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Dan Snow's History Hit
Gladiators: The Real Spartacus
00:40:58
Spartacus is probably the most famous gladiator in history but how much of his legend is actually true?
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- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
40 gigabyte C details thanks for listening.
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Dan Snow
To Dan Snow's History Hit. To get ad free early access and bonus episodes, head over to historyhit.com subscribe or you can sign up on Apple Podcasts with just one click the fate of the gladiator in ancient Rome was grim. Some could win their freedom. They could retire after a long, successful career. Some would even be presented with the rudest little wooden sword. The sword that symbolized the meant freedom for gladiators, presented by some grandee or later in the Empire, even the Emperor himself. But many, many more gladiators bled out on the floor of an amphitheater. Or they limped off into the lower reaches of Roman society and after an injury, a tear, an infected wound had ended their career. He might see out his days, if he was lucky, stamping on grapes in a country estate, or worse, swinging a pickaxe in a hot, crowded dark quarry beneath the city, hacking out the volcanic tufo that made up the core of Rome's buildings. There were many routes that a gladiator could take, and I think most of them led to an early death. There were some exceptions, though, and in this podcast we're going to go way back into the days of the Roman Republic. And look at how one gladiator escaped and forged his own path, an enslaved man who led a mighty uprising that took Rome to the brink. It started as a kitchen revolt, an escape attempt. It turned into a savage regional war. Swathes of territory ravaged hundreds of thousands of people, affected Rome itself. The Eternal City threatened, and at its end, thousands upon thousands crucified in a line that stretched over 100 miles from Capua to Rome. This war was both a terrifying glimpse of the vulnerability of Rome's empire, but also a gruesome lesson to those who dared defy it. The gladiator at the heart of this rebellion was, of course, Spartacus. The afternoon sun beats down on a dirt courtyard in Capua 120 miles south of Rome, the air is thick with the smell of sweat, possibly blood. Death lurks here. It's pervasive. Next door is the arena, where men will be pitted against each other while other men face wild beasts for the amusement of a baying crowd. This is the ludus. It's a gladiator school that serves the amphitheater in Capua. It's ground zero for gladiatorial combat, the area that first made the games popular. The ludus is a training facility, but it's also really a prison. Men are held captive in sparse barracks, and they're forced to train for hours under the blistering sun so they can bleed for entertainment. These men are athletes. They're also slaves. And these men really have two paths to freedom. One is to survive, become the best or the longest serving, and be granted a pardon. Others, though, will die killed in the amphitheatre or die of their wounds. And they will find freedom in death. This is the ludus where Spartacus trains. We think he was captured during Rome's campaigns in Thrace in the modern day Balkans. He's fighting as a mamillo, a gladiator who uses a short sword and a large shield in the arena, mimicking in many ways, the kit of a Roman legionary. And as a result, perhaps of the years he spent fighting in the Roman army, He is good at it. He knows his tools and how to use them. But life at the ludus is brutal. The training is punishing. The masters are cruel, and there's always the anticipation of entering a ring, the knowledge that death stalks you. His fellow gladiators would have felt it too. And it's a place of discontent. In hushed conversations, a plan is made for an escape. A bold, daring, lethal enterprise, because the gladiators have spotted that although the ludus is something of a prison, it does have its vulnerabilities. Spartacus gathers, we think, around 70 men. Some sources say up to 200. And one night, using improvised arms found in the ludus, kitchen utensils, cleavers, knives, spits, they force their way out, likely killing their instructors and guards. Alerted to this disturbance at the ludus, a small force of Roman soldiers are sent to quell the gladiators. They fail. Spartacus men massacre them. The group then move towards Mount Vesuvius, a more defensible position, an area covered in vineyards and farmland. They raid the countryside for supplies. They recruit more slaves to their cause. They fight off one Roman force by rappelling down vines to outflank and Surround their attackers in the mountainous terrain. They appear to elect three leaders. Spartacus and two Gallic slaves called Crixus and Eunomias. They begin to recruit more supporters. Word of their success, of their freedom, of their defiance spreads. Enslaved people flock to Vesuvius. This is no longer a nuisance, but a revolt. And it will grow and grow. It metastasizes into an all out war that threatens the very heart of Roman power and will end in one of its most grisly displays of might. To unravel the true story of Spartacus, I'm joined by Dr. Rhiannon Evans from Melbourne's Latrobe University. She's a leading expert in ancient history and a host of the excellent Emperors of Rome podcast. You'll listen to Dan Snow's history hit and this is the next installment in our series, Gladiators. Rhiannon, thank you very much for doing this.
