Spartacus & The Gladiator Revolt Against Rome Documentary

The man known to history as Spartacus was an individual of very obscure origin. Based on the fact that he was in the fighting prime of his life in the mid-70s BC, it is generally assumed that he was born sometime between 105 BC and 100 BC. A reference in the brief accounts of his early life to his probably being a member of the Maedi tribe strongly suggests that he was born near the Strymon or Struma River in what is now western Bulgaria, a region known in ancient times as Thrace. Of his parents and family background absolutely

nothing is known. Spartacus hailed from a part of the ancient world which lay on the fringes of the richer Mediterranean states of Greece. Thrace covers the section of the Balkans on the northern side of the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara, the waterways dividing the Balkans from Anatolia, the western side of modern-day Turkey. Thrace was the name of the wider region covering the small Turkish enclave where Istanbul sits today, the south-eastern quadrant of what is now Bulgaria and the north-eastern corner of modern-day Greece. There were a number of significant port towns here dominating the waterways

between the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea, but the major power was the population of Thracian tribes-people who dominated the interior. These were fierce fighters, though they were considered to be foreign barbarians by the Greeks. In the late sixth century BC they had been briefly conquered by the Persian Empire as the Persians sought to expand into Greece, but after the invasion of mainland Greece failed in 479 BC, a Thracian warlord by the name of Teres successfully established an independent Kingdom of Thrace ruled by a tribal confederation known as the Odrysians. He and his successors would

dominate the Thrace region with the exception of the southern coastal region where a number of broadly independent cities and port towns predominated, however there were periods during which the Odrysian kingdom was dominated by other regional powers such as the Kingdom of Macedon and the empire of Alexander the Great from the middle of the fourth century BC onwards. Spartacus’ story belongs to a different time period altogether, one during which new power dynamics had begun to operate in the wider world of the Eastern Mediterranean. The conquests of Alexander the Great had spread Greek or Hellenic culture far

and wide. The Odrysian Kingdom of Thrace had remained a nominal part of the Kingdom of Macedon into the third century BC, but as near constant conflicts raged between the successor kingdoms to Alexander’s empire, notably the Kingdom of Macedon, the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt and the Seleucid Empire in the Levant, the Thracians largely became entirely independent again. They were aided in this process during the second century BC when a new power began to emerge in the Eastern Mediterranean. This was the Roman Republic, a state which during the third century BC had conquered most of the Western

Mediterranean and was now being drawn into the wars of the East. Between the end of the third century BC and 146 BC they fought a series of wars with the Kingdom of Macedon which saw that state utterly defeated. With their near western neighbour decimated during these conflicts, the position of the Thracians, who first allied with Macedon against Rome but then switched sides, became more chaotic, with the Odrysian tribes suffering a decline and power fragmenting here. A new Thracian tribal group, the Sapaeans, would eventually emerge as a client state of Rome’s, but Thrace during Spartacus’ time

was effectively a region on the borders of Rome, one experiencing severe political and military unrest and from which slaves were often being acquired as the spoils of war and conflict by the Romans. There are numerous sources available for the study of Spartacus’ life and actions, though these are fragmentary in their coverage and provide little information on his birth, family background or early life, instead broadly focusing on his time as a slave and rebel leader within Roman Italy when he was already an adult in his mid-to-late twenties. These are all sources written by Roman and Greco-Roman

writers. The most detailed is the account found in the Life of Crassus written by the second-century AD Greco-Roman writer, Plutarch. Plutarch wrote dozens of biographies comparing the stories of ancient Greek and Roman politicians, lawmakers and military commanders. His Life of Crassus tells the story of Marcus Licinius Crassus, a contemporary of Spartacus who was reputedly the wealthiest man in the Roman Republic during the first half of the first century BC, and thus a figure who had a claim to being the wealthiest individual in the whole world at that time. Crassus would play the central role in

commanding the Roman military suppression of Spartacus’ slave revolt in the late 70s BC. In relating Crassus’ story, Plutarch necessarily discussed Spartacus’ revolt in considerable detail and also provided some back story on who Spartacus was, though his work was written over 200 years after the events it describes and needs to be approached with some caution. There are several other important sources concerning Spartacus’ life and actions. One of these was by a more obscure Roman historian, Publius Annius Florus, a figure understood to have lived around the late first and early second centuries AD, a century and a

half after Spartacus’ time. Florus composed an epitomised or abbreviated version of the more well-known Roman historian Livy’s vast History of Rome Since its Foundation. A significant enough passage of this work addresses Spartacus and the Third Servile Revolt that he led. More substantial still was the work of Appian of Alexandria, a Greco-Roman historian and contemporary of Plutarch. In one of his many works, The Civil Wars, a large work addressing the crisis, decline and fall of the Roman Republic roughly between 140 BC and 40 BC, there is a sizeable section covering the slave revolt Spartacus led, one

