Spartacus

In 73 BC, a gladiator escaped slavery and launched a rebellion that shook the Roman Republic to its core. His name was Spartacus, and his uprising became one of the greatest threats Rome had ever faced from within. Tristan Hughes is joined by Ben Kane to explore the dramatic story of Spartacus and his slave revolt that swept across Italy. Together, they cover the breakout at Capua to the battles against Roman armies and discover how Spartacus transformed a small band of fugitives into a force capable of humiliating Rome. Was he fighting for freedom, revenge, or something more? MORE The Roman Centurion Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000757089148 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/6lom5loW5NOP0rZjaaAXWX?si=ECqk2XAWTmGbNE09JOqjBA How to Survive in Ancient Rome Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000639460278 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/1JTitvxh96n2XflQQ7qwo4?si=boWAaJ_SQPGvHKJjP2PBeQ The Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch here: @TheAncientsPodcast https://www.youtube.com/@TheAncientsPodcast We're going on *TOUR* to Australia and New Zealand! - grab your tickets here https://fane.com.au/whats-on/an-evening-with-tristan-hughes/. Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. 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/subscribe.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one. And I'm Carter Roy and this is What the Fact? Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 1:02Tristan Hughes?

  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 labors 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.

• 1:59Tristan Hughes?

  It was the underdog who humiliated Rome. It was the rebellion that refused to die. In 73 B.C., 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.

• 2:39Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 3:24Tristan Hughes?

  Welcome to The Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of Spartacus. Our guest is the bestselling Roman novelist, Ben Kane. Ben, always a pleasure. Welcome back to the show. Thanks, Tristan.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  It's lovely to be here.

• 3:43Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 3:57Speaker 02

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

• 4:03Tristan Hughes?

  Right, so how difficult is it for us today, if his story has only recently been rediscovered, to sort fact from fiction?

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Incredibly difficult. As you probably know, less than four thousand words survive about Spartacus from ancient texts.

• 4:21Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  To translate that, that's ten 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 four thousand words, which is virtually nothing.

• 4:42Tristan Hughes?

  So it's not just one text that talks about Spartacus's story in detail. Those four thousand surviving words are also split around various texts that survive.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  There were, we know there were more complete descriptions of them, for example, by Salist, but they didn't survive. So they're fragmentary. Sometimes they're only a line in someone's poem or something like that, but.

• 5:03Tristan Hughes?

  And so what are these types of sources that we have surviving? So you mentioned poems there.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  We've got poems, we've got text by Salist, we've got Appian, we've got, Livy wrote something about him, but only a few fragments survive. I think there's some, maybe some Arian and some Plutarch, but it's, it's all very here, there and everywhere. And some of it contradicts what other people said, which is the norm for Roman history.

• 5:29Tristan Hughes?

  Roman historians and biographer like Plutarch as well, so they're the kind of figures that you have. And, well, let's start right at the beginning. Do we know much, do we know much about his origins? Who is this figure of Spartacus? Where does he supposedly come from?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  So we know he was Thracian, that, that, nobody really argues about that, and Thrace is essentially modern day Bulgaria. This was an area full of many, many different. 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 there is some thought that he may have been from the Maedi tribe, that's M A E D I. But that comes from a presumption made by a German historian that the word describing, which is nomadocos, or nomad, I think it's nomadocos, means that he was Maedi tribe. But I think most historians think that means he was a nomadic tribesman, which a lot of Thracians were. So he may not have been Maedi at all. They were from the southwest of Thrace.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  He may be in Odysseia, which was a tribe on the east of Thrace, close to the Black Sea, because we have an example of a of a king of that tribe having a very similar name.

• 6:37Tristan Hughes?

  Right. Yes, the Spartacus, yeah, and the Spartacus.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Sparadocos or something like that, I think.

• 6:41Tristan Hughes?

  And the Odrysae, you know, for a time, they were the biggest tribe in Thrace. Yeah, so they were very powerful.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  He he may have had, you know, kingly origins. But again, if that was his name at all, if that was his real name, because it's not certain that it was, but if that if that was his real name, he may have been named just because they wanted to, you know, have some, show that he had similarities to somebody. It doesn't mean he was from that tribe. It's so frustrating. But we know that he was Thracian and we know that he was a soldier in the service of the Roman Empire. So he would have been an auxiliary. And as a Thracian, it's quite likely he would have been a cavalryman, because they were very skilled horse riders. And at the time of the rebellion, which was seventy three to seventy one B C, say he was a mature adult man. So he was in his twenties, maybe early thirties.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  So if he'd been in the service of the Roman army, it's quite possible that he was involved in the military campaigns against Mithridates, who was a king in modern day Turkey, who led a very long fifteen year war against the Romans. And the Romans were forever, you know, basically fighting them and used Thracians as as their auxiliaries, among others.

• 7:52Tristan Hughes?

  Because that's important context to highlight. So the Roman Republic, so not an empire at this time, in the early first century B C. By this time, the Carthaginians had been beaten and the Romans. Very much establishing a foothold in that eastern Mediterranean area. And one of those key areas being what is modern day Turkey, where Mithridates lived.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  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 B.C. This was only thirty 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 thirty one B.C., which is the Battle of Actium,

• 8:54Speaker 02

  to two thirty five A.D., which is when the wheels started falling off. In that two hundred and sixty six year period, they had a success rate in battle of seventy percent, which is quite extraordinary. If you compare that to any sporting team and ask them to win seventy percent of their matches for three centuries, it's not going to happen. So that was the scene and Spartacus was an auxiliary. 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 he was wrongfully enslaved. So I I like to go with that one myself.

• 9:38Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  The ronfaya.

• 9:57Tristan Hughes?

  The ronfaya kind of bladed weapon as well.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  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, who was showing me all these photographs of straight ronfaya. Literally like a spear, but with a blade all along one the bottom of it.

