hearts of the people who lived in those regions, it came up with the simple solution of bringing in new people who would love it more. These new Roman interlopers have understandably never won the trust of the locals and now suspect that the remaining small farmers are all privately pleased at seeing the Romans’ slaves fleeing. And in this it appears they are largely right, as the Campanians recognize that the usual order of things has once again been overturned.

Capua is also the site of a large slave market that meets the large-and-growing-larger landowners’ ever increasing demand for slaves to work what once was the land of the Campanian farmer. Today this market has become a great information and recruitment center for our revolution. If any slaves should arrive there without knowing about us, is guaranteed that they will leave with that knowledge – and in the company of a nervous Roman, who has the same knowledge.

Rome today exists in a state of permanent war. They say that never before has a city stolen so much wealth from the rest of the world as Rome has. Naturally every other nation that Rome has waged war on and stolen from hates Rome, which is to say that the entire rest of the world hates Rome. Rome therefore understandably, and correctly, fears that these nations might wish to attack it if given the chance. This, in turn, provides Rome with a constant reason to go to war to attack an enemy, or potential enemy, before that enemy attacks it. Having destroyed its principal rival in Carthage some time ago, Rome now aims to remain on top by destroying any possible future rival before it can become powerful enough to seriously threaten Roman supremacy. Rome will never cease acting in this way – until it is no longer able to do so. Even so, there are those in Rome for whom there can never be enough war. It is said that after Rome defeated Carthage in their third war there were Romans who argued against its destruction because Rome needed it as a formidable enemy whose potential threat would serve to keep the city’s martial spirit high – or otherwise Romans would devolve into fighting one another. This prophecy proved true.

Of course the common Roman citizen will not see it that way. Living a life only possible due to the slaves and the tribute Rome extracts from everyone else, to him these barbarians who would rather not supply Rome are indeed forever threatening the great things Rome has achieved. This is what his leaders have told him. The young soldiers of Rome’s allies will march off to war knowing that the slaves they may capture might be sold to a wealthy absentee landowner from Rome, or maybe one of Sulla’s veterans, who will use them to tend the fields that once belonged to the allies’ soldiers who marched forth in Rome’s past wars. They will have no illusions that the Roman senate cares about them, or they for it. Rather it is to their generals that they now look, hoping that if they survive twenty years of pillaging they may get a piece of land taken from someone else. These generals have become the true leaders of Rome.

Rome today is a nation of slaves, slave owners, soldiers, and paupers. When the small farmers of Campania are no longer able to maintain their land, many will simply be off to Rome, with whatever bit of cash they might have managed to get for that land. Once there, they begin a new life of standing in the lines for the dole that the government metes out from the corn supplies that other nations have paid Rome in tribute – as a result of the military campaigns they and their comrades have conducted. All the while they will hope that they will find a way to manage to continue to live indoors. Others head for the hills where some of them may find themselves living no better than slaves. Some of those now even seek to join us.

In time, yet another army arrived from Rome. Once again there were many more soldiers in this one than the last and there were also far more of us than when the last Romans arrived. Our new arrivals informed us that this army was commanded by another one of Rome’s praetors, Publius Varinius. We again assumed that this army would have the advantage over the last in having an even better idea of what it was actually up against. Presumably it would not be caught sleeping so easily as the last one. The first difference we could see was that these Romans divided up their forces – they had at least decided that they wouldn’t all get wiped out at once. We of course were no longer on the mountain and therefore no longer leaving it to the Romans to decide the place at which we joined battle. The first group of them that we engaged numbered maybe 2,000 and through our usual sources we learned that Varinius had assigned its command to a subordinate named Furius. Although Rome tries to act as if a campaign against ex-slaves is not a proper war, they are not so foolish as not to recognize that when you send men out to kill or be killed, that is war and when they arrived to confront us they were suitably organized for that. One need only consider the number of offices Rome devotes to its war-making to know how seriously it takes it. This Furius, for instance, was what they called a legate, a position said to be very attractive to the Romans for the tremendous opportunities it offers for returning home from war with both great wealth and great friends, the friends made because the legate may also make others wealthy from the spoils he deals out. Of course this particular legate was never going to be in a position to return home with great wealth since a band of ex-slaves has no further wealth to steal – Rome has already taken everything from them. And this legate would not return victorious at all – we made short work of his division.

We moved on across Campania, through a town called Abella near Nola, into the neighboring region of Lucania, seeking more open territory where we might find an abundance of cattle, and men to recruit to our ranks. Having acquired a guide with detailed knowledge of the environs from among the captives taken in battle at Picentia, we took the pass at Nares Lucanae through the Eburian hills by night, so that we were able to arrive at the town of Anni Forum with the morning sun. This came as a complete surprise to the locals – to them it appeared as if an army had sprouted in the fields overnight.

Our arrival shocked the slaves to an equal degree. All the way up until now, individuals had been joining us along the route, as word of our existence and then our approach had spread. Most of them have known about us for a while and have carefully considered their decision to flee the certainties of a life of slavery for the risks of the fight for freedom with us. Anni Forum was the first time and place where a great many eyes opened to this new reality and possibility – all at once. Here the choice appeared to them in a flash, as if awakening from sleep into a dream. Their decision had to be made just as fast. Jubilant, suddenly free men flocked to us: by noon many of them had spent their last day in slavery.

