Spartacus: The Slave Revolt That Set Up Rome's Collapse

By 73 BC, Rome had stopped running on its citizens.

It was running on slaves, and the whole peninsula had been reshaped around that fact over the previous 40 years or so.

The conquest did it.

The wars against the Cimbri and the Teutons up north sent people to the south in chains.

The Sulla's campaigns in Greece and Asia sent more, and the pirate fleets working every coast in the Mediterranean were selling whatever they could grab.

Every victory ended more or less in the same way, with the legions coming home and the slave traders following along behind them.

Hundreds of thousands of people got dragged into Italy that way.

They worked the big estates down in Campania and Apulia.

They herded sheep in the hills of Lucania, and they ground the grain in the mills outside Rome itself.

Free farmers couldn't compete with that.

A lot of them had gone off to fight in Sulla's wars.

And they came back to find their land already bought up.

So they sold out and moved into the city.

That's the Roman version of the story.

Anyway.

The archaeology is messier than the moralists made it sound.

And a small farm doesn't disappear off the landscape as fast as Appian wants you to believe.

But the direction only ran one way.

And the rich? Well, they bought everything.

They built the Latifundia, these massive slave-run farms that were the size of small towns.

Walter Scheidel has done the closest work anyone's actually done on counting the enslaved population of Italy.

And he lands somewhere around a fifth of everybody living on the peninsula.

In the rural South, the concentrations ran heavier than that.

Heavy enough that in the whole districts of Locania and Apulia, the men working the land outnumbered the men who owned it by margins that should have frightened somebody.

That's not really a labor market at that point.

By 73 BC, Rome had stopped running on its citizens.

It was running on slaves, and the whole peninsula had been reshaped around that fact over the previous 40 years or so.

The conquest did it.

The wars against the Cimbri and the Teutons up north sent people to the south in chains.

The Sulla's campaigns in Greece and Asia sent more, and the pirate fleets working every coast in the Mediterranean were selling whatever they could grab.

Every victory ended more or less in the same way, with the legions coming home and the slave traders following along behind them.

Hundreds of thousands of people got dragged into Italy that way.

They worked the big estates down in Campania and Apulia.

They herded sheep in the hills of Lucania, and they ground the grain in the mills outside Rome itself.

Free farmers couldn't compete with that.

A lot of them had gone off to fight in Sulla's wars.

And they came back to find their land already bought up.

So they sold out and moved into the city.

That's the Roman version of the story.

Anyway.

The archaeology is messier than the moralists made it sound.

And a small farm doesn't disappear off the landscape as fast as Appian wants you to believe.

But the direction only ran one way.

And the rich? Well, they bought everything.

They built the Latifundia, these massive slave-run farms that were the size of small towns.

Walter Scheidel has done the closest work anyone's actually done on counting the enslaved population of Italy.

And he lands somewhere around a fifth of everybody living on the peninsula.

In the rural South, the concentrations ran heavier than that.

Heavy enough that in the whole districts of Locania and Apulia, the men working the land outnumbered the men who owned it by margins that should have frightened somebody.

That's not really a labor market at that point.