Читать книгу The Warrior's Manifesto. Ideals for Those Who Protect and Defend онлайн
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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?