By the autumn of 72 BC both consuls had been beaten and the Senate wanted someone else. Marcus Licinius Crassus, a praetor and already the richest private citizen in Rome, took the command. He was given six new legions on top of the two consular armies, somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand men, and he began by making sure they would fight.
Plutarch says that when one of his officers, Mummius, disobeyed orders, engaged Spartacus and lost, Crassus revived the old punishment of decimation on the men who had run: five hundred of the first to flee were divided into groups of ten, and one man in each ten was chosen by lot and beaten to death by the other nine, in front of the army. Appian is not sure whether it was those five hundred or the whole force. Either way it worked. Plutarch says the men feared Crassus more than the enemy after that.
The wall
When Spartacus moved to the toe of Italy and tried to hire Cilician pirates to carry his army to Sicily, and the pirates took the money and sailed without him, Crassus built a wall across the peninsula behind him. Plutarch gives it as three hundred stades long, roughly fifty-five kilometres, with a ditch fifteen feet wide and deep. Spartacus broke through it on a night of snow by filling a stretch of the ditch with earth and branches, and a third of his army got out with him.
Crassus, who had asked the Senate to recall Pompey from Spain and Lucullus from Thrace, now wanted the war finished before either of them arrived to take the credit. He destroyed the breakaway army of Gannicus and Castus at Cantenna, and then met Spartacus at the river Silarus in Lucania in the spring of 71 BC. Spartacus died in the battle. Six thousand prisoners were crucified along the Appian Way between Capua and Rome. Pompey, arriving from the north, caught five thousand fugitives and wrote to the Senate that Crassus had won the battle but he had ended the war.
The ovation
The Senate did not vote Crassus a triumph. A war against slaves was not thought to merit one, and he was given an ovation instead, the lesser procession, on foot rather than in a chariot. Plutarch adds that he was allowed to wear the laurel of a triumph rather than the myrtle of an ovation, which was a consolation and read as one. He and Pompey were consuls together the next year, and Crassus feasted the city at ten thousand tables and gave each family grain for three months. He went on to become one of the three men who ruled Rome, and died in Parthia in 53 BC.
Sources
- Plutarch, Life of Crassus 10–12.
- Appian, Civil Wars 1.118–121.
- Pliny, Natural History 15.125, on the laurel.
Checked against the sources on 2026-09-07. Where two ancient authors give different numbers, both are given.