which provides some back story on the Thracian. All of these works suffer from being written in or around 200 years after the events they described. Conversely, Sallust, a Roman historian of the first century BC, was alive at the time of the Third Servile War that Spartacus led, though he was just a child at the time. He is more well-known today for composing two short histories on The Jugurthine War and The Catiline Conspiracy, but Sallust also authored a set of further Histories. The majority of the text is unfortunately lost, but one of the fragments of it

which has survived pertains to the revolt of Spartacus and his followers in southern Italy between 73 BC and 71 BC. These texts, along with a limited amount of archaeological evidence like inscriptions and material remains from excavation sites in southern Italy, are the primary basis for reconstructing the life of Spartacus to the degree that we can. One theory which has emerged concerning Spartacus and his background is based not so much on ancient sources which directly address the man himself, but is instead based on analysis of his name and whether it indicates some royal ancestry. Between the

mid-fifth century BC and the late second century BC, right around the time Spartacus was born, the Spartocid dynasty ruled over the Kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus, a state that dominated much of the Crimean Peninsula and nearby coastal regions on the eastern side of the Sea of Azov. Five rulers of this kingdom, beginning with Spartokos I between 438 BC and 433 BC and ending with Spartokos V, who ruled for two decades between 200 BC and 180 BC, bore a name which is effectively the same as Spartacus though with a slightly variant spelling in modern translation. It

has therefore been suggested that Spartacus may have been descended or in some way related to the Spartocid dynasty that ruled this kingdom on the northern side of the Black Sea and may have hailed from a branch of the family that established themselves in Thrace at some time in the second century BC. It is a not entirely implausible supposition, though one based purely on the circumstantial evidence of his name and one which some observers have probably been a bit too willing to believe, with its romantic overtones of a young man of royal blood reduced to the

status of a slave in Roman society and battling to free himself and return to his former life. What little evidence we do have concerning Spartacus’ early life is very limited, but it is consistent. All of the ancient accounts of him agree that he was a Thracian. Plutarch described him as hailing from a nomadic tribe, information which was complemented by others who added that he came from the Maedi tribe. These were quasi-nomadic pastoralists and we can assume that if these details are true he lived a somewhat wandering early life, moving with his family and other kin

around the southern Bulgarian countryside tending to sheep and other livestock. Plutarch also described him as being possessed of a great spirit and physical strength, something which would certainly make sense given his later position as both a soldier and a gladiator slave, while it is also from the Greco-Roman historical biographer that we learn that Spartacus was, quote, “much more than one would expect from his condition, most intelligent and cultured, being more like a Greek than a Thracian. They say that when he was first taken to Rome to be sold, a snake was seen coiled round his

head when he was asleep and his wife, who came from the same tribe and was a prophetess subject to possession by the frenzy of [the god of ecstasy] Dionysus, declared that this sign meant that he would have a great and terrible power which would end in misfortune.” We also have some limited details on his life as he became an adult in Thrace and how he managed to end up as a slave within the Roman Republic. Appian tells us that Spartacus was, quote, “a Thracian who had once fought against the Romans.” This view of the man

as an individual who fought against a Roman incursion of some kind into Thrace is corroborated by other ancient writers, but unfortunately there is no further detail about it. It leaves us with more questions than answers. For instance, was Spartacus just a common soldier with a Thracian fighting band of some kind or was he a leader amongst them who commanded a regiment of his fellow people? This is an important question, as, if we knew the answer to it, it would reveal much about how he met with such success against the Romans when he led his revolt

in Italy many years later. Unfortunately, though, no further details are forthcoming from the available evidence. At the same time, we can assume that he must have been captured, perhaps after some battle or military defeat for the Thracians he fought with, around the early-to-mid-70s BC and was soon sold into slavery in Italy after being sent there from Thrace. He most likely was not in captivity for many years before he appears on the historical record in 73 BC, as had he been a slave of longstanding Plutarch, Appian and others would have surely mentioned this in their otherwise

very brief accounts of his backstory. Spartacus was now entering into slavery in the Roman world. This was a complicated existence. Slaves had virtually no rights or liberties of any kind, though their lives were often not as brutal as those who experienced the chattel and plantation slavery that prevailed in the Caribbean and southern states of the United States between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. For instance, many slaves in the Roman world were household servants and if they had owners that treated them well did not experience brutality. Still, they were un-free, though they could win their freedom

through various mechanisms. There was the darker side of slavery though. If an owner was inclined to mistreat their slaves, their lives could be extremely difficult and there is no shortage of evidence of slaves having to wear collars and fetters that indicated their enslaved status and called on anyone who apprehended them to return them to their owner. Because of the nature of the Mediterranean societies that Rome conquered from the third century onwards and the nature of Roman imperialism itself, the Roman Republic was a state in which slavery was extremely common. Slaves were taken from each conquered