• 10:12Tristan Hughes?

  But it's testament, isn't it, that, you know, if Spartacus is a Thracian auxiliary, straight away, he's being linked to these people who, since the time of Herodotus, that the father of history, have been renowned as as pretty ferocious people.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Indeed, there are lots of quotes about how savage they were and bloodthirsty and they carried the, you know, they severed the heads of their enemies and so on, um. A bit like the Gauls, who were part of Spartacus's army, they fearsome descriptions of these people, they were definitely a warlike people who didn't take kindly to um 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 learnt 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.

• 11:06Tristan Hughes?

  And you mentioned that you like to believe that version where he was wrongfully made, well, forced into slavery. Is there another version where he was a deserter? I mean, are there various in the surviving four thousand words we have, are there various stories as to how he went from auxiliary to slave?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  My memory, 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, 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

• 12:12Speaker 02

  shouldn't be a slave. And how are you going to do that? So slavery after battles, um, 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'm realizing now it's because I'm Irish and the Irish were underdogs for so long. We like, we like the person who's had something wrong done to them and then, and then ultimately their story, you know, improves, although obviously for Spartacus it went bad at the end, so.

• 12:48Tristan Hughes?

  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? Do we know much about the Roman Republic as a slave state at that time?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, we know quite a lot. We know quite a lot. Rome, as I mentioned, was a dying republic. It was in a, 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 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

• 13:42Speaker 02

  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, their families undergoing great hardship and indeed starvation and migrating as, 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, these men who then joined the army were no longer joining the army because they needed

• 14:26Speaker 02

  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. To the Republic. But the point is that slavery had then become almost a need. And together with the unprecedented success of the Republic in war in the third and second centuries B C. 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 B C, it was over two hundred thousand slaves in a hundred years.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  So that's a lot, that's a lot of people.

• 15:12Tristan Hughes?

  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 had the scourging of a region called Epirus. And maybe like fifty or a hundred thousand people.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:25Tristan Hughes?

  Slaved on the way.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  The taking of Carthage in one four six, fifty thousand. 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 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.

• 15:47Tristan Hughes?

  And at this time, so slaves are being acquired for work purposes on the farms and so on. But of course, the story of Spartacus is very much linked to him becoming a gladiator. So are we seeing at the beginning of the first century B C, slaves also being used for entertainment?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Yes, so during this period, we also had the change, the massive change as a permanent thing of gladiator fights being something that happened at the funeral of a famous rich person, like a consul. The first gladiator fight in Rome being recorded in two sixty four B C. A celebration of two men fighting possibly to the death at his graveside. And this was copied from the Campanians, who are a people who lived south of Rome. And we have evidence from tombs from the fourth century B C, so before that, of gladiator fights taking place and painted on the insides of tombs. But by the first century B C, these had become.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Such a spectacle, people flocking to funerals to see the gladiator fights, that politicians, because you remember, people like Crassus who defeated Spartacus or Julius Caesar, they were still politicians at this time with private armies. But they were still being elected to office. And in order to be elected to office, they would hold gladiator fights. And in a series of ever-growing spectacles, conspicuous consumption, you put on a gladiator fight with however many fighters. So I'm going to put on one with even more fighters. So you're going to do a bigger one. And that's the way it went. Till of course, then during the time of the empire, the emperor took control of gladiator fights because they were such a way of making yourself popular. He didn't want anybody else to be allowed to do them unless they had his permission, or he himself put them on.

• 17:32Tristan Hughes?

  And where can you get a key source of gladiators at this time? Well, as with Spartacus, it's enslaved people.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Yes, so they were generally prisoners of war, or slaves, or criminals. Very rarely, well, depends on your sources. Sometimes, I won't say very rarely, sometimes citizens did become gladiators. Maybe as a consequence of debt, they would sell themselves into the gladiator school, but they were, they were definitely a minority of fighters.

• 17:59Tristan Hughes?

  And you mentioned Campania, so that's beautiful region, south of Rome today. Think of Mount Vesuvius, think of Pompeii. But this region, it's also like the epicenter of gladiatorial fights of these gladiator schools, and that's still the case in the first century B.C.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Correct, yeah. The first gladiator school was in Capua, and there wasn't actually a gladiator school in Rome at that time. So there was one in Pompeii as well, although that was later. But Capua had a large gladiator school, which was run by Lanista, who was a Roman citizen called either Batiatus or Vatiad, depending on your source. And he would have been looked down on by the Roman population, because although this was a very popular sport, it was still a low-class thing that you wouldn't want to be associated with. So he would have been in the same class as a pimp, for example.

• 18:48Tristan Hughes?

  Right, okay.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Or a butcher.

• 18:50Tristan Hughes?

  But it's this figure, Batiatus, who acquires Spartacus.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:55Tristan Hughes?

  And takes him to his gladiator school.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  And we don't know where he was bought or how. I mean, some people would say it was in Rome. Personally, I would think it's easier to come over the sea to Brundisium.

• 19:08Tristan Hughes?

  I was thinking.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  And come up the main road towards Rome, but we don't know. But he arrived in Capua and he was a gladiator. We don't know any real details about his career in the gladiator arena. When I've written, for your listeners and viewers, I've written two books about Spartacus. It was great fun and I started it in Thrace and I moved straight into the rebellion. And I get a lot of emails, or I did when they were first published anyway, about why didn't you have the Spartacus fighting in the arena? And it was partly because the stuff he did in real life is so exciting. I didn't want to get stuck. Plus, we don't know what he did.

• 19:43Tristan Hughes?

