The Thracian Gladiator Who Led 70,000 Slaves Through Italy for Two Years and Was Killed Without His Body Being Found in 71 BCE

In summer 73 BCE seventy gladiators escaped from the training school of Lentulus Batiatus at Capua, in central Italy. The training school provided gladiators for the games at Rome. The escaped men were predominantly Thracian and Gallic prisoners-of-war. The leader was a Thracian named Spartacus.

The party took refuge on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. They were joined within weeks by escaped agricultural slaves from the surrounding Campanian latifundia. Within months the band numbered in the thousands. Within a year it numbered approximately 70,000.

Why it was hard to suppress

The Spartacus revolt is the third — and largest — of the three Servile Wars that the Roman Republic fought against its enslaved population in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. The earlier wars in Sicily (135-132 BCE and 104-100 BCE) had each taken years to suppress and had each cost the lives of senior Roman commanders. The Spartacus revolt was worse.

The army’s military effectiveness was a surprise to the Roman senate. Spartacus had been a regular Roman auxiliary soldier before his enslavement and gladiator career. He understood Roman tactics. His army adopted Roman organisation, drilled in Roman methods, and fielded captured Roman weapons.

In 72 BCE Spartacus defeated successive Roman armies under the praetors Publius Varinius, Lucius Cossinius, and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus, and the consul Lucius Gellius. The defeats were embarrassments. The army marched the length of Italy twice — first north towards the Alps (where Spartacus reportedly intended to release the men to return home), then south again when the army refused to disband.

Crassus

In late 72 BCE the Roman senate appointed Marcus Licinius Crassus — the wealthiest private citizen in the Republic, a personal rival of Pompey — to a special command with eight legions and unprecedented authority. Crassus was 42 and politically ambitious. He intended to settle the war before Pompey, then returning from a campaign in Spain, could share the credit.

Crassus reorganised the Roman army using decimation — the execution of one in ten randomly selected soldiers in any unit that had retreated — to restore discipline after the 72 BCE defeats. The decimation order was applied at least once to a cohort that had broken in front of the slaves. About 500 Romans were beaten to death.

The Roman army pushed Spartacus south through Lucania to the southern tip of Italy. Spartacus negotiated with Cilician pirates to ferry his army across to Sicily — where the earlier slave revolts had succeeded for several years. The pirates accepted payment and then sailed away without delivering the ships.

The trapped army turned to fight Crassus at the Battle of the Siler River in spring 71 BCE. The slaves lost. The mainland body of Spartacus’s army was destroyed.

Spartacus’s body

Spartacus is described in the contemporary Roman sources as having died on the battlefield — fighting on after being wounded in the thigh, killing two Roman centurions personally before being cut down. The Roman troops searched the battlefield for his body afterwards.

The body was never identified. The Roman explanation, in Plutarch and Appian, was that the body had been so disfigured that it could not be distinguished. The Spartacus legend has, since the 19th century, drawn on the missing body to suggest survival or escape. No contemporary or near-contemporary source supports survival; the silence in the immediate aftermath suggests death without identification rather than escape.

The crosses

Crassus crucified approximately 6,000 surviving captives along the Appian Way between Capua and Rome — a distance of approximately 200 km — at intervals of about 35 metres. The crosses were left standing for years after the war as a public deterrent against further slave revolts. The bodies decomposed in situ. The Appian Way crucifixions are one of the most documented mass-execution events of Roman antiquity.

About 5,000 of the slaves had escaped north from the Siler River battlefield and were intercepted by Pompey’s returning army in Etruria. Pompey killed them all. Pompey then sent a dispatch to the senate claiming that he, rather than Crassus, had “ended the war” — which produced the political feud between Crassus and Pompey that would dominate Roman politics for the following decade.

The Spartacus revolt did not end Roman slavery. The Roman senate, however, did pass legislation in the years immediately after 71 BCE expanding the legal protections of slave-owners against revolts — including a law that required the execution of all slaves living in any household where a master was murdered, regardless of individual culpability. The Spartacus revolt had not made the Roman slave system more humane. It had made it more brutal.