![]() ![]() Through analysis I rationalize and clarify both accounts, perhaps shedding some new light on the controversies and mysteries surrounding them, to produce two distinct but coherent pictures. Based on this extensive examination of the ancient literary sources, the book provides a carefully argued analysis, comparison and critique of the two patently incompatible accounts of the final campaign of the war of Spartacus that derive from the two historical traditions. This work presents in detail the source materials for both the Sallustian and the Livian versions of the final campaign of the slave war as well as for the most important military events which led up to it, with extensive commentary. Because the accounts of the final phase of the war found within the two traditions are so much at variance in their details and yet internally so self-consistent, each alternative account should be considered in relative isolation, enabling us to see the Livian/Senatorial Spartacus at his minimum historical stature and the Sallustian Spartacus at his maximum. Thus, the time has now arrived for a reappraisal of the two conflicting historical traditions. In particular, regarding Spartacus, many historians seem unable or unwilling to accept the possibility that what the Sallustian and eyewitness sources, including Cicero, are telling them is actually true. Unfortunately the process of amalgamation of the two traditions has led to a blurring of the lines between them, hiding both the ultimate futility of Spartacus’s challenge to Rome embodied in the Livian tradition and the real potential threat of that challenge which emerges when the Sallustian version is pushed to its limits. This is particularly unfortunate, yet probably understandable, because, despite Spartacus’ almost miraculous earlier victories over the armies of the Roman consuls, it is the events of the final campaign against Marcus Crassus, particularly those of the final battle, that provide the best measure of how great a threat he actually posed to Rome. In contrast with their relatively consistent accounts of the campaigns against the consuls, the Livian and Sallustian sources’ versions of Spartacus’s final campaign, fought against Marcus Licinius Crassus, are much more clearly demarcated indeed they are radically divergent. Thus, most scholars have made their selections from both traditions. ![]() However, to choose the Livian version would result in what seems to most modern scholars to be a far too distorted account of events, leaving out a number of significant Roman reverses during the final campaign but choosing the Sallustian version derived from Plutarch and Florus would leave out other important earlier Roman defeats from the previous campaign against the consuls described only in Appian and the Livian epitomists’ versions. The simplest and most consistent approach for scholars would have been to ignore one version altogether. Because of these inconsistencies, the modern historiography of the war of Spartacus, has come down to various sets of individual choices between the two traditions that different scholars have made. ![]() Because of the paucity of the surviving brief literary sources, modern historians have felt compelled to patch together pieces deriving from both these traditions in order to get as complete a picture as possible, particularly for the first years of the war, even though, for the final campaign, those pieces were often mutually contradictory. Any attempt to understand the slave rebellion of Spartacus must contend with the two very different historical traditions which provide the source of all our evidence concerning his revolt: the overtly hostile Senatorial aristocratic tradition which derives from the monumental work of Livy and his sources, the post-Sullan annalists, and the more sympathetic legendary Roman populares and Greek eastern tradition which has come down to us from the fragments of the earlier Histories of Sallust and perhaps the Universal History of Posidonius or his lost appendix to it on the Life of Pompey, as well as the works of the more anti-Roman Greek historians of the early Augustan age. ![]()
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