Did she actually inspire Spartacus’s revolt? To say that would be going beyond the evidence, but she certainly added to his mystique. Imagine Spartacus’s wife announcing, perhaps after a vision in a trance that Dionysus had sent a snake as a sign of Spartacus’s great power. Slave owners may well have feared her, having learned from the Sicilian rebellions that prophets and witches were troublemakers.Īs for the story of a snake coiled around Spartacus’s face, herpetologists discount the possibility, but that may be why it seemed like a miracle at the time. Thracians valued the religious authority of women and they set great store by prophecy, making it likely that Spartacus’s wife was a respected figure. Hence, Dionysus made a good symbol for Spartacus. Sicily and the Anatolian King Mithradates of Pontus, whose long war against Rome was still on at the outbreak of Spartacus’s revolt in 73 B.C. Several enemies of Rome chose Dionysus as their rallying cry, including rebel slaves in second-century B.C. Various peoples considered him their national god, from Thracians to Greeks in southern Italy. Another thing about the cult of Dionysus: She probably handled snakes, the god’s symbol.ĭionysus was the god not only of wine but also of liberation. As a worshipper of Dionysus, she was used to rural places, especially mountainsides. As a Thracian woman she probably had tattooed arms. Spartacus’s wife was religious, vocal, and hardy enough to endure the life of an escaped slave battling the Roman army. Roman slaves often had wives, and children too, although such marriages were not valid in Roman law. If it seems odd that a gladiator had a wife, it shouldn’t. This woman shared in his escape and was then living with him. It is said that when he was first brought to Rome to be sold, a serpent was seen coiled about his face as he slept, and his wife, who was of the same tribe as Spartacus, a prophetess, and subject to visitations of the Dionysiac frenzy, declared it the sign of a great and formidable power which would attend him to a fortunate issue. In his “Life of Crassus,” Plutarch writes:
Only one ancient source mentions her existence, but he is Plutarch, who relied on the (now largely missing) contemporary account by Sallust. Neither her name nor the name of their tribe survives. She was a Thracian like him, from the same tribe.
That a gladiator like Spartacus should have a wife to help his rebellion catch fire seems like a Hollywood touch but, in fact, it’s true. The penultimate episode of “Spartacus,” titled “The Dead and the Dying,” airs tonight. As the Starz drama “Spartacus: War of the Damned” hurtles towards its conclusion, Speakeasy asked historian Barry Strauss to reflect on some of the important but little-known aspects of the true story of Spartacus.
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