All parts of the Greek and later Roman world were built upon exploiting either their conquered foes or those with the simple misfortune of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite its supreme importance in daily life, there were several attempts by slaves to throw off their shackles and cast down their cruel masters. In the late Roman Republic, the island of Sicily saw a series of major revolts, the Servile Wars, that risked shaking the foundations of the Roman world.
A Brief History of Roman Sicily
The Roman province of Sicilia was a crucial part of the Roman world in the aftermath of the Second Punic War. Having finally seized control of the resource-rich island from the Carthaginians in the wake of Hannibal’s defeat, Roman settlers swept in like vultures to exploit the natural resources on the island.
Sicily was not only a lucrative spot for trade, whether it be between Hispania and Greece or the Peninsula and North Africa, but also for its fertile soil. The volcanoes on the island created a perfect terrain for growing cash crops and foodstuffs. With wealthy Romans moving in to set up plantations to best take advantage of land grants given to them by the Senate, all that was needed was a workforce to earn them more wealth.
While the island itself had been subjugated during the Second Punic War, and likely countless were sold into slavery, the Romans had a strict policy of importing slaves from the frontier to work closer to the imperial heartland. Sicily was no different. In the late 2nd century BCE, Rome was rapidly expanding into the Near East with their wars against the dying Seleucid Empire. These wars saw not only massive land gains but also large amounts of slaves. Prisoners of war and those captured after the Roman legions systematically sacked and destroyed major cities were the prime targets for enslavement and selling.
Greek slaves were always sold for the most. As a result, particularly avaricious slavers would rename the slaves to something Greek, regardless of where they actually came from. This is what happened to possibly up to 200,000 slaves from Syria and the Levant that ended up in Sicily in the mid to late 2nd century BCE.
Rising Tensions
Slaves in Rome could broadly be divided into two categories: those in the house, who were generally treated better than most and were considered close to their masters, and those who worked manual labor. Both types of slaves existed in Roman Sicily in the 130s BCE and in all other parts of the Republic. What made Sicily unique enough to allow for a slave revolt, which it should be noted were quite rare, was the sheer brutality of the Roman slave masters.
Slaves were rarely given much humanity in any place or time, but in Roman Sicily, slave life was considered worthless as Roman conquests in the east provided a stable supply of thousands of slaves at a moment’s notice. The primary place outside of the home for slaves was working the fields. Sicily’s volcanic ash mixed into the soil proved to be a great boon to farmers and plantation owners on the island and it was not long after the end of the Second Punic War that Sicily became the breadbasket for the city of Rome itself.
If slaves died from overwork or were struck down by their cruel masters, it did not matter. Someone else would be brought in. No efforts were made to try and improve conditions or anything else of the sort. They were frequently brutalized, overworked, and left to turn to banditry to survive. The Romans did not realize that they were setting up a ticking time bomb.
The leader of the future First Servile War was a Syrian soothsayer named Eunus. What his original name was is unknown as only the Greek designation remains of his time as a slave. Before the Romans came, he was a priest to the Syrian goddess Atargatis and a soldier in the armies of the Seleucids. At some point, he was captured by the Romans and sold into slavery alongside his wife.
Once in Sicily, the aged Eunus was owned by a man named Antigenes in the city of Enna at the heart of the island. It was said that due to Eunus’s claims of receiving visions from Atargatis, Antigenes used Eunus as entertainment for his guests. The ancient historian Diodorus Siculus claims that one of Eunus’s visions that he shared with Antigenes and his guests was that one day the Syrian would be king. Among his duties as an entertainer, he told fortunes for his guests and performed a fire-breathing technique where he would place the perforated shells of walnuts in his mouth, place an ember in the shells, and breathe gusts of flame.
In Enna, there was a sanctuary to the Greek goddess Demeter and her Roman equivalent, Ceres. Atargatis was a fertility goddess that the Greeks and Romans frequently associated with both Ceres and Venus, goddess of love and beauty. Due to the vast number of slaves in Sicily being Syrian in origin, the goddess was near and dear to everyone’s hearts. As a soothsayer for Atargatis, Eunus would tell the other slaves who visited the sanctuary that the goddess was sympathetic to their plight and that one day she would help them break their shackles.
Due to the nature of the slaves being overwhelmingly Syrian in origin or otherwise distinctly not Roman due to either their Greek or Gallic upbringings, Eunus’s dreams of overthrowing the Romans and generally embracing an identity predicated on their opposition to everything Roman was quite popular message that spread among the slaves around Enna.
