Publius Varinius

Publius Varinius was a Roman praetor in 73 BCE and the second magistrate tasked with ending what had begun as a gladiators’ escape. Less is known of his origins than of his failures: the sources present him chiefly as the officer who arrived after Glaber’s humiliation and tried to apply standard Roman methods to an enemy that refused to fight on Roman terms. He divided his forces, delegated to lieutenants, and sought to corner Spartacus through converging pursuits rather than a single set-piece battle.

Spartacus made Varinius pay for that dispersion. He ambushed and crushed detachments under Varinius’s officers—ancient writers name men like Cossinius—before turning on the praetor himself. In a sharp encounter, Varinius’s command buckled. He reportedly lost his lictors and fasces, the emblems of Roman authority, and escaped with his life but not his reputation. The rout reverberated through the countryside: farms smoked in the distance, freed slaves streamed to the rebel camp, and Roman confidence cracked. By the year’s end, the revolt had become a national crisis requiring consular armies.

Varinius was neither coward nor innovator; he was a competent cog in a machine suddenly grinding on unfamiliar terrain. He faced a foe who moved like mercury—fast, elusive, and willing to fight at night or in marsh and mountain. His decision to operate in detachments, sensible for policing bandits, proved disastrous against an enemy that could mass quickly for shock, then dissolve. The loss of his insignia became a symbol of the Republic’s shaken authority, a theatrical humiliation in a culture that prized dignity as much as victory.

In the larger arc of the Third Servile War, Varinius’s defeat marks the moment when the Senate understood that ordinary measures would not suffice. His failure helped bring the consuls Gellius and Lentulus into the field and set the stage for Marcus Licinius Crassus’s eventual appointment with eight legions. If Glaber’s collapse announced the revolt, Varinius’s rout confirmed it. He is remembered not for who he was, but for what his fall made necessary: Rome’s heavy footfall and a war fought to the bitter end.