Before our sudden appearance the entire basis of the existence of these now suddenly freed slaves in Italy was the pleasure and ease of Romans. They had been compelled to do what was demanded, whatever that might be. If they were field slaves, they had lived their lives in chains. Some might be branded or collared if they had attempted to escape – or maybe just because the Roman felt they should be. And, much as the Roman slave might delight in seeing a crime or dispute among Romans, he will call himself unlucky if he should actually be witness to one, for if he is he may well be brought before a court to testify. And if he is brought to court he first will be tortured, as the Roman believes that the only way to guarantee that the slave will tell the truth is to torture him, because the slave is otherwise incapable of moral judgement. He might be stretched on the rack until his bones popped loose if that was what the Roman felt necessary. The slave in that situation will naturally say whatever he thinks the Roman wants to hear – something he is already used to doing in his normal daily existence. As always, he must decide whether it is the truth or the lie that the Roman prefers to hear in this instance; torture guarantees neither one nor the other. Of all of the things that will amaze one new to the land of the Roman, the most amazing of all may be the fact that a people so stupid as not to understand that could come to rule the world.

For the Roman who has too many slaves to be bothered with the difficult and time consuming task that torture of his slaves would pose, there is the option of hiring a man who makes his living by doing just this, so great has the slave population in Italy grown. Rome has even designated a location – Campus Equilinius – specifically for the punishment of slaves. Some executioners advertise that they will provide the nails necessary for crucifixion with no additional charge; others will charge. There are also Romans making a living off of the fees they collect for catching runaway slaves. In normal circumstances, the slave might be beaten for no other reason than that his master felt unpleasant on that day. The female slave might even be bitten by an angry mistress. The very dividing line between Roman and slave is the fact that the Roman is not subject to crucifixion, torture, and beating without reason. The Roman philosopher may counsel against beating your slave too harshly or for too frivolous a reason, but he will never counsel that the Roman should not beat his slave at all. It is difficult to find a slave in Italy who does not bear the mark of the whip on his back. In the Roman’s mind, feeling the whip is a routine part of the job. Spare the rod, spoil the slave, they say. In the Roman’s theater, the audience comes to laugh at performers who pretend to be slaves living in constant fear of the whip and the master’s bad temper.

The slave eats the food the Romans will not. He cleans up their shit and vomit. He copies the books the Romans read. The women and young boys are available for the Romans’ sexual desires, which is in fact the principal reason Romans purchase many of them. When the Roman says dance, you dance. When the Roman says fight, you fight. When the Roman says fuck, you fuck – this is the code upon which the great Rome rests.

Under the usual circumstances, the runaway slave who joined us felt extremely fortunate just to be able to slip away from all of this, his master continuing to hold the upper hand over him until he was safely in our presence. In other situations, such as when we had just won a battle, the soon-to-be former masters in the vicinity made themselves scarce, leaving it to us to unchain their now former slaves when we arrived. In these cases, the Romans lost the upper hand in an instant and would now be the ones to feel fortunate should they be able to slip away. And so there were many who joined us here who understandably wished to repay their former masters for the outrages of an entire life – in a single day. The fact remained that, although we had already experienced undreamed of successes against the Romans, the idea that this entire group could somehow fight its way to freedom remained a proposition still much farther fetched than all of what we had managed to achieve up until to the current moment. But while you could in no way be sure that this venture would succeed or that your future would turn out happily, in an extraordinary situation such as what occurred at Anni Forum, with the Romans scurrying to escape the sudden appearance of an overwhelming force, you certainly did now realize that you were looking at a most improbable once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give a Roman a taste of his own medicine. Many of yesterday’s masters were found in the places where they had gone to hide, dragged into the light of day – where they now cowered powerless, no longer holding whip in hand – to meet justice roughly administered. Many Roman women suffered the indignities that were a routine part of the lives of slave women. Many a former master’s house was put to the torch. Many a former master experienced a taste of the beatings and torture they had once administered. Some were hacked apart.

At the same time there were others who knew the past of this area and understood that while the natives were not our friends, they need not all be our enemies either, for there were many among them who loved Rome not. These cooler heads would caution that we should bear this in mind and avoid actions that might cause those who did not own slaves to come to love Rome more and us less. But the future does not always overcome the past. The conflict between rage and strategy would always be present among us. Throughout our struggle, lacking the ability, or the desire, to inflict draconian Roman-style strictures upon our own people, we must rely instead on reason and the force of argument. Even if that should mean that we do not always make the decisions that some will consider the wisest, this is how an army of truly free men functions. And, with our numbers now so greatly increased by slaves who had become free men overnight and by surprise – we had doubled our ranks in Lucania, a land rife with shepherds and freebooters – the struggle between revenge and strategy was greater than it had ever been before.

In the battles of this time, we again overestimated the Romans, who again underestimated us, again unprepared for what they would encounter. They were in a real war, but fortunately for us they persisted in treating it as less than such. As we had once been their slaves, they continued to assume they were pre-destined to carry the day when we met. So with Varinius’s ranks in disarray, he thought he’d best let the toga-wearers back in the Roman senate know how things really were, lest they blame his defeats on his failings as a commander. He sent another subordinate Gaius Thoranius – a quaestor, the official who keeps track of who owes Rome what – back home to fill them in on the greater-than-expected difficulties they had experienced.

