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Ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play. You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer. There's a new way to sweetgreen Meat wraps handheld, hearty and made for life on the move. With bold, chef crafted flavors, fresh ingredients and over 40 grams of protein. They're built to satisfy without slowing you down. Try wraps today in the app or@order.sweetgreen.com available at all participating locations. This gladiator brutally fought his way out of prison in Southern Italy. He led an army of escaped prisoners armed with nothing but a stolen kitchen knife. Within two years he had raised an army of 70,000 people, marched the entire length of the Italian peninsula and defeated the most powerful military force on earth. Not once, not twice, but over and over again. He had no country, no resources, no political power and and single handedly sent the Roman Senate into a full blown spiral. He was supposed to be property. He was supposed to be used for entertainment and he nearly brought the entire thing down. This is the story of Spartacus, the Third Servile War, the most savage gladiator who dared to defy the entire Roman Republic. And today we're walking through his entire journey from prison cell to to the coast of the sea to the Northern Alps. Through every battle and along the way we will see why history will be forced to reckon with him time and time again. So sit back, relax and welcome to History Camp. What's up dude? Welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagon and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from around the world. From all time through all history forever. Yes, that is what I do here every single week as I try to understand everything that has ever happened. Truly, I'm trying to figure out everything that's been going on and every single day new history gets made. So we have a lot of catching up to do. No time to waste. But before we do a couple camp announcements. First, I want to thank you for clicking on this video every time you support, comment, like subscribe, all that stuff. You help keep the lights on in the tent and you help keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Also, I want to invite you if you are Interested and so inclined to join our secret society. Yeah, this is a special invite for you and you alone. Tell no one about this. It's called patreon.com campgagnon. That is the inner sanctum. That is where we gather. And allegedly, I can't confirm or deny this. If you go to that link, you can get new episodes every single month, episodes that don't go out to the public. You can get every single episode of this podcast completely ad free. You can get live zooms where all the campers hang out and we chop it up and we talk about the ongoings of the world and our own personal lives. And you can talk to my pal Christos Papadapados, just for the small price of a cup of coffee every single month. Yes, that is what you get@patreon.com Camp Gagnon Speaking of Christos, how are you? What's going on, Christos? I'm sorry we don't have a ton of time because today we're talking about perhaps the most interesting and sophisticated society ever to be created on the planet Earth, and that's the Roman Empire, not the Greeks. You know, that bothers me, and I'm saying it just to drive a wedge, you know. No, I'm just kind of goofing around here. We are talking about our pal Spartacus, and I'm sure you've heard the name, right, you've probably seen some movies about him, but do you actually know the real Spartacus? Well, if you don't, you're in the right place. Where does the story begin with old Spartacus? Well, we're going back to the first century bc. You see, in the first century, the Roman Republic was one of the most brutal social arrangements in human history. It had one of the craziest, the craziest hierarchies, and unfortunately not one that is too uncommon. It ran on slavery, not slavery as like a distant, distant institution or like a thing people did on the side. Slavery was integral to the entire economy. Scholars estimate as many as 1.5 million enslaved people toiled on the Italian peninsula alone. And this is again, in a population of only like 5 million at the time. That's nearly one in three people. Slaves worked the great agricultural estates, the Latofundia, that the Roman aristocracy had amassed through centuries of conquest and empire building. They built the roads, they served in the houses of the wealthy. They worked the mines, where, you know, conditions were so lethal that a sentence to the mines was basically a death sentence. And some of them, the unlucky ones who happened to be intimidating, physically imposing. Well, they were sent to gladiatorial schools. They are known as the ludi. And they were to be trained to be killed or to kill for mass entertainment. Now, gladiators occupy a strange and specific place in Roman society. They were largely slaves, and they were celebrities at the same time. The crowds adored them. Their names were scratched into walls across the empire the way, like, a modern city might, you know, put up graffiti of, like, a famous football or basketball player. Some even accumulated enough fame that they were actually granted their freedom. But to be a gladiator was to live inside a compound that was partially barracks, partially a prison. And they were trained and fed and housed like a prized horse, you know, like very expensive livestock. And instead of racing, they were taught how to swing a sword. They were kept alive because they were an investment. The average gladiatorial career was measured in years, not decades. And it was not a. A great recipe for a long life. And the