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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Good morning on this swelteringly hot summer's day in London. Just a quick message from me before we get going. The Ancients, first time ever, we're going on tour. We're going international.
Australia and New Zealand, a series of live shows in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, Perth and Auckland in early August. Really exciting. Hope to see you there. We're going to be covering topics where myth meets ancient history, the labours of Hercules or the story of Romulus and Remus. That's to come.
So if you are listening to the show in Australia and New Zealand, we'd love to see you at one of these shows. Really do hope to see you there. We'll put more information and links to tickets in the description. Now, on with the episode. He was the underdog who humiliated Rome. It was the rebellion that refused to die.
In 73 BC, in a world where human beings were bought, branded and worked to death for profit, one man slipped the chains and set the Roman Republic on fire. Spartacus began as a Thracian outsider, living on the Roman frontier. The story goes that he had served as a soldier in the Roman army before he was enslaved and sold to a gladiator school.
He was expected to risk his life for entertainment, nothing more than muscle and blood in the sand. Instead, he led a daring breakout that turned a handful of desperate fighters into a roaming army, sparking a slave revolt that traversed the length of Italy and perhaps even beyond.
Today, we follow Spartacus up the slopes of Mount Vesuvius as he outsmarts Roman commanders who dismiss him as a mere bandit. We explore how he shatters consular armies and gathers tens of thousands under his banner. And what about the motive? What was driving Spartacus? Was he simply trying to get his people out of Italy, over the Alps? Or was he trying to bring the slave system to its knees?
Why did he fight on, win after win, until the Roman noose finally tightened? Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of Spartacus. Our guest is the best-selling Roman novelist, Ben Kane. Ben, always a pleasure. Welcome back to the show. Thanks, Tristan. It's lovely to be here.
And to talk about Spartacus, of all figures, you know, this former gladiator who turns leader of this massive revolt, his name's become immortalized today, one of the most recognized names from the whole of ancient history.
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Chapter 2: What was Spartacus's early life and how did he become a gladiator?
Yeah. So to set the stage, Rome was not an empire. It was a republic. Now, it was a weakened republic. It wasn't anything like what it had been fighting Hannibal in the third century BC. This was only 30 years before Julius Caesar and when there was a civil war that ended up with the republic being dying. But it was still a functioning democracy of its type.
And by this stage, it had largely subjugated a lot of the Mediterranean world. But as you say, there were areas of it like in modern day Turkey where Mithridates was, which, you know, was not completely under Roman control because...
Although the Romans had a startlingly high success rate in battle between 31 BC, which is the Battle of Actium, to 235 AD, which is when the wheels started falling off, in that 266-year period, they had a success rate in battle of 70%, which is quite extraordinary. If you compare that to any sporting team and ask them to win 70% of their matches for three centuries, it's not going to happen.
So that was the scene, and Spartacus was... and he was then, according to one Roman source, I think it was Varro, wrongfully enslaved. So for Romans to admit that something was done that was bad is very rare. So some Roman sources say that he was enslaved, but one of them says he was wrongfully enslaved. So I like to go with that one myself.
And it's fun speculating about his time in the army and how he served. The Thracians with their... pretty famous reputation in ancient times for being these fierce warriors. And as you mentioned, likely cavalrymen with their javelins. There's also certain tribes that we all did that big two-handed. The Romfea. The Romfea kind of bladed weapon as well.
That's right. And there are loads of types of those. I thought they were all curved, but a friend who was on holiday in Bulgaria a couple of years ago, he was showing me all these photographs of straight Romfea, literally like a spear, but with a blade all along the bottom of it.
Big bladed weapon. But it's testament, isn't it, that if Spartacus is a Thracian auxiliary, straight away he's being linked to these people who, since the time of Herodotus, the father of history, have been renowned as pretty ferocious people.
Indeed. There are lots of quotes about how savage they were and bloodthirsty, and they severed the heads of their enemies and so on. A bit like the Gauls, who were part of Spartacus's army. They have fearsome descriptions of these people. They were
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Chapter 3: How did Spartacus lead the breakout from the gladiator school?
Definitely a warlike people who didn't take kindly to anybody coming into their territory. So he would have been a natural warrior just from growing up. And then he was a Roman soldier and he would have quite likely learned Roman tactics. And then he was made to be a gladiator where he would have continued to fight.
And so there were a lot of things standing to him which helped, no doubt, to form him into the man he became.
And you mentioned that... You like to believe that version where he was wrongfully forced into slavery. Is there another version where he was a deserter? I mean, are there various, in the surviving 4,000 words we have, are there various stories as to how he went from auxiliary to slave?
My memory fails me. I think there's mention of him potentially one of the sources that he was a deserter and that he was caught. You got to remember with slavery in the ancient world that you didn't have ID. You didn't have proof of I'm a British citizen.
Chapter 4: What strategies did Spartacus use to defeat Roman armies?
I'm an American citizen. Here's my passport. If you were a non-Roman, i.e. a non-citizen, and some Roman soldiers in a combat zone took you as a slave,
nobody was going to stop you being a slave you could shout and scream all you liked so wrongful slavery i mean how can slavery ever be right but my point is that enslaving people just because they felt like it was potentially quite easy to happen and nobody would undo it unless you could prove that you shouldn't be a slave and how are you going to do that
So slavery after battles, you know, when a Roman army won a battle, it was just, you just became a slave. There was no say in it. Oh, well, what did I do? Well, you're on the losing side, buddy. So, yeah. 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.
So do we know much about slavery at this time in the Roman Republic? Were most slaves gained as the vanquished in a war, in a battle?
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Chapter 5: What motivated Spartacus during his rebellion?
Do we know much about the Roman Republic as a slave state at that time?
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.
And you do get some of those... Notorious events at the end of certain campaigns. I think it's Flamininus at the end of a campaign in Greece, which is like the scourging of a region called Epirus, and maybe like 50 or 100,000 people were slaved on the way.
The taking of Carthage in 146, 50,000. Julius Caesar, I mean it's later than Spartacus, but Julius Caesar, it's accepted, they reckon he took a million slaves in Gaul and killed another million. The number of Gaulish slaves in Rome was so great after Julius Caesar's campaigns in Gaul that they devalued the price of slaves to that of an amphora of wine.
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