Hi and thanks for the reply DVX:
I think that we once again impose our modern sensibilities upon
poor old Spartacus.
He could have succumbed to the lure of plunder and/or hubris.
He did have more than one oppurtunity to escape. Over the
Italian Alps, or possibly could have left with
his "entourage" at many points. I doubt if he would have been killed out of hand by
members of
his army for that-but who knows?
Even conservative historians note that he was simply fighting at least in announced purposes to escape the
Roman Empire and live out
his life in freedom-not to make a statement about the philosophical unfairness of slavery.
He was a very,
very good tactician, and a born leader, but that does not mean he was well educated in the worldly sense.
At some point,
his vision or
his absolutness of command got skewed or undermined by
his subordinates. He could have, once again, simply escaped at several different points in time.
I conjectured that he did based on the dividing up of
his army, and the subsiquent "bad choices" someone (yes, possibly Spartacus himself though perhaps second-in commands thrust into new leadership positions) made after the escape from the toe of
Italy.
DVX: The idea that Spartacus fell fighting and "looking for Crassus on the battlefield" is a great storyline, but not supported by facts. He might indeed have died on the battlefield, but I doubt that it was in such close quarters that he was "looking for Crassus". I could be wrong. It sounds so "right" given the modern interpertation of how we view him.
In that vein, as with all the emperors, as much as we love their coins and stories, we as moderns must realize that they all would have been extremely violent, oppurtunistic, and without what we consider modern morals.
History does record that unlike the movie, in which Spartacus reluctantly allows Crixus to force two
roman generals to fight each other, in actual fact he forced over a hundred
men to engage each other in life or death duels. And I somehow doubt the "victors" lived after.
And yes, there are many moderns that would feel quite at
home in any of those time periods.
And though Tia has a very valid point about not making Spartacus a martyr, I
still feel that given the
roman penchant for dragging and displaying even dead adversaries around with or without body below the neck, the recorded...."Sparticus fell in battle".....and no mention of
his body(or someone's) being displayed, especially with the "encouragement" of torture, or bribery to identify that body-suspect. I'd be much more comfortable with a codicil of:
"and the body of Spartacus was displayed before the gates of
Rome at the
head of the 6,000 crucified rebellious slaves that followed him"
But in the end, Spartacus did this:
He started with a small group of gladiators and kitchen utensils, and ended up besting multiple
roman legions, and threw such a scare into the
roman empire that even hundreds of years later they were very, very careful about these valiant, violent, canny
men and never allowed their politicians to own too many of them, moved them away from population centers in time of strife, and I think and this is subjective, always a
bit afraid of them.