Spartacus
Spartacus
Executed 71 b.c.e.
Slave, gladiator, and revolutionary
The People’s Champion . The Thracian-born slave Spartacus had once served as an auxiliary in the Roman army and had been sent to Capua to train as a gladiator. In 73 B.C.E. Spartacus escaped from the training school. With several companion escapees, Spartacus led a revolt, having attracted Thracian, Celtic, and German fugitives. His army, numbering approximately ninety thousand, defeated several Roman armies. The renegade gladiators and fugitives plundered Italy as they moved up and down the peninsula until Crassus caught and executed Spartacus in 71 B.C.E. All of Spartacus’s followers who had been caught were then crucified along the Appian Way. Although the gladiators who escaped from Capua had been slaves, they did not attempt to recruit runaway slaves from the towns around Italy. Instead they attracted downtrodden and disillusioned country folk. The experience is a reminder that gladiators, whether criminal or slave, were human beings whose dignity was compromised in the interest of mass entertainment.
Sources
Edward T. Salmon and Andrew William Lintott, “Spartacus,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, third edition, edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 1433.
Joseph Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Idea of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).