The initial spark for the revolt came when a group of slaves, miserable and discontented over the cruel treatment of their masters, visited Eunus at the sanctuary of Demeter and asked him what to do. The soothsayer and prophet is said to have gone into a trance before finally proclaiming that the gods were with them and it was time for the prophecy to come to fruition.
The now ex-slaves rose up and seized control of the city of Enna in a burst of extremely violent revenge. The masters were cut down in the streets and all the valuables were taken and distributed among the fledgling army, as per the customs of war in the ancient world. The only spot to be spared was the sanctuary of Demeter. With the city now firmly under the control of the ex-slaves, a new government had to be formed. Eunus was the obvious and only choice. With the support of the ex-slaves of Enna, Eunus was proclaimed as King of their new kingdom.
A Kingdom is Born
Upon his ascension, Eunus immediately set out to establish a functioning government and state. His first order of business was to rename himself in the style of Hellenistic kings, adopting the regnal name of “Antiochus” and immediately ordering for coins to be struck bearing his likeness and with his name on them.
His next step was to create a system of governance once again modeled after the kingdoms of post-Alexandrian Greece. Antiochus wore purple robes, and a simple diadem, and created a new formalized court with competent appointees. However, in one crucial area, he diverged from the monarchs he sought to emulate: proskynesis. None would bow to him as if he were a god. He may have been king of the Western Syrians, as he named his kingdom, but he was not a figure of divinity, simply their servant as all of his subjects were.
The revolt began in 135 BCE and from the outset, the slaves sought to create an actual state by which to protect their newfound freedom. A Greek slave by the name of Achaios, a veteran of the various Achaean Wars against Roman imperialism, began arranging tactics and provisions for the armies that were being raised.
The first move the West Syrian armies took was to stage guerrilla attacks against convoys and garrisons in order to gather supplies, disrupt the flow of commerce, and avoid direct confrontation with the Romans.
Across the island in Agrigentum, to the south of Enna, a slave by the name of Cleon led a revolt of 5,000 slaves and seized control of the city from the Romans. Immediately the leader swore his loyalty to Antiochus. As a result of these two massive victories, slaves and freedmen who worked in conditions not far off from being slaves themselves fled their homes to join the fledgling Kingdom of the Western Syrians to earn their freedom and get revenge against the Romans who bound them in chains.
Promises to distribute the fertile land into the hands of the citizens of the kingdom proved a lucrative offer to many. Soon the numbers would rise to upwards of possibly 70,000 men according to historians such as Diodorus.
Rome’s Raging Response
Rome responded as soon as word reached them of the revolt. Sicily’s importance to the economy of the Republic, and its vital nature as one of the most important breadbaskets for the city of Rome, ensured that they would not sit idly by. Praetor and Governor of Sicily Lucius Plautius Hypsaeus landed in Sicily not long after the beginning of the slave revolt.
Due to how Romans saw slavery, the Praetor was given broad instructions to put an end to the rebellion, restore productive capacity, and return the slaves to their masters. Hypsaeus gathered an army of mercenaries and set out to crush the rebels with around 8,000 soldiers under his command. It was an utter disaster. The majority of his army fled, died, or were themselves put in chains. The army camp was looted and all their supplies were distributed among the army of Western Syria. Thousands more joined the ranks of Antiochus, and it was not long before most of Sicily was under his control.
In Rome itself, the news caused more and more alarm among the Senate. What was initially a concern that needed to be solved grew into a full-blown crisis. The attempts at creating an actual state with an assembly, a court, a system of laws, and a genuine army left the Romans without the ability to claim that it was a mere slave revolt anymore. It was clear that this was now an attempt at a war of liberation and independence.
To preserve their pride, they insisted that this was still merely a revolt of the servile classes. However, this belied the biggest threat of all: famine. The foodstuffs from Sicily still flowed north to Rome, but they were in quantities that were unsustainable for the population. It was clear to the Senate that something had to be done quickly. Famine itself is of course a problem, but the true problem that the elites of Rome feared was that of popular revolt. At various points in history, famine preceded violent discontent among the lower classes and the Senate was utterly terrified of that possibility.
Because of the nature of the situation and the strategic importance of the island, the Senate came to a simple conclusion: an army would be raised and sent to Sicily to slaughter the slaves en masse and punish them not just for their audacity in proclaiming themselves free of their masters, but also for the even greater crime of humiliating Rome by defeating them in battle.
The consul in Rome tasked with personally leading troops to restore order and the flow of grain in Sicily was a man by the name of Caius Fulvius Flaccus. Due to wars happening on the borders of the Republic, Flaccus was forced to use poorly disciplined volunteers and mercenaries who failed to reach the numbers necessary for an overwhelming victory. His initial hopes were that on the long march into southern Italy, recruits and volunteers could be found and recruited to supplement his army.
Eventually, he landed in Sicily in 133 BCE and made haste to besiege and capture the capital city of Enna. Flaccus failed to achieve this due to the strong defensive position of the city, its fortifications, and the lack of a large enough army to truly besiege it. He tried repeatedly to take it anyway but failed each time. In the end, he returned to Rome humiliated and defeated. The slaves of Sicily had humiliated Rome once more.
The Beginning of the End
One of the new consuls by the name of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi was sent in that same year to find success where Flaccus could not. Piso’s army faced many of the same problems that Flaccus faced when he landed in one of the few cities Rome yet controlled on Sicily, the town of Messana.
Upon landing and restocking his supplies, Piso marched out to make war against Antiochus and battled a slave army not too far from the town he had left. In a major reversal of fortunes, Piso managed to defeat the army of the Western Syrians and slaughtered over 8,000 of the former slaves. However, the first attempt to capitalize on this victory failed, with the stronghold of Tauromenium remaining in the hands of the Western Syrians.
Piso once again found success after recapturing the city of Morgantia and crucifying nearly 10,000 former slaves. Ultimately all attempts to retake Enna failed and Piso was recalled to Rome at the end of his tenure and admitted that despite some successes, the slave kingdom remained.
When 132 BCE arrived with new consuls, poor tidings also arrived. The city of Messana had fallen into the hands of the Western Syrians. Rome reacted with force once more, dispatching newly elected consul Publius Rupilius. New legions were swiftly raised and Rupilius marched south with great haste.
Upon hearing that the Romans were sending an army to retake Messana, Antiochus and his armies marched to Messana to prepare and meet them in battle and send yet another Roman army back in humiliating defeat. The defeat that came was not that of the Romans, but the former slaves. After a brutal battle with heavy losses on both sides, Rome had successfully retaken Messana, and over 8,000 surviving former slaves were crucified along the northern coast of Sicily. The tides were turning against the fledgling kingdom.
The Romans once more besieged Tauromenium, but unlike the attempt by Piso, Rupilius managed to successfully capture the town after a long siege. The survivors of Tauromenium, the few that remained, were not subjected to crucifixion. Instead, they were tortured and thrown off the sides of cliffs.
Rupilius marched swiftly to Enna and besieged the capital of the kingdom. The siege was brutal for both the besieger and the besieged as a plague broke out in the citadel city and reduced the defenders to starvation. At some point, General Cleon was slain in an attempt to break the siege. Eventually, internal saboteurs and traitors broke the siege and the Romans poured in. All were slain or put in chains once more.
Antiochus had managed to escape with a small personal retinue but was soon abandoned by them due to mass suicide by his bodyguards. Rupilius’s men found the would-be king hiding in a cave and clapped him in irons. He was sent to Morgantia as a prisoner and slave once more. What the Romans would have done with him is impossible to say as shortly after arriving in Morgantia, King Antiochus, formerly known as Eunus, died of illness while in captivity. The victorious Rupilius spent the rest of the year massacring any remaining strongholds of rebels and insurgents, pacifying the island once more.
The war was over and countless dead. Food would flow north to Rome once more, but the cracks in the Republic’s ability to project order were beginning to grow. It would not be long until instability reached the beating heart of Rome.
Bibliography
Barce, N. 2020. Rome’s Sicilian Slaves: The Revolts of Eunus & Salvius 136-132 & 105-100 BC. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Books Ltd.
(Special thanks to the above book, the majority of the recounting of material comes from here.)
Bradley, K. 1983. “Slave Kingdoms and Slave Rebellions in Ancient Sicily.” Historical Reflections 10:435-451.
Pfunter, L. 2015. “Reading Diodorus Through Photius: The Case of the Sicilian Slave Revolts.” GRBS 55:256-272.
Pritchard, R. “Land Tenure in Sicily in the First Century.” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 18:545-556.
Verbrugghe, G. 1972. “Sicily 210-70 B.C.: Livy, Cicero, and Diodorus.” TAPA 103:535-559.
