Ben Kane

So I, who knows?

I mean, the reason I like to think he was wrongfully enslaved is because I'm a novelist.

And I realize now it's because I'm Irish and the Irish were underdogs for so long.

We like the person who's had something wrong done to them, and then ultimately their story improves, although obviously for Spartacus it went bad at the end.

Yeah, we know quite a lot.

We know quite a lot.

Rome, as I mentioned, was a dying republic.

It was in a state of great change.

So the days of the citizen army in the Punic Wars, when men went off to war and weren't able to come home because prior to the Punic Wars...

generally legionaries who were citizens who volunteered to fight and went home when the war was over and wars frequently only took place during the campaigning season which was sowing of your crops in the spring to harvest time and then if you didn't win the war you more or less agreed to cease hostilities with your enemy you both went home to your farms and harvested your crops and you attacked each other again in the spring but when you're at war for years you can't do that

And this need for a permanent army had led to many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of citizen Romans being away from their farms in Italy for years on end, their families undergoing great hardship and indeed starvation and migrating as homeless people to the cities, which in turn led to large areas of Italy becoming depopulated and landowners, noblemen buying up

the land, and you then had basically the need for workers on those farms who were not citizens because the citizens were the poor in the cities.

This also, it's worth mentioning, gave rise to, it sort of fed the weakening of the Republic because these men who then joined the army were no longer joining the army because they needed to as a citizen required to by the Republic.

They were joining warlords like Julius Caesar and Pompey.

and following them for years on end and becoming personally loyal to generals, not to the Republic.

But the point is that slavery had then become almost a need and together with the unprecedented success of the Republican war in the third and second centuries BC, you did have a massive influx of slaves from war.

And we actually have the sources.

Someone compiled a list of the numbers of slaves taken in in wars by various sources.

And in the second century BC, it was over 200,000 slaves in 100 years.

So that's a lot of people.