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GUERRILLA LEADERS AS LATRONES
‘Nor were they refused by the man who, from being a Thracian mercenary
had become a soldier, a deserter, then a highwayman, and finally, thanks
to his strength, a gladiator.’ 29 Spartacus’ miles, desertor, latro, gladiator correspond
with the venator, latro, dux, imperator that the same writer attributes
to Viriatus. 30 What distinguishes their careers are the opposing directions
taken by each man – Viriatus towards good and Spartacus towards evil. The
careers of Tacfarinas, Gannascus and Maternus also took the wrong turn. All
sank from Roman soldier, to deserter, to common bandit. 31 The difference
between them and Viriatus was that for them the status of latro was not the
beginning of something better but rather the culmination of a criminal
career. This disparity in estimation, i.e., in the case of Viriatus the emphasis
on a man on his way up, in that of Spartacus (by way of example) on someone
on his way down, was determined by their respective aims. A war of
liberation against corrupt Roman generals could, looking back from the
imperial period, be very much pointed up as a ‘good example’ (exemplum
bonum). By contrast, even by the time of Florus, leadership of a slave revolt
could not be forgiven. But Florus was not the only Roman writer who was
reminded of Spartacus by Viriatus. Ammianus Marcellinus made the same
connection, and this demonstrates the constancy of such chains of thought
over time. For Ammianus, Viriatus and Spartacus were men of whom Fortune
decreed that they should humble the most illustrious Romans of their
day and force them to clasp their knees. 32
4 Viriatus as barbarian and leader of a guerrilla war
That the majority of ancient authors believed that they did justice to the
personality of Viriatus by terming him, without prejudice, latro or leistarchos
(‘bandit leader’) 33 followed from the coincidence of several distinguishing
qualities, of which his pastoral origin was but one. What is more, in his person
Viriatus embodied wider connotations of the word latro: for the Romans,
he was a latro by being both a representative of a barbarian foe and a guerrilla
leader.
These two aspects of the term ‘bandit’ are not far apart, as can be particularly
demonstrated by reference to the Iberian peninsula. Its inhabitants,
especially the Lusitanians, struck Roman observers as a ‘a warrior race,
accustomed from childhood to banditry’. 34 Sallust, cited here, surely did not
just mean that from their youth Spanish warriors learned to be bandits, but
that the acts of robbery that they committed as youths turned them into
warriors especially suited to guerrilla warfare. Strabo illustrates Sallust’s
general observation by ethnographic details, which testify to his admiration
of the ‘noble savagery’ of the Iberians, of their courage in battle and of their
skill in handling weapons, as well as to his misunderstanding of cultural
difference, seen in his simultaneous contempt for their ‘barbarous customs’. 35
Like the Lusitanians, barbarians were judged to be latrones because they lived
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