  Well, I was going to ask, I mean, do we have any idea what he would have done whilst he was still in the service of Batiatus?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Um, it's thought that what's interesting, so the earliest classes of gladiators, before all the ones you see generally on TV and film. In the Republic, there were only three types of gladiators, although this was changing. And those three types were based on enemies of Rome. So one was a Samnite, who were the people who defeated Rome a couple of times before ultimately being defeated themselves from central Italy. One was a Gaul and one was a Thracian.

• 20:16Tristan Hughes?

  So a Thracian was actually one of the classes.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Thracian was one of the three classes, yeah. But we know that Spartacus did not fight as a Thracian. Now, this is quite likely, again, we don't know, but it's quite likely to have been a deliberate choice maybe by Batiatus. Because he wouldn't have wanted him to get ideas above his station or for people to start maybe, I don't know that he'd become too popular because he was a Thracian. So it's thought that he fought as a Marmillo, which is the famous fish, the guy with the fish-crested helmet and the armour and the gladius sword, which would have been just basically starting out at that time. So, but we know really nothing else about his career.

• 20:55Tristan Hughes?

  Well, it's also thinking about the name. Would he have been given the name Spartacus when he was there?

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Again.

• 21:01Tristan Hughes?

  That link to royal Thracian.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Yes, it's possible. It's possible that it was a stage name given to him, but the sources don't mention that. So it's also possible because, as I mentioned, that that nobleman of the Odysseae, whose name was Sparadox, Spartacus, I think. Sorry, these names sometimes very hard to pronounce, that it was a name from Thracian. So it may have been his real name.

• 21:22Tristan Hughes?

  I just love mentioning that because there is, in the Crimea of all places, for a time, a Greco-Thracian dynasty, it is believed, I'm not completely sure, that is commonly called the Spartacus dynasty as well.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:36Tristan Hughes?

  It's funny how you can then explain why the name Spartacus can also be linked to Crimea, just as much as Italy.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:44Tristan Hughes?

  As we're discussing today.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy and important thing that's ever happened in human history. From the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost, and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out. Dan Snow's History Hit, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing, and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  And I'm Carter Roy, and this is What the Fact. Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Podcast.

• 23:12Tristan Hughes?

  Okay then, let's get into the escape and the revolt of Spartacus. So what do we know? How does he escape the house of Batiatus?

• 23:21Speaker 02

  So gladiators were treated, they weren't treated as strictly before Spartacus's rebellion as they were afterwards, but they weren't still trusted completely. So they were kept, you know, they were locked into the gladiator school at night and so on. And about 200 of them, the sources tell us, decided to break out, which is a lot. So it was a big, it was a big gladiator school. Now, we don't know how, why, or when, but somebody must have spilled the beans to Batiatus because only, depending on your source, between 70 and 80 of them got out. And they weren't able to seize the weapons, which would have been kept separately in an

• 24:06Speaker 02

  armory in the gladiator school. And the action started in the kitchen. Again, we don't know why, but you know, presumably because somebody realised, maybe when they were eating their meal, that they'd been rumbled and they needed to move right now. And so they smashed their way into the kitchen and used the implements that they found there, which were meat cleavers, and even pestles, you know, big pestles for pestles and mortar, smashed their way out of the gladiator school. Again, we don't know how, but about 70 or 80 of them, and were very fortunate on the road out of Capua to come across a wagon train with arms for gladiators

• 24:48Speaker 02

  in a different gladiator school. And presumably it only had a few guards, so they overpowered them, probably killed them, took all the weapons, and hot-footed it away. Now, where did they go? Well, they went to Mount Vesuvius, because at that time, it hadn't erupted as a volcano for hundreds of years. And yet, because of the volcanic eruptions... That makes for very fertile growing conditions. So you, again, your viewers and listeners are probably familiar with the very famous image of Pompeii. With Vesuvius in the background and Bacchus, and it's literally green from top to bottom.

• 25:21Tristan Hughes?

  Covered in vines, isn't it?

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Covered in vines, yeah. And so it was an incredibly fertile area and but it's also a big mountain. Great place to go and hide out at the top. So that's where they went and um set up camp. Possibly in the crater. Nowadays, there are two craters. Back then, there was only one because it hadn't erupted, obviously, like it did in seventy nine. So maybe in the crater and presumably, uh, basically, what are we gonna do? And so they started robbing the local estates. You've got to remember that there was pretty much no police force in ancient Italy. There wasn't a police force in Rome until the early first century A D. So in a rural area, there was even less. And there would have been local politicians and there would have been local militias potentially, but there wasn't a police force. So

• 26:06Speaker 02

  you defended your property with your slaves and and and whatever you had if somebody came to steal. But if an armed group of eighty men came, pretty much no estate would be able to defend themselves. So it was basically like stealing toys from a child or sweets from a child.

• 26:21Tristan Hughes?

  It sounds like a bandit camp, you know, right at the top of the hill where you wouldn't venture this idea.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what that's what he was. And slaves began to come and join him and it was uh apparent right from the outset that he refused to accept domestic slaves, soft-handed domestic slaves. He only accepted agricultural slaves used to work in the outdoors. Interestingly, herdsman, men who looked after sheep and cattle, slaves, were the only slaves who were allowed to be armed. Because you remember there would be wolves and bears, so they they they would have had spears and bows and arrows. So he allowed them to join and also, you know, obviously gladiators. So we've no idea how quickly his force swelled, but the Romans were quite slow to react, just as they had been in the previous

• 27:07Speaker 02

  two slave rebellions, which had taken place in Sicily between one thirty five and one thirty two B C and one oh four and one hundred B C.

• 27:15Tristan Hughes?

  So this is why if someone searches Spartacus today, you might also. So see the words, the third Servad War.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Correct, correct. This was the third and biggest by far slave rebellion. And the previous two had rumbled on for years because the Romans had a, they had a very low opinion of slaves. Well, it's only slaves. What do we care? So when they decided to act, the Senate being the ruling body of Rome at the time. And there were no, there were no emperors, remember? They sent a, they designated this rebellion as a tumultus. As in the word tumultuous, which is basically just an upset. It wasn't a bellum, it wasn't a war because it was just slaves.