crowd that cheered for you on a Tuesday could be just straight up voting for your death on a Friday. It was a fickle industry to be in. And that is the world that our story starts. Now, the Spartacus guy, who was that and how did he end up on the inside of this treacherous economy? Well, there's actually no contemporary accounts of Spartacus whatsoever. Yeah, there's nothing written about him from anybody who was alive at the same time. Every source we have, from Plutarch to Flores and the fragments of the, you know, of Sallust and Livy, they were written at least a century after the events had actually taken place themselves by Roman and Greeks who were working from earlier sources, which are now lost to time. They were writing about a man whose own perspective was never preserved from firsthand accounts and never told from him or, you know, his own perspective. You know, there's no letters or an autobiography or nothing. Plutarch describes Spartacus as a man of intelligence and of culture and capability that a Roman audience would not have expected from, you know, the run of the mill, gladiator, slave. Now, whether that reflects Spartacus's own background or just simply Plutarch's framing, we can't really know. But what we can say is that he was the kind of guy that stood out and he was someone worth remembering. And all the sources that we have agree on that much. Now, Spartacus was Thracian from a region that's roughly in modern day Bulgaria or in northern Greece. Oh, Thracia, I like that. Now, Rome considered this to be the edge of civilization. You know, as the Romans typically do, if you're not, you know, properly Roman, you're uncivilized. And so these people were just right on the precipice. Now, Spartacus had at some point served as a soldier, possibly in the Roman auxiliary forces. He may have deserted or had been captured. Either way, he did something to warrant him becoming enslaved. And at some point, he was sold to a gladiatorial school in Capua, in the Campanian region of northern Italy, which is, like, roughly 25 miles north of modern day Naples. And there he trained as a fighter, as a gladiator, and above all, as an entertainer. He was, by all surviving records, surprisingly and exceptionally good at being a gladiator. It was a republic in the middle of a deep structural crisis. Two generations of brutal warfare. You have the social war, the civil war between Sulla and Marius, and the ongoing campaigns in Spain and the east had hollowed out the Roman spirit. And quite literally, the Roman countryside. I mean, small farmers were pushed off their lands, and this concentrated an enormous amount of wealth and power at the hands of a very small, you know, bureaucratic kind of aristocratic class. I mean, the senators of this ancient Roman period were very rich, and the slaves were everywhere, and the middle class was completely disappearing. And the army had become a tool of really just like, individual powerful men. And a lot of these very rich nobles kind of had their own militias, and it was in the control of these men rather than the state. The Republic's final decades had begun, and everyone could feel the ground was starting to shift. It was a world ripe for someone to start a massive fire. And in 73 BC, Spartacus decided he wasn't going to be risking his life for Rome's entertainment anymore, and he was going to be that spark. Now, according to our sources, a group of roughly 200 gladiators had been planning this mass escape from the gladiator school slash prison. But someone, and we don't know who, betrayed that plot. The guards moved in before the gladiators were ready. And Spartacus, faced with the sudden collapse of a carefully planned operation, made an immediate decision to improvise. He and roughly 70 other gladiators broke for the kitchen. They grabbed whatever was in there, whatever they could just put in their hand. I mean, you know, cleavers, carving knives, pots, pans, anything they could find in the kitchen. And they fought their way out of one of the most heavily supervised facilities in the Roman world, armed with just cooking equipment against professional guards and soldiers. By sheer ferocity, they were able to manage an Escape. And then led by Spartacus, they intercepted a wagon on the road outside the school. It was carrying gladiatorial weapons and armor. Armor to other ludis. Now, they gained a wagon and some extra gladiator supplies, and they headed for the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. It was dormant in 73 BC. Vesuvius, as we know this is the massive volcano that ultimately destroyed and covered all of Pompeii and much of Naples. Now, at the time, it was dormant and it was heavily forested and served as a natural fortress for these rogue rebellious gladiators. And it kind of raised above farmland of the nearby town. Now, high ground, dense cover, and, you know, a view over the richest agricultural estates in Italy, where they could see for miles. It was a perfect defensive position for this little rebel militia. And it was about to become the recruitment camp for these rebels. Word spread all throughout the countryside, not just of the escape, but what was growing as a result. And the Roman response to these rebels at this stage was, I mean, just a massive blunder. I mean, comically dismissive. They were basically like, all right, a group of runaway gladiators had are hiding in the woods. And the Senate dispatched a local militia force with about 3,000 men under a commander named Gaius Claudius Glaber. Not a seasoned general, not a full legion, but basically just like. Like the local police is how you could think of it. Now, this commander Globber, marched his men up to the foot of