During this time, some of the Romans who had escaped with their lives, but had perhaps shed some of their arrogance, chose not to return to Varinius’s ranks and, instead deciding that this all was more than they bargained for, they simply returned to their homes; others of them fell ill with the autumn rains. Some who were present and able-bodied simply refused to fight. Despite all of this the number remaining at Varinius’s disposal was the size of a regular Roman legion, even if it might not have the discipline of one. And so, no doubt presuming that Rome would accept no excuses for his failing to join battle with what they persisted in thinking to be a motley band of runaway slaves, Varinius soldiered on with what men he had. As usual the Romans remained well supplied – each Roman will carry provisions for 15 days, and they are always in a good position to make further arrangements with local landowners, while we could only continue to rely on foraging the countryside, generally at night. Since its greatest advantage lies in the continual support that a society organized around a state of permanent war will provide, Rome will always look for an opportunity to starve its foes into submission. To that end, Varinius constructed a heavily fortified camp – as is the Roman custom -- and in this case very close onto our position, hoping to choke off our search for food.

Just as had been the case when we were on Vesuvius, the Romans had accurately assessed our situation and, just as when we were on Vesuvius, the Romans presumed they would be able to force us into battle under conditions favorable to them. And just as when we were on Vesuvius, we were not about to carry out our part of their plan. Our idea instead was that once foraging became too difficult we would move on – without the Romans. On the night when we had decided to go, we lit our usual fires – and even more of them than the usual, so that the Romans might fear that we had numbers even greater than we did – and set our usual night watch. But the guards on watch were anything but the usual. These were in actual fact some of our greatest heroes; they were men who served our cause twice, once in life and a second time in death. For, in place of our normal watch, we had propped up the bodies of some of our recently killed comrades, tying them to stakes set in the places where our guards would usually be. The fact that their eyes were forever closed and none ever saw a Roman that night did not matter; what did matter was that the Romans saw them. In departing, leaving behind only a trumpeter to blow the customary notes that the Romans had come to expect, we left silently – again by a route not known to them. It would not be until the morning, when the usual wake-up stones that our men would normally begin to rain upon them failed to materialize – along with the usual cries of “murderers” and “stooges,” which generally accompanied the stones – that the Romans would realize we were gone.

Those who have traveled far and wide say that peoples who experience more of a certain type of thing may have more different words to describe it than those who see it less frequently. Those in snowy mountainous regions will have more words for the different types of snowfall than people of warmer regions; those with a lot of fog can describe more kinds of fog than desert people would. So, since the Romans are the most studied and experienced killers this world has ever brought forth, they naturally have more ways of describing their various methods of dealing death, words that are unknown – and unnecessary to other languages. In their language, a fustuarium is the ritual beating to death with clubs that Roman soldiers administer to those in their ranks who have failed in an important duty, such as falling asleep on watch. They even have a word, vapulo, that means to be beaten. We suspected that a number of the Romans’ night guards might be getting pummeled to death afterwards for their failure to notice that the enemy had left on their watch and although we were not able to stay around to observe, that day we wished the Romans a happy fustuarium with much vapulo.

Even after we were gone, our scouts informed us that Varinius, having now gained some awareness of how little he really knew of us and of what was going on all about him, drew up his troops and retreated in battle formation fearing that we might yet be hiding unseen at close proximity, about to attack them from some unknown quarter. Having lived long enough to reach this state of enlightenment – unlike those who preceded him – he went off in search of fresh recruits.

Meanwhile, it appeared that the quaestor Thoranius’s mission to Rome had met with success. Not only did he return with a force of his own, but the Romans also sent out an additional army, under the command of the other praetor, Lucius Cossinius. The Greeks among us tell us they have a word in their language - ὑβρις [hubris] - that describes the man who possesses vastly more confidence and self esteem than he has any right to, because of his belief in his own superiority. These first Romans we faced might easily have convinced you that ὑβρις must actually be a Latin word, so thoroughly did they embody it – but then they routinely steal their ideas from the Greeks anyway. Even as we move on to new locations, thanks to the men who come down from the hills, we have continued to maintain excellent knowledge of the terrain about us – and then there is the fact that locating a Roman army is seldom difficult anyway; one need only follow their famous roads – and they generally will make a great deal of noise as well. All in all, we were able to continually observe the Romans without being observed by them all the way up to the right moment when we caught Cossinius totally unprepared, while he was bathing in the spring at a villa near the town of Salinas, just as if he were back home enjoying all the comforts of Rome. Wearing neither his armor nor even his tunic, no doubt screaming for some damned slave to fetch his sandals, he may well have found the villa’s slaves not so quick to the task as usual on that day. In any case, the praetor just did get away himself, bootless but alive, and his army was forced to leave behind all of the supplies, equipment, and pack animals that they had arrived there with. The sight of an enemy force on the march – made up of former slaves, no less – with a Roman army in pursuit inside of Italy itself had never before been seen by any living person. And as if that were not enough to shake the Romans to their core, that slave army had now switched from pursued to pursuer as we attacked Cossinius’s army repeatedly until we finally overran their camp and eliminated them as a force. Cossinius himself was not so fortunate as to manage a second escape.

Varinius fared somewhat better. When he managed to put together some new recruits – who once again thought themselves rulers of the world and once again proved not to be that when we overran their camp – this Roman praetor at least did make it out with his life, although horseless and without his army’s battle standards. We also took the camp of the quaestor Thoranius after his return from Rome.

After that the Romans would be silent – for a time. The crops of autumn were ripe in the fields about us. Word of our repeated victories over the Romans spread widely and our numbers were swelling into the tens of thousands. It was now time to decide what came next.

