Ben Kane

Correct.

But the reason for that, because his name was lost for more than a thousand years, is because of modern history.

As you probably know, less than 4,000 words survive about Spartacus from ancient texts.

To translate that, that's 10 pages of a book.

So you've got sometimes, I mean, for example, a complete cookbook by Apicius or Livy's histories and so on, Plutarch's books.

Some of them survive in their entirety, but from various texts, we have less than 4,000 words, which is virtually nothing.

Correct, correct.

We know there were more complete descriptions of them, for example, by Sallust, but they didn't survive.

So they're fragmentary.

Sometimes they're only a line in someone's poem or something like that.

So what are these types of sources that we have surviving?

So you mentioned poems there.

We've got poems, we've got text by Sallust, we've got Appian, we've got Livy wrote something about him, but only a few fragments survive.

I think there's maybe some Arian and some Plutarch, but it's all very here, there, and everywhere.

And some of it contradicts what other people said, which is the norm for Roman history.

So we know he was Thracian.

Nobody really argues about that.

And Thrace is essentially modern-day Bulgaria.

This was an area full of many, many different tribes, most of which had been conquered by Rome by the period that we're talking about, but some of which had not.

And