Was Spartacus a Real Person? The Gladiator Who Shook the Roman Republic

Yes, Spartacus was a real person. He was a Thracian gladiator who in 73 BC escaped from a gladiatorial school near Capua and led a rebel army of escaped slaves against the Roman Republic in what historians call the Third Servile War, which lasted until 71 BC. We know about him from ancient historians such as Plutarch, Appian and Livy, but their accounts are short, written long after the events and sometimes contradictory. So the real Spartacus sits somewhere between a few solid facts and two thousand years of legend.

A Thracian in chains

Spartacus probably came from the Maedi, a tribe of Thrace, in what is now Bulgaria. The sources disagree about how he ended up enslaved; some suggest he had earlier served with Roman forces before being captured or condemned. Either way, he was sold to a school that trained gladiators near Capua, south of Rome.

Gladiators were usually slaves trained to fight, often to the death, for public entertainment. They were valuable property, carefully fed and trained, and closely guarded.

The breakout of 73 BC

In 73 BC around seventy gladiators broke out of the school, armed at first with nothing more than kitchen utensils, and then seized proper weapons and armour. The ancient numbers vary: Plutarch says 78, Livy 74, Appian "about seventy". The escapees chose Spartacus and two Gauls, Crixus and Oenomaus, as their leaders.

Escaping down Mount Vesuvius

Rome did not take the rebellion seriously at first. A force under the praetor Gaius Claudius Glaber trapped the rebels on Mount Vesuvius, blocking the only easy path down. The rebels made ropes from wild vines, climbed down the cliffs on the other side and attacked the Roman camp by surprise.

News of the victory spread across the farms and estates of southern Italy, worked by huge numbers of enslaved people. Thousands joined. The rebel army grew to an estimated 70,000.

Beating Roman armies

Over the next two years the rebels defeated several Roman forces sent against them, moving up and down the Italian peninsula. For the Roman Republic, which depended heavily on slave labour, this was a terrifying humiliation.

What did Spartacus want?

This is one of the great debates. Plutarch says Spartacus wanted to lead his followers north over the Alps, so they could scatter and return to their homelands. Other ancient writers, Appian and Florus, say he considered marching on Rome itself.

Modern readers often see him as a fighter against slavery itself. But none of his recorded actions clearly aim at abolishing slavery as an institution. His goal may have been freedom for himself and his followers, which was radical enough in its time.

Crassus and the end

In 71 BC the Senate gave Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the richest men in Rome, eight legions to finish the war. Crassus restored discipline brutally, using decimation, the execution of one in every ten soldiers in units that had fled. Crassus also worried that his rival Pompey, returning from Spain, would arrive in time to take the credit.

In the final battle in 71 BC, in southern Italy, the rebel army was destroyed. Spartacus is presumed to have died fighting, but his body was never found. About 6,000 captured rebels were crucified along the Appian Way, the great road leading to Rome, as a warning.

How a gladiator became a symbol

Spartacus became a hero to later revolutionaries. Karl Marx admired him, and the German Spartacus League took his name. Most people today, though, know him from Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film Spartacus, based on a novel by Howard Fast. Its most famous scene, in which captured rebels one by one stand up and declare "I'm Spartacus!" to protect their leader, is an invention of the film, not of ancient history.

The real Spartacus is harder to see, but in a way more impressive: a man the Romans themselves described as able and intelligent, who turned a desperate escape into a war that nearly broke the most powerful state in the Mediterranean.

Learn with Spartacus: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to break free	to escape from control or a limit	She broke free from her old routine.
to rise up against	to rebel against	The workers rose up against unfair rules.
to stand up for	to defend or support	Stand up for your classmates.
against overwhelming odds	when the other side is much stronger	They held out against overwhelming odds.
to make an example of	to punish someone to warn others	The teacher made an example of the late student.

Try this: Imagine the "I'm Spartacus!" scene. Write three English sentences about a time someone stood up for you, using "stand up for" and "break free".