Spartacus

• 1. Introduction

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  Spartacus, a Thracian gladiator who lived from about 103 BC to 71 BC, launched a revolt against Rome with little more than kitchen utensils. In 73 BC around seventy gladiators broke out of a training school near Capua. Rome barely noticed at first. That small breakout became the Third Servile War, a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic.

  Yet the man at the center of it is strangely hard to see. Nobody who knew him left a surviving word about him. So who was he before the arena? How did a band that small beat Roman soldiers? And what did he actually want? Every answer comes from writers who were not there.

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• 2. Voices From Later

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  Plutarch of Chaeronea, who lived from 46 AD to 119 AD, wrote the Life of Crassus, one of only two main sources on Spartacus. Appian of Alexandria, who lived from 95 AD to 165 AD, covered the revolt in his Civil Wars. Both works date to the Second Century AD, a hundred years or more after the war.

  The gap shapes everything we know. None of the surviving authors was an eyewitness, and none was a slave or former slave. The earliest of them wrote at least a generation after the fighting. Their accounts contradict each other, and little is known about Spartacus outside the war itself.

  Only two points are shared by every source. He had been a gladiator, and he was an accomplished military leader. Appian and Plutarch even tell the story of Rome's early defeats in divergent ways.

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• 3. Soldier To Gladiator

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  The river Strymon, in Thrace, is where the sources place the birth of Spartacus. Thrace is now Bulgaria. He may have belonged to the Maedi tribe, who lived on the south-western edge of Thrace, beside the Roman province of Macedonia. Plutarch called him "a Thracian of Nomadic stock".

  Appian gave a short life story. He called Spartacus "a Thracian by birth, who had once served as a soldier with the Romans, but had since been a prisoner and sold for a gladiator". Florus offered a longer chain. In his telling, a Thracian mercenary became a Roman soldier, deserted, was enslaved, and was finally made a gladiator for his strength.

  Plutarch adds that the wife of Spartacus, a prophetess of the Maedi, was enslaved alongside him.

  The name itself turns up around the Black Sea. Five of the twenty kings of the Thracian Spartocid dynasty of the Cimmerian Bosporus and Pontus bore it. A Thracian recorded as Sparta, Spardacus or Sparadokos was the father of Seuthes I of the Odrysae. One modern author puts Spartacus at about thirty when the revolt began, which places his birth around 103 BC.

  Lentulus Batiatus owned the gladiatorial school, or ludus, near Capua where Spartacus was trained. Some readings of the sources say he arrived there as a captive taken by the legions. He fought as a murmillo, a heavyweight gladiator. A murmillo carried a large oblong shield called a scutum and a broad, straight sword, a gladius, about 18 inches long.

  The plotters fought their way out of the school and seized several wagons of gladiatorial weapons and armour. They defeated the soldiers sent after them and plundered the countryside around Capua. Many other slaves joined them. Eventually they withdrew to a more defensible position on Mount Vesuvius.

  Once free, the escapees chose three leaders. They were Spartacus and two Gallic slaves, Crixus and Oenomaus. Roman authors assumed a single group with Spartacus in command. They may have projected their own hierarchical view of armies onto a spontaneous organization, and so pushed the other leaders into lesser roles.

  The slopes of Mount Vesuvius were steep, and that steepness would soon decide the rebels' first test against Rome.

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• 4. Rome Underestimates Them

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  A revolt in Hispania and the Third Mithridatic War had pulled the Roman legions far from Italy. Rome also saw the escaped gladiators as a matter for policing rather than a war. The Senate sent militia under the praetor Gaius Claudius Glaber, who besieged the camp on Vesuvius and hoped that hunger would force a surrender.

  Spartacus answered with vines. His men made ropes from them, climbed down the steep side of the volcano, and attacked the unfortified Roman camp from behind. Most of the militia were killed. A second expedition fared no better. The rebels nearly captured its commander, killed his lieutenants and seized the military equipment.

  These victories drew more and more slaves, along with many herdsmen and shepherds from the region. The army swelled to some 70,000. Celts, Gauls and other peoples marched together, and some were veterans of the legions, thanks to the earlier Social War of 91-87 BC.

  Country slaves made better recruits than city slaves. Rural life had prepared them for hard campaigning. Urban slaves, by contrast, were called "privileged" and "lazy". Spartacus proved an excellent tactician, which suggests he may have had earlier military experience. His followers lacked formal training but used local materials skilfully and fought in unusual ways.

  The rebels spent the winter of 73-72 BC training, arming and equipping new recruits. Their raiding reached the towns of Nola, Nuceria, Thurii and Metapontum. The distances between those places suggest two groups, one commanded by Spartacus and one by Crixus. When spring came in 72 BC, the rebels left their winter camps and began moving north.

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• 5. Crassus Takes Command

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  Alarmed by the defeat of the praetor's forces, the Senate sent Lucius Gellius and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus with a pair of consular legions. The legions first defeated a group of 30,000 rebels under Crixus near Mount Garganus. Then they lost to Spartacus.