region as the spoils of war, often with a huge proportion of a city or town that resisted Roman rule being enslaved afterwards. It is estimated that upwards of 20% of the population of the Roman Empire at its height were slaves. These were used in various capacities. Some were household slaves. The more educated might acquire positions as scribes and clerks and were considered valuable members of a patrician or wealthy individual’s staff and household. The less fortunate were menial labourers whose lives were spent carrying out hard labour in mines, quarries and building sites. Amongst these, gladiatorial slaves

occupied a somewhat unusual position in that their lives could be short and violent, but if they succeeded as gladiators they could aspire to not only win their freedom, but also to live a life of riches and fame. Gladiators, whose name is derived from the gladius short sword that many fought with, were combatants who took part in the Ludi Romani or gladiatorial games that had become common in Rome from around the third century BC onwards. By Spartacus’ time they had become a staple of Roman life and amphitheatres for holding gladiatorial contests were beginning to appear in

many provincial cities and towns. Many gladiators were slaves, though some were volunteers who were eager to gain fame and renown by winning contests on the sands of the amphitheatres, while riches could also await particularly successful gladiators. Still, death was the outcome before long for many fighters and as the Ludi Romani became more and more popular a constant stream of slave gladiators was needed to replace those who had lost their lives fighting one another for the entertainment of the Roman people. The contests would go through peaks and valleys of popularity, with some later Roman emperors favouring

the less violent sport of chariot-racing instead, though in the politically turbulent and violent last century of the Roman Republic, which Spartacus lived right in the middle of, the gladiatorial contests were at the absolute peak of their popularity, with Roman generals and politicians managing gladiatorial schools and holding contests as a way of bolstering their own popularity with the wider Roman population. Slave gladiators like Spartacus became in the mid-70s BC were trained at a Ludus, a gladiatorial school. These were relatively new innovations. The first Ludus for which there is concrete evidence did not appear until the very

end of the second century BC, around thirty years before Spartacus was enslaved. The town of Capua and the surrounding region quickly became the centre of such gladiatorial schools in Italy, as it lay in close enough proximity to the city of Rome to be able to transport gladiators there at short notice, while at the same time being far enough removed to provide extensive room for the school grounds and also to avoid violence spreading to the capital if a revolt occurred at a Ludus, southern Italy having experienced numerous slave revolts already in the second century BC. Excavations

of major gladiatorial schools such as the Ludus Magnus, the great gladiatorial school built near the Colosseum in Rome in later centuries, reveals that barracks and dormitories were laid out for the slave gladiators. Water was piped into the Ludus and the living quarters were of a good quality. The diet of gladiators was also quite good, as they needed their strength to perform well, while expansive training grounds were laid out for gladiators to exercise and practice their fighting skills. Overall, slaves like Spartacus that found themselves being brought to a Ludus could expect a higher living standard than

most other slaves in Roman society, the catch being that their lives could be quite short depending on how they fought in the amphitheatres. Spartacus’ potential as a gladiator was quickly realised following his enslavement and his arrival in Italy. Our ancient sources do not reveal much about how it came about, but we do know that he soon ended up at the gladiatorial school managed by Lentulus Batiatus, otherwise named as Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia, in the town of Capua down the coast of western Italy from the city of Rome itself. Capua was an extremely important satellite of

Rome, a major urban centre between the capital and the rich settlements of southern Italy and a stopping point on the Appian Way, the great road the Romans had built through the region two and a half centuries earlier. Batiatus may well have been the Cornelius Lentulus who successively served as quaestor and the tribune in Rome in 75 BC and 72 BC and was consequently a figure of some considerable social prestige and wealth at the time Spartacus arrived at Capua. At the Ludus here Spartacus was assigned to fight as a Gallus, a type of gladiator who fought

with a large oblong shield and gladius sword and who were assigned the role of pretending to be a Gallic warrior from Gaul in France and the Low Countries, the Gallic people being formidable enemies of Rome who had been the last people to sack the city all the way back in 390 BC. These Gallus gladiators became known as a murmillo after the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar two decades later when it became politically unacceptable to refer to the new subjects of Rome as individuals who would be sent to their death in the amphitheatres. Unfortunately, our

sources provide almost no further information of any kind on Spartacus’ life at Capua, but based on his decision to lead a breakout with other slaves from the Ludus before long we can conjecture that conditions were not idyllic. Spartacus had ended up enslaved in a gladiatorial school of southern Italy during a period of long-running tensions within the world of the Romans. While the Roman Republic had entered into a period of conquest and expansion in the third and second centuries BC of an unprecedented kind for a power from the Western Mediterranean, power and riches had brought their

