Spartacus
The Thracian gladiator whose 73 BC breakout became Rome's largest slave revolt, and whose defeat made him history's enduring symbol of resistance.
In 73 BC, roughly seventy men broke out of a gladiator barracks in the town of Capua armed with kitchen knives and cooking skewers. Two years later their leader commanded a moving army of tens of thousands, had beaten one Roman force after another, and had marched the length of Italy in both directions. Not since Hannibal had an enemy roamed the peninsula so freely. His name was Spartacus, and nearly everything recorded about him was written by the people he terrified.
The breakout at Capua
Spartacus was a Thracian, born near the Strymon river in what is now Bulgaria, and may once have served as an auxiliary in the Roman army before being enslaved and sold to a gladiator school owned by Lentulus Batiatus. In 73 BC the fighters there plotted an escape; when it was betrayed, about seventy of them fought clear with whatever was in the kitchen, seized a wagon of real gladiatorial weapons, and dug in on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. When Rome sent militia to swat them, Spartacus destroyed it. Word spread, and escaped slaves and the rural poor swelled his ranks; ancient writers put the total, women and children included, as high as 120,000.
Two years the legions could not end
From 73 to 71 BC the revolt beat consular armies in the open field, a humiliation Rome struggled to explain. What Spartacus actually wanted is still debated: the likeliest reading is that he meant to lead his followers north and out over the Alps to freedom, yet for reasons unknown the host turned back south. Rome finally handed the war to Marcus Licinius Crassus, its richest man, who restored discipline by reviving decimation, executing his own men by lot. Spartacus was cornered and killed in battle at the Silarus river in 71 BC; his body was never found. Crassus crucified some 6,000 captured rebels along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome and left them hanging as a lesson. Pompey, marching home from Spain, mopped up the survivors and claimed the glory, a theft that soured the two warlords toward each other for years.
The prisoner who outlived Rome
The crucifixions were meant to erase Spartacus. They immortalized him instead. Because every surviving account is Roman and hostile, from Plutarch and Appian to Sallust and Florus, we have not a single word from the man himself. That silence left a blank the modern world filled with its own hopes. Karl Marx called him the most splendid fellow in all of ancient history. Toussaint Louverture was hailed as the Black Spartacus of the Haitian revolution. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht named their revolutionary group the Spartacus League (Spartakusbund) after Spartacus: the Spartacus Group from 1916, formalized as the Spartacus League in November 1918. The armed January 1919 Berlin revolt it was tied to became known as the Spartacist uprising. Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film gave the world the line I am Spartacus. The man who may have wanted nothing grander than to get his people out of Italy became, against Rome's wishes and beyond his own knowledge, the enduring symbol of the slave who fights back.