The Desolation Rome Has Wrought

With this pause, I may begin to tell some of the larger story of all those who have been condemned to live the lives of slaves of Rome. If we should triumph in the fight we have undertaken, this account will be neither important nor necessary; there will be many eager to tell our tales and sing our praises – perhaps even to a degree beyond what is true or deserved. But our victory is anything but certain and in the event that we ultimately fall, who will sing our song? We are a band set apart from all of our various homelands. None will mark us in their sagas. And for their part, the Romans will certainly record these events as nothing more than a minor disturbance created by some insignificant group of bandits who set out do nothing more than rape and pillage – that is, if they even acknowledge it at all. When Rome destroyed Carthage, the Romans also destroyed everything the Carthaginians had left to tell their side of the story to ensure that those who came in the future would know only Rome’s version. The Roman leader who once ended all his speeches by declaring that Carthage must be destroyed, meant that it should be destroyed for all time – even in memory. It was to be remembered only for being Rome’s enemy; the city that lost the wars. Likewise Rome will certainly destroy any records we might leave behind as well – if they should find them. No one has yet read a book written by one of Rome’s slaves and no one ever will – unless we defeat Rome or, failing that, unless this book is passed on. It is written so that the truth of our struggle against the nation that has killed, raped, beaten, enslaved, and robbed more people than any other that this world has ever known will survive – even if we do not.

Untold numbers of once-free men and women have over the years had the misfortune of encountering Romans and being sentenced to lives of carrying out the work that Romans would not or could not do for themselves: they were vineyard laborers, maids, builders, miners, tutors, olive workers, scribes, shopkeepers, nursemaids, prostitutes, gladiators, and many, many others -- who spent their days toiling for the benefit of Romans. We are not the first of the Romans’ slaves to rise up against them, nor are we the first to do so in vast numbers – but we are the first to do so in such numbers within Italy itself. We have become the most massive army to confront the Romans within Italy since that of the Carthaginian Hannibal; but unlike the Carthaginians, we did not invade Italy, we did not wish to come here at all. The Romans brought us here themselves and we will be only too happy to leave this land to them. My hope in telling our story is that there may come a day when there will be people who need an accounting of the events of our times and the realities of our situation because they would otherwise know nothing of Rome and its people who will have long since ceased spreading their miseries and desolation throughout the world.

Those who have studied such things tell us that while Romans have written many books about the history of Rome’s rulers, soldiers, and slavers, they have written none on the history of its slaves. Today, no matter in what direction you may look in all of Italy, you will certainly see the work of slaves, but nowhere will you see anything that slaves created out of their own desire to do so. You may even enter the house of a wealthy Roman and find the picture of a slave painted on the wall, but you will not know what the actual slave living in his house thinks – that is, unless you too are a slave. They say that the only things you can find in the lands Rome controls that slaves have actually created of their own will are the coins and bullets that the former slaves of Sicily minted when they rose up in the first of the great slave rebellions.

If you have come upon this book at some point in the future, you may not at first even believe that all of what is told could ever have happened. But know that everything I will tell you about our struggle is exactly as I have seen it and everything I tell you beyond those events that I myself have seen has been seen or studied by one of our number. This is not just one man’s tale, it is a book of things seen and heard by eyes and ears beyond counting and told by hundreds of tongues.

The Romans chant an endless hymn to their own glory. Wealthy Romans, with slaves enough to tend to all of their other needs and wishes, write book after book about their people’s magnificent history. Ah, what joy to be a Roman, whose legions win victory after victory over the rest of the world – those barbarian nations who will thereafter provide Rome with the slaves and food that will allow it to continue to send forth ever more legions to wage ever more wars and to continue on as the leading people of the civilized world. As for the events of this history, Romans surely will whisper of them, but they will not speak too loudly about what really happened. So far does the Roman slave owner consider himself to be above his slaves that he simply cannot believe that any acts they undertake of their own initiative should even command his attention – an arrogance for which we are grateful, as it has played no small role in our successes up to now. In his belief that he can buy anything, including knowledge, when the wealthy Roman wants his son to learn about the past he will buy a slave who knows the subject in order to teach it to the boy; a Greek will be especially prized for that task. When our numbers grew large they came to include such slaves and thus we have had historians in our ranks able to inform us of past events concerning slaves in Rome. I did not arrive in Italy as an educated man, but it has been the fortunate part of my unfortunate fate that I have been able to learn much from many who did.

Rome did not invent slavery and slavery may very well live on when Rome is hopefully long gone, but no other people have ever enslaved so many as the Romans. Before Rome, a life of slavery was often the fate of those who lost wars: the women, the children old enough to make the march to captivity, and whatever men fortunate enough not to have been slain in battle, or massacred afterwards. With Rome everything has changed. With Rome, slavery is not simply something that follows if Rome should win a war. Once their frequent wars began to make slaves plentiful, the Roman started to think every Roman household could and should have slaves. The life of ease that every Roman aspires to – and now takes as his due – depends upon the continual supply of new slaves that Rome’s wars bring. Every Roman who does not have a slave feels that he must acquire one in order to be a proper Roman. And the Roman who has but one slave feels the need for two, like his neighbor has. The Roman who has a hundred slaves needs five hundred, like his neighbor who is truly rich. All of this must be seen to be believed. The enslavement of other peoples is no longer merely a result of Rome sending its legions forth to war but has now become a principal reason for doing so. The first task of those newly enslaved will be to haul everything stolen from their land back to Italy, at which point they themselves will become the war’s most valuable acquisitions. Slavery and war have become Rome’s principal business. Today it does not know one without the other.