own problems. Beginning in the 130s BC there were social and political problems in Rome itself, while by the dawn of the first century BC a growing problem was that of Roman military commanders becoming far too powerful and exercising excessive control within the Republic. Two camps had developed, one supporting a general named Gaius Marius and another, a younger upstart called Cornelius Sulla. Eventually Sulla had won a civil war against the Marians after the death of Marius himself and had claimed the title of dictator in Rome for several years between 82 BC and 80 BC. When Spartacus

arrived in Italy, the Republic was only just settling back into some form of normality after the civil war and dictatorship, with Sulla eventually having retired to his country estates, where he died not long afterwards. The sharks continued to circle the dying Roman Republic though and the next half a century would see general after general trying to claim absolute power in Rome before an imperial system would finally be established by Caesar Augustus in 27 BC. This political crisis was mirrored in a social crisis which was much more germane to Spartacus’ story. Rome, as we have seen,

was a slave-owning society, one in which at its height an estimated 20% of the population were slaves. Beyond slaves themselves, a large proportion of the free population were the poor and landless labourers. It was only Roman citizens and in particular the Roman elite who held major wealth and benefited from the empire. This highly inegalitarian situation had led to both slave revolts and popular protests against Roman policies for decades. For instance, between 135 BC and 132 BC a huge slave rebellion occurred on the island of Sicily, one which saw much of the island come under the

control of a slave army for years before being suppressed. It became known as the First Servile War. A Second Servile War followed on Sicily as well between 104 BC and 100 BC, when the large slave population on the island took advantage of the invasion of northern Italy by the Cimbri and other enemies of Rome from beyond the Alps to try to carve out their own domain in Sicily. Finally, between 91 BC and 87 BC, the Social War, a clash between the Romans and their non-Roman, Italianate subjects across Italy, was fought as the non-Roman, Italian people

sought to be given the honours of Roman citizenship. What all of these conflicts point towards is that there was a strong tradition across Italy by the 70s BC of revolts against Roman rule, both from within the large slave community and the Italian free community, with Sicily and southern Italy in particular being places of frequent revolts and insurrections. When combined with the recent civil war between Sulla and the Marians, the political and social environment that Spartacus found in Italy in the mid-70s BC was febrile at best. Spartacus would soon lead a new slave revolt in southern

Italy, one which eclipsed the First and Second Servile Wars in terms of the numbers involved and the threat it posed to the city of Rome itself. This began with an escape of several dozen slaves from the Ludus at Capua sometime in 73 BC. Plutarch provides the most detailed account of the events which initiated the slave revolt that would become known as the Third Servile War. In his Life of Crassus he relates the following: “The rising of the gladiators and their devastation of Italy, which is generally known as the war of Spartacus, began as follows. A

man called Lentulus Batiatus had an establishment for gladiators at Capua. Most of them were Gauls and Thracians. They had done nothing wrong, but, simply because of the cruelty of their owner, were kept in close confinement until the time came for them to engage in combat. Two hundred of them planned to escape, but their plan was betrayed and only seventy-eight, who realized this, managed to act in time and get away, armed with choppers and spits which they seized from some cookhouse. On the road they came across some wagons which were carrying arms for gladiators to another

city, and they took these arms for their own use. They then occupied a strong position and elected three leaders. The first of these was Spartacus.” Elsewhere we learn that the Thracian’s two co-leaders were the gladiator slaves Crixus and Oenomaus, while two slave gladiators from Gaul, Gannicus and Castus, would quickly become involved in leading the revolt as well. The slave breakout at Capua would spiral into a much wider revolt amongst the servile classes of Roman society in southern Italy. Spartacus and his allies headed south from Capua towards the city of Neapolis, modern-day Naples, and other settlements

like Pompeii. As they did, more and more slaves and discontented individuals were drawn to their cause and their numbers swelled, first into the hundreds and eventually into the thousands. This process was facilitated as they began attacking and looting isolated Roman villas and small villages, then moving on to towns throughout the Campania region. They soon made their way to Mount Vesuvius, the great volcanic mountain overlooking Neapolis and the Bay of Naples, the one which a century and a half later would erupt violently and bury the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under volcanic ash and rock. Here

they made the slopes of the mountain a staging post where they began consolidating their forces into a makeshift army. The Romans were responding too though. No legions were allowed to be stationed in Italy under normal circumstances south of the River Rubicon, so it took some time for a major army to be raised, but in this initial stage of the Third Servile War a militia force of several thousand men under a Roman magistrate by the name of Gaius Claudius Glaber was sent south to deal with the insurrection. There Spartacus and his men used a novel strategy,

rappelling down the steep sides of Mount Vesuvius on ladders and then flanking Glaber and his men in a surprise attack which led to a significant victory. With this, word spread that a new revolt against Roman oppression was underway in southern Italy and unrest gripped the region. The Third Servile War had begun with Spartacus as its leader. There are differing accounts as to how the Third Servile War which now began played out, with Appian and Plutarch disagreeing on a number of specific aspects of it. What is unanimously agreed upon is that this was a war which

lasted for around two and a half years between the original slave breakout from Capua and the Battle of Mount Vesuvius in 73 BC and when it would finally be suppressed late in 71 BC at the Battle of the Silarius River. Both ancient historians also agree that after a period of building up their forces to tens of thousands of men, Spartacus and the other rebel leaders moved to the eastern coast of southern Italy and then headed north along the eastern side of the Apennine Mountains that form the spine of central Italy. Spartacus then won a considerable

victory over the Romans at a site to the east of Rome, most likely in the vicinity of modern-day Pescara. Where they differ is that Appian holds that Spartacus then largely headed west and might have been attempting to strike at Rome itself before thinking better of this strategy and retreating back to southern Italy. Plutarch, by way of contrast, describes Spartacus and his men as venturing much further north towards Ravenna and Bologna, before fighting a victorious battle against the Romans at Mutina. According to the historical biographer in his Life of Crassus, he then headed south, but did

not pass as close to Rome as Appian holds. Both accounts suggest these events occurred in 72 BC and that even as they were playing out the Romans were diverting a great number of legions back to Italy to crush the revolt. The culmination of it all would come in southern Italy in 71 BC. Throughout the accounts of Plutarch, Appian, Florus and others it is entirely clear that Spartacus was viewed as the paramount leader of the slave rebels and their allies. The question of how close to the city of Rome Spartacus and his followers went raises questions

as to what his objectives were and what the other leaders of the revolt hoped to achieve. After all, if they had simply wished to win their freedom, why did they not simply acquire some ships early on in the revolt and flee from Italy altogether. In an age when piracy was rife around the Mediterranean and the Romans were not yet masters of what they would later call Mare Nostrum, ‘Our Sea’, it might have been possible for Spartacus to make his way home to Thrace with a bit of luck. Florus argued that Spartacus and his earliest followers

were initially motivated by nothing more than a desire to escape captivity. Later, as their efforts at Mount Vesuvius met with success and more and more men gravitated towards them and their numbers swelled, these aims mutated into a desire for revenge against the Roman people. Finally, he suggests that as their confidence grew the Thracian began to entertain hopes of attacking the city of Rome itself. This is a neat explanation for Spartacus’ actions, but there may have been other factors at play. For instance, some historians of the Late Roman Republic argue that many thousands of those who

joined the revolt were not in fact slaves and were instead former Roman soldiers or individuals with other resentments against the state. In this light the Third Servile War is cast as a conflict in which slaves and others in southern Italy who felt that they had not been properly rewarded for their role in the rapid expansion of the republic in years gone by banded together to punish the elite of Italy and to potentially grow their strength until they could strike at Rome itself. Appian’s account of their progress, with the northward march and then abrupt swerve westwards

close to Rome, suggests a possible objective of attacking the capital, though Plutarch, who as we have seen describes Spartacus and his followers as campaigning much further north towards the Plain of Lombardy, hints that perhaps they were attempting to simply break out of Italy altogether to freedom over the Alps where Gallic and German tribes still lived free from Roman rule. The theory that Spartacus’ army was comprised of many former Roman loyalists who were disillusioned at the way they had been excluded from the benefits of empire would certainly fit with the size of the army that Spartacus

was able to assemble. The ancient accounts concur that he was soon leading an army of tens of thousands of men in southern Italy and it seems plausible that this was not made up of slaves alone. Historians estimate that the entire horde soon grew to 120,000 followers, but this included camp followers like women and auxiliaries and camp aids who did not fight. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that the rebel army reached a fighting capacity of as much as 70,000 or 80,000 men at its height in 72 BC. From Florus we hear how Spartacus and the other slave-leaders

built up their army. He states that their forces became, quote, “a regular army by the daily arrival of fresh forces, they made themselves rude shields of wicker-work and the skins of animals, and swords and other weapons by melting down the iron in the slave-prisons. That nothing might be lacking which was proper to a regular army, cavalry was procured by breaking in herds of horses which they encountered, and his men brought to their leader the insignia and fasces captured from the praetors.” Throughout these events Spartacus and his men won several notable victories against the Romans. After

the initial small force of hastily assembled troops under Glaber had been defeated at the Battle of Mount Vesuvius, another Roman magistrate and commander, the praetor, Publius Varinius, was ordered to gather together as many men as he could and head south. This was still in 73 BC when the full scale of the threat posed by the rebels had not yet become apparent. Varinius’ expedition met with even greater failure than had Glaber’s. He marched with several thousand troops, so much so that he decided to split his forces into two contingents, a costly mistake which saw Spartacus’ army

defeat the two weaker contingents with ease. Varinius barely escaped alive and most of his men were either killed or captured. This was a boon to the slave army, which now used the captured armour and weapons to arm themselves and strengthen their own forces. Then in the winter of 73 BC into 72 BC they conducted a series of raids against the principle towns and villages of the Campania region, including Nola, Metapontum, Thurii and Nuceria. In this way they continued to strengthen their own position. Further victories followed in the spring and summer of 72 BC, this time

against greater forces. As Spartacus led his tens of thousands of followers north along the eastern side of the Italian peninsula, two much larger armies under the two consuls for 72 BC, the leaders of the Roman Republic elected on an annual basis, Lucius Gellius and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus, moved to prevent them moving any further north. A battle occurred near Gargano in the Foggia region, one in which the Thracian and his men once again scored a victory. It now became apparent to the Senate in Rome that they were not going to be able to suppress the

unrest in the south of Italy by sending small forces against Spartacus and a much more concerted war using the extensive resources of the Roman state would be necessary. They would need full legions and several of them. Thus did the call go out to the provinces for the governors and commanders there to begin dispatching their men towards Italy to protect the city of Rome itself. At the same time, these victories did not come with complete ease for the rebels. During these early engagements in the Third Servile War, Oenomaus, one of the slave gladiators who had led

the revolt since its earliest days alongside Spartacus, was killed, while the engagement against the consular armies near Gargano in 72 BC may have ended in victory but was costly all the same for the rebel armies. As legionaries began pouring into Italy from the provinces in the second half of 72 BC and into early 71 BC three individuals were tasked with taking charge of them and crushing the war Spartacus had become the leader of. One of these was Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus, a Roman pro-consular governor of Macedonia who had been engaged in border wars in Spartacus’

native Thrace in the early stages of the revolt and now arrived back in Italy with several legions. Another was Gnaeus Pompeius, a figure who had risen to prominence as a commander as a young man in his twenties during the civil war that brought Sulla briefly to power as dictator of the Roman Republic. In the course of the 70s BC he had overseen the suppression of a lengthy revolt in Hispania by the Roman general, Quintus Sertorius. Pompey, as he is more widely known, had just brought the Sertorian War to an end in 72 BC when he

was recalled to Italy with some of his legions in response to the threat Spartacus posed there. But the most important Roman commander now appointed by the Senate was Marcus Crassus, Rome’s wealthiest political figure. A clear indication of his critical role in the war against Spartacus is indicated by Plutarch’s Life of Crassus being the most detailed ancient source we have for Spartacus’ life and actions. Appian and Plutarch’s accounts of the end of the war converge again and largely agree on the final stages of it. Having decided to march back to southern Italy with his forces, Spartacus

was soon confronted by Crassus marching south with eight legions, a nominal force of 40,000 well-trained men. In the now unlikely event that he should defeat these, Pompey and Lucullus were advancing in Crassus’ rear with further legions. Despite the size of the revolt, there was now nearly parity when it came to the size of the two opposing armies. Perhaps the result was inevitable given this injection of legionaries into Italy. Crassus won a series of battles through the early months of 71 BC and by the second half of the year had hemmed Spartacus and his remaining army

into the south-western extremities of the peninsula. At this juncture Spartacus reached out to the great pirate leaders of Cilicia, a region in southern Anatolia in modern-day Turkey, and according to Plutarch formed a deal with them whereby they would transport what remained of his forces across the Straits of Messina to Sicily, where he would reinvigorate his war by drawing tens of thousands of new recruits to his banner. The Cilicians, though, reneged on the agreement and Spartacus and his ever-declining band of followers were left stranded in the toe of Italy with Crassus, Pompey and Lucullus all advancing.

Facing such insurmountable odds, Spartacus elected to try and engage with Crassus' forces before they were reinforced by Pompey or Lucullus. The final battle of the Third Servile War would take place at what was then known as the Silarius River in southern Italy, the modern-day Sele River, which runs through Battipaglia, a town to the south of Naples, Amalfi and Salerno on the Italian coastline. Like all parts of the war we do not have an exact date for when it occurred, only that it took place late in 71 BC, perhaps around two and a half years after

the initial breakout by Spartacus and his comrades from the gladiator school at Capua, with Appian describing it as lasting close to three years. In keeping with the tendency that was common amongst ancient Greek and Roman historians to exaggerate the size of enemy armies, the sources for the battle suggest that Spartacus was still in command of over 50,000 men and outnumbered Crassus’ legions, but modern historians tend to agree that Spartacus’ army was probably down to 20,000 to 30,000 men at this juncture. Moreover, they were hemmed in. A new archaeological study, details of which have only been

published in the summer of 2024, purports to have found the remains of a two and a half kilometre long wall in the Dossone della Melia forest in Calabria which Crassus and his men seem to have built to surround Spartacus’ army. Outnumbered and facing better-trained and resourced legions that were effectively encircling them with these quickly erected fortifications the slave army had no option but to engage the Romans and were soundly defeated. Thousands perished, though not without inflicting heavy enough casualties on the Romans, this possibly being a product of Crassus engaging Spartacus faster than he should have

