BMCR 2009.03.17, Theresa Urbainczyk, Slave Revolts in Antiquity

Theresa Urbainczyk, Slave Revolts in Antiquity.  Berkeley/Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2008.  Pp. xiii, 177.  ISBN
9780520257023.  $19.95.

Reviewed by Teresa Ramsby, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
([email protected])
Word count:  1920 words
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The treatment of slaves in ancient Rome is one of the clearest
indicators that the Romans well applied what they believed about human
nature.  Indeed, threats of brutal violence resulted in the obedience
of many slaves in the Roman empire, but incentives guaranteed the
compliance of many also.  The possibility of manumission and the nearly
immediate inclusion of freedmen into the fabric of Roman society were
significant factors in preventing frequent revolts among the slave
population.  Even so, there were periodic slave revolts in the Roman
empire and in pre-Roman Greece.  By whom and what conditions were these
revolts instigated?

In her recent book, Theresa Urbainczyk finds answers to these questions
in histories by Athenaeus, Appian, Diodorus Siculus, and others.  In
addition, she tries to answer some tougher questions: is there value in
comparing ancient slavery to that in New World colonization; did the
slaves who revolted have an identifiable ideology of freedom; were the
leaders of slave rebellions exploiting an opportunity, or did they have
a vision of a free state without slavery?  In this respect,
Urbainczyk's book ambitiously seeks to analyze those moments in ancient
history when armies of slaves put Roman legions and Greek armies to the
test, and when the humblest class may have called into question the
justice of the institution that nearly all ancient cultures took for
granted.  Urbainczyk does not quite answer these questions to full
satisfaction, however, and perhaps she cannot; but she has also
organized this book in a way that thwarts a clear understanding of the
material she hoped to illuminate.

In the process of dealing with these questions, Urbainczyk offers us
something that is very useful: summaries of and quotations from a
diverse array of ancient sources (the above mentioned historians, plus
Velleius Paterculus, Strabo, Orosius, Florus, and Julius Obsequens).
She also points us to relevant passages in the copious narratives by
more familiar authors: Cassius Dio, Livy, and Plutarch.  The
organization of the book is thematic and somewhat philosophical, not
the best format for providing factual data, but  this deficiency is
supplemented somewhat by a handy timeline in the front of the book.
The titles of Urbainczyk's chapters are: Chapter 1: The significance of
slave revolts; 2: Preparing for revolt; 3: Maintaining Resistance; 4:
The role of the leader; 5: The ideology of slaves; 6: Sympathy for the
slaves: Diodorus Siculus; 7: The secret of the success of the Spartan
helots; 8: Slave revolts in the ancient historiography.  There is
difficulty here in reading an analysis of any one revolt: its
significance, leadership, maintenance, and ideologies get treatment
separately among the chapters.  To get a holistic analysis of
Spartacus' Slave War, for example, one may wish to read Urbainczyk's
earlier book (Spartacus. London: Bristol Classical, 2004) or chapter 5
- The Slave War of Spartacus - of Keith Bradley's still significant
work Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World, 140 B.C. to 70 B.C.
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989).

In her first chapter Urbainczyk explains that there are limitations on
any attempt to compare ancient slavery rebellions with New World slave
rebellions due to the lack of information we have about ancient
rebellions.  She quotes and summarizes some important scholarship on
Europe's colonial slaves (by Herbert Aptheker, Niall McKeown, and
Eugene Genovese, among others), but at least one reflection on the
material is a bit simplistic (p. 7: "What Nat Turner's revolt
illustrates is that slaves were prepared to take extreme action to gain
their freedom, as they have always done when possible").  She
summarizes Genovese's useful analysis of conditions that often result
in slave rebellion, conditions met in the Late Republic (pp. 4-5), and
develops that further in the following chapter.  She poses the
interesting idea that captives spared by Roman armies to be sold into
slavery (servi) might have felt psychologically less powerful than
slaves merely captured and sold (manicipia) (p. 8), but she does not
develop that idea there or elsewhere in the book.

Chapter 2 offers us the mitigating factors in the emergence of most of
the known slave rebellions in the Greek and Roman world. She examines
similarities between the First Sicilian Slave War (roughly 141-131 BCE)
and an uprising of slaves and free citizens in Pergamum in 133: one
being a split within society: in Sicily it was between magistrates and
equestrian slave-owners, while in Pergamum it was between Romanized
land-owners and the poor free-citizens of Pergamum who supported local
control.  Urbainczyk explains that such sociological divides aided the
emergence of a full-scale revolt.  U. then approaches the possibility
that a few small uprisings sparked the second full-scale Sicilian Slave
War (104-100 BCE).  The weight of her argument lies on the suggestion
that slaves were ubiquitous and thoroughly involved in the delivery of
news and messages.  She therefore thinks it likely that reports of
slave uprisings would have inspired others to act. (By way of contrast,
Keith Bradley preferred to see these events as isolated, and rather
dependent on similar failures on the part of slave owners of the period
(Bradley 1989, 73).)  Urbainczyk then provides information about
circumstances that surround the emergence of the Second Slave War on
Sicily and the Spartacan uprising.  She closes this chapter with a look
at Sparta, her main point being that the helots took advantage of
external threats against Sparta to deliver themselves from their
bondage.