• 27:57Tristan Hughes?

  This is a little problem.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  A little problem. So little problem equals we don't need to send real soldiers. At this time, you know, not in an active massive war like they were against Hannibal, for example. The Republic had four legions each year and they were commanded by two consuls. The most senior magistrates of the Roman Republic. So each consul had two legions. They didn't send them. They sent a praetor who was a justice lower down the ranking to a consul, of which there were either six or eight. They sent a praetor called Caius Claudius Glaber. And he didn't have any troops because the troops, the only sort of troops that were ready to go would have been the consul's legions.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  So he quite possibly recruited veterans and just men from towns or from Rome.

• 28:45Tristan Hughes?

  Like a town watch kind of thing?

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, on his way, on his way south. But what we know is that he had about three thousand men. By the time he, he reached Vesuvius, the area of Vesuvius. And let's say Spartacus had a couple of hundred men by this point, you know, maybe more, but probably not very many more. Certainly nothing to compare with three thousand armed, well armed, there would have been Roman soldiers of, even if they were of dubious quality. Now, Vesuvius is pretty big, so Glaber couldn't surround it completely. But what he did was he blocked the road up to it. There was only one road up to the top and set up camp. And presumably had sentries in and maybe watchposts separated around, around the base of the mountain. We don't know.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  But what we do know is that he he sat and waited to see what would happen. And one of the things that's pertinent to mention at this point is that um generally in ancient times, nobody fought at night. Hmm. The night was the domain of gods and demons and spirits, and it was really bad luck. Now, obviously, they didn't have the um infrared, they didn't have radios, so it was very confusing and easy to get lost, all those things. So Spartacus attacked the camp at night, but um how did he get down there? It's really, really, really cool what he did. There were, and still are, wild vines growing on the slopes of Mantuvius today. And they fashioned ropes from them.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Now, we're not talking about going down a vertical cliff because they're not strong enough to take the weight of a man. But a lot of the slopes coming down of Vesuvius are really steep and potentially covered in scree and gravel type surface and would have been very dangerous and difficult to come down, especially if you're carrying weapons. So they fashioned ropes and came down at night um in an area where the Romans weren't watching. And they attacked the Roman camp under the cover of darkness and caused total panic. I mean, I had such fun writing scenes like this because what's likely, I mean, a Roman army on the march, when it finishes, it digs out a two to three meter, six to nine foot deep V shaped ditch, and then uses the earth from that to make a two to three meter high wall if it's doing its job properly.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  But maybe Glaber's men didn't haven't done it properly because, oh, what do we care? They're only slaves. So they may not have even had a rampart at all, or if they did, it wasn't high enough, or there weren't enough sentries. Anyway, total panic and Glaber's men just fled. They just ran off into the night, basically abandoning their camp and all their arms and equipment. Now, presumably, some of them were killed, but it didn't really matter because suddenly Spartacus's men had the arms and armor, a potentially of three thousand soldiers. And at this time, the slave population of Italy is estimated to be over a million, at least a third of the population. And in that rich fertile area full of farms and estates, high density of slave population, you can

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Bet your boots that the gossip around the well or the gossip in the marketplace of slaves meeting each other on the road with wagons or, you know, whenever there was a point for slaves of one estate to talk to others, it would have just gone around the country like wildfire.

• 31:54Tristan Hughes?

  The story would have been in the form of Pompeii, you know, all of those places.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, everybody, the citizens would have been talking about, they would have, the citizens would have been terrified. But the slaves importantly would have said, do you hear what happened? And I mean, literally from that point on, the slaves were flocking to his army because some slaves lived in manacles, but mostly they didn't. Or if they did, it was at night, if they were agricultural. And in domestic cases, they probably were never chained up. So they could just run away. And actually, they're fetters, even if they did come to infetters, they then later used them to make weapons.

• 32:29Tristan Hughes?

  So. I mean, the weapons part I'd like to ask a bit more about because you mentioned how, you know, early on, they fortunately come across that wagon of weapons for a gladiator school.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 32:41Tristan Hughes?

  Now, weapons for gladiators, they were like army weapons, but normally slightly different. They're a bit more specialised for the whole spectacle of a gladiator fight. So can you imagine the weapons that they started with when they were fighting this first makeshift army, three thousand soldiers, were maybe slightly different to the ones that they acquired afterwards?

• 33:00Speaker 02

  They weren't that different. The gladius used by gladiators was the same as in a military one.

• 33:05Tristan Hughes?

  You're saying it's exactly the same?

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the spear that the Gaul used, we don't know, but it was probably just the same as any other spear. It wouldn't have been a peelum. Now, the Thracian gladiator used a sicca, which is the curved Thracian blade.

• 33:18Tristan Hughes?

  I think that's more I'm thinking of.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's specialised because only a Thracian warrior would have used one of them. So they may have had some of them. But, I mean, in the night time, you're wielding one of that, even if you've never, if it's sharp and you chop someone with it, it's.

• 33:32Tristan Hughes?

  Maybe it's more the armour as well, I guess.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, well, again, the legionaries labour commander would have had the armour, we think, and weapons of a typical republican legionary, which was male shirt, simple montefatino helmet.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Larger shield than you're used to seeing on TV, a republican scutum, which is bigger, top and bottom and curved, and one or two throwing javelins. And probably a dagger as well. So, you know, great equipment for, if you're trained how to use weapons, just because you've never used a particular, you know, if you've used one kind of gun, it's usually quite easy to work out how to use another type of gun. So.

• 34:09Tristan Hughes?