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
You're welcome, Dan. Please do.
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Dan Snow
What do we know about where he came from? What do we know about Spartacus birth and upbringing?
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
We know very little. We're told that he's Thracian by origin, which is just north of Greece. The Greeks thought of it as sort of barbarian country, but it would be part of modern Greece. And he is supposed to have, according to one source, served as a soldier with the Romans, but then had been a prisoner, we don't know why, and then sold as a gladiator. That is the sum total.
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Dan Snow
And just going back to Thrace had been incorporated into the Roman Empire at that point.
- [07:25]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
It had, yes, very much so. So we're in the 70s BCE and Greece has been turned into two provinces by that point.
- [07:34]
Dan Snow
And were the Thracians? This is a bit of a 19th century question. Were they a very warlike people? You often read about Thracians being at the forefront of military affairs.
- [07:42]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Yeah, they're seen as certainly later in the Roman Empire they have emperors who are Thracian and they're tough guys and that is their reputation that they are kind of savage. There are myths where there are Thracians who behave in very barbaric ways. As I say, the Greeks themselves sort of thought they were on the borderline of not quite being Greek because they weren't quite civilized enough. So they've kind of got that reputation of being tough. And there is actually one of the sort of varieties of Roman gladiator is called the Thracian. So that just means they wear particular kind of armor and that helmet with the visor cover. But I think it tells you that they thought of Them as being tough fighter warrior types.
- [08:23]
Dan Snow
So this would be sort of northern Greece today, but possibly into north Macedonia, parts of Bulgaria, maybe Albania. We're talking about that kind of area of the Balkans.
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Exactly. Yeah. That's where he's supposed to have come from. We do also know that he's supposed to have had a wife. We don't know anything about her, we're given no name, but just that he was living with her and she seems to have accompanied him in his rebell and we don't know anything about her fate.
- [08:46]
Dan Snow
So the Romans would have recruited freely from that part of Europe. There's a suggestion he may have been a Roman soldier and deserted. Was that common and if so, what were the sort of typical punishments for desertion?
- [08:59]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
So he's not a Roman citizen, so you'd think he couldn't really be a Roman soldier at this point, but he could be an auxiliary. And that's what I assume is meant by this. As I say, it's pretty vague. Yeah, it's pretty common, I think amongst especially auxiliaries for people to sign on for the benefits and then maybe they're just not seeing the benefits so they would desert and they'd probably get away with it in the remoter parts. But if that is his story, he gets caught again and imprisoned and then sold into slavery.
- [09:29]
Dan Snow
And auxiliaries are people. I'm just remembering my beautiful picture book I had when I was at school and there was a picture of a Roman legion and these kind of auxiliaries stuffed over to the side as slightly inconvenient allies. But the auxiliaries would have to a certain extent maintained their own equipment and fighting traditions. Or do we imagine him dressed as we imagine a 1st century BC Roman soldier would have been dressed in that kind of uniform and fighting with that short sword in that kind of very standardized fashion?
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Yeah, if he is one of the auxiliaries, then he doesn't look like your typical Roman soldier. The auxiliaries typically were archers, as I say, the kind of sidelined ones. All Roman soldiers had to maintain their own uniform though. So this is something that they had to kind of take out of their pay and maintain for themselves. But he probably wouldn't have looked with the little skirt and the cloak and quite as good armor. However, it seems pretty clear from what subsequently happens that he'd really learned how to fight well. So I guess he had picked up something from that and also from being sold as a gladiator.
- [10:31]
Dan Snow
Give us a quick health check of the Empire at this time. Would there have been lots of opportunity for fighting? Obviously, we don't know where and when he served, but was there a lot going on that might have overlapped with his time of service?
- [10:41]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
There's always a lot going on with the Romans. They're almost never not fighting, actually. Kind of intriguing. I hadn't really thought of that before, but his time in the army, presumably would have overlapped with one of the early Roman civil wars. We tend not to call it that, but the war between Sulla and Marius, which is happening in the late 90s, maybe he's a little bit later than that, so he just missed it. But even when there aren't outright wars, either between Romans or in terms of conquest, there are always people rising up against the Romans, there are always disputes going on, and even if you're not in open warfare, you have legions and auxiliaries who are planted in provinces. The Roman Empire isn't huge at this point. It's not as big as it will become, certainly, but they've already defeated Carthage, so they've got swathes of North Africa, Spanish provinces, yet to conquer Gaul, obviously, the whole Italian peninsula and mainland Greece, as we mentioned. So there are plenty of places he might have been. And I imagine, given that he's from that region, it's perhaps in Greece or northern Greece that he would have been fighting.