in an effort to bring the war to an end before either Pompey or Lucullus could steal some of the glory for defeating the Thracian from him. In the midst of the Battle of the Silarius River the Thracian slave gladiator that led the Third Servile War was killed. Appian provides a detailed account of Spartacus’ death during the battle, relating how, quote, “Spartacus himself was wounded by a spear-thrust in the thigh, but went down on one knee, held his shield in front of him, and fought off his attackers until he and a great number of his followers

were encircled and fell. The rest of his army was already in disorder and was cut down in huge numbers; consequently their losses were not easy to estimate (though the Romans lost about 1,000 men), and Spartacus’ body was never found.” Florus simply tells us that he fell during the battle, though interestingly for a Roman writer describing the actions of a barbarian enemy he praises the gladiator general for falling while fighting bravely on the front lines as a general. This positive account of the manner in which the Thracian met his demise was mirrored by Plutarch, who gave

the most detailed account of all of how Spartacus met his end. Here he describes the rebel general as slaying his own horse in the midst of the battle, declaring that if they won the battle he would have many Roman horses to choose from and if they lost he would need none. Then he charged with a cohort of followers towards Crassus. He never made it to the Roman general though. Instead, after slaying many Romans, including two centurions, Spartacus’ followers began to abandon him as the result of the wider battle became clear. Undismayed, Spartacus continued his charge,

only to be cut down by the Romans before he could make it to Crassus. Plutarch’s description of Spartacus’ death, written more than two centuries after the events it purports to describe and nevertheless alleging to produce an eye-witness account of the scene, must be taken with a large pinch of salt. While it is possible that he himself was drawing on more contemporary sources that could reliably have described the battle and the death of the general, it is far more plausible that he was exercising a degree of creative licence which makes his portrayal of Spartacus’ death more

historical fiction than historical reality. Spartacus’ body was apparently never recovered from the battlefield following the Battle of the Silarius River. The engagement brought the Third Servile War to an end as Pompey, who had not brought his legions to aid Crassus in the actual battle, now moved to engage several divisions of the rebel army and slew thousands more in the hours and days that followed. He also sent word to Rome where he informed the Senate of the victory in a manner which allowed him to try and claim most of the credit for the victory that Crassus

had won. For his part Crassus engaged in a brutal conclusion to the war. He captured some 6,000 of the remaining rebels and crucified them at regular intervals along the 200 kilometre stretch of the main road between Capua and Rome, the famous Appian Way. Crucifixion was an already well-established form of capital punishment in the Roman Republic, one which involved the nailing of a condemned individual to a cross by the hands and feet until they bled to death or starved. This grizzly punishment would have been designed as a form of exemplary deterrence, with slaves all over Italy

relating stories of the vicious end suffered by those who had revolted against their owners and defied the power of the Roman state. It was a brutal end to the revolt of Spartacus. The Third Servile War had implications for slave-ownership and slavery in general in Italy during the era of the Late Roman Republic and the Early Roman Empire. Some classical scholars have argued that there was an improvement in the conditions slaves lived in and their treatment of them by their owners from the middle of the first century BC onwards and that this may have been owing

to residual fears about a potential Fourth Servile War and the threat to free Romans that Spartacus’ war had posed between 73 BC and 71 BC. There was also a marked increase in the use of free labour to carry out a range of tasks across Italy, particularly working on rural estates in the early imperial period, a development which may have been due to increased fears about having large numbers of slaves on estates here. This was possibly caused by other developments though. The era of major Roman conquests, for instance, ended just a few decades later during the

era of Emperor Caesar Augustus as he decided to consolidate Rome’s territorial empire rather than expand it. Without endless conquests that ended in mass enslavements of subjugated people Rome’s supply of abundant and cheap slaves dried up, leading to better treatment of existing slaves. Hence, Spartacus’ revolt was just one factor in the improved conditions slaves lived in under the Early Roman Empire. While the Third Servile War ended with individuals like Spartacus and his many allies paying the ultimate price, either falling in battle of being crucified as a warning to any potential future slave rebels, the suppression of

it was the making of Marcus Crassus’ political career. For a time in the early stages of the war, the slave revolt had presented an enormous threat to the safety of Rome itself and the villas of the rich elites scattered across the Italian countryside. In using his immense wealth to quickly arm and supply the legions which he then led south to crush the insurrection, Crassus acquired the legitimacy he had sought since the downfall of Sulla and managed to emerge from the military campaign with a greater share of the credit for crushing it than Pompey did. He

would go on to hold several senior political offices at Rome in the 60s BC. Meanwhile, Pompey went on to lead an immensely successful military campaign to the Eastern Mediterranean in the early 60s BC, one which over the course of several years saw the final annexation of the lands of the Seleucid Empire there, the military defeat of Rome’s bitterest eastern enemy, King Mithridates of Pontus in what is now northern Turkey and the diplomatic realignment of the region to make powers like the Kingdom of Judaea into full-fledged Roman client states. In the process the Kingdom of Thrace

