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LEADERS OF SLAVE REVOLTS AS LATRONES
to resort to such fighting only at the start of his rebellion. Because so
many rallied to his cause, his slave army quickly became strong enough
to operate in the field. 14 The sheer size of his forces compelled Florus to
refer to Spartacus as a hostis though, consonant with the legal distinction
between hostes as regular and latrones as irregular foes, with the telling
phrase, ‘it shames me to say’ (pudet dicere). 15 In line with this thinking,
the three great slave wars were similarly referred to as bella in the official
senatorial language of the time. 16
All these aspects of the use of the terms latro and latrocinium are basic and are
applicable to slave wars in just the same way as they are applicable to every
other violent uprising in the Roman Empire. In this respect, the fact that
the slave wars were perpetrated by the unfree had no influence on writers’
choice of words. Slave revolts were not labelled latrocinia because they were
led by slaves, but because they were, as revolts, acts of violence against
the Roman state. Likewise, the circumstance that runaway slaves became
bandits more or less as a matter of course had nothing to do with slave
revolts being described more closely in terms of banditry than, say, uprisings
in provinces or cities.
All these aspects of latro and latrocinium also relate to slave revolts as a
whole, not to participating individuals. Though slave leaders were, as individuals,
termed latrones and leistai, in their case these words had a meaning
to some degree different from the blanket terms applied to the revolts in
general. On this note, we can now look at particular slave leaders in their
role as latrones.
In their depiction of slave leaders as latrones, Roman writers drew upon
specific established elements of a literary bandit typology which intentionally
stimulated automatic preconceptions among their readers who were
already acquainted with these as regularly recurring patterns in other contexts.
We already know of some of these from what we have come across so
far in this study. For example, we have already encountered the ‘common’
and ‘despicable’ and the ‘noble’ bandit. However, in applying this literary
pattern specifically to unfree leaders of revolts, authors made significant
variations which broaden our knowledge of the evolution of the bandit motif
and allow us a better understanding of Roman deployment of the word latro.
3 Eunous, Cleon and Comanus
We begin with a negative finding. Eunous, the best known of the slave
leaders of the Sicilian war escaped personal defamation as a ‘bandit’. Let us
simply accept this and defer explanation until later. Unlike Eunous, the
source tradition gives Cleon, Eunous’ colleague, the profile of a latro. 17 Cleon
first operated alone, independently of Eunous, as the leader of dissident
slaves in southern Sicily. 18 Before long, however, to facilitate a consolidation
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