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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Licinius Nerva had captured Gadaeus, but persuaded him to undertake a
dangerous mission by dangling before him the prospect of exemption from
punishment. Together with a group of slaves who had remained loyal to
their masters, he was to offer help to the rebels. He won their trust, so that
they finally appointed him military commander. 52 He carried out his secret
orders and forthwith led the unsuspecting slaves into disaster. Thereafter we
hear no more of him.
In Diodorus’ account, Gadaeus the leistes plays a contradictory role. His
most striking characteristic, limiting his attacks to the freeborn, suggests
some sort of social motivation, 53 all the more remarkable because Gadaeus
was himself no renegade slave but rather, to judge from his name-form,
a Roman citizen. Of course, this does not mean that he was born free.
K. Bradley sees his unusual third name (cognomen) as an indication that he
had formerly been a slave. 54 This might explain why Gadaeus spared the
unfree; but an argument based on his name alone is not really strong enough
to allow such a significant conclusion. According to J. Ch. Dumont, Gadaeus’
implied criticism of society should not be understood merely as a literary
flourish, but as what he actually felt. Dumont ascribes the same feeling to
Cleon, slave leader of the first Sicilian war. He takes the banditry practised
by both these men to be a form of protest against slavery: ‘Pourtant, l’un
comme l’autre vivent leur banditisme comme une protestation contre
l’esclavage.’ 55 Later, he returns to confirm this point: ‘Il est impossible de
refuser à ce banditisme son contenu social’ and in the end, as he must, turns
to Hobsbawm’s ‘social bandit’ as a model for Cleon and Gadaeus. 56 If ever
two bandits of Antiquity were not social bandits, it is this pair. Of what we
know of Cleon, there is nothing to bring him even close to being a social
critic and everything to suggest that he was a self-seeking adventurer. And
Gadaeus hardly held back from handing over the slaves, whose trust he had
so falsely won, for execution. He did this for his own selfish ends – to save
his neck from the Roman noose. 57 As a result, the story about the bandit
who made a point of sparing slaves loses all its credibility. As we shall see,
comparable statements about Bulla Felix, who is supposed to have robbed
only the rich, may be similarly explained. 58 No bandit bent on plunder
would bother himself much with slaves, who usually owned nothing. This
concept was, perhaps, a variation on the theme of the latro clemens 59 – a figure
of romantic fiction, who has no place in the harsh realities of the period of
the slave wars.
6 Spartacus
In what our sources tell us about Spartacus we have the most vivid picture of
any slave leader of the Roman period. This completes the spectrum of latrones
of the slave wars by adding another new type. 60 In a short but telling
passage, Florus summarises his career: ‘. . . from a Thracian mercenary to a
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