Vesuvius, blockaded the one known path to the summit. Basically just waited. And his logic was straightforward. He's like, okay, these are a bunch of slaves. They're trapped and they're going to run out of food in this forest and they're going to come down and this is the only way down. So we're just going to sit here and then arrest, slash kill all of them when they get here. So at this point, Rome isn't even treating this as a military problem. This is just like a little prison break, little pest issue, you know. Spartacus looked at the situation from above and he did what a good trained soldier does. He found an angle that. That this commander wasn't covering. He had his men stripped the wild grapevines growing in abundance across the slopes of Vesuvius and wove them into ropes. Then, under the COVID of night, they rappelled down the cliff face on the opposite side of the volcano, the side that no one was actually watching, and they crept around the Roman camp and attacked them from behind. Now, in the chaos of this night, attack from an entirely unexpected direction. They overran the entire camp. Most of of the forces were killed or fled. And the gladiators basically now seized their weapons and their armor and all their supplies. And in just one night, with just 70 men, Spartacus had taken his first Roman military camp. And the issue with these types of slave rebellions is that all the other slaves start to see this and they go, huh, if they could do it, maybe we could do it. And as a result, now the Roman Empire has an issue. Runaway field workers, shepherds, herdsmen from the vast, you know, companion estates, even people who were techn frankly free, but lived lives just basically in destitute poverty. They all began flocking to the mountain. And within weeks, the camp on Vesuvius had grown from, you know, like 70 escaped slave gladiators to thousands. And here's something the sources will skip over, but I think deserves a little bit of attention. Think about what that looked like. This is not a Roman army. It didn't have a uniform or, you know, all the same equipment or money. They didn't even have a shared language. I mean, you had people from Germans to Celts to, you know, Thrakians to Gauls, like, everyone from all these different regions, all the different cultures, communicating across languages and dialects, all for this shared cause of just like, yo f these rich people. Some had been gladiators, you know, professional fighters, and they were very disciplined. Some had just been like, agricultural slaves who had spent years just working the field and never even held a weapon in their lives. Some were women who had followed their husbands or even came on their own terms. And according to the historian Barry Strauss, the camp almost certainly included some children as well. There were people who had arrived carrying nothing but the clothes that they were wearing and people who had managed to bring iron tools from the fields. And what they all had in common was this thing. It is time for a change. So the Roman Senate gets wind of this, and they send another praetor named Publius Ainius. This was a much more serious expedition with several thousand men, but they, too, were defeated. Vinus himself barely even escaped. The rebels captured his equipment, his horses, I mean, everything. They even took his fasces. This is the bundle of rods and axes that basically act as, like, a. Like a badge that symbolizes, like, official Roman authority and this symbol of Roman power. Roman authority was now in the hands of this, like, ragtag group of, like, rebels that are now camped out on a mountain. And the message is very clear. They're like, hey, we're not running. We are fighting. And we are going to die for this. Because either we're going to die in that stadium for nothing, or we can gamble here, die on a hill, or get free. And they're like, you put us in a. You put us with no choice. We're going to fight to be free. Now, by the winter of 73, 72, the rebel force had grown to be an estimated 70,000 people. Though the ancient sources tend to inflate their own numbers. And modern scholars will treat these figures with a lot of caution and nuance. But what's clear here is that this is no longer like a band of fugitives that need the police to go, you know, teach them a lesson. This is an army. And they spent that winter manufacturing weapons and training recruits and expanding their raids across the entire region. And the Senate of Rome was now finally forced to really pay attention. So by the spring of 72 BC, the Senate was noticeably worried. The situation had gotten more than just a little bit out of hand, and, you know, they had to do something. So the Senate dispatched both consuls for the year. The two guys are Lucius Gellius Publicola and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Claudianus. Great job. I did pretty good with that. That's pretty good. So these two consuls, each of them commanding full legions of men, this is like the. Officially, the Romes, like the Roman A team, all right? They got like the Jordan of their time to go out there, take this little ragtag army out, and put an end to this. They were done being embarrassed by these, you know, rebel slaves. But old Spartacus was on the move. And the thing is, at this point, the historical sources can't agree where he was going or why he was going there. Plutarch writes that Spartacus goal was to lead his followers north to cross the Alps and then disperse them back into freedom, many of them back to their homelands from wherever they were conquered from. Now, under this reading, Spartacus wasn't necessarily a revolutionary in the way that we think about it. He was running an extraction