Spartacus and the Third Servile War (73-71 BC): Slave Revolt

The Third Servile War was a great slave uprising in Italy that began in 73 BC, when about 70 to 80 gladiators led by the Thracian Spartacus escaped from a training school at Capua. Their small band grew into an army of tens of thousands that defeated several Roman forces and marched the length of the peninsula. It ended in 71 BC with Spartacus’s death in battle against Marcus Licinius Crassus and the crucifixion of thousands of captives, and it has made Spartacus one of the most famous rebels in history.

Background: slavery and gladiators in Roman Italy

By the first century BC, Roman conquests had brought enormous numbers of enslaved people into Italy. Captives from wars in Greece, Asia Minor, Gaul and the Balkans worked on large agricultural estates, in households and in workshops. In some rural areas, especially in the south, they made up a large part of the population.

Rome had already faced two major slave revolts, both in Sicily: the First Servile War of about 135-132 BC and a second rising in 104-100 BC. Neither had spread to mainland Italy.

Gladiators were a particular group. Most were slaves, prisoners of war or condemned men, trained in schools (ludi) owned by businessmen who hired them out for shows. The gladiatorial games were becoming a central part of Roman public life, and Capua in Campania was one of the main training centres.

Italy itself was unsettled. The Social War of 91-88 BC and Sulla’s civil war in 83-82 BC had devastated parts of the countryside, and many of Rome’s best troops were overseas, fighting in Spain against Quintus Sertorius and in the East against Mithridates VI of Pontus.

The breakout from Capua and early victories

In 73 BC a group of gladiators from the school of Lentulus Batiatus at Capua broke out. The sources give their number as between about 70 and 78. Plutarch says they had planned a larger escape that was betrayed, and that the survivors armed themselves with kitchen knives and spits, then seized a wagon carrying gladiatorial weapons.

Their leaders were Spartacus, a Thracian, and two Gauls, Crixus and Oenomaus. Ancient writers say Spartacus had once served with Roman forces, possibly as an auxiliary, before being enslaved. Plutarch adds that his wife, a Thracian woman with prophetic powers, accompanied him.

The fugitives took refuge on Mount Vesuvius, then a quiet, vine-covered mountain whose volcanic nature was not understood. Rome at first treated the affair as banditry and sent a praetor, Gaius Claudius Glaber, with a hastily raised force of about 3,000 men to blockade the only path up.

The rebels escaped the trap in a famous manoeuvre. According to Plutarch, they twisted wild vines into ladders, climbed down the cliffs on the side Glaber had left unguarded, and attacked his camp from behind, routing his men.

Victory brought recruits. Slaves from the estates of Campania and herdsmen from the hills poured in, along with some free poor. The rebels defeated another praetor, Publius Varinius, and his subordinates in a series of engagements in late 73 BC, capturing Varinius’s horse and the fasces, the symbols of a Roman magistrate’s authority. Oenomaus was killed in this early fighting.

Over the winter of 73-72 BC the movement spread across southern Italy, raiding towns such as Nola, Nuceria, Thurii and Metapontum. The sources say Spartacus tried to restrain the worst violence and to share plunder equally, and that the rebels manufactured their own weapons.

The campaigns of 72 BC

By 72 BC the Senate was alarmed enough to send both consuls, Lucius Gellius Publicola and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus, each with two legions. The rebel army split. Crixus, with a force often put at about 30,000 men, stayed in Apulia, where he was defeated and killed near Mount Garganus by an army under Gellius’s command.

Spartacus moved north and defeated the consuls one after the other. Appian reports that he sacrificed 300 Roman prisoners in honour of Crixus, while other writers say captives were made to fight as gladiators at his funeral rites. He then pressed on to Cisalpine Gaul in the far north, where he beat the governor, Gaius Cassius Longinus, near Mutina (Modena).

The way over the Alps now seemed open, and Plutarch suggests that Spartacus’s aim was to lead his followers out of Italy so they could return to their homelands in Thrace and Gaul. Instead the army turned south again. The sources do not explain why; perhaps many of his followers preferred to stay in Italy and plunder, or perhaps Spartacus himself thought of marching on Rome. He did not.

Crassus and the final battle

In late 72 BC the Senate gave the command to Marcus Licinius Crassus, a praetor and one of the richest men in Rome, with six new legions in addition to the surviving consular troops. When his legate Mummius disobeyed orders and was defeated, Crassus revived decimation, an ancient punishment in which one man in every ten of a disgraced unit was chosen by lot and executed. Plutarch says 500 men who had fled first were punished in this way, so 50 were killed.