  They still wanted to ask because it's interesting to think about how they're now get it out.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Well, it's in, it brings us on to the, which we'll talk about later, his successes in battle. Did he train them in the Roman fashion? Because it's quite possible indeed, there's even a suggestion there may have been a Roman or two helping them to do that. Because at the time, there was a, a general called Sertorius, who was in Spain.

• 34:34Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Who was a rebel against the Republic. And there is some reference in the texts to potentially, and obviously I used it in my novels. A Roman soldier from Sertorius coming to Italy and joining Spartacus.

• 34:48Tristan Hughes?

  An agent.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  To help train his men, because that would help bring down the Republic, which would help Sertorius.

• 34:54Tristan Hughes?

  I love the story of Sertorius, who deserves his, what a story he is out in Spain.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:59Tristan Hughes?

  So amazing to think that there could be a link. But what do we know from the sources about the aftermath of the Vesuvius victory for Spartacus? So more slaves joined his forces.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's thought that he broke out of the ludus, or the gladiator school in the spring of seventy three B C. And that he was on Vesuvius into the summer of seventy three B C, when Glaber came to, you know, basically get beaten. And run away. And then the army swelled in size massively, potentially beyond ten thousand, potentially up to thirty thousand or even more. A really big force. Now, obviously, most of them would not have been trained soldiers. And so despite the size of this army, which now came down off Vesuvius and started moving south.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Because they needed food. So tens of thousands of men, whether they're slaves or legionaries, they need an awful lot of food. You're talking hundreds of tons of food every day. So they're like a plague of locusts. So God forbid you were a Roman citizen in Forum Anni, for example, which was a small Roman town south of, uh, near Nola and Nusiria, which are two other towns which were probably attacked by Spartacus, which was descended upon by Spartacus's army at that time. And basically, you just imagine what they did. They did everything horrible that you can imagine, killed and raped and murdered. And it's thought that Spartacus didn't want that to happen.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Interestingly, some of the sources describe him as a man of great, uh, not just great strength, but of, of intellect and someone who was not a savage.

• 36:35Tristan Hughes?

  Right, okay.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  You could argue that they did that because it was common, just like descriptions of Hannibal Barker. When you've got somebody who's basically handed the, um, Republic its own backside on a plate multiple times over, you can't denigrate him and make him out to be useless and stupid and a savage.

• 36:52Tristan Hughes?

  It's the noble barbarian.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  So the noble barbarian, because how else could he have beaten us?

• 36:56Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah. They do with Pyrrhus and Tannenbaum.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Yes, they do with everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the Romans, let's face it, everybody, the Romans were racist, misogynistic and homophobic for the most part. So if you were non-Roman, you, you know, you were, you really were looked down on.

• 37:11Tristan Hughes?

  You seen as the other.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, the other with a capital O, yeah.

• 37:14Tristan Hughes?

  Uh, and so is that very much his strategy, whether he liked it or not, for the following months, following that victory over Glaber, whilst the forces are growing, they're still all together, but there's the need for food. And it is just kind of those local, rich towns and settlements that feel the brunt of the force?

• 37:31Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. They moved down the west coast of Italy, right down to the arch of the boot. And so the bit that's between the heel and the toe, which has got a great big sort of massive bay, if you like.

• 37:46Tristan Hughes?

  It's the Bay of Tarentum, isn't it?

• 37:47Speaker 02

  The Bay of Tarentum, where Taranto is now, but, but west of Taranto. Taranto's over near the heel of the boot. We're talking about places like Thuriay and Metapontum, who were towns, which were towns that were attacked by Spartacus. And we've got examples in the countryside. I think, um, there is a villa.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  They found near there in which they found a pot of coins and a gold, a piece of gold jewellery buried. And the carbon dating dates it to about seventy three B C or seventy five B C. So it's possible that it was buried by a panicked landowner who was hearing of this slave army. Because if you lived in the countryside, I mean, you just got out quickly and went to the local town. And there's another building that's been found in that area with a burnt stoa, which is like a facade at the front of a building, and that may be from that time as well. So these fascinating little finds that you, you know, we all want to link to things because it makes sense. But if the carbon dating works, then it certainly is possible.

• 38:51Tristan Hughes?

  It immediately makes me think of something like the Phoenic treasure in Colchester.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:55Tristan Hughes?

  Which is linked to like a Roman family.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Correct. I mean, that, that, that's definite because it's below the ash layer from the destruction of Colchester by Boudicca's army. I, I show that image in talks I do and I say, this is from such a date in, in sixty A D. We don't know exactly when in sixty A D, but it's so rare to have an exact date. The best one for that is the loaf of bread from the oven in Pompeii. And that, that was baking when Vesuvius went boom. Yeah, on that day. So I sometimes have a best before date with an arrow and the slide when I'm showing it to people. And most people don't get it.

• 39:29Tristan Hughes?

  And the makeup of this army when they're in southern Italy, is it very much Spartacus, the charismatic leader? He is the commander in chief and the sole general. Do we know much else about the command structure?

• 39:41Speaker 02

  We do. We know that his force initially was made up of Couts, i.e. Gauls, although there were Couts from Thrace as well, but probably primarily from Gaul and Germans, very warlike people. Now, probably some Thracians as well. We do have a few names. We have the name Inimaus and we have the name Crixus.

• 40:04Tristan Hughes?