operation. He was like, let's just get the people out of here and get them to safety and go be free. And that was how some people interpret this, that he was just trying to, you know, get him and his squad just to be free. But Appian and Floris write something very different. They say Spartacus intended to march on Rome itself, that he had his eyes on the capitol, and that the terror this possibly generated in the city was very real and widespread, and people were afraid of a proper revolution. And both accounts may contain some of the truth, what we can say for sure here is that the rebel army was not a single coherent entity like any military. People are joining for different reasons, right? It's a coalition of disparate people with different backgrounds and motivations held together by this shared grievance and the momentum of, you know, a couple unexpected victories. But, you know, many of them divided on every other issue in their life. And that part of the story is still not clear. So looking at the battle of 72 BC, you have this rebel army, and they all have their own little motivations, and you have the Roman consuls coming in to crush them. Now, here's what happens, all right? Crixus, this is a guy who's operating a contingent of the rebel force, and he's got roughly like 30,000 men. And they engage with the Roman Consul Gellius near Mount Garganus in Apulia. And this is what happens. Crixus was killed. It was a serious blow to this entire movement and a very real reminder that Rome, when it actually committed, was a legitimate, formidable enemy. But then Spartacus engaged the other two armies directly and defeated both of them. The sources record that he held funeral games in honor of Crixus afterward, using Roman prisoners as the fighters, which is a deliberate, pointed inversion of the spectacles that Rome had staged with these enslaved men. Now, whether every detail of that account is exact, I mean, the symbolic element of the writing is very clear that this was a message written in a way that Rome would understand it. Like, hey, we are not your toys. We are not just going to die for your entertainment. As a matter of fact, tonight, you're going to die for our entertainment. And now this is where we know that the rebel army pressed north all the way to the Po Valley, all the way to the foot of the Alps, toward a passage of freedom. A military force of roughly 10,000 Romans under the governor of Cisalpine Gaul tried to stop them. And they were just swept aside. And then Spartacus's men stopped. They were there. The mountains were right in front of them. And on the other side of those mountains lay Gaul and Germany and home for many of them, or at least the direction of home. At the very least, freedom. And the army that had marched the length of Italy. Marvel Television's Wonder man, an eight episode series now streaming on Disney Plus a superhero remake. Not exactly what we'd expect from an Oscar winning director Simon Williams audition for Wonder Man. I'm gonna need you to sign this. Assuming you don't have superpowers. I'll never work again if Anyone found out monolips are sealed. 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I still take it because, you know, I like natural supplements and it makes me feel good. Now when they ask where you heard about it, tell them the good people at Camp Gagnon sent you. It really helps the show more than you know. Now let's get back to it. Now the sources don't give us a clear explanation of why. And the truth might be that they didn't Know why either? We can guess that some of the men didn't want to leave Italy. Some wanted to keep on raiding. You know, the plunder had been extraordinary and, you know, there was much more available that they could just go on as a, you know, rebel militia and just, you know, pillage different towns and, you know, taking money and living life that way. Some had been enslaved in Italy for so long that the idea of going home wasn't even a real thing, because they had been perhaps enslaved since they were kids or maybe their whole lives. So the idea of going to a country that they were actually a foreigner in didn't even make that much sense. And Spartacus, whatever his personal intentions were, you know, he was not a Roman general issuing orders from this unquestioned position of authority. He was leading a bunch of other rebels who had chosen to follow him. And it seems like they chose to go back. This was the moment that the rebel army could have just disappeared from history, but instead, they turned back and marched toward it. They went south. And Rome, receiving word of this news, back in the capital, they made a decision. No more consuls, no more half measures. This rebel army needed to be squashed and forced into submission like the slaves they were. They required the most dangerous man in all of Rome. So in the late summer of 72 BC, the Senate handed this rebel now, I mean, full on, like a war effort, to none other than Marcus Licinius Crassus. Now, Crassus deserves his own episode. And we'll probably do that here at the campsite. Please write that down on it. But for now, what you need to understand about him is this. He was the wealthiest man in the Roman world, possibly the wealthiest private individual in the entirety of the ancient world period. He had made his fortune through real estate speculation and silver mines. And the guy had a weird thing where he knew how to profit off of catastrophe. Like if Rome was burning, his private fire fire brigade would race to the burning building and, you know, he wouldn't start putting it out until the panicked owner agreed to sell it to Crassus at a discounted price. He owned a ton of Rome. He had even financed