Third Servile War

Between 73 and 71 BC an army of escaped slaves, led most famously by the gladiator Spartacus, defeated one Roman force after another and roamed the length of Italy. Known also as the Gladiator War or the War of Spartacus, it was the third and last of the great slave revolts against the Roman Republic, and the only one fought in the Italian heartland. It was finally crushed by Marcus Licinius Crassus, and its suppression helped launch the political careers of Crassus and Pompey.

By the 1st century BC the Roman economy depended heavily on slaves, many of them captives from Rome's wars of conquest. Huge numbers worked on estates and in mines, especially in southern Italy and Sicily, in harsh conditions and with no legal protection. Two earlier slave wars, beginning in 135 and 104 BC, had erupted in Sicily, but Italy itself had never seen a rising on this scale.

In 73 BC around 200 gladiators at a training school in Capua plotted to break out. The plot was betrayed, but about 70 of them fought their way free with kitchen knives and spits and seized a supply of weapons. They chose as leaders two Gauls, Crixus and Oenomaus, and Spartacus, described in the sources as a Thracian. Other slaves and rural herdsmen joined them as they raided the Campanian countryside.

The Romans at first treated the outbreak as banditry. A hastily raised force of 3,000 under the praetor Gaius Claudius Glaber trapped the rebels on Mount Vesuvius, but they climbed down the cliffs on ropes made from vines, took the Romans from behind and destroyed them. A second praetor, Publius Varinius, was also defeated. By the winter of 73 to 72 BC the rebels were said to number some 70,000, and they spent it training and raiding towns across the south.

In 72 BC the Senate sent both consuls against them. One of them, Lucius Gellius, caught a separate band under Crixus near Mount Garganus and destroyed most of it, killing Crixus. After that the ancient accounts diverge. Appian says Spartacus beat both consular armies, sacrificed 300 Roman prisoners in gladiatorial combat in revenge for Crixus, and considered marching on Rome before turning back south with a following he puts at 120,000. Plutarch instead has him defeat the governor of Cisalpine Gaul near Mutina. What the rebels intended, whether to escape over the Alps or to keep plundering Italy, is unclear, and no source says they aimed to abolish slavery.

In 71 BC the Senate gave the war to Crassus, with eight legions. He imposed brutal discipline, reviving the punishment of decimation for units that failed. His legions began to win, driving the rebels south to the toe of Italy. Spartacus reportedly paid Cilician pirates to carry part of his army to Sicily, but they took the money and failed to appear. Crassus then walled off the peninsula near Rhegium.

As Pompey's army returned from Spain and other forces landed at Brundisium, Crassus hurried to finish the war before others could claim the credit. Spartacus broke through the siege lines, but his army was losing cohesion. He turned to fight in what is known as the Battle of the Silarius River, and his forces were routed. Spartacus was said to have died on the field, but his body was never found. About 6,000 captives were crucified along the Appian Way between Capua and Rome, and Pompey's troops killed some 5,000 fugitives in the north.

Pompey claimed that he had ended the war, to Crassus's anger. Both men kept their armies near Rome and were elected consuls for 70 BC, an early example of the military pressure that would undermine the Republic. Crassus later died leading an invasion of Parthia at Carrhae in 53 BC. Rome never again faced a slave rising of this size.

Our 100 BCE map shows the Roman Republic in control of the whole of Italy a generation before the revolt.