  Crixus.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Both of whom were Gauls. And look, these would have been alpha males, all of them. There would have been no, oh, Spartacus, you're the boss. It would have been, well, you've got the ideas, but maybe I've got some ideas and it would not have been a happy camp. They wouldn't have been doing what he told them. And that was evident fairly soon after the rebellion began, but. They certainly went along with what he was doing for the moment as they moved down into into the south and obviously that far south, the winters are milder. So they spent the winter of seventy three into seventy two B C in the Bay of Torrento and then started moving north again in spring of seventy two B C. And by this point, the Romans were taking it a bit more seriously.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  And they sent another praetor by the name of Varinius with several senior officers and a force of, we don't know how many, but certainly potentially some thousands of men. Okay. You know, not. Bigger than Glabers. Yes, bigger than Glabers. Yeah, not legion, not under a consul still, but stronger in force. And bad things started to happen to them pretty much straight away. Like, the sources are so scant. When you're writing novels, as I do, when you get handed a scene that's so amazing and funny that you couldn't make it up, it's like winning the lottery. And so what happened to one of

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Varinius's officers, which was a man called Cassinius, was literally laugh out loud. He was in command of two thousand men. So the, obviously, Varinius's army was not marching together. And they were marching south to find Spartacus. And hot day, he found a local villa which had a swimming pool, as some big Roman villas did. And he had presumably said to the owner, look, I I'm very hot and bothered. Do you mind? And the officer was probably delighted to have some Roman soldiers in the vicinity. Yes. Protecting his house, of course. So he was in this swimming pool, having a nice time. And Spartacus's men literally appeared in the grounds of the villa. Whilst he's in the swimming.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  While he was in the swimming pool and he literally jumped on his horse. Now, in my book, I had him jump on his horse naked. It was that bad. Whether he had his clothes on or not, we don't know, but he fled for his life, pursued by Spartacus's men and was attacked in his camp. Survived, but thousands of his men were killed. A massive defeat for the Romans. And then this began to happen in quick succession. So another officer of Averinus, who was called Furius, quite, he was probably furious. He got beaten as well, ambushed. They still weren't facing the Romans in open battle. And but it all went wrong. There was another officer called Terranius, I think he was, and he got beaten as well.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  And so in very quick succession, in a matter of a few months, the Romans just suffered defeat after defeat by Spartacus's army, which presumably led to even more slaves joining his army. Because it's thought by, at some point anyway, at the height of his rebellion, he had as many as fifty or sixty thousand men following him.

• 43:13Tristan Hughes?

  So they're starting to realise that, hang on, this guy we're fighting against, he actually does know how to effectively combat the Romans at war. He's playing to his strengths, like ambushes and the like.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, and by this point, having defeated so many Roman armies, just like Hannibal did after Trasimene, they would have been pillaging the corpses for their, for their armour and their swords and their spears and their shields. So a lot of his men were probably fighting with Roman weaponry, looking like Roman soldiers, maybe racially different or whatever. But this is where it starts to get really interesting. We know that they'd caught wild horses during the winter down in, in the Bay of Taranto. And they were using cavalry. So whether they were Thracians or other, the Gauls were renowned horsemen as well. So at this point, I mean, I had in my novels, a Sartorian officer teaching them how to fight like Romans and, and Spartacus teaching them how to fight like Thracian cavalry.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Whatever they did, we know as well, as the story unfolds, that they beat the Romans again and again, even in open battle. A lot of people will tell you who don't know, oh, well, Spartacus, what did he do? He never beat the Romans in open battle. Absolutely, he did. He beat both consuls in open battle.

• 44:24Tristan Hughes?

  Did he? Right.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  We'll talk about that in a minute, but yeah. So that you couldn't do that unless your army was well trained and well drilled. You just couldn't, because even if those legions weren't. Five years of war against Hannibal, battle hardened. They were still Roman legionaries in a trained legion who could beat just about anybody.

• 44:43Tristan Hughes?

  And at the same time, keeping the logistics networks up that they must have sorted with the, you know, whether it's still raiding the nearby towns or taking advantage of the rich lands of formerly Magna Graecia, you know, the Greek cities and all of that stuff to their benefit.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Interestingly, he didn't let silver or gold. I mean, it probably did happen a bit, but he didn't let silver or gold come into his camps. You were only allowed to bring iron because he didn't want people fighting over money.

• 45:07Tristan Hughes?

  Really?

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was, he was a dude.

• 45:11Tristan Hughes?

  Giga chance, Spartacus.

• 45:21Speaker 03

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• 45:59Speaker 01

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• 46:06Speaker 04

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• 46:39Tristan Hughes?

  Right, so how do we go from those successful ambushes and chasing away that guy naked from the swimming pool to this pitched battle against two consuls?

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so by this point, the slave army had broken up. Crixus had had enough.

• 46:56Tristan Hughes?

  He's decided.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  He's decided, you know what, actually, I'm not going to take orders probably from you anymore. And he'd split away from Spartacus by this point. And his army, which they think was between 20,000 and 30,000 strong, so potentially a big chunk of Spartacus's army, it went over to the east coast of Italy and was presumably pillaging its way through settlements and towns up there because nothing would have been able to stop it. But by this point, the Romans had realised, the Senate had realised, that they had to face this with proper force. And so both consuls were mobilised and sent to deal with it. And one of them, who interestingly was a man in his 60s with not much combat experience,

• 47:42Speaker 02

  called Gellius, Gellius Publicola, he was 62 years old. So that's really old for a Roman. And he encountered Crixus near Mount Gargano. Now, if you look at a map of Italy and you go up from the heel of the boot and the toe of the boot, on the Adriatic side, about a third of the way up, there's a bump, like a callus.

• 48:05Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, yep.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  And it's near the town of Bari. And that callus or bump, if you zone in on it on Google with your looking at the terrain, it's a mountain called Mount Gargano. Maybe it was a volcano a very long time ago. But that's on the slopes of that mountain is where the Romans put their forces. So they took the high ground. They were outnumbered significantly, 10,000 roughly soldiers, two legions with maybe some socii or auxiliaries, we don't know, but about 10,000 soldiers.

• 48:37Tristan Hughes?

  Those the non-citizen kind of light soldiers?