Julius Caesar's early career. He was a man who understood that money was power and power was money. But here's the thing that tormented Crassus, the thing that just gnawed at him underneath, you know, everything that he had accumulated, all the wealth and riches. He didn't have military glory. You see all of his great rivals of the time, all the most renowned and, you know, admired men Pompey and, you know, Caesar, they accumulated the kind of fame that could only come from a battlefield victory. Pompey had already conquered Spain, and his reputation was legendary across Rome at the time. And Crassus, you know, he had money and influence and, you know, the kind of quiet power of a man who, you know, everyone owed debts to. But he never stood at the head of a victorious army with a crowd cheering his name. And in ancient Rome, this was a military empire that mattered more than maybe anything else. And this campaign against the rebels was finally his chance. So Crassus took. Took command of a new full strength army, approximately eight legions, which is roughly in the range of like 40,000 soldiers, and immediately signaled that this campaign would be conducted differently than anything that had come before it. When a detachment of his forces ran from an engagement with Spartacus and his men, Crassus ordered something that had never been done in Roman memory. And this is called decimation. Now, this word decimation comes from the root decim, which means ten. So every soldier in all the units, they were placed into groups of 10, and each group drew straws. Basically, they drew lots, and the loser in each group of 10 would be beaten to death, literally stoned and clubbed to death by the other nine soldiers. It was a punishment designed not to kill the guilty specifically, but to traumatize the entire army together. Every man was forced to look at what happened to units that ran, and they all had to bear the punishment. Some innocent men were killed because of this embarrassment. And Crassus's message was very simple. He said to the soldiers, I'm more dangerous than Spartacus. You could be afraid of Spartacus, but you are going to be more afraid of me. But here's what makes Crassus genuinely fascinating as a historical figure, right? I mean, like, put him in contrast with Spartacus. The man that he was trying to hunt. Spartacus had nothing. He had started with kitchen knives and, you know, the clothes on his back. He was quite literally a slave. And everything he had built the army, the reputation, the string of, you know, Roman defeats, it all came from nothing. Now, Crassus was the opposite. He had everything. I mean, wealth, connections, political power, resources, classical education. I mean, he had everything. And he needed to turn his men against each other in order to fear and respect him. So two men coming from opposite ends of the Roman social hierarchy headed towards each other on a collision course. The campaign that followed was methodical and brutal. Crassus drove Spartacus south through Lucania, winning engagements, forcing the rebel army into progressively smaller and smaller territory and just grinding them down over time. Rome wasn't being out fought in this battle, it was just being relentless. By the end of 71 BC, Spartacus and his force were cornered at the very toe of the Italian boot, at the Strait of Messina, the narrow channel of water separating Italy from Sicily. And he desperately needed to get across this body of water. Now, Sicily had its own enormous enslaved population, one that had already risen in rebellion twice in the previous centuries, the first and second servile wars. If Spartacus could reach the island, he might be able to find allies. He might be able to resupply and continue the war from a much more defensible position. It was very desperate thinking. It was quite clever on Spartacus's end, but he didn't really have any other options. He found Cilician pirates. These are professional seafarers who worked the western Mediterranean. And he basically negotiated a deal. He straight up just paid them. And according to Plutarch, they took his money and sailed away. Now, whether they were bribed by Rome or frightened off or just simply decided like the risk wasn't worth the price and, you know, just wanted to, you know, make some money off these desperate people. Plutarch calls it deception, but the full circumstances are still not fully known. What's certain is the outcome. Spartacus stood on the Italian coast with no boats, no passage, less money, and no way to Sicily. He even tried to build rafts, but that plan failed. The sea just was too difficult. You know, it was the. It was the final thing, basically his final option. And then Crassus made his move. He built a wall. You see, Crassus built extensive fortifications, a ditch and this massive wall stretching across the toe of Italy, cutting Spartacus off from the north. This is a 35 mile siege line. Now, researchers in 2024 actually announced the discovery of a what they would call stone and earthwork remains. And this is found in the Dassone della Meia forest in Calabria. And they say that they're consistent with large scale Roman military fortification. The excavation team thinks that this is a probable section of the barrier that Crassus actually built to seal the rebel army in. I mean, truly a remarkable find for a story that we don't even have. You know, the primary sources of to find potentially the barrier that Crassus actually built to capture Spartacus. It's pretty remarkable. Now, Rome thought that they had found the one thing that Spartacus couldn't get through. They thought, finally, we have Spartacus cornered. But of course they didn't realize who they were