  The Senate next turned to Marcus Licinius Crassus, the wealthiest man in Rome and the only volunteer for the job. He received eight legions, upwards of 40,000 trained soldiers. Crassus ruled them harshly. He revived decimation, in which one-tenth of the men were killed, so that they would fear him more than the enemy.

  For unclear reasons, Spartacus had retreated to the south of Italy. In early 71 BC he and his followers moved north again. Crassus placed six legions along the borders of the region. He sent his legate Mummius with two legions to get behind the rebels, with orders not to fight. Mummius attacked anyway, at a moment that looked promising, and was routed.

  After that, the legions of Crassus won several engagements and pushed Spartacus south through Lucania. Eventually the rebels camped at Rhegium, now Reggio Calabria, near the Strait of Messina.

  Plutarch says Spartacus struck a bargain with Cilician pirates to carry him and some 2,000 men to Sicily. There he meant to incite a slave revolt and gather reinforcements. The pirates took payment and then abandoned him. Minor sources mention raft and shipbuilding attempts, but Crassus took unspecified measures to stop any crossing, and the rebels gave up.

  Crassus followed the rebels back toward Rhegium and built fortifications across the isthmus there, despite raids against his workers. The rebels were cut off from their supplies.

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• 6. The Last Stand

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  The legions of Pompey, back from Hispania, were ordered by the Senate to head south and help Crassus. Crassus feared that Pompey would take the credit for beating Spartacus. Spartacus, hearing of Pompey, tried to make a truce. Crassus refused.

  Spartacus and his army then broke through the Roman fortifications and headed for Brundusium, with the legions of Crassus in pursuit. The legions caught one portion of the rebels, separated from the main army. Discipline collapsed, and small groups attacked the oncoming Romans on their own.

  Spartacus turned his whole force around and threw it against the legions in a last stand. The rebels were routed completely, and the vast majority died on the field.

  The battle is placed at what is now Senerchia, on the right bank of the river Sele, in the High Sele Valley. At the time the area belonged to Lucania. It reaches the border with Oliveto Citra and stretches toward Calabritto, near the village of Quaglietta. Armour and swords of the Roman era have been found there since 1899.

  Plutarch, Appian and Florus all say Spartacus died in the battle. Appian adds that his body was never found. Six thousand captured survivors were crucified, in a line along the Appian Way from Rome to Capua, a distance of more than 100 miles. That road ended beside the town where the school he had escaped once stood.

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• 7. What He Wanted

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  Classical historians disagreed about the aims of Spartacus. Plutarch wrote that he wished to escape north into Cisalpine Gaul and send his men home. That raises a puzzle. After defeating the consular legions, he had a clear way over the Alps, yet he turned south.

  Appian and Florus claim that he meant to march on Rome. Appian also says he later gave up that plan, which may only reflect Roman fear. A statement by Plutarch, together with the independently operating groups of the early campaign, suggests another explanation. Some of the escaped slaves preferred to plunder Italy rather than flee over the Alps.

  None of his actions openly suggests an aim to reform Roman society or abolish slavery. No historical account claims that this was the goal.

  That silence did not stop later admirers. Voltaire called the Third Servile War "the only just war in history". Classical historians never contradict that reading, even though none of them supports it.

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• 8. A Name That Travelled

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  Karl Marx listed Spartacus among his heroes. He called him "the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history" and a "great general, noble character, real representative of the ancient proletariat". Communists and socialists made him an icon. The German Spartacus League of 1915-18 was a forerunner of the Communist Party of Germany, and a communist uprising there in January 1919 was named the Spartacist uprising.

  Toussaint Louverture, a leader of the slave revolt that led to Haiti's independence, was called the "Black Spartacus". Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Bavarian Illuminati, often called himself Spartacus in his letters. Spartacus Books, one of the longest running collectively-run leftist bookstores in North America, carries the name. So does the village of Spartak, in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine.

  In the Soviet Union and communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, the name reached athletics. The Spartakiad was a Soviet bloc version of the Olympic games. Czechoslovakia held a mass gymnastics exhibition under the same name every five years. FC Spartak Moscow is one of many Spartak clubs in Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Serbia and Slovakia. The Ottawa Senators have a mascot called Spartacat.

  Artists kept returning to him as well. Raffaello Giovagnoli wrote a historical novel in 1874. Howard Fast's novel became the 1960 film directed by Stanley Kubrick, which Kirk Douglas executive-produced and starred in. The Starz series ran from January 2010 to April 2013, with Andy Whitfield and later Liam McIntyre in the title role. Aram Khachaturian wrote a ballet in 1956. On a lighter note, the Legends of Tomorrow season 6 premiere has an alien abduct and eat him.

  Spartacus Peak, on Livingston Island in the South Shetland Islands, also bears his name.

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