Spartacus withdrew to Bruttium, the toe of Italy, and arranged with Cilician pirates to ferry part of his army to Sicily, where another slave war might be lit. The pirates took his payment and sailed away without the rebels. Crassus then sealed the peninsula with a ditch and rampart which Plutarch says ran for 300 stadia, roughly 55 kilometres, from sea to sea.

On a snowy winter night in early 71 BC, Spartacus filled part of the ditch with earth, timber and bodies and broke through with a portion of his army. By now Rome had recalled Pompey from Spain and Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus from Thrace, and Crassus was eager to finish the war before either could claim it.

Divisions weakened the rebels at the end. A breakaway group under the Gauls Gannicus and Castus was destroyed by Crassus in Lucania. Spartacus, his options closing, turned to face Crassus in a pitched battle in 71 BC, probably near the upper Silarus (Sele) river in Lucania.

Plutarch says that before the fighting Spartacus killed his own horse, declaring that if he won he would have plenty of horses and if he lost he would need none. He tried to reach Crassus himself, killing two centurions, before he was surrounded and cut down. His body was never found among the dead.

About 6,000 captured rebels were crucified along the Appian Way between Capua and Rome, a deliberate display of terror on one of Italy’s busiest roads. Around 5,000 survivors who fled north were caught and killed in Etruria by Pompey, who then wrote to the Senate that while Crassus had defeated the slaves, he had pulled the war up by the roots.

Key people

• Spartacus: Thracian gladiator and leader of the revolt, praised even by hostile Roman writers for his courage and intelligence.
• Crixus and Oenomaus: Gaulish gladiators who shared the early leadership; both died in battle.
• Marcus Licinius Crassus (c. 115-53 BC): The commander who defeated the rebels and used the victory to advance his political career.
• Pompey (106-48 BC): Arrived at the very end yet claimed much of the credit, souring his relations with Crassus.
• Gaius Claudius Glaber: The praetor whose defeat at Vesuvius turned a breakout into a war.

Consequences and legacy

The revolt did not change Roman slavery, which continued for centuries. Its immediate political effect was on the careers of the two generals. Crassus was granted only an ovation, a lesser form of triumph considered appropriate for a war against slaves, while Pompey celebrated a full triumph for Spain. Rivals but needing each other, they shared the consulship in 70 BC, a partnership that later fed into the First Triumvirate.

Some historians argue that the fear Spartacus inspired made Roman landowners more cautious about concentrating large numbers of slaves, and that it contributed over time to greater use of tenant farmers. This is debated, and the evidence is indirect.

Spartacus became a symbol of resistance to oppression in modern times. The Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture was called a “black Spartacus”, Karl Marx admired him, and German revolutionary socialists named their group the Spartacus League, which led the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919. Aram Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus (1956) and the 1960 film carried the story to wide audiences.

By the numbers

Myths and facts

Myth: Spartacus led a campaign to abolish slavery. No ancient source says so. The rebels sought freedom for themselves, and the sources suggest some of them hoped to go home beyond the Alps.

Myth: “I am Spartacus.” The scene of rebels shielding their leader comes from the 1960 film directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas, based on Howard Fast’s 1951 novel. It has no ancient basis.

Fact: we only know Spartacus through his enemies. Every surviving account was written by Romans or Greeks of the Roman world, mostly long after the events, so his own motives must be inferred.

Timeline

• 73 BC: About 70-78 gladiators break out of the school of Lentulus Batiatus at Capua.
• 73 BC: The rebels escape Glaber’s blockade on Mount Vesuvius and defeat his force.
• 73 BC, autumn: Victories over the praetor Publius Varinius; the rebel army grows rapidly.
• 72 BC: Crixus is defeated and killed near Mount Garganus in Apulia.
• 72 BC: Spartacus defeats both consuls and the governor of Cisalpine Gaul near Mutina.
• 72 BC, late: Crassus receives the command and restores discipline by decimation.
• 72-71 BC, winter: Crassus walls off Bruttium; Spartacus breaks through.
• 71 BC: Spartacus is killed in the final battle in Lucania; about 6,000 prisoners are crucified.
• 70 BC: Crassus and Pompey hold the consulship together.

Why it matters

The Third Servile War was the largest slave revolt the Roman world faced on Italian soil, and for two years it humiliated Roman armies. It helped launch Crassus and Pompey towards the summit of Roman politics, and the figure of Spartacus has outlived the Republic that killed him as a lasting emblem of the struggle for freedom.