- [11:51]
Dan Snow
And I don't want to get too psychoanalytical here, but it's interesting, as you say, if he's watching the first of these civil wars, one of the great civil wars that would absolutely tear Rome apart for the next, well, a couple of generations. Marius and Sulla, they're the Caesars before Caes over mighty citizens of the republic who wield dictatorial powers. So perhaps he saw a bit of a weakness in the Roman system there, but we cannot know for sure. So what we do know is he ends up in Capua in a gladiator school. And that's not gladiator school. That's the wellspring of the gladiatorial games, isn't it?
- [12:23]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
It is indeed. Yeah. It has the oldest arena, and, you know, the arena, the place where the gladiators fight, is kind of the Roman structure of entertainment. So you can think of theatre as having been influenced by the Greeks and that kind of thing. But gladiatorial games is all Roman and Capua is where we find it. And so it is a kind of, I hate to use the word great, with something like people fighting each other and maiming each other, but that is the great gladiatorial school, what they call the Ludi. And that's where he seems to end up, in southern Italy amongst these, we're told, other Thracians and Gauls. So those seem to be the main ethnicities of the people there in the gladiatorial school with him.
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Dan Snow
Right, interesting. So the Thracians have already been conquered, but the Gauls sort of haven't been.
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Well, yeah, they haven't been. You're quite right. It's going to be the 50s with Julius Caesar. But the term Gaul is pretty vague in this period, so it sort of means also what we would count as northern Italy.
- [13:19]
Dan Snow
Right, those mountain dwellers in northern Italy.
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Yeah, yeah. So they may be from there. It's kind of anything to the north, the north and the west is Gaul.
- [13:28]
Dan Snow
And do we think these gladiators are all slaves like Spartacus, or are there some who've signed on?
- [13:35]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Well, it's possible they signed on, certainly. We know in later periods, in the imperial period, there was a kind of draw towards something that was sort of a bit forbidden, because being a gladiator is being the lowest of the low in terms of status. We don't know a lot about this period of where gladiators were coming from, if they were coming from free Roman citizens. But I imagine in the main it is people who've been sold into it because it's a hard and brutal life. Although I guess relative to other kinds of hard and brutal lives, you're getting well fed. The owners want you to be well fed so you can fight well.
- [14:11]
Dan Snow
And it isn't the slaughter fest that Hollywood would have us believe. Can some of these gladiators go on and have long careers and win their freedom and perhaps even build a living?
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Absolutely. And again, it's not just a humanitarian aspect here, it's that the people running the games don't want to risk their investment because these gladiators are worth a lot of money and you've invested a lot in them, in training them and in keeping them alive. So it's fairly unlikely that many fights would have been fights to the death. And we do have records, graffiti, where people will write up that they had this many victories, this many defeats as well, which shows us that not every.
- [14:48]
Dan Snow
Defeat ends in a death, not every defeat is terminal. But the suggestion is that this gladiator school was not a bed of roses. And for some reason, Spartacus rose up and convinced other gladiator to follow him.
- [15:00]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
There is always a feeling that groups of enslaved people might rise up in Rome and there had Been two wars already in the second century that they call the Servile wars in Sicily. This time, though, it's going to be on the mainland, which is a bit different. So we're not told details in our very sparse sources about what was going on there. We've got a certain amount that is, I think, probably a bit later moralizing, saying, oh, you know, that they were being kept for the entertainment of others and that he was kind of more noble than this. But I think that is probably later moralizing. I suspect it was harsh conditions and seeing the chance.
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Dan Snow
And anytime you got slavery like the ancient Spartans knew, you have got the possibility of violent insurrection.
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Yeah. And as I say, there is this constant fear because there have been these two previous wars. But also this weird. You were talking about psychology before, but this weird psychology for the Romans of having an enemy in the household. You have household slaves as well, and a kind of enemy who is your. In this case, your body of entertainment. And therefore they have to be contained at the same time as they're very kind of desirable to go watch and worth a lot of money. And having this weird status of being both the lowest of the low. But also something I perhaps should have mentioned before, some graffiti and some poetry seems to treat them like they're sex symbols. They're these great celebrities. So there's this real paradox going on with both gladiators and enslaved people.