And, just as with slavery, war has been waged since the time of our oldest ancestors, but surely none who have ever walked this earth before us have fought so many wars and killed so many people as has Rome. They say that there is a temple to their god Janus that will close only at a time when Rome is at peace – and that this temple may go a hundred years without shutting its doors. Rome is home to diseases of all kinds; but above all it is the love of war that is the great Roman sickness. It has been known since before the time of anyone now living that Rome relies upon force in all its undertakings; it has lived from war to war – for better than two hundred years now.

The greatest honor to which a Roman may aspire is the public celebration they call a triumph. In order to qualify for a triumph the Roman must have led an army that has killed at least 5,000 of its enemy, although here, as in all else, slaves do not count; a victory over slaves will not qualify for a triumph, but only for a lesser honor called an ovatio, which is what the Roman commanders who suppressed the slave uprisings in Sicily received. They say Rome celebrates a triumph about every three years. Of course, there is little doubt that these honored military leaders have lied mightily about these events that have taken place far from Rome, including how many enemy were killed. As they say, “How do you know when the Roman is lying? It’s when he speaks Latin.” But while one may not believe the numbers that the Roman says he has killed, you may certainly believe that he considers their killing to be his greatest glory. And in the end, who would seriously question the Romans’ standing as the world’s foremost killers?

Besides the gladiatorial combat and the other types of killing that Rome celebrates, their triumph is the way that Rome most clearly displays what it is all about. I have never seen such things myself, but many with us have. In their triumphs, Rome’s senators – their richest men – the ones who send their soldiers off to massacre some foreign peoples, will prance through Rome’s streets wearing white garments, freshly cleaned by slaves, that bear no stains of the blood of those massacres. Horns will blare. Standards will be borne. Captured enemy soldiers will be marched through the streets – perhaps along with their leaders – all to be killed after the celebrating is done. Animals, local and foreign, will be led through the streets – also to be slaughtered later. They may even display some of the plants and trees of the conquered region. There will be signs to explain what everything means. With all of this comes the exhibition of what Rome has stolen in its latest war – the gold, the silver, the statues that will later find their place in the homes of the most cultured senators and generals. And then will come the conquering hero – the general waving from a chariot, wearing some shrubbery on his head. The whole thing will be as closely planned as the war itself was. These are the rarest and most sacred of Roman celebrations – the festivals honoring mass slaughter.

Yet it is also true that the Romans did not introduce cruelty to the world. In fact, it seems that they have learned many of their particularly cruel customs from their enemies – Rome will never hesitate to take anything from an enemy that it considers to be of value. Crucifixion, for instance, has become so thoroughly Roman a practice that one might well think they invented it, but it appears that here too they have merely mastered a method that they learned from the Carthaginians.

Likewise, it is certainly true that there have been other armies of the past that have also slaughtered the entire population of cities they have conquered. But none have done so as frequently; this the Romans do routinely, as a part of their military policy. Nor does it stop with the people - when they storm a city the Romans will cut dogs in half and hack the limbs off of other animals, they will kill everything but the young women and children whom they will rape and then sell into slavery – all of this to send the message to anyone who may learn of it that this is what will happen to any people who refuse to yield to a Roman army. The Greeks among us say that even in the terrible years of continual wars between their city states, this was not their way. Phalanx would fight phalanx but seldom would an enemy’s city be ravaged. Today, as Rome sees it, anything goes – on or off the field of battle.

And now fate has decreed that it is we, who are among its greatest victims, who confront Rome, the killer, enslaver, and pillager of the world, within its very homeland – and even from within its own households.

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Professor Sinigaglia: You expect to win the first time. That doesn’t happen. That would be too easy, and you’re not the first, you know. This fight began with Spartacus.

Raoul: Who’s Spartacus?

Professor Sinigaglia: I’ll tell you some other time ...

Mario Monicelli, “The Organizer”

Spartacus was a real man, but if you look him up in the history books you find only a short paragraph about him. Rome was ashamed. This man had almost destroyed them. They wanted to bury him.

Kirk Douglas, “The Ragman’s Son”

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Chapters:

Introduction/Escape/On Vesuvius/Rome’s slaves/Freedom/Roads to slavery/Bread and spectacle/A thousand camp fires/Rome’s greatest fear since Hannibal/The uprisings that came before/Crassus – the richest man in Rome/Decimation/We turn again/Now in your hands/Spartacus and the shame of the modern historian

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Introduction

Spartacus – is there another historical figure so famous and yet at the same time so little known? The famous Spartacus is the character Kirk Douglas portrayed in the eponymous 1960 blockbuster film; the film with the scene that immortalized this book’s title phrase, “I am Spartacus.” The Roman slave revolt he led is now more than two millennia past, yet there are millions who today recognize his name – if only from those words uttered by a cast of thousands – a sort of proto-meme of solidarity surviving into the internet era.

But it was not Hollywood that created the real, historical Spartacus – if anything, the film rather underplayed the impact of the events portrayed. Nor was Hollywood first to contribute to his fame. Well before the age of Technicolor, the eighteenth century French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire had called the Spartacus rebellion “the only just war in history.” German revolutionary philosopher Karl Marx, source of many proto-memes, called him the “finest fellow antiquity had to offer.” Giuseppe Garibaldi, the renowned Italian unifier – a man himself called “the only wholly admirable figure in modern history” by historian A. J. P. Taylor – once described the ex-slave leader as “like Christ the Redeemer.” France’s great novelist Victor Hugo, in an appeal to the “illustrious American Republic,” called the impending execution of abolitionist-insurrectionist John Brown “a crime ... surpassing the first fratricide in iniquity,” going on to say, “there is something more terrible than Cain slaying Abel: It is Washington slaying Spartacus!” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of Russia’s October Revolution, called Spartacus “one of the most outstanding heroes of one of the very greatest slave insurrections.” There have been novels, most notably Howard Fast’s 1951 Spartacus, the basis of the movie, and Arthur Koestler’s 1938 The Gladiators; a widely performed Soviet ballet; plays, and even a rather fanciful television series.

No, the uprising and the man were never forgotten, but the depth of the public’s knowledge about them has in no way approached the breadth of its recognition, and given the sparsity of the historical record it could hardly be otherwise. The Roman society that the slaves rose up against despised them and all that they stood for. The painful and inglorious memories of those events were not something the Roman master class wished to dwell on, so there were few among them all that interested in reading or writing about those times, a reticence only enhanced by the fact that it would be slaves who would likely do much of the work of transcribing any such documents written. And most Romans understood that, in the words of the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, “We have as many enemies as we have slaves.”

As a result, only a handful of references to Spartacus and his rebel army are to be found in so-called “classical literature” – along with a single possible graffito depiction in Pompeii. Of the three principal existing sources, Sallust’s Histories, the only one written by someone alive at the time – as well as the only one in Latin – exists in only fragmentary form. The other two – Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, and Appian’s Roman History – were written in Greek at more than a century’s remove. Nonetheless, even the scattered references to Spartacus we have from still later years make it clear that while the print record may be scanty, the mere mention of his name would continue to conjure up the antithesis of all “decent” Roman society – for nearly five centuries.

Meanwhile, from the slave side there is nothing at all. Not only do we have no account of the Spartacus uprising from the insurgent viewpoint, but there is not a single existing document of slave perspective from the entirety of the Roman slave experience – a period spanning more than a millennium. As a result, those searching for the historical Spartacus have generally been forced to either piece together the threads of the story from the classic sources – or consult the scholarship of those who have done so. After which, understanding the conditions underlying the revolt, as well as learning the history of prior Roman (and Greek) slave uprisings will generally require additional investigation.

I am Spartacus is written for the reader looking to find this entire story in one place, adopting a format in a style known to the era – the war journal, the best known examples of which are Xenophon’s Anabasis and Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars and Civil Wars. Spartacus, operating in considerably more difficult circumstances than these other warrior/authors, unfortunately did not actually leave us such a document. Technically speaking then, I am Spartacus is fiction. It is, however, not an “historical novel” of the usual type – like Fast’s or Koestler’s, but is instead a sort of non-fiction fiction, containing none of the imagined characters, dialogue, or episodes typically created in order to produce a page-turner. Every event cited is taken from the historical record – and footnoted (NB: Footnotes unfortunately do not come through on Substack); every description of the lives and treatment of Rome’s slaves attempts to be consistent with current understanding of the period. There is no dialogue and the viewpoints and observations attributed to Spartacus, while fictitious, are intended to be minimally so, which is to say designed to highlight a specific fact or aspect of the events and times, rather than to develop a character personality profile. Readers may on occasion wish that the historical record contained more detail, but at the same time they may be certain that the details they do find were not fabricated simply to advance the story – and hopefully come away feeling that they now really know the story of “the only just war in history.”

Escape

I am Spartacus, but this story is far more than my own. It is that of the thousands of slaves who have risen in revolt against the most depraved nation to ever plague this world – the senate and people of Rome, as they call themselves. My role in these events began when my wife and I were brought to a Roman slave market and sold to a man named Lentulus Batiatus. Batiatus was what the Romans call a lanista – a Roman word with no match in other languages because the lanista only exists where the Roman language is spoken. The lanista is a man who lives by the sword, but does not wield the sword that he lives by. The lanista buys men at the slave market for the purpose of training them to use the swords that he will provide them – to fight one another. These men will then be called gladiators – men who wield swords, in their language. Batiatus brought us to his ludus. Ludus means school in Rome’s language, but again it is only in lands under Roman control that you will find such schools. This was in fact a prison camp for gladiators and there were hundreds imprisoned there. To enter a gladiators’ ludus is to understand the depth of the desolation Rome has created in this world. For their part, Romans consider all of this – their gladiators, their lanistas, their ludi – to be marks of the superior, sophisticated people they believe themselves to be.

Batiatus’s ludus was located in Capua, in the part of Italy known as Campania, a hundred miles south of Rome. The Romans call it campania felix – the happy countryside; not so for us. Capua is sometimes called the second Rome and indeed the first of Rome’s famous roads, the Appian Way, was built to connect the two, although Capua is in fact not nearly the size of Rome. The gladiatorial business that Rome took to its heart originated in Capua when wealthy Campanians would bring men in to hack each other apart for entertainment at their funeral banquets. The city remains at the center of the monstrous enterprise that has been organized and made profitable for men like Batiatus to the point where Romans now build arenas to witness such atrocities everywhere they go. They say Campanians will still sometimes revert to their original funeral custom, but the Romans now disapprove of this ancient provincial practice, preferring to keep the gore at a respectable distance from their table.

As a matter of course, the Romans will generally try to keep their slaves divided and, ideally, at odds with one another. This is a matter of particular concern in the case of gladiators, since they are drilled daily in methods of maiming and killing and rare is the gladiator who would not prefer to demonstrate his skills on, rather than for his Roman benefactors – should such opportunity ever present itself. One of the methods for dividing gladiators is by creating a ranking system in which there are ordinary gladiators and special ones who might be chosen to fight in a major event, thereby attempting to instill in them some kind of twisted pride in their miserable fate and hoping they would vie for the opportunity to bleed and die before a larger audience in front of a bigger and better crowd.

They also prefer to mix slaves from different lands. Those of us imprisoned at Batiatus’s were mostly Gauls and Thracians, but the general idea was that the more different languages a group of slaves speak, the more difficult it will be for them to understand and trust one another, and the more difficult it will be for them to conspire – in which case they will be burned to death if caught. The more prisoners the Roman hears speaking to one another in a language that he does not understand, the more nervous the Roman becomes. But for all its efforts to hinder communication among its slaves, the fact Rome cannot avoid is that the greater the number of lands it conquers, the more people there will be who understand its language. And at the ludus it was certainly the case that the inmates understood and spoke more Latin than our guards knew of German, Gaulish or Thracian. This was one of the few advantages we held over them.

Normally, when a Roman buys a slave he will want his investment to last. If his slave doesn’t live a long, healthy, useful life, he will have to pay the price of a new one to do his work for him. So the Roman generally wishes his slaves well, in the sense of hoping they will have those long productive lives he has bargained for. And for many slaves then, any thought of escape, much less revolt, must be weighed against the prospect of failure which would entail the loss of this sort of security or protection: As bad as the life of the slave might be, it could always get worse. The slave who lives in the house might be sent to the farm to live the much harsher life there. The slave on the farm might be sent to the mines, or to the ludus. But the gladiator was already at the bottom. The Roman therefore quite properly saw the gladiator as the most desperate of slaves – and yet the only one he armed.

So although Batiatus too had an interest in keeping us alive in order that he might rent us out to fight again on yet another day, we knew that the life plans for us did not involve our dying in a warm bed at an advanced age. More likely it would be in front of a crowd of blood thirsty Romans screaming for our death. Over time, therefore, about 200 of us decided that this life would not be for us and that we risked little in trying to escape, so we plotted to do just that, reasoning that the worst that could happen would be that we would die on our own terms. There would be no laughter or jeering if and when we did – and any blood on our weapons would be Roman not slave. Because of the cost involved for those who put on the gladiatorial entertainments, the most special event that the Roman ever hopes to witness at one of them is a match of two gladiators sentenced to fight sine missione – without release – the loser must die, with no appeal to spare the life of the downed gladiator allowed. In breaking out, our group had decided we would fight sine missione from there on out – just not in the way the Romans had in mind. At the least, a few of us would achieve every gladiator’s dream of killing not some other slave, but a Roman. In our option, Romans would not be spectators to the game; they would live it – and hopefully die in it.

When it comes to combat, however, there are few things that will ever go exactly according to plan because the other side will always have a plan of their own. And so it was with ours from the outset, as our plot was discovered and we were forced to make our break sooner than we had anticipated. Since the weapons we used in the ring were always kept locked away except for the times when we were training for combat, we attacked the guards with kitchen knives and spits just as planned, but fewer than half of us made it out. Still, we felt confident that we would prove more than a match for any band of Romans that might be in the vicinity and once free, we were soon able to further arm ourselves by taking weapons from the travelers we encountered along the route of our escape – since everyone who travels the Roman roads between the towns knows the dangers to be found there and will arm himself with a club or dagger when he sets out. Then, as fate would have it, because Campania is the land of the ludi we soon encountered a caravan transporting weapons for gladiators at another ludus in the area. We overpowered the caravaneers easily enough and upgraded our weapons just like that. Although the whole show of the gladiator combat is of barbarians clashing with one another while clothed and armed as in their lands of origin, it has become such a spectacle that the gladiator’s actual weapons may no longer come from his homeland but will now be fashioned in Rome. These are not real weapons of war, yet they were still better than the kitchenware and travelers’ cudgels we had been previously carrying. This was perhaps the first time that weapons designed for gladiators were ever put to righteous use – for the benefit of the now former-gladiators themselves.

We soon enough got the chance to use them, as we encountered a group of Roman soldiers sent from Capua to put a quick end to us and our rebellion. The Romans are a people who believe themselves to lead the world in everything. This of course is not true, but one thing they surely do lead the world in is arrogance – often to the point of stupidity. They believe intensely that they are superior to all whom they enslave, this despite the fact that many of them are themselves the children or grandchildren of slaves. And so it was that although we were a group of men the Romans had forced to train and fight for their entertainment, after our breakout they still somehow despised us as nothing but an inept, disorganized rabble of runaway slaves who would quickly fall when confronted by Roman soldiers. This miserable group of fools out of Capua soon learned otherwise, as we put a quick end to them and their delusions. Had they truly possessed the intelligence they thought they did, they might have understood that there is a reason why gladiators are employed to train Roman soldiers, and not the other way around. Few of them lived to further ponder this question, however. But if the soldiers the slave owners had sent against us proved not to be top notch, at least their weapons were. After all, in the end, it is weapons that have made Rome what it is today. And now we had the opportunity to discard the showplace weapons of the arena in favor of the legion-grade stuff. When the next army attacked us, thanks to this first group of Roman wretches, some of us at least would now be properly armed. This was by far the best thing any Romans had ever done for us - so said we all.

We made straight for Vesuvius, the mountain twenty miles from Capua that commands the entire region’s horizon, with a view past Capua, halfway the distance to Rome. From there we would be able to see the entire Bay of Naples from Cumae to Naples to Sorrento to Capri – the area the Romans call the Cup. We looked down on the summer villas that the richest of the Romans had built – which is to say, that their slaves had built for them – on the coast at Baiae, as well as on the port of Puteoli and its great slave market, where our presence up on Vesuvius might inspire hope among those who had been brought there for sale – or fear among those doing the buying and selling. From Vesuvius we could see all the way to the Appenine Mountains and the city of Salerno. We would be able to spot the next army sent against us from a considerable distance. We would not be taken by surprise – even by sea. At the same time, any slave in the area who wished to join us now knew just where to find us. An armed group of freed slaves will always attract great attention – and very quickly. We had from the beginning determined that our survival would require absolute unity of purpose and we could not afford to harbor any sources of division. Therefore anything we were able to seize from the Romans would be shared equally. Over time, this grew from an obvious immediate necessity to a unifying principle of our revolt. So while the Romans took us for a band of thieves, word quickly spread among the slaves that we were not seeking to enrich ourselves, and might in fact be the only group in all of Italy that was now neither slave nor thief. This naturally greatly increased their enthusiasm for throwing in with us.

At the time, there were few among us who knew any of the history of Rome’s slaves of the past but we would learn that there had been two great slave revolts in Sicily, and in both cases men claiming connection to the gods had been chosen as kings. How that happened I do not know, but what we did know is that you are not about to convince a band of men who were once gladiators that one of their number has actually been sent by the gods to be their king; they know better. Having endured the Romans and their belief in the superiority of everything Roman, we knew what fraud it would be for anyone to claim that he led us by right. The former slaves who joined us knew of many gods from their various homelands, but they also knew that their gods had nothing to do with starting our revolt. We had done that ourselves alone. In the course of events, three of our number were designated leaders - Crixus of Gaul, Oenomaus of Greece, and I. Today I am the one remaining. None who joined us was looking to be ruled by some new master, whether that master be known as king or by any other name. We knew no king.

In short order, we gladiators from Batiatus’s ludus were but a drop in a sea of runaway slaves and from then on gladiators would remain a small part of our ranks, as they are few in number among the enormity of Rome’s slave population and they are guarded more heavily than most. We did not, however, lack for men familiar with war. The immense numbers of slaves who had been brought in to work the fields of Campania in recent years were mostly men enslaved as a result of fighting against Rome in a losing cause. Most who joined us knew the enemy all too well but few had expected to be fortunate enough to be able to pick up a sword against a Roman again. And any who did arrive without such experience found no shortage of willing teachers. Rome now has so many gladiators spending their days honing their skills for battle in the ring that they were wasting a resource and have lately taken to dragooning them to train Roman soldiers. But now for the first time we have gladiators passing their skills on not to Rome, but to its enemies. Now we say, that for all this that you Romans have taught us, we salute you!

Our arrival at Vesuvius gave us our first opportunity to take the measure of the situation, assess our surroundings, consider a course of action, and above all come to grips with the enormity of the mounting challenge of feeding and arming ourselves on an ever larger basis. Shortage of weapons was and would always remain a problem and our encampment on Vesuvius did not provide us ready access to any. What the mountain did offer, however, was willow trees growing up its sides in great numbers and by now we had been joined by a considerable number of men previously enslaved in the region – as well as some who had been freemen – who knew the local handicrafts and put us to fashioning the willow branches into small round wicker shields in the form of those generally borne by cavalry. Armies will use shields such as these for training purposes, but would naturally never take them into battle since they could not withstand the blows that a proper shield must. The trick here was in disguising the fact that they were not the real thing by covering them with hides, so that at first sight all the Romans might know for certain was that our men bore shields – and not that those shields would not withstand a single strike.

Our men also fashioned spears from stakes hardened by fire. Here again, the Romans’ first impression would be that our spear holders were properly armed, although in this case that impression would be closer to true, in that while the fire-hardened spears were surely not the equal of the properly iron-tipped ones that the Romans threw, they might nonetheless kill or maim a man if they struck home. And for whatever it might prove to be worth, we knew the Romans would approach combat with us certain that they held the edge in weaponry – as they did in all aspects. But if their first impression upon seeing us was that their assessment had been wrong in that, it might well shake their confidence in the rest of what they thought they knew. In battle first impressions may mean life or death. New arrivals meanwhile brought a steady stream of such weapons as they could get a hold of on their way out of captivity.

It is not only chains that hold a slave captive There is also the fear of punishment or death should an escape attempt fail, and often the unwillingness to leave others behind as well. For some the problem is that they are strangers in a strange land, ripped away from all they once knew, while for others it is the fact that they have no other homeland to return to. But the longer that we survived free and unbound, the more slaves began to think that joining us was the only chance they would likely ever encounter to be somewhere that they could think of as being free and as a sort of home – for however long that might last and however difficult the situation might prove to be. As we established our ability to defeat Romans over the next months, the flow of arrivals steadily increased, often to numbers greater than we could readily handle.