Spartacus: The Gladiator Who Defied Rome

In the summer of 73 BCE, somewhere in the leather-and-blood smell of a gladiator school in Capua, in southern Italy, a small group of armed slaves fought their way out of the gates and into the countryside. At their head was a Thracian named Spartacus, a former soldier who had been condemned to the arena. Within two years, this man and his desperate companions would defeat the armies of the Roman Republic sent against them, throw the whole of Italy into panic, and write a name in history that has outlasted nearly every Roman general of his time.

Who Was Spartacus?

Almost nothing certain is known about Spartacus before his revolt. He was, according to the Greek historian Appian and the Roman historian Florus, a Thracian — a people renowned for their fierce warrior culture from the lands north of the Aegean. He had at some point served as a soldier in the Roman army, perhaps even as an auxiliary, before being captured and sold into slavery. He ended up in the ludus of Gnaeus Lentulus Batiatus at Capua, where he was trained as a gladiator. Modern excavations have uncovered what may well be the very grounds of that school, complete with cells, training yards, and the bones of the men who died there.

The conditions inside such schools were brutal. Gladiators lived on hard rations, were branded, and were taught to kill or be killed for the entertainment of the public. Spartacus and roughly seventy companions — some accounts say as many as two hundred — decided they would rather die fighting than in the sand. They seized kitchen knives, killed their guards, broke out of the school, and fled into the countryside.

Escape and the Building of an Army

The first Roman force sent to recapture them was small and overconfident — a detachment of perhaps three thousand men under the praetor Claudius Glaber, who camped carelessly on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Spartacus and his followers climbed down a vine-strewn cliff, attacked the camp from behind, and slaughtered the soldiers. A second force under Varinius met the same fate.

These early victories did something more important than simply save Spartacus’s life. They made him a destination. Runaway slaves, desperate peasants, and broken men of every kind began to drift into his camp. Within months, Spartacus commanded a force of 70,000 or more, possibly a great deal more. Among his early followers were two other escaped gladiators from the same school: the Gallic Crixus and the German Oenomaus, each of whom led his own detachment. The Roman senate, slow to react, sent neither a serious army nor a competent commander.

Italy Trembles

Spartacus and his army now controlled much of southern Italy. The rich farmland of Campania lay open to them, and they sacked the rich city of Nola and other towns. Slaves from the great estates, many of them chained field hands, ran to join them, and a few free peasants, too, attached themselves to the revolt. Italy, which had been the source of the Mediterranean world’s grain, was in chaos.

The slave-army was not, however, a disciplined legion. Many of its followers were noncombatants, and the leadership squabbled. Spartacus wanted to march his men north, over the Alps, and out of Roman territory altogether — back to their homelands, or at least to freedom beyond the reach of Rome. Crixus disagreed, broke off with a large detachment, and was killed by a Roman force. The revolt had become, in Spartacus’s mind, less a war of vengeance than a desperate march.

Crassus and the Long Road to Suppression

In 72 BCE the Roman Senate finally appointed a serious commander: Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the richest men in Rome and, not incidentally, a ruthless ex-campaigner. Crassus gathered a large force, perhaps as many as ten legions, and began a long, methodical campaign to trap the rebels. Spartacus tried to negotiate — offering Crassus a “personal friendship” that the Roman read as the offer of a private army — but Crassus demanded unconditional surrender.

Crassus’s army won a series of bloody engagements, including a near-disastrous near-rout in which Spartacus’s men killed two Roman legates and seized their equipment. To restore discipline, Crassus revived an old Roman punishment and decimated his own men, killing one in ten of the unit that had fled. It is one of the last known Roman decimations.

Pressed from the south, Spartacus turned his men back toward the north, intending to cross the Alps through Cisalpine Gaul. But the weather, the supply situation, and the slave-army’s sheer size made the passage impossible. He turned again toward the south, hoping to escape by sea. Piratic ships were supposed to meet him at the straits of Messina but failed to appear. He and his army were now trapped in the toe of Italy.

The Final Battle

In 71 BCE the decisive battle was fought on the peninsula of Lucania, in southern Italy, near the headwaters of the Siler River. The exact site is lost, but ancient writers agree on the outcome. Spartacus’s army, perhaps still around 50,000 strong, faced Crassus and eight of his legions. Spartacus himself, fighting at the front, was wounded in the thigh with an iron spike but refused to fall and kept swinging his sword until he was cut down. With him died an estimated 60,000 of his followers, their bodies never recovered.

The bodies lined the Appian Way, Rome’s oldest and most famous highway, for nearly 200 kilometers. Spartacus’s body was never found, and Crassus could not even show Rome the head of the rebel leader.

Pompey, who had been mopping up the remnants of the slave-army in the north, took care to plant himself in the path of the final survivors so that some of the credit for the war’s end would fall on him. Crassus and Pompey would both, within a few years, be members of the First Triumvirate with Julius Caesar — the very general who, like Crassus, would later be drawn into the collapse of the Roman Republic.

The Man and the Legend

Spartacus left almost no personal writing. The few ancient sources we have — Plutarch, Appian, Florus, and the late Historia Augusta — are mostly written from the perspective of a Roman ruling class that, by Spartacus’s time, was already beginning to feel uneasy about the scale of Italian slavery. Plutarch’s account of Spartacus’s death in particular is sympathetic, and the picture it paints of a man who preferred death to capture has inspired two thousand years of rebels, novelists, and film directors.

Whether Spartacus was a freedom-fighter in the modern sense is doubtful. He seems to have wanted, above all, to lead his men out of Italy alive. Yet the sheer scale of the revolt — the way it briefly made Rome herself tremble — marks it as one of the most serious internal threats the Roman state ever faced, and it shaped how Rome dealt with slave revolts for the rest of its history. The Roman legion, the institution that finally destroyed Spartacus, would go on to make its emperors masters of the Mediterranean.

Spartacus in Memory

Karl Marx later read Spartacus as the first proletarian revolutionary. Howard Fast’s 1951 novel Spartacus and Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film made him a global icon of resistance to oppression. Even before that, in the years after the revolt, Roman aristocrats consoled themselves by repeating a line, supposedly from a Greek play, that “the sun has never seen anything more terrible than this.” History, on the whole, has agreed with them — while quietly remembering that the most dangerous enemy the Roman Republic ever faced was, for one blazing summer, a Thracian gladiator with nothing left to lose.