- [16:32]
Dan Snow
Yes, you're right. Not just the public domain, the gladiators, but within your own household, they can be loved and trusted, but they also represent a threat. Right, so let's get the uprising underway. What do we know about what happens?
- [16:43]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
So we've basically only got two sources, and the main one is this historian called Appian, who's writing about 200 years later. It begins in 73 BCE, and Spartacus escapes from the gladiator school, as you've already indicated. Apparently with 70 others. Doesn't seem enough to conduct a war at this point. Where do they escape to? They go to Mount Vesuvius, which doesn't seem like the greatest place to meet because you could get trapped there. But this is what we're told they did, and they fight off 3,000 Roman soldiers. So they're clearly pretty good at what they do. I don't think we can rely on any numbers. I should say, as we go on, 70 vs 3000 does not seem like a winning strategy to me.
- [17:24]
Dan Snow
It's so tempting to sort of make guesses and think about whether, as a Thracian, he might have come from the Mountains and sought out a kind of mountainous landscape in that part of Italy. And Mount Vesuvius offered itself up. But we just don't know. We don't know. We know that the Romans initially kind of can't take this seriously. It's a minor revolution. And presumably there would have been agricultural slaves and other enslaved people escaping and taking to the hills and police operations almost rather than military operations hunting them down.
- [17:50]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Yeah, that is very much how they treat it. They treat it like it's a bit of raiding and piracy. And what that means is they don't send in legions. They don't treat it like a war at all. They sort of go around, sort of local officials get conscripts, just people they pick up on the way in a way Roman citizens, not proper soldiers. And soldiering is getting more and more professionalized in the first century. So they could have gone in with legions. They don't. And they sort of think, well, these people haven't got weapons, they've just got these things they've picked up on the way and raided. And it's like kitchen implements and farming implements. And what they don't realize is that it seems to be becoming more and more popular. And some of this may be true that Spartacus says that there'll be an equal share of the spoils. So other people join in others who are either impoverished or fleeing slaves. And. And so it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, this rebellion, this idea that you can actually stand up against Romans, especially if they're not going to take you seriously.
- [18:49]
Dan Snow
It's so interesting. Is it how that information would have traveled because all official networks, of course, any mention of it would have been banned. And yet somehow word spreads through the countryside. His numbers swell again.
- [19:02]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
I think we need to take some of these numbers with a pinch of salt. But eventually, over the course of the year, the numbers in our sources range from 40,000 to 120,000 people who join up with Spartacus, which is incredible, if true.
- [19:20]
Dan Snow
More on Spartacus after this.
- [19:27]
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- [20:00]
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- [21:04]
Dan Snow
Are they still hiding out on Vesuvius, or is this. Have they moved into a. Morphed into more of a military force of holding and taking towns and territory?
- [21:13]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Well, they don't seem to take territory, and to be honest, our sources are very unclear about what they're trying to do. So Plutarch, who writes a biography of the man who eventually defeats Barticus, he says, well, they're trying to get north. He wants to get over the Alps, because they're just trying to get to freedom. So there's no kind of idea that they're trying to stand out and defeat Romans. They're just trying to escape in Plutarch, and they do seem to go north initially, but along the way they are defeating Romans, and it becomes within a year it's actual proper armies that they're defeating. There doesn't seem to be any indication that they're taking territory. Appian mentions at one point that they're heading for Rome, but that may have been a Roman fear. You know, the great Roman fear is that any enemy will come and take the city itself, because that doesn't seem to go anywhere. He passes by Rome and goes north.
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Dan Snow
And that proves to be a mistake.
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Yes, but that doesn't really work out.
- [22:14]
Dan Snow
Whether it's Hannibal or if you're fighting Rome, go and deal with Rome.
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Has he learned nothing from Hannibal?
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Dan Snow
Just in a way, so frustrating.
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Did you want Rome to end at that point?
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Dan Snow
Well, now that you mention it, I don't know. I don't know.
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
It might have been interesting with Spartacus in charge, I suppose, or being negotiated with. It's not what happens. But you're quite right. If he had learned his history, if he'd learned about the Second Punic War, there is a certain mirror image going on here because Hannibal is there a lot longer and he's marauding around the Italian peninsula. And it's kind of what Spartacus is doing. There are lots of little raids going on, picking up more troops, picking up more weapons, but he doesn't, as far as we can tell, he doesn't seem to have a strategy against Rome. Nevertheless, when the consuls decide they're going to go themselves, both consuls of the year of 72 take a legion each with them.