• 48:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, or maybe the legion was 5,000 strong then. And you know, because who knows how big an legion was and all that, about 10,000 Romans, a lot, but about 30,000 slaves. And they attacked up slope at Gellius's army and apparently attacked three or four times and were beaten back. And now the Romans, instead of doing the normal triplex ACs formation, which is three ranks, having four cohorts in the front rank, three cohorts in the second and three in the third, slightly staggered. So the gaps in the front line are covered from behind by the cohorts in the second line. And likewise, the gaps in the second line covered by the gaps, by the cohorts in the third line.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  They deployed in a duplex ACs, so a, a more concentrated fashion. But regardless of being outnumbered, they absolutely butchered the unfortunate slave army and Crixus died fighting. They were very brave. There was a battle where the Romans defeated the Gauls, uh, some 30 or 40 years before, where not a single Gaul was, was recorded to have run away. And in a later battle, which I'll mention, um, which happened to another breakaway section of Spartacus's army, only two of the 12,300 dead were found to have wounds in their backs. So they died, you know, they were brave, um, but that was the, that was the end to them.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  And that, that would have really weakened Spartacus's forces.

• 50:05Tristan Hughes?

  Would have shook them that they realized.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  And would have shook them as well. Yeah. So by this point, the other consul, who, if my memory serves me, had one of those dreadfully long four names, Roman name. But I think Lentulus was, was the last one. He's known as Lentulus. And he went in pursuit of Spartacus and Spartacus was probably aware, just from the Bush telegraph, that what had happened to Crixus and that he would soon have two consular armies after him. So he knew you'd have to fight, it'd be better to fight one and then have the other. So he ambushed Lentulus's army. Okay, he ambushed him, but they still absolutely thrashed the Romans. He was then pursued by Gellius soon after that.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Nothing survived the battle, except that he beat Gellius.

• 50:52Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  So maybe it was ambush, but this is two consular armies. He's just beaten one after another. He then continued north and came down out of the Apennines Mountains, uh, uh, to near the modern day town of Medina, which was known as Mutinat to the Romans. And was there faced by a consular sized army under a pro consul, whose name was Longinus, Cassius Longinus, father of one of Julius Caesar's murderers or assassins. And he beat him as well in open battle. And all right, he had a bigger army, but he's still a proper Roman army. And then you have this, which again, your listeners and viewers will all be aware of this moment where the slave army,

• 51:35Speaker 02

  having defeated every Roman army in its path, has nothing to stop it leaving the Roman Republic. Nothing but the Alps.

• 51:43Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, because they've gone from Campania to the south, then, you know, Mutina.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  All the way north.

• 51:48Tristan Hughes?

  All the way north.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:50Tristan Hughes?

  Defeating everyone as they come.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:52Tristan Hughes?

  Do they just keep going north towards the Alps?

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Well, this is the whole story. So, you know, historians think that Spartacus must have wanted to leave because why else did he go that way? And maybe he did or maybe he didn't. I think that makes, that makes sense to me. But the fact is that his army turned around and then marched south again. And, and we don't know why. Now, there are probably loads of masters essays on it and PhD theories about it. And academics love to argue about it. We simply don't know. The sources don't tell us. So you've got to think about, was it because autumn was coming and the Alps are a significant barrier?

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Was it because they had spent the last year and more literally doing what they wanted up and down Italy? And had beaten everybody. The Japanese during World War Two, when they were moving really fast and taking everything in their path, like Singapore and all the islands in the Pacific, they had a term that they called victory disease. And it's like, you know, supporters of Man United back in the nineties, you, you, when you, you keep winning, you just think you're always going to win. Well, why would we leave now? What are the Romans going to do to us? We can beat anybody.

• 53:03Tristan Hughes?

  Just one more army to beat.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Just one more army to beat, yeah. So Spartacus obviously could have left himself. So that's what I thought about. We, interestingly, we know that he had a wife who was a priestess of Dionysus. So I had her as a character in the book. We know almost nothing about her, except that she interpreted a dream of his before the rebellion, when he had a snake wound around his head in this, well supposedly it happened, but as anyone who knows about snakes, snakes don't do that. But regardless of whether it was a dream, it was a portent of him having a great and terrible power. And in the days of when everyone was a pagan and Roman generals, including Sulla, had used seers in their campaigns, this would have been potentially very powerful for Spartacus to use. So he had a wife with

• 53:47Speaker 02

  him, we think. And if he'd gone, you know, turned right and just headed across through Slovenia towards Thrace, who would have found him? Now, I think the Romans would have gone after him because they were famous for revenge being a dish best he can call. Look what they did with Germanicus in his raids into Germany after the Varyen disaster. I mean, they waited five or six years.

• 54:11Tristan Hughes?

  With Arminius, yes.

• 54:12Speaker 02

  And then they crossed over the Rhine and they practiced genocide for a couple of years. So, but maybe he suspected that, who knows? Maybe even though he wanted to leave, he didn't want to leave his army because he, by this stage, he was the undisputed leader and he had a big army and, you know, people have big egos. So who knows?

• 54:33Tristan Hughes?

  Funny, isn't it? But for whatever reason, he doesn't.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  For whatever reason, he didn't. He turned around and they marched south again. And some of the sources say they then met the double consular armies of Lenculus and Galleus and beat them in open battle as well.

• 54:47Tristan Hughes?

  Ah, okay.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Which is just extraordinary, quite extraordinary. So they bypassed Rome. Some people said, oh, why didn't they attack Rome? I mean, that's nonsense. Rome had 25 to 30 foot high walls and a double legion in size. They didn't have siege engines. They were, there was no way they were ever going to say that.

• 55:03Tristan Hughes?

