He saw
that excesses were likely to demoralize his army, and so render it
unfit to meet the legions which it must sooner or later encounter.
[Footnote 4: These ravages seem to have made a great impression on
the Romans, and were by them long remembered. Forty years later
Horace alludes to them, in that Ode which he wrote on the return of
Augustus from Spain (Carm. III. xiv. 19). He calls to his young
slave to fetch him a jar of wine that had seen the Marsiaii War,
"If there could be found one that had escaped the vagabond Spartacus."
The manner in which he, the son of a _libertinus_, speaks of
Spartacus, is not only amusing as an instance of foolish pride, but
is curious as illustrating a change in Roman ideas that was working
out more important results than could have followed from all the
acts of the first two Caesars, though, perhaps it was in some sense
connected with, if not dependent upon, their legislation.]
Much as Spartacus had done, and signal as had been his successes, it
was not yet the opinion at Rome that he was a formidable foe. The
government despatched Publius Varinius Glaber to act against him, at
the head of ten thousand men. This seems a small force, yet it was
not much smaller than the army with which, three or four years later,
Lucullus overthrew the whole military power of the Armenian monarchy;
and it was half as large as that with which Caesar changed the fate
of the world at Pharsalia.
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