- [23:11]
Dan Snow
These are the top two officials. The top two officials of the Roman state.
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Yeah, the two consuls are the magistrates voted in with supreme power for that one year. So in 72 BCE, the two consuls, there are always two, because you have to have balanced out power in Rome. They take a legion each and they go against Spartacus. And at first, one of them is fairly successful and Spartacus closest colleague, a man called Crixus, is killed. And this is very cinematic. I mean, you can see why they made a film of this. Spartacus comes back and defeats both consular armies one after the other. So there's kind of initial setback and then Spartacus is successful. So now even against proper professional armies, he's able to defeat them.
- [23:58]
Dan Snow
But Rhiannon, why and how? I mean, we're all told the Roman army was this. They've conquered a chunk of the known world by this point. Why is this former gladiator able to inflict these stunning defeats?
- [24:09]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Well, it's interesting that you say that, but I think, one, they're probably still not taking him that seriously. They think it's going to be a pushover. Two, certainly our sources don't have very high regard for the consuls of that year. And I guess not all consuls were great generals. Sometimes you get that. But partly because the role of consul is both political leader and general. General and even religious leader to a certain extent. You kind of have to be everything at Rome. But also I think, because gladiatorial training, it might not have trained you how to lead an army, but it has trained you how to fight really well. And it's something that Spartacus seems able to pass on to others. So I think we have to assume that he's training up his troops well.
- [24:53]
Dan Snow
But it is very interesting, at the battle of Picanum, the one you mentioned, he defeats two consuls in battle. I mean, that's something that Many of the enemies of Rome aspired to do and never managed. I mean, it's a stunning achievement.
- [25:04]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
It is. And I think it is a testament to just how tough an army has been got together. It's something that's kind of terrifying to the Romans because of this whole great divide in their society between the free and the enslaved. And the fact that they think nothing of these people. You know, they think they're beneath contempt. In fact, one of the reasons it takes so long for the consuls to get involved is they sort of think it's beneath them. And at this point, this is when they have to really take it seriously. The Roman Senate and they need to find one of their great war heroes, one of their great generals to go and do this, but nobody really wants to. You know, their great general at this point is Pompey, Pompey the Great. But he's out in Spain and probably, certainly initially, he's not that interested. What glory is there in defeating enslaved people. There's nothing in it for him. It's not like conquering a province. It's not like having some great epic type war with Carthage or Mithridates in the east, as he'll eventually go to. So I think that it's this constant not taking Spartacus seriously, underestimating what he can do, that really leads them into a three year war against a people they wouldn't have considered worthy of them.
- [26:22]
Dan Snow
So Pompey is not available. Who takes command?
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Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Well, the man we get is Marcus Licinius Crassus, who has been a big hero in that war we mentioned at the beginning, the civil war between Sulla and Marius. And he has had great success there. He hasn't really done much as a general since then, but he's kind of being brought back, brought back into the fold, called upon to take care of this problem, which has moved again back down south because for some reason not able to get over the Alps, perhaps. Spartacus, and it's very vague in our sources, I'm afraid, has moved back to territory he knows. So he's back down in southern Italy by this point, and we're in 71 by now.
- [27:08]
Dan Snow
And so Crassus, I mean, the geography of the Italian peninsula does confer certain advantages, I suppose. So Crassus knows he can bottle him up in the south of Italy.
- [27:16]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
That is exactly what he does. Yeah, and he's not messing around. He takes six legions with him. So before we had two legions who clearly weren't working together because they were defeated separately. Now Crassus is given all the resources of the Roman state and he moves on them. He's actually got the six legions he enrols, plus he's got the two consular legions who've been defeated. And he adds them in, and we're told that he perhaps decimates them. So he literally takes 1 in 10 men and kills him, which is the original meaning of decimate, just as a warning to the others because they have been so unsuccessful against Spartacus.
- [27:57]
Dan Snow
But that is a huge force, isn't it? I mean, that's a bigger force than Scipio would have taken to North Africa in the Punic War, for example. I mean, this is a serious military operation now.
- [28:06]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
It is. And I think it's a testament to just how worried the Romans are. It's always quite hard to estimate exactly how many people there are in a legion at any given time, because it shifts around. But if we think about it as somewhere between five and 6,000 legionary soldiers, six of them, that's my maths. Isn't great, but that's over 30,000, plus whatever's left of these two consular legions. We're probably talking 40,000 troops.