  Same at Hannibal, isn't it? You know, it's not worth the effort of doing it.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  No, no. And I'm sure you'll come to it about whether he wants to abolish slavery or not. We'll come to that maybe at the end. But he continued south. Past Rome to, you know, happy hunting grounds below, below Rome in Campania and further south. And by this point, they encountered another Roman force, which was small, but beat that too. But by this point, the Roman Senate had realised, this is really serious. We need a massive army. And so in came Marcus Licinius Crassus.

• 55:37Tristan Hughes?

  Right, okay.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:39Tristan Hughes?

  So who is Marcus Licinius Crassus?

• 55:42Speaker 02

  He was a remarkable individual. There's a bust that survives of him. And if it's true, he was a miserable looking git.

• 55:49Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Really serious, frowning, doesn't look happy.

• 55:54Tristan Hughes?

  A lot of stress marks.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  A lot of stress marks. Yeah, you know, like bull neck. But he was, he was a very clever man, a very able man in many ways. He was from a family which had had mixed fortunes. So in the civil wars, in the sort of 20 years before, or 15 to 20 years before this, his father had committed suicide when he wouldn't back Marius. And so the young Crassus had had to flee to Spain and he then ended up joining the army of Sulla, who was marching on Rome. And when Sulla was attacking Rome and his army was losing the battle to take Rome, it was Crassus on the right flank who actually won the battle for Sulla. But he then fell foul of Sulla, although made himself very rich during the proscriptions. So, hey, you

• 56:39Speaker 02

  supported, you supported the wrong guy. So did you were taking your property. And he was very good at doing that. And indeed, may have added someone's name to the list who hadn't been a supporter of the, you know, for previous regime. He was also astute at, fire was a really big problem in ancient Rome, because most buildings were made of wood and streets were really narrow. So fire spread very readily. No fire brigade, no aqueducts at this time. He had his own private fire brigade of slaves. So when a street was busy burning down, he'd come along. Let's say there was a wine merchants at the end of the street, which wasn't burning yet. And he would be there with his fire brigade of slaves with, you know, instruments to pull down buildings to stop a fire.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  From spreading and and the wine merchant would say, well, save my property. And he'd say, of course, I'll buy your I'll buy your business from you for ten percent of what it's worth.

• 57:30Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, it wasn't just that how much you're going to pay me. It's I'm going to take your business.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  I'm going to take your business. Yeah. So and they would say, well, of course, I'm not going to give you that. And he'd just wait for the fire to come closer. And then he'd wait till he could get it at a knock down price and then save the save the business. So he was ruthless.

• 57:45Tristan Hughes?

  Savage.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  Ruthless. And however, he was so rich that he was able to personally pay for six legions to be put into the field. Now, we know the cost. It was approximately a million denarii to support a legion for a year. And later in his life, Crassus said, you're not rich unless you can pay for a legion. And he paid for six, so thirty thousand, nearly thirty thousand men, twenty four to thirty thousand men in the field. And he was given the four legions of the two consuls as well. So he suddenly, over a period of months, obviously, but more or less suddenly, had an army of ten legions.

• 58:25Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  So this is what he went to face Spartacus with.

• 58:29Tristan Hughes?

  So he's now got a sizable army at his back. They're deciding we've got to deal with Spartacus now.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:35Tristan Hughes?

  And Spartacus, in the meantime, has he just been, I'm sure he's hearing the reports of what's happening.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:40Tristan Hughes?

  Um, but he's been marching south.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  He was, uh, good, because by now we're into sort of the summer, uh, coming towards autumn of seventy one B C. Sorry, seventy two B C, I beg your pardon.

• 58:53Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  And he wasn't going to go north again because he would have heard of Crassus's army and that's where they'd come from anyway. So they would have been raiding farms and towns for food and uh, equipment and so on. And Crassus pursued him down towards southern Italy. And his army would have been moving in different parts. And a leading part of his army was led by an officer called Mummias. And he was given very strict instructions to get close to Spartacus, but not to engage with him. So he had a force of two legions under his control and in the way that often happens when men. Blood is up. He got too close to Spartacus and his troops started fighting. Maybe they

• 59:38Speaker 02

  were scouts, maybe he deployed some legionaries. It developed into a battle and they got beaten.

• 59:42Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  And they came with their tails between their legs back to Crassus' camp and Crassus decided that he had to lay down a really certain deliberate message that you do not run away from the enemy in battle. And so he ordered, it's thought, a full cohort to be decimated.

• 1:00:02Tristan Hughes?

  Right. Okay. This is gruesome stuff. What is a decimation?

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  So I'm quite pedantic, as your readers might have astounded, or readers, sorry, viewers and listeners might have astounded by this point. Decimation, the meaning of decimation is actually different today, and it's happened because of ignorance. Because decimation today, if you hear news reporters talking about it, it means annihilation. If a town has been decimated or an army unit's been decimated, almost none of them survive. However, it comes from the Roman punishment, so this is the correct interpretation, which is one man in ten will be executed. In fact, beaten to death in front of his, the rest of the legion by his comrades. So fifty men or forty-eight men out of a cohort of four-hundred-and-eighty

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  were beaten to death in front of the army. And that brutal message meant that none of Crassus' soldiers ran away after that. So I get asked this a lot. Well, if the Romans were forever, you know, using the fustuarium, which is where you beat a few men to death, or the decimation, if they were always doing that, then how did they ever have any men to fight? Because they would have been executing all these men. You don't have to do something like that very often. You know, do it once and it'll work for years before men run away again.

• 1:01:17Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, it doesn't seem to have been a very regular punishment. The only other example that comes immediately to my mind is with another rebel a few decades later, Tacfarinas in North Africa, where I think there is a similar case of a Roman army going out, being beaten by Tacfarinas, being overconfident, and then the commander in chief orders another decimation. So yes, brutal, but doesn't seem to have been very regular.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  It was very rare. Decimation is only described three or four times in all of the Roman battles that I, that I'm aware of.

• 1:01:49Tristