Sicily is a fascinating place full of history and to my mind it is a microcosm of the Mediterranean world from antiquity up to the present time. From antiquity, the island was home to the original Siculi tribes followed by early Greek colonists, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Moslems and Normans.
In places like modern-day Taormina (ancient Tauromenium) it is possible to see the layers of all these civilisations as one walks the streets of this glorious city. I have had the privilege of visiting Taormina twice and I was fascinated with its natural beauty, its setting high on Mount Tauro overlooking the Ionian Sea and looming large on the near horizon is Mount Etna. However, Taormina's crowning glory is the magnificent red brick, Graeco-Roman theatre which is still in use today. And because of it, I was moved to include Tauromenium in my writing of "Glaucus of Korinthos"
My last post, the crucifixion of the rebellious slaves by the Tribune Flaccus Bruscius, was prompted by historical fact. Long before the Spartacus rebellion, the man whose statue is featured above - it stands in the city of Enna in the centre of Sicily - led a revolt against Rome in the First Servile War fought between 138-132 BC.
His name is Eunos and he was a Syrian slave owned by a Greek master, Antigenes who lived in Enna. Eunos was said to be an oracle imbued with mystical powers and he soon emerged as the leader of the slave revolt. He successfully defeated the Romans a number of times and eventually styled himself "King Antiochus Eunos". He was reported to be an able administrator and even minted coins showing him as a king.
Naturally, Rome couldn't allow such a slave rebellion to succeed and in 132 BC Eunos was defeated by the Roman Consul Publius Rupilius near Messina.
Twenty-thousand slaves were crucified as a result of Eunos' defeat.and this figure far surpassed the six thousand put to death by Marcus Licinius Crassus after the Spartacus revolt. Some Roman observers estimated a Sicilian slave population of 200,00 at that time and this, no doubt, influenced Rome's savage response in the slaughter of the recaptured slaves.
Eunos was captured by Consul Rupilius and taken to Rome where, no doubt, he was to be humiliated and eventually put to death. However, it is said he died of an illness in a Roman prison and therefore, he was spared the indignity of being publicly paraded through the streets and executed.
Picture sourced from the internet; text is mine
As always, the posts by Chris regarding Roman History are admirable, for the profound knowledge and for the mastery in presenting the facts and in recreating the atmosphere of those ancient times.
ReplyDeleteI have few things to add to the narration by Chris of the First Servile War in Sicily and of the rise and fall of Eunus, a slave who proclaimed himself a King and who even minted golden coins with his image !
No doubts that this first insurrection of slaves on a very large scale, surpasses under several aspects the much more famous revolt of Spartacus of 73 B.C. and not only for the number of captured slaves that eventually were crucified as an appalling “example” for all the other slaves.
In particular, there are at least two interesting pieces of information that may be worthy to be added to the exhaustive above description by Chris and that derive from the two main Latin historical for this rebellion, i.e. Diodorus Siculus and Orosius.
The first one regards Antigenes, the rich landowner of Greek origin to whom Eunus and the first small group of 400 slaves that started the insurrection, belonged.
Antigenes is described by Latin sources as a real sadist, almost at a pathological level. And the same is told also of Demophilus (and of his wife Megallis) another even richer landowner whose about 1,500 slaves were the first to band together in the revolt with the slaves led by Eunus, after having slaughtered their Master and Mistress.
Both Antigenes and Demophilus are told to take pleasure and amusement from tormenting, torturing, mutilating and executing in the most atrocious ways, without any reason or cause. Besides the “normal” punishments inflicted on slaves ……. “normal” punishments that were so common that they were considered as a “necessity” and not as a form of cruelty, like whipping or branding with hot irons …….. the historians tell that in the houses of Antigenes and Demophilus never a day passed without that at least one or two slaves were flogged to the death, or were crucified or impaled, or their limbs were slowly dislocated on the rack, or were slowly castrated by burning or by crushing their genitals etc. And this happened not only inside the domestic torture-chambers that the rich houses of the two Lords had, but quite often during banquets as a “pastime” and amusement for the Master and his guests.
The sadistic Lady Megallis, the wife of Demophilus, was said to particularly like to torture in their genitals his helpless young male slaves, so that most often the atrocious emasculations of young male slaves that happened in Demophilus’ house were performed by the ferocious Lady with her own hands, according to various and “fancy” techniques that the sadistic woman liked to “invent”.
And when she was not flogging, or torturing or castrating some young male slaves, her sadism was always so uncontrollable that, even during her morning dressing and making up, she continuously tormented her maidservants, by lashing them with a quirt or by disfiguring the slave-girls’ faces by hitting and wounding their faces with combs and brushes or by piercing their cheeks or their breasts with long iron pins …….. a torture, this last one, that the sadistic Lady liked a lot to apply even more to her young and masculine male slaves, by transfixing with long pointed pins their massive scrotum and their big testicles, a form of genitals’ torture and of castration that “sent into raptures” the ferocious Mistress.
Karel (continues below)
These examples of deeply sadistic Roman Masters and Mistresses in the 2nd century B.C. are the “ancestors” of an endless long line of other countless examples of extremely cruel and “pathologically sadistic” Roman owners of slaves that, like a “leitmotif” goes through the whole Roman history, for centuries, showing how the existence itself of Slavery was a powerful and extremely effective stimulus and occasion for Romans for venting out, even in a domestic environment, all the cruelest, wildest and “beastly” sadistic instincts. Countless other examples are mentioned here and there in the whole Latin literature; but it would be sufficient to recall the famous Vedius Pollio, the stunningly wealthy courtier of Emperor Augustus, who was well known –besides countless other forms of barbaric tortures and executions of his slaves that he owned in the number of several dozens of thousands- especially for feeding his slaves to beasts as a form of “show” and amusement.
ReplyDeleteIn particular, during his banquets, he had invented a gruesome but exciting spectacle: a robust nude male slave was slowly immersed from the ceiling of the banquet-hall, into a pool, filled with starving moray-eels that very slowly ate the poor slave, piece by piece, bite by bite …….. Vedius Pollio, and with him many other Roman sadists owners of slaves, was really a direct descendant of Antigenes, Demophilus and Megallis, and he would probably deserve a dedicated post in this blog.
The second aspects of the Eunus’ slave-revolt that I would like to explain better and emphasize is the following: how could Eunus have an army of rebel slaves as large as more than 200,000 men just in Sicily ….. when e.g. Spartacus, in the heart of Italy , was able to gather not more than 120,000 slaves at the maximum success of his revolt ?
The fact that Eunus collected so many rebel slaves and just in one region, is due to the abnormal influence (in the Sicily of his age) of a phenomenon that was always a large “cause of new enslavements” in the Roman world, even if often it is underestimated compared to other sources of new slaves, like prisoners of war or pirates etc.
I’m talking of the SLAVERY FOR DEBTS, one of the cruelest laws of Roman jurisprudence …… and that in case caused EVEN ROMAN CITIZENS to BECOME SLAVES.
In fact, according to Diodorus and Orosius most of the rebel slaves that followed Eunus were Sicilian and Roman peasants who had been sold into slavery because of debts with rich landowners , debts that they were unable to pay; or who had been sold as slaves by the Roman State because they were unable to pay the due taxes.
…….. a very interesting source of new slaves, worthy to be further discussed in this Blog, I believe.
Karel