Microreview – Slave Revolts in Antiquity, by Theresa Urbainczyk
By Theresa Urbainczyk
University of California Press, 2009
As Theresa Urbainczyk points out in her slim and powerful new study Slave Revolts in Antiquity, it’s alarmingly easy for those possessing even a little power enslave those possessing less. Force is the rule rather than the exception in all societies; a majority of all the human beings who’ve ever lived have been slaves, and as Urbainczyk’s book quite rightly point out, slave revolts – whatever their specific cause or duration – have intrinsic importance in understanding the past.
It’s an importance curiously slighted in many modern histories of antiquity (“curiously” because slavery is still widely prevalent in the world – no less healthy for being illegal, it thrives in every country on Earth, including the United States), and redressing that drift is a large of this book’s mission. Slave Revolts in Antiquity is a sweet-tempered and calmly-reasoned work, but you can often feel Urbainczyk’s impatience with the present state of scholarly affairs:
As an indication of the scholarly attention to the topic of slave revolts it is interesting to note the differences of treatment of slave wars of the Roman Republic in the first and second editions of The Cambridge Ancient History, volume IX. The first edition, from 1932, discussed the first Sicilian slave war in Chapter 1, on Tiberius Gracchus, and the second war in Chapter 3, “The Wars of the Age of Marius”; they were discussed, in other words, in their historical setting, since these wars were 30 years apart. The reader of the second edition, on the other hand, has to search in the subsection “Sicily” of Chapter 2, “The Roman Empire and Its Problems in the Late Second Century”, to find two pages dealing with both slave wars together. The second edition also puts Spartacus into a subsection of the chapter “The Rise of Pompey”, a subsection of some nine pages, entitled “The Wars Against Sertorius and Spartacus 79-71”, but only two of those pages are about Spartacus.
Ah, Spartacus! In any book like this one, no matter how broad its canvas or all-inclusive its themes, we will of course come back to Spartacus, who led a slave revolt from 73-71 B.C. that managed to defeat or confound whole Roman legions sent against it. A big chunk of Slave Revolts in Antiquity is concerned with the Spartacus revolt, which Urbainczyk treats with her usual combination of insight and circumspection:
The Chateau film Dracula’s Guest move
The remarkable success of this slave army must have been helped by the alienation of the Italians from the Romans. In his account of the Mithridatis War, Appian comments that the Italians had sided with Spartacus even though he was a wholly disreputable person, against the Romans, so great was their hatred for them. The survival of this slave army for such a length of time, on the Italian peninsula, the core of the Roman Empire, bears witness to the truth of this. The slaves had judged the situation carefully, and one might venture to suggest that this is why they did not leave Italy as they were apparently expected to do.
She leaves to her (ample and helpful) footnotes the scholarly debate about whether or not Spartacus was really a slave, whether or not ancient sources can be trusted as to the nature and extent of his rebellion, and indeed whether or not he really existed or was just a bogey-man conjured by a Roman people recently shaken by a series of Sicilian slave wars. In her book’s main body, she’s got more serious work to do. She furthers, for example, the welcome reassessment of Diodorus Siculus begin by Kenneth Sacks in 1990, and more importantly, she probes the possible reasons why slave revolts often receive less than their critical due the present day. The result is a book not to be missed by any serious student of antiquity. Slave Revolts in Antiquity packs a lot of punch in less than 200 pages.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
-Ascanio Tedeschi
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