they a choice, they would have elected a different path for themselves. Some embraced their fate. Some volunteered to test their mettle or defend what they believed. They may have been warriors. But those forced to fight in the schemes of tyrants are not warriors. They do not fight by choice for a cause embraced as just.
The long history of warfare, moreover, often stumbles into malignancy unconnected to battle proper. Perhaps the crudeness of conscription feeds the malignancy. In any event, defeating an enemy often meant (and, sadly, means still) raping, pillaging, and plundering. Brutalizing a defeated village is thuggery. Those who do it may be fighters in a war. But fighters, brawlers, and brutes are not warriors. Fighting in a war does not make a warrior.
The warrior existed before any army; the warrior existed before any police; the warrior existed before any shield, sword, or gun; the warrior existed before rank, before hierarchy, before divisions, before units. The warrior exists still above all these things—though he may exist in them too. War needs warriors. Warriors do not need war. Ask any cop.
The trendy cant braying about the “ethical warrior” is therefore a redundancy. It confuses the warrior with one who fights in a war. Nobility was always the pride and mark of the warrior. The soldier, the cop, the freedom fighter must earn the name. It is not bestowed by status or appointment.
History illuminates the theme.
By 73 BCE, the empire of Rome spanned the known world. Its military and cultural power was immense. Rome was everywhere. To challenge it was madness. One man defied its peerless might. His true name remains a mystery. He kept it for himself. History calls him Spartacus.
Of Thrace and free by birth, “he served as soldier among Romans, after captive and sold as gladiator.”1
Spartacus was enslaved by the Romans and pressed into death-reeking arenas for the amusement of elites who elevated themselves above others. The elites could do what they would with lesser peoples. They were Romans.
For Spartacus, life as a slave began in the ludus of Lentulus Batiatus at Capua. Existence was harsh in the ludus. To prepare for combat whose end was death to amuse spectators often meant death along the way.
Spartacus yearned for the freedom into which he was born, the freedom wrested from him by a Roman sword. As a skilled strategist burning with life, he hungered for an opportunity to shatter chains. When it tapped, Spartacus seized the day and slashed through his masters to the world beyond their cages. Other gladiators joined. They fought as warriors would, with whatever they could find: kitchen implements, training tools, bare hands. “Furor arma ministrat”2—rage finds its weapons. Some imagine him rallying his fellow gladiators with these words:
If ye are beasts, then stand here like fat oxen, waiting for the butcher’s knife! If ye are men, follow me! Strike down yon guard, gain the mountain passes, and there do bloody work, as did your sires at old Thermopylæ! Is Sparta dead? Is the old Grecian spirit frozen in your veins, that you do crouch and cower like a belabored hound beneath his master’s lash? O comrades! warriors! Thracians! if we must fight, let us fight for ourselves! If we must slaughter, let us slaughter our oppressors! If we must die, let it be under the clear sky, by the bright waters, in noble, honorable battle!3
Slaves overthrew slave masters. Spartacus prevailed.
Rome sent Praetor Gaius Claudius Glaber to quell the rebellion. He pinned them on Mount Vesuvius and pursued victory by attrition. But Spartacus was a bold and unorthodox tactical thinker. He scaled down a side of the mountain along plaited vines with a small group of about seventy comrades, outflanked the Romans, and attacked from behind, dispatching the much larger Roman militia, including Glaber, to its end.4
Slaves throughout the empire allowed the hope of a once silent word to touch their lips: freedom. They flocked to join Spartacus in thousands. He made an army of them.
Spartacus outwitted, outmaneuvered, and routed legions under command of Publius Varinius. Varinius surrounded the encampment of the rebels. Spartacus posted stakes at regular intervals around its periphery. To the stakes he affixed corpses decked in soldiers’ garb, nailing weapons to their hands as he lit fires throughout the camp. The impression from a distance was that of a bustling and well-garrisoned space. Varinius, thus deceived, delayed attack.5 In the meantime, Spartacus slipped the camp with his army by night, wheeling on the duped Varinius from a better position and destroying his legions.
The Romans clung to the orthodoxy that they were unassailable, that the slave rebellion was but a nuisance. Rome continued to underestimate the will and determination of the rebels—and the leadership and savvy of Spartacus. Its haughtiness was paid in blood. Spartacus defeated legions commanded by Lentulus and Gellius in turn. Each triumph shattered the prevailing dogma that Rome was ineluctable master of the world. Here was a ragtag clutch of disorganized slaves, largely untrained, thought inferior by birth but trim in heart and sharp in will, defying the mightiest power of the day, fighting finally for themselves rather than for the pleasure of others. Other slaves saw it. Rome shuddered in due course.
Finally, when Spartacus choked Rome with its illusions and showed that greatness is not a function of place or birth or class or position, the Senate hurled the full might of Rome against him. Marcus Licinius Crassus, rich, ambitious, and cruel, undertook command of eight battle-hardened legions to defeat the rebellion. To turn in battle under his command meant death. The weight of resources, numbers, and organization was crushing.
Spartacus shifted tactics. Small raids marked by speed and savagery harried Crassus but could not defeat him. Patiently, methodically, Crassus at length maneuvered the rebels into pitched battle and succeeded where others had failed. He defeated the rebels in a desperate and brutal last stand. A strategic thinker as incisive as Spartacus knew its denouement. Finally, he had no delusions about the end of what he started. Rome was, after all, Rome. He might have fled. But where to run when Rome was everywhere? So, he fought.
Though killed on the battlefield, Rome never claimed his body. His men, the men he led, the men who bled with him, the men who breathed but briefly the free air with him, would not yield his body to the abuse of Roman cruelty. He disappeared as he had appeared—in nameless mystery.
Some academics debate his motives and question whether he opposed slavery. This is theorizing among clouds. Spartacus did not, it is true, publish position papers. He was a warrior and otherwise occupied. In any case, outside ivory towers, actions speak. Spartacus fought for his own freedom against those who enslaved him. He fought for the freedom of his brothers in the ludus against those who enslaved them. He fought with seventy thousand slaves who flocked to him against their oppressors. Among warriors, there is no debate. He fought for freedom. And when the fell clutch of circumstance exacted his fall, he fought as a free man against tyranny, the terms of death his own, an equal adversary on the battlefield. This was his message: in battle, the pretension of status counts for nothing. Where the final arbiter is blood, skill, and will, the “inferior” Thracian was the equal of the “superior” Roman, whatever the outcome. This was a warrior, his final battle fought in the teeth of defeat to seize deeper victory, for the warrior does not always fight to prevail in particular battles. Sometimes the warrior fights for a broader principle, for a future yet unwritten, to reshape thinking, to change the world. He at times fights just to show that it is possible. The unchallenged dogma of the day proclaimed that Rome was and would always be unquestioned ruler of the world. Submission and tribute were the lot of the remainder. Spartacus defied dogma, questioning the unquestioned. History scarcely remembers Crassus, still less Glaber, and less still Batiatus—except as footnotes to the warrior whose true name remains a mystery. Who won the war, then?
Spartacus did not fight under the banner of any nation. He did not sport fine uniforms. He did not fight for the gods. His tactics were heterodox. His army