messing with because Spartacus is him. He's that dude. And what does Spartacus do when he's got no place left to go? He broke through the wall. Yes, on a winter night, the sources suggest, very harsh conditions, possibly even a snowstorm in that part of Italy in that winter. And he had his men fill sections of the D ditch with earth and trees and wood and whatever else they could carry. A large portion of the rebel army punched through Crassus's sieged fortification, overwhelming the defenders at one chosen point on the line, and they were actually able to escape north. It was a remarkable achievement and just another reminder that these were not, you know, necessarily seasoned soldiers, but they were desperate to survive and they knew how to be crafty. But it was not in the end of victory. After this point, there were two things that happened simultaneously that sealed the fate of the rebellion forever. First, Crassus had written to the Senate requesting even more reinforcements. And the Senate had responded by recalling Pompey from his campaign in Spain. And they even called in Lucillus from the east. Both were marching back towards Italy with armies. This was the political nightmare that Crassus had been dreading. Pompey was the most famous general in the Roman world. This is the man that they. The great. If Pompey arrived with his veterans and claimed the decisive victory, Crassus would have done all of this and get none of the credit. All those legions, all that discipline and the glory would go to someone who showed up right at the end and obviously had a much bigger name and decisively ended this thing. It's like how, you know, like a famous actor might appear, like, the biggest, like, in, like, a movie trailer, or like, on the screen cover of the movie, even though they only appear in, like, one scene. That's what Crassus was afraid of. Of. So Crassus had to finish the war before Pompy's boots actually got onto Italian soil. Second issue, working against Spartacus, is that Spartacus's army was starting to fragment after two years of battles and skirmishes and wars, two years of just constantly moving around the human cost, the disagreements about purpose and direction, and where we're going, we're at the Alps, returning back, all that stuff was pulling this coalition apart. And a large contingent of Gauls and Germans, led by Ganicus and Castus, separated from Spartacus's main force. And shortly after, they were caught and destroyed by Crassus. Now Spartacus was now fighting his way, trying to go north again with a much Smaller army holding off Crassus's advancing legions as he was going along. And he was still winning these individual engagements. And the sources will record that he was still very dangerous. But then, according to the historian Barry Stross, Spartacus appears to have made a final decision. He wasn't going to escape anymore. And whether this was because of exhaustion or pride or just simply the, you know, calculation of a man who had just run out of road, Spartacus turned to face Crassus directly. In what reads across the sources as a deliberate charge toward the Roman command structure. He reportedly drove towards Crassus himself. A decapitation strike, the most desperate possible tactical gamble that you could do. You take out the commander, confuse and collapse the army, and you change the outcome in just a single massive gamble. If you succeed, you win. If it goes wrong, you're done. He killed two Roman centurions on his way. He was wounded in the thigh by a javelin, but he continued to fight on. The issue was that he was never going to reach Crassus. The battle of the Sila river in Lucania in The spring of 71 B.C. was the end. Spartacus fell in the fighting. He was not captured. He wasn't taken prisoner. He was not crucified. Plutarch, Appian, and other sources are very clear. He died fighting at the front of his own army. And afterwards, in the chaos of thousands of men fighting and dying in the banks of the river, his body was never identified. Rome couldn't find him. They couldn't display him. They couldn't even hold up a corpse that day and be like, all right, we did it. The threat is done. The man's dead. You know, hierarchy and order and, you know, hegemony within the Roman Empire has been restored. Spartacus just seemingly vanished. I mean, he was there, he was powerful, he was fighting, he was inspiring his men. And then in one battle, he was gone. And in the aftermath of that final battle, Crassus captured approximately 6,000 surviving rebels. He crucified every single one of them along the Appian Way, the great Roman highway running about 132 miles from Capua to Rome. 6,000 crosses spaced evenly along the road. Every traveler who used that highway for the months it took the bodies to decay would pass by them one by one for mile after mile after mile from the city where it all started, all the way to the heart of the city that it had threatened. Pompey arrived too late for the battle, unfortunately for him, but just in time to intercept several thousand fugitives fleeing north. And he killed them. And wrote to the Senate that while Crassus had defeated the slaves in pitched battle, he himself pulled out the roots of the war. Crassus received an ovation, a lesser ceremony on foot, without the spectacle of a triumph. But Pompey, just as Crassus feared, got the full triumph and all the cheering crowds. Even at the moment of his greatest victory, Crassus was outshone by one of his biggest rivals, doing the exact thing that he was trying to take all along. Some problems, as it seems, can't be fixed with money. Now, at the end of the day, the truth of this is that we don't really know fully what Spartacus wanted. I mean, we