would also become a satellite of Rome. Eventually, towards the end of the 60s BC, Crassus and Pompey began to form a political alliance along with another rising young politician, Gaius Julius Caesar. The First Triumvirate, which became public knowledge in 59 BC, provided the basis for the three men to wield power in the republic between them. When it collapsed years later Rome descended into civil war again. It is notable that two of the three individuals involved rose considerably in the political life of the Roman Republic owing to the Third Servile War that Spartacus led. Spartacus’ revolt

and the Third Servile War would inspire many other slave revolts and political movements against overt oppression over the centuries and millennia that followed. There would be nothing comparable to it again in Roman times, with the Third Servile War being the last of the three such conflicts to occur in the Late Roman Republic. Other cultures and time periods produced far more successful ones. For instance, the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt was born there in the middle of the thirteenth century out of a slave revolt when the Mamluk slaves of the Arab rulers managed to gain control over

the country and establish their own polity. Similarly, there were a great many different slave revolts throughout the Caribbean and other parts of the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries during the era of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. One of these, the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s and 1800s, would eventually lead to the establishment of the first nation state in the New World ruled by black people whose ancestors had been brought to the Americas as slaves. One of the main early leaders of the revolt against the French on Haiti, Toussaint Louverture, consciously viewed himself as a

latter-day Spartacus. In a somewhat different vein, when German communist agitators led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht launched a revolt against the centrist government of Germany in Berlin in January 1919, their attempted revolution became known as the Spartacist Uprising in recognition that they had founded a group called the Spartacus League back in 1914. Thus, Spartacus has remained an inspiration for slave revolts and movements against political and social oppression down to modern times and his name has accordingly been co-opted as such. Spartacus has also emerged as a culturally significant individual, with his story retold in many

different formats in modern times. For instance, as early as 1874, the Italian author, Raffaello Giovagnoli, published a book entitled Spartaco, while the great German cultural critic and playwright, Bertolt Brecht, made Spartacus the subject of the second play he ever completed. Less than twenty years later, the Hungarian author, Arthur Koestler, published his first book in English, The Gladiators. It focused on the revolt of Spartacus and his followers and was notably the book Koestler wrote right before he began work on Darkness at Noon. The latter is widely considered one of the great novels of the twentieth century

and with its anti-totalitarian themes, Koestler’s recent work before writing it on a group of slaves revolting against the oppression of their Roman owners was doubtlessly an influence. Another two decades later the film Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas in the title role and Laurence Olivier as Marcus Crassus, appeared. Based on a 1951 book by Howard Fast, the film was directed by the great Stanley Kubrick and won several Academy Awards, including a nod to Peter Ustinov for his depiction of Batiatus, the owner of the gladiatorial school in Capua where the revolt that launched the Third Servile War began.

Further television series have retold the story of Spartacus in recent decades. Though less critically lauded, they point towards the continuing interest in the slave leader’s story and the war he led against Rome between 73 BC and 71 BC. Spartacus is a very interesting historical figure. Rattle off the name today and almost anyone you meet will have either heard of it before and might even be familiar with the broad parameters of his story. He was the leader of a slave revolt against the might of the Roman state, a romantic figure whose story has been retold repeatedly

in books, films, television series and plays over the centuries. And yet, when we dig down beyond the romantic tale, we actually know virtually nothing about Spartacus. The amount of written source material concerning his life and the revolt which he led against Rome, the Third Servile War, found in the works of Plutarch, Appian, Florus and a handful of other fragments, stretches to just a few thousand words when compiled together. These provide little more than a few sentences about his early life and backstory and other than some conjecture about his possible ancestry we know almost nothing about

him other than that he hailed from Thrace and after fighting against the Roman state was enslaved and ended up at a gladiatorial school in Capua in the mid-70s BC. Thereafter we have a good bit more detail on the two or so years between when he and his accomplices initiated the Third Servile War and when he died fighting at the end of it. It must be said that it was an heroic struggle. For two and a half years a gang of men who were enslaved and oppressed managed to turn a small local revolt into a full

blown war in which they took over southern Italy and threatened the security of the city of Rome itself, drawing tens of thousands of men to their banner in the process. Even those Roman historians who wrote about Spartacus expressed admiration for his bravery. But his cause was ultimately doomed and the war was crushed brutally in 71 BC. In the end perhaps the reason why Spartacus has been so easy to romanticise is that we know so little about him. All that really exists is the colourful fable of an obscure slave who revolted against a great power, threatened

it for a brief time and then died valiantly in battle. What do you think of Spartacus? Was he a major slave leader and social upstart or has his rebellion simply been romanticized by Hollywood since the middle of the twentieth century? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.