Ben Kane
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It's about one crucifix every 40 yards or 40 meters for more than 130 miles.
so you would be able to see countless numbers if you were a merchant or a traveler you would be and and what's telling as well is sometimes they would take them down sometimes they wouldn't guard the crucified people but crassus had soldiers guarding the crucified people even at night and their bodies were not taken down until they had rotted so the smell through the summer of 71 bc and
But what this barbaric act did was it delivered in the most graphic terms possible to every slave in Italy, if you rebel against the Republic, this is what happens to you.
And there was never again another slave rebellion.
And modern historians and modern people took Spartacus to their heart.
So Voltaire, before the French Revolution, wrote about this being the only just war in history.
You then had Engels and Marx writing about him and bringing him into the public consciousness.
There was a man called Toussaint Louverture, who was a former slave in what is now Haiti.
literally based his rebellion against the French on Spartacus and won freedom for his country and was then, you know, taken prisoner afterwards.
But you then, coming through into the 20th century, you had a German communist organization called the Spartacus League who idolized him.
Moving forward, you had Soviet politicians holding him up as an example.
Then Howard Fast, famously an American communist.
Yes, there was a thing as an American communist who was imprisoned for his beliefs during the McCarthy era.
He wrote the book Spartacus, which was essentially an allegory about the free people being against the evil Roman Empire, which he meant the American Republic.
And it sold 5 million copies, sparked the film Spartacus with Kirk Douglas and the I Am Spartacus moment, and had this huge impact on public awareness.
But back then, Spartacus was never about ending slavery.