- [28:31]
Dan Snow
I expect. He left his Thracian auxiliaries on garrison duty in the north of Italy. But so that astonishing number of men, he marches south. What happens then?
- [28:40]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Well, Spartacus heads for Sicily. So he seems to be on the run now, perhaps spooked by this huge professional force that's coming down. It's possible, you know, his motivation was always just to escape, but it's not to kind of put his troops at risk. Anyway, he heads for Sicily, but he can't make it there. He's cut off in kind of the toe of Italy. He can't get over the water. He's been cut off there. He gets trapped. You're quite right. The geography plays against him here. He gets trapped, literally by siege warfare, by forts being put up. And all he can really do now is these kind of guerrilla tactics, these raids, which he's reasonably successful at, pretty successful at whatever he does. He sends a warning to Crassus, apparently. He captures a Roman soldier and crucifies him in a no man's land public area just to show that they can still lash out against the Romans.
- [29:37]
Dan Snow
I suppose the problem with Sparscus army is it was easy come, easy go. I mean, when times were good, it gathered huge numbers, but it probably doesn't have the discipline, the bureaucracy, the infrastructure to maintain that. And those recruits can drift away into the darkness when they suspect that the game is Up.
- [29:53]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Exactly. I think you're probably quite right there. We're not really told that in our sources, but the numbers seem to be dwindling. And that I think is the reason.
- [30:01]
Dan Snow
Whereas Crassus can use all the vicious tools of the Roman professional tradition and, you know, execute 1 in 10 and do all these kind of things that probably ensure discipline in a way that Spartacus couldn't.
- [30:11]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Indeed, yes. He doesn't even have some kind of formal pay structure. So there's not that incentive. It's all great when you are raiding towns all up and down Italy and you say, oh, I'm going to share out everything equally. So he looks like this very egalitarian leader, but once things are bad and there isn't much to share out, then what is the incentive for these troops to say with him?
- [30:32]
Dan Snow
Speaking of raiding up and down Italy, do the Roman sources go overboard on the sort of grotesque bestial atrocities perpetrated by these former slaves? I mean, do they try and other them and write a lesson into the history books about the threat that enslaved people posed the system, or is there a sense that Spartacus was choosing his targets more carefully?
- [30:52]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
There is a bit of the othering going on. I think they try and have it both ways, some of them. So we get told that earlier on, when Spartacus had defeated those consular armies, that he sacrificed 300 Romans to his dead colleague Crixus. And this human sacrifice is considered very barbaric by the Romans, as by many cultures, and something that they might associate with those weird northerners off in Gaul or Britannia, somewhere like that. So there's a bit of that going on, but at the same time there is a little bit of the, oh, he was noble, he was better than just being a gladiator. He was brave. I mean, at the same time, as you're seeing what we would later call, I guess maybe the noble savage here, there is a little bit of. He would have to be incredibly brave and very good as a leader to have defeated those armies. So I think there's a little bit of rationalization going on, remembering that all our sources come from about 200 years later.
- [31:50]
Dan Snow
Yeah. But I'm just wondering what the effect on the civilian populations must have been. It's always terrible in war, but an army with slightly looser bonds of discipline, you know, one wonders what the effect of that moving through the landscape would have been.
- [32:01]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Yeah, I think you're quite right. And we shouldn't forget about the effects on non combatants. Whenever there is warfare, you know, if it's out in the Spanish provinces, if it's in Gaul, wherever it is, that the Romans bring it and that this slave army is bringing it, the local population is going to suffer. And I think again to think about that psychologically that they know that these are not free people. Part of their culture is to think of them as non people, as less than nothing. And yet they are able to exert this violence and you know, this deprivation on the peoples of Italy. It must have been very strange to.
- [32:38]
Dan Snow
Them, Roman society turned on its head. Let's get back to the action. We're in the south of Italy. Spartacus forces are dwindling. He's not able to get to Sicily. He's not able to escape by ship. What happens?
- [32:51]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Well, of course there's one final battle because that's what you would have in a movie and that is what we get. So Spartacus, he actually breaks out through the siege that's effectively trapped him in the toe of Italy. So now he's sort of more in the almost in the heel of Italy or maybe the instep. And we get that final battle where Spartacus is wounded. He's wounded in the thigh. Our source tells us that's Appian. He sinks down into one knee with his shield in front of him and fights to the bitter end with comrades around him. And his body is never found. So the army is wiped out, all but 6,000 who are taken captive. So Crassus manages to get this final, very bloody defeat of the slave army.