know more or less what he did from those secondhand sources. We know the arc of his movement, the geography of his campaigns, the name of his lieutenants and his enemies. But the why that actual catalyzing force remains still somewhat uncertain more than 2,000 years later. Right. Plutarch says he wanted to escape. Appian says that he wanted to march on Rome and take it for himself. Neither account actually comes from a source with, you know, as we know, direct access to Spartacus's side of the story. There were no chroniclers in the rebel camp, just the distant voices of these Roman and Greek storytellers. Years later. Some have argued then as well as now that this was a proper social revolution, that Spartacus was trying to end slavery as an institution, trying to liberate his fellow indentured men and women himself and lead the actual march on Rome. Voltaire would later call this war the only just war in history. Karl Marx considered him one of his great heroes. But here's the thing. The historical evidence doesn't quite support all of these interpretations. As Britannica bluntly summarizes, his uprising was not an attempt at a social revolution. And none of Spartacus's documented actions suggest that, that he had a direct political program for Rome's entire social order. He may have just been trying to free his boys. He may have been trying to, you know, get this army out of there. He was maybe trying to, you know, just get himself free or something. We don't know exactly. And that's a very different view from trying to dismantle the institution of slavery itself. It's possible, you know, maybe that was his goal, you know, it. But. But at the same time, we don't know for certain. He wasn't theorizing about freedom. He was trying to find it. He was trying to fight for it, for himself at the very least, and for the people who had chosen to follow him. And the gap between that and the symbol that Spartacus became is pretty big. And it's difficult to know truly what it is. And maybe that's the point. Maybe that's why Spartacus is such a revered historical figure 2,000 years later. Because, you know, you take a guy with a very clearly stated political program that's just a historical figure, but a guy whose intentions remain genuinely unresolved, a man who can be interpreted by any person that, you know, chooses to read, you know, what the historians have written about him, he becomes a symbol, an idea, and something that is much more powerful than, you know, just a regular general or an emperor. I mean, 2,000 years later, people have decided what Spartacus means to them, and they are not always thinking the same thing, which maybe that's better. I mentioned Karl Marx before, and he wrote a letter in 1861 to Frederick Engels called Spartacus. And he basically says that he's the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history. A great general, a noble character, a genuine representative of the ancient proletariat. And for Karl Marx, the third Servile war was proof of a principle that he was spending his life trying to articulate that even the most systematically oppressed people can organize and resist and threaten the established order. And to him, that meant something. And in 1914, a group of German socialist revolutionaries were trying to organize underground opposition to World War I and the German imperial government. And they started to distribute illegal pamphlets and building this secret network and literally putting their lives on the line for their politics. And they needed a name that captured what they were trying to do, and they chose the name Spartacus. The Spartacus League, also known as Spartacus Bund, was founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Their pamphlets were called Spartacus Letters. And the logic was very clear. It's very explicit. This is a man who refused against all odds against the most powerful institution of the world, and fought back against the richest people in his society. And Luxembourg and Liebknecht were murdered by paramilitaries in January of 1919, and the league became the Communist Party of Germany. And the name lived on. I mean, someone we've done an episode on. Toussaint l', Ouverture, who led the Haitian revolution, and, you know, the only fully successful slave revolt in modern history was described by his contemporaries as a modern day Spartacus. Sports clubs and teams across the world bear his name. The 1960 Stanley Kubrick film gave the 20th century this iconic line. I am Spartacus, a scene that has no basis in the ancient, you know, historical sources, but captured something so emotionally true about solidarity and collective resistance that it entered into the cultural consciousness even to this day. I mean, every generation, in a way, finds its own Spartacus. But here's the thing. That distance is not a problem with the story. Like, you know, what Spartacus actually wanted, and the icon that Spartacus became in the hearts of the people who read about him. Him. That is actually what the story is all about. You know, like that gap, that ambiguity. Human beings always need figures that they can, you know, place themselves onto. You know, these. These legends, these heroes that, you know, are larger than life. And sometimes the ambiguity is helpful with that. You know, it's. You know, it's. It's able to do something that when you know every single detail, every wrongdoing, every. Every nuanced little point, it actually makes it harder to map yourself. But when you're able to follow someone and apply and ascribe your own desires onto them, all of a sudden you become them and they become you. And I think the story of Spartacus as we know it is extremely tantalizing. You know, this is a guy born into a world where he's property and, you know, he. He can't argue his way to freedom with some type of philosophical treaty. But you can point to what he did, and you can look at this guy, a gladiator who stood up against the most terrifying and powerful empire in the world and fought back. And I think a lot of people can look at that and say, this guy did the unthinkable. Maybe so can I. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an abridged story of the life and times of Spartacus. I mean, what an exciting story. I mean, the life of Spartacus is like. That gets you fired up. He's the ulta ultimate alpha kind of. Right. Yeah. I mean, what, like an absolute beast. I mean, it's like. It's crazy to think that, like, one guy was able to lead this rebellion out of the prison, get his men, go up to a mountain, collect even more to the point that he was, like, at 70,000 people, and then continue to just. Just fight and fight and fight against everything that the Romans, you know, threw at them. I mean, it gets you. It gets you feeling yourself. You know, you don't understand why, like, Voltaire and Marx and all these guys, like, looked at him and they were like, yeah, he did it. It's also a classic David and Goliath story of, yeah, being against Rome. It's pretty cool. Yeah, right? I don't know. I can. I think everyone can identify with that, and I think the ambiguity of the story actually makes it stronger. This is like what I was mentioning before. Like. Like you can put yourself in that situation, whether you are, you know, like, you know, like a Nat Turner, like an American slave that's rebelling, or you're Toussaint l', Ouverture, or you are, you know, like a communist in, you know, 1900s Russia. It's like, you can look at your situation and be like, things aren't fair. The people at the top have everything. Me and most of the population have nothing. And we're going to go get it back through violence. It just is. Like, there's something human about it, dude. There's something about it that's like, yeah, we should get it back. Yeah. I can see why it becomes a rallying cry and why his story becomes, you know, so symbolic of all these types of, you know, revolutionary movements. I mean, truly fascinating. But I'm curious, is there anything you learned here, Christos? Anything that you want to share with the people? No, it's just awesome that they. The 6,000 people, had a chance to go back into chains and instead decided to follow this guy and be like, we're with him. Yeah. I mean, again, this is. There's an old term that they use to describe France before the French Revolution, the noblesse oblige, where basically it's the obligation of the nobles to distribute their wealth and to do public works and to help the people. And when they don't, you know, do the obligation of the nobles, when they don't fulfill the noblesse oblige, the people are going to kill him. And that's my. That's my plea to the wealthiest people in our society today. Hey, just build, like a monument or something. Build, like a cool park, and the people will look at you and be like, oh, yeah, he's a nice guy. It's also cool that they never found his body. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's almost like Christlike, like he became like. Like a martyr and like he, like, ascended into heaven. Like, I. I feel like him in his last moments, he's like, don't let them find me. Put me somewhere they'll never have my body. Me. They can't say that they got me. Well, have you heard the Spartacus is still alive Theory to this day. To this day, this is a theory I'm starting from now, but that he actually survived the Third Servile War, him and Epstein Exactly. He escaped, and now he's in a small island in Little Saint Germany. No, Spartacus would never do it. He's a. He's a freedom fighter and a patriot and an activist. Not at all. How would you ever. How dare you put that on him? I think Spartacus might have escaped, dude. It might be in Valhalla right now. That'd be great. And by that, I mean a small island where they put all the political refugees. Who knows? I'm curious what you guys think. If you're a historian or you're someone that's read about the life and times of Spartacus. Is there anything I missed? Please drop a comment, let me know. If you're just a fan like me that never really heard the story in all details, please let me know what you learned. I would love to hear what your thoughts are. I read all the comments, YouTube, Spotify, all that. I also have great news. If you like religious deep dives, we talked a little about crucifixion today, which was rampant in the Roman Empire. Well, there was one famous guy that was crucified, and he also happens to be your Lord and savior. His name is Jesus Christ. We do many episodes about him, as well as every other religion above and below the sun. And you can check that out. Religion camp. Also, if you like modern deep dives of crazy stuff going on right now, things specifically pertaining to the mystical, the divine, the occult, the unexplained. Well, that's what Camp Gagnon is for. That is where I do deep dives and all the crazy stuff going on right now. And also I talk to people way smarter than me that sit across from me that actually educate me on what's going on, going on in the world. And if you just rock with us here at history camp. Well, great news. We drop these episodes every single week, so make sure you subscribe. You can check out the secret society over@patreon.com Camp Gagnon. And I just want to thank you again, dude, for real, for watching this show and just supporting us and making all of our dreams come true. God bless you, and I'll see you in the future to talk about the past. Peace.