Chapter 3 focuses on the maintenance of longer term slave-resistance
that rarely happened in ancient Greece or Rome.  The few exceptions,
like the resistance led by Spartacus, are intriguing, and Urbainczyk
presents a good summary of a slave-community on Chios led by Drimakos
in the third century BCE (pp. 30-31).  Urbainczyk then launches into a
discussion about "maroons," or communities of fugitive slaves that
developed in the Caribbean and Americas.  She argues that although we
have little evidence of such communities in the ancient world, surely
they existed, and what little evidence we do find points to the
possibility that among Greek and Roman slaves there may have been hope
of creating a society without slavery.  This is a problem that
Urbainczyk cannot convincingly resolve, particularly when one considers
how frequently former slaves became slave-owners themselves. Take, for
example, C. Caecilius Isidorus of the mid first-century BCE, a former
slave who owned 4,116 slaves when he died (Bradley 1989, 128).  Finally
Urbainczyk takes on the maintenance of armies in the slave wars, but
she does not provide much in way of tactical explanations.
Urbainczyk's main concern here is to argue that leaders like Spartacus
may have taken inspiration from prior slave uprisings (in Sicily and
elsewhere), and that they may have intended to separate their people
from Roman rule and the system of oppression that they had so long
suffered.

Chapter 4 provides more information about the leaders of various
uprisings mentioned in previous chapters.  It is somewhat inconvenient
that these more detailed portrayals are kept separate from the larger
narratives of their revolts.  It is also curious that Urbainczyk has so
little to say (two sentences on page 60) about the regalia and coinage
that some slave-leaders adopted to reinforce their authority over their
followers.  Keith Bradley has 8 pages on the topic (Bradley 1989,
116-123), and surely there is much more Urbainczyk might have used from
that discussion to address the motives and possible intentions of these
temporary rulers.  She does, however, include a praiseworthy analysis
on Plutarch's treatment of Spartacus and his motives for doing so (pp.
67-71).

Chapter 5 provides some of the philosophical or literary musings upon
the institution of slavery that we can glean from the ancient sources.
Urbainczyk is reluctant to assert that slaves had the intention to
create slave-free societies, but "only that we are not entitled to
declare definitely that they did not" (p. 80).  Fair enough; but it is
curious that she does not engage the evidence that she presents in any
depth.  For example, there is a distinct difference between the pagan
Roman notion that slavery is inconsistent with the natural order (a
convenient way of criticizing things one has no intention of altering)
as espoused in the legal text called the "Digest," and the Christian
notion that slavery is a sin (and therefore incompatible with Christian
living), as proposed by Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century.  Lots
of things in ancient Rome were considered by various philosophers to be
inconsistent with the natural order (seafaring, mining, eating meat,
eating to excess, sleeping in the daytime), but that did not inspire
populations to abolish their practice.

Chapter 6 addresses the various aspects of sympathy Diodorus Siculus
expresses for the slaves involved in the uprisings that he reports.
Urbainczyk suggests that Diodorus has a mind to criticize Roman
imperialism in general, and therefore finds in the slave revolts a
narrative that highlights the intractable and cruel nature of Rome's
empire.  Chapter 7 comes back to the helots, and this is one her most
successful chapters (despite its repetition of material from Chapters 2
and 4) because she deals solely with the Spartan helots, and explains
much about the history of and attitudes towards that oppressed group.
The final chapter is an interesting analysis of the historians who
report the first century BCE slave revolts, principally Appian,
Polybius, Florus and Orosius.  Overall, she finds that ancient writers
tended to see these rebellions not as isolated events, but as events
integral to the narrative of the decline of Rome's Republic.

The book ends with a closing quote from St. Augustine, but without
Urbainczyk's own conclusions - an indication of weakly supported
arguments throughout the book.  Sad to say, there are also many errors
in this book: loose threads, typographical errors, and poorly
constructed sentences that stifle one's enjoyment of the reading
experience.  Regarding loose threads, the point I mentioned above
regarding slave psychology is a throw-in without development (p. 8).
Similarly, on page 60, she moves from Diodorus' account of the slave
wars in Sicily to Florus' account, but first mentions his obscure
reference to a slave revolt in the fifth century BCE without any
further development.  See also the awkward transition from one thought
to another here on page 16: "That is, although slaves who rose up
against their masters elsewhere helped the rebels in Sicily, they
themselves were overwhelmed by the forces against them.  In Pergamum
the situation was more like that in Sicily in that the region was
clearly split between those who supported the Romans, or at least saw
opportunities for themselves under their protection, and those who
objected to the dramatic last will and testament of their king."  Note
also the strange correlation made in this sentence without any further
context (appearing at the end of a section on Spartacus) on page 24:
"In other words, we learn about slave revolts by accident because they
are added to indicate that Nero was a bad emperor, in the same way that
we hear about the birth of a deformed child."  Lastly, although the
timeline in the front of the book is useful, I wonder why she did not
list there all the leaders of the slave rebellions instead of only a
few.

Perhaps Urbainczyk might have organized this book with historical
sources and narratives of slave rebellions in one section (with more
quotations from the ancient sources and greater integration of the
material in the footnotes into the main text) and thematic
considerations in another section.  It would then have been an ideal
book for an advanced course on ancient slavery or slavery in general.