- [33:39]
Dan Snow
Stay with us for more after this quick break.
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Kate Lister
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- [35:24]
Dan Snow
Tell me about the fate of the 6,000 captured men.
- [35:27]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
They are crucified. They are crucified all the way along the Appian Way, which is the road from Rome to Capua. And the crucifixions were said to have stretched all the way from Rome to capua, which is 115 miles. So that would be quite a message.
- [35:43]
Dan Snow
We don't hear from Spartacus wife.
- [35:46]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
We don't hear anything about her. Again, it's very sad. I presume it would have been hard to think that she might have survived all of this.
- [35:53]
Dan Snow
These sources that writing 200 years later, are they citing sources written close to the time, which no longer exist? Do we think this would have been well attested and documented and perhaps one day we may find these other sources? Or is this all we're ever going to get?
- [36:07]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Oh, that would be so exciting. Well, you know, they keep finding more and more papyri in the villa of the papyri in Herculaneum.
- [36:14]
Dan Snow
We love that villa. We're excited.
- [36:17]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
So one that might help us a lot is one that we have fragments of, which is the histories of Sallust. So a historian called Sallust, we have two things written by him that are quite short, but we know he wrote a much longer history and we only have fragments of it basically quoted by other people. So we know he covered this period and he was writing in the 40s BC, so 30 years after the events.
- [36:40]
Podcast Announcer
Wow.
- [36:40]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
So that might be good. And that would have been available to Plutarch and Appian writing their accounts.
- [36:48]
Dan Snow
Oh, wouldn't it be wonderful to find that, that villa, the papyri, just so everyone knows what that was. A villa that was caught in the eruption Herculaneum when Vesuvius swamped it. And they have developed ways now to read what people had thought were bits of charcoal, but turned out to be scrolls in a massive library overlooking the sea. And so we may unlock some more wonderful, wonderful Greek and Roman sources from there. It's very exciting. What does the Spartacus revolt tell us about Rome in This period, was Rome far more vulnerable than some of its. Well, I want to say almost some of its fans in the modern world would have you believe.
- [37:22]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
The counterfactual history is always interesting to do, isn't it? I think that it's hard to think that the Roman state was ever going to be vulnerable to an army of enslaved people. Much as I'd like to think that that potential was there for people who were oppressed beyond belief to rise up against their oppressors. But given that in three long wars, the Carthaginians, with a huge empire, had not managed to conquer Rome, it just seems less likely to me that this team of incredibly professional for where they'd come from, and I guess highly motivated in the first instance, group of people could defeat the Roman state. I think once they bring in one of their war heroes. And by the way, Pompey does join in at the end. He does come back for the final victory and tries to take credit for it, which Crassus is very annoyed about. Once they bring one of those people in and put serious resources into it, the Roman state is just too professional. Their army is. It's a machine. By this period, it's around the turn of the second to first century, when Marius, who was involved in that war against Sulla, when he had professionalized the army and started enrolling people who didn't have land, he didn't have to be wealthy to get into the army. From that point on, it becomes very hard to entirely defeat the Roman state for a long time.
- [38:53]
Dan Snow
And yet the careers of Crassus and Pompey. Let's just quickly finish off them. They do show ways in which Roman power could be threatened in two very different ways. Tell me about both their grisly fates and how in different ways, it does reveal, well, some of the weaknesses of Roman power.
- [39:08]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Yes. So if you're at the top, you're not necessarily going to survive. In fact, you're very vulnerable to assassination and to being brutally killed by an enemy. So, first of all, Crassus, he's looking for proper military glory, not just defeating an army of slaves. He goes off to Parthia. Parthia is the enemy that Rome wants to conquer for a long time, actually. And they never really get to do it in the way that they would like to in some huge victory. But Crassus goes east. Crassus, by the way, it's worth mentioning, is the richest man in the Roman world. He's just enormously wealthy. This is one of the reasons he can get six legions together. He can pay for everything they need.
- [39:49]
Dan Snow
And so we should just say Parthia is roughly where Iran is now. It's the sort of. Can we describe it as a sort of vague successor of the Persian Empire?
