Spartacus

Spartacus was a Thracian gladiator who escaped from a training school at Capua in 73 BCE and became the leader of the largest slave revolt in the history of the Roman Republic, known as the Third Servile War. For two years his army, which grew to tens of thousands of escaped slaves and poor free men, defeated several Roman forces and marched the length of Italy, until it was destroyed by Marcus Licinius Crassus in 71 BCE. Little is known about him as a person, but he has become one of history's best-known symbols of resistance to oppression.

Everything known about Spartacus was written by Romans and Greeks from the side of the slave owners, and none of it by eyewitnesses. The fullest surviving accounts are Plutarch's Life of Crassus and Appian's Civil Wars, both written in the second century CE, more than 150 years after the revolt. The contemporary historian Sallust wrote about the war in his Histories, but only fragments survive, and shorter accounts appear in later writers such as Florus and Orosius. The sources often disagree on numbers, routes and the order of events, and their picture of Spartacus's motives reflects Roman assumptions. Much of his story therefore has to be reconstructed with caution.

Spartacus came from Thrace, a region roughly covering modern Bulgaria and parts of Greece and Turkey, and some writers link him to the Maedi, a tribe on the middle Strymon river. His birth date is unknown; a date around 103 BCE is sometimes given but is only an estimate. The ancient accounts of how he became a slave differ. Appian says he had fought against the Romans and been taken prisoner; Florus says he had served as an auxiliary in the Roman army, deserted, turned to banditry and was enslaved. Both suggest he had military experience, which would help explain his later success. Plutarch describes him as strong, intelligent and more cultured than his station, adds that his wife, a Thracian prophetess, was with him, and calls him "more Hellenic than Thracian", a phrase meant as praise by a Greek writer.

He was sold to a gladiator school near Capua, in Campania, owned by Lentulus Batiatus. Gladiators were mostly slaves, prisoners of war and condemned criminals, trained to fight in public shows, and conditions in the schools were harsh.

In 73 BCE about seventy gladiators broke out of the school, reportedly armed with kitchen knives and skewers, and seized a cart of gladiatorial weapons on the road. They chose Spartacus and two Gauls, Crixus and Oenomaus, as their leaders, and took refuge on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, near modern Naples. Slaves and herdsmen from the surrounding countryside joined them.

Rome's main armies were then away fighting in Spain and against Mithridates of Pontus in the east, and the Senate treated the outbreak as a police matter. The praetor Gaius Claudius Glaber, with a hastily raised force of about 3,000 men, blockaded the rebels on the mountain. According to the ancient accounts, they climbed down the cliffs on ropes made of wild vines, came round behind the Roman camp and routed it. A second praetor, Publius Varinius, was also defeated. Through the winter of 73 to 72 BCE the rebels raided across southern Italy, attacking towns and estates, and their numbers grew rapidly. Spartacus is said to have tried to restrain some of the looting, without much success.

In 72 BCE the Senate sent both consuls, Lucius Gellius Publicola and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus, against the rebels. The movement seems to have split: a large group under Crixus, perhaps mostly Gauls and Germans, was destroyed by Gellius near Mount Garganus in Apulia, and Crixus was killed. Spartacus defeated the consuls in turn, and is reported to have made Roman prisoners fight as gladiators at a funeral in honour of Crixus. He then marched north and beat the governor of Cisalpine Gaul, Gaius Cassius Longinus, near Mutina, modern Modena.

The way over the Alps now seemed open, and Plutarch says Spartacus intended to lead his followers out of Italy so they could return home. Instead the army turned back south. The reason is unknown; the sources suggest that many followers preferred to stay and plunder, and Appian claims that Spartacus considered marching on Rome itself. Estimates of his army's size at its height range from about 70,000 to 120,000 people, figures that may be exaggerated but show the scale of the crisis.

Late in 72 BCE the Senate gave command to Crassus, the richest man in Rome, who raised a large new army of around eight legions. When part of his force fled in an early clash, he revived the old punishment of decimation, executing one man in ten, according to Plutarch. Spartacus withdrew to the toe of Italy near Rhegium and arranged for Cilician pirates to ferry part of his army to Sicily, where earlier slave revolts had broken out, but the pirates took his payment and failed to appear. Crassus then dug a long ditch and wall across the peninsula to trap the rebels.

Spartacus broke through, probably in early 71 BCE. By then Pompey was returning from Spain with his army, and Crassus, anxious to claim the victory himself, pressed for a decisive battle. Spartacus's forces were weakened by splits and losses, and in the spring of 71 BCE, in Lucania in southern Italy, probably near the upper Sele river, they were defeated. The ancient writers say Spartacus died fighting, trying to reach Crassus himself; his body was never found. About 6,000 captured rebels were crucified along the Appian Way between Capua and Rome. Pompey's army caught around 5,000 fugitives in the north and he claimed to have finished the war, to Crassus's lasting resentment. The two men, later partners with Julius Caesar in the alliance known as the First Triumvirate, shared the consulship in 70 BCE.

Nothing in the sources suggests that Spartacus aimed to abolish slavery or reform Roman society, and slavery remained central to the Roman economy for centuries. The ancient writers present his goals as escape, plunder or revenge, and the evidence points to a loose coalition of groups with different aims rather than a single movement with a programme. His skill as a commander and the scale of what he achieved with untrained followers are not in doubt.

Roman writers remembered the revolt as a terrifying disaster, but from the eighteenth century Spartacus was recast as a hero of freedom. The Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture was hailed as a "Black Spartacus" in the Haitian Revolution, and Karl Marx admired him as a genuine representative of the ancient working class. The Spartacus League, the German revolutionary group of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, took his name in 1916, as told on the History of Germany page. Novels, a ballet by Aram Khachaturian and Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film made him a figure of popular culture, often at some distance from the little that is actually known. His revolt is part of the wider story of ancient Rome and the History of Italy.