Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Uncategorized The Spartacus War follows a rebel with a cause
Posted by John Stoehr on Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 9:42 PM
Citizens of ancient Rome didn’t mind slavery. As they saw it, there were Romans, and there was everyone else. In 70 B.C., slaves comprised 20 percent of the Roman population, and included Celts, Germans, and Thracians from modern-day Bulgaria. They also included a man named Spartacus.
A Thracian who fought in the Roman army, Spartacus was accepted in principle as a Roman but was exploited as a slave and gladiator. He revolted in the summer of 73 B.C. with 70 other slaves, using kitchen knives as weapons. Spartacus went on to assemble an army of 60,000 slaves that rebelled in the name of nationalism, revenge and faith. For two years, Spartacus ravaged the countryside, defeating nine Roman armies. The Republic had never been so vexed from within.
Barry Strauss, a military historian and professor of classics at Cornell University, chronicles Spartacus' legendary slave revolt in his new book, The Spartacus War. Strauss recognizes the rebellion as one of the most successful insurgencies in world history, and finds some intriguing parallels between it and the United States' War on Terror.
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