- [39:56]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Absolutely, yes. That's very accurate. It is the kind of, well for the Romans, the modern Persia, and it's huge. It's wealthy, it's got this long, long history. And after the defeat of Carthage, it really is the remaining enemy for the Romans in the Mediterranean, Middle Eastern area. So it's kind of this prize that every Roman general sets as his goal. For example, Mark Antony was going to go off to Parthia before he gets defeated a few decades later. So Crassus does this. He's been consul by that point. He decides that this is going to be his next move. He takes his army east to Parthia. The Parthians defeat him. That's a huge, terrible defeat of the entire army. They capture Crassus. They know that his reputation is that he's incredibly wealthy, and they kill him by pouring molten gold down his throat. Okay, so that's Crassus, Pompey, then. Pompey and Crassus and Julius Caesar teamed up in 60 B.C. as a kind of. We're going to be in charge of Rome now. We're not really going to abide by the rules of the Republic. But that starts to fall apart after Crassus dies. And the result of that is a civil war between Pompey and Julius Caesar. And Pompey flees. He flees to Egypt. He flees various places, but he ends up in Egypt, where he thinks he will get a warm welcome after a defeat. But the locals there, the acolytes of the Ptolemy in charge in Egypt, think that this would be a great prize for Julius Caesar, who's on his way over if they give him literally the head of Pompey. So they kill him and behead him and present his head to Julius Caesar. He was duly disgusted by this, that a great Roman general should have met his end in this way.
- [41:47]
Dan Snow
So all the key players involved in the Spartacus tragedy all end up dying brutal deaths.
- [41:55]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Maybe this is Spartacus, revenge from beyond the grave. They do not fare well.
- [42:00]
Dan Snow
I mean, if you reach high office in the 1st century BC in the Roman world, you're not going to die in your bed, are you?
- [42:08]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
No. I mean, it's a violent place to be. It's a violent place to be powerful. Of course, the most famous assassination of all is the other character I just mentioned, Julius Caesar. He's only going to last a few years after Pompey and then be brutally killed in a meeting of the Senate.
- [42:24]
Dan Snow
Well, it makes you wonder why they bother. Why they bother. But it's because of our incredible ability to ignore the odds and think we're going to be the odd one out. We're going to live to a comfortable old age, wielding total power and enjoying great wealth.
- [42:38]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Indeed, yes. I mean, I guess someone got there in the end with Augustus. Who is the successor? Julius Caesar. He did have a long life in power as Rome's first emperor.
- [42:48]
Dan Snow
And I suppose also Sulla died on his couch, didn't he? Surrounded by actresses and drinking wine and having a lovely old time.
- [42:55]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
He did. But, you know, Sulla was famous for having taken on the role of dictator, which is not quite the same as our meaning of dictator. It's an official role for the Roman Republic where in a time of crisis, you have absolute power. It's meant to be for only six months. Sola takes it on for longer than that, for a few years. But he does give it up. He gives up the power and he retires. And this was a big mystery to the Romans. Why had he retired when he had so much power, but he dies peacefully in his bed? So maybe that's why.
- [43:26]
Dan Snow
That's right. Think about it, folks. Think about it. All those despots out there take the option. Thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. Now, tell us all about your podcast.
- [43:36]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Our podcast is called Emperors of Rome. This is our 10th anniversary.
- [43:40]
Dan Snow
And what's it about, Rhiannon?
- [43:43]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
Well, it did start out being about the emperors of Rome. We started off with Julius Caesar, who isn't an emperor, and when we went through the biographies of successive emperors. But we broadened out a lot from that, so now we do look at issues like slavery. We've done a podcast on the movie Spartacus, so you can go and listen to that one and I'll talk about how. What they change in the film and why they might have changed that and how it's different from our sources. So we look into all kinds of aspects of ancient Rome and ancient Roman history.
- [44:10]
Dan Snow
Great. Go and check it out, everyone. Thank you very much. Rhiannon, thank you for coming on the podcast.
- [44:14]
Dr. Rhiannon Evans
It's been a pleasure. Thank you, dan.
- [44:18]
Dan Snow
Thanks to Dr. Rhiannon Evans. Make sure to check out the Emperors of Rome podcast if you're looking for a deep dive on all things Roman. Join me on Monday for the next episode in this gladiator series, where we'll be looking into the shadowy world of the Praetorian Guard, the true power brokers of Rome. The Emperor may have been able to say who lived and died in the arena, but the Praetorian Guards were the one who decided if the emperor lived or died. So make sure to hit Follow in your podcast app. We'll drop it into your feed on Monday.
- [44:55]
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