Glaber led a force slightly smaller than the one sent against the rebels of 104 b.c.: three thousand men instead of 4,400 and, so far as we know, no cavalry. His obscurity was another sign of how little attention Rome gave Spartacus. He was a plebeian with probably at most a distant link to the more famous members of the Claudius clan. He never rose to the consulate and he had no known descendants. They were men of great expectations, since the praetors were the second highest-ranking of the annually elected public officials in Rome only the two consuls stood higher. He was one of eight praetors that year, each of them at least thirty-nine years old, and each elected to an annual term. The senators chose Caius Claudius Glaber to send against Spartacus.
But in 73 b.c., the senators enjoyed a period of power. Once rare, those challenges had become more frequent. They were the oligarchy that ran Rome, except for those occasions when they were challenged by a general like Marius or Sulla. They had automatically become senators, without election, after holding high public office, and they served for life. Senators were all very wealthy men, and almost all members of a few elite families. So the obvious policy in 73 was to send in the praetor. Capua had seen a slave revolt before, in 104 b.c., which had been crushed by barely the number of troops in a single legion - four thousand infantry and four hundred cavalry, for a total of 4,400 men - led by a praetor, a leading Roman public official. Given the big picture, the gladiators' revolt might have seemed minor. In Crete, Antony got ready to sail out against pirates attacking Roman shipping. In the Balkans, Gaius Scribonius Curio was the first Roman general, along with his legion, to see the Danube River. In Asia Minor, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, the consul's brother, began an invasion of the homeland of King Mithridates, who had fought Rome on and off for fifteen years. In Spain, Pompey ground down the renegade Roman commander Sertorius by taking out his strongholds one by one. In 73 b.c., six hundred and eighty-one years after the founding of the city of Rome, during the consulship of Lucullus (Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus) and Cassius (Gaius Cassius Longinus), the republic was fighting wars at both ends of the Mediterranean.
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