Рим Республикасындағы Сицилиядағы құлдар көтерілісінің тарихы

Unsuccessful slave uprising against the Roman Republic on the island of Sicily

The Second Servile War was an unsuccessful slave uprising against the Roman Republic on the island of Sicily. The war lasted from 104 BC until 100 BC. It was one of three Servile Wars, spaced approximately 30 years apart.

The consul Gaius Marius was recruiting soldiers for the war against the Cimbri and Teutones in the North. He requested support from King Nicomedes III of Bithynia near the Roman province of Asia, and was refused, on the grounds that every able bodied man in Bithynia had been enslaved by Roman tax gatherers for being unable to pay their dues. The Senate replied by issuing orders that no slaves were to be taken from among allies of Rome, and that all such slaves should be immediately freed. The propraetor Publius Licinius Nerva, in obedience to the edict, at once freed around 800 slaves in his province of Sicily; aside from awakening discontent among slaves from other nationalities who were not freed, this had the effect of alienating the Sicilian plantation owners who saw their human chattels unceremoniously being taken out of their hands. Alarmed, Nerva revoked the sentence of manumission (the freeing of the slaves), which provoked the slave population into revolt.

When Salvius Tryphon, the Slave King, heard of Lucullus‘ arrival he wanted to hold out against the Romans inside Triocala. His general Athenion, however, persuaded him not to hide but instead face the Romans in open battle. Marching to meet Lucullus, the rebels encamped at Scirthaea, twelve miles distant from the Roman camp and, the next day, the two sides lined up for battle. According to Diodorus, Tryphon's host numbered around 40,000. Lucullus did this to render the task harder for his successor, Gaius Servilius the Augur; Lucullus intended, by ensuring the failure of his successor, to prove his own innocence from any alleged incompetence.

In 102 BC Athenion, who had succeeded as slave king after Salvius' death (he had passed after the earlier battle) was able to take Gaius Servilius's camp by surprise; Servilius' army was routed and dispersed, undoing all of Lucullus' previous success.

Finally, in 101 BC, the Roman consul Manius Aquillius was given the command against the insurgents in Sicily. The Senior Consul, Gaius Marius, donated several cohorts from his army in Gaul to Aquillius. With these and the troops he recruited, equipped and trained en route he succeeded in defeating Athenion's slave army upon arrival. He supposedly killed Athenion by his own hand. The revolt was quelled, and 1,000 slaves who surrendered were sent to fight against beasts in the arena back at Rome for the amusement of the populace. To spite the Romans, they refused to fight and killed each other quietly with their swords, until the last flung himself on his own blade. It was the second of a series of three slave revolts in the Roman Republic fueled by the same abuses in Sicily and Southern Italy.

F. L. Lucas's short story "The Boar" (Athenaeum, 10 September 1920 ) is set in Sicily in the aftermath of the Slave War. In Steven Saylor’s novel Arms of Nemesis (the second book in his Roma Sub Rosa series) the Second Slave War (Servile War) is mentioned in detail during a dinner party with Marcus Licinius Crassus who is about to campaign against the rebel slaves of Spartacus in the Third Slave War. In Colleen McCullough‘s novel The First Man in Rome (the first book in her Masters of Rome series) the Second Servile War is mentioned several times. It figures as the background for the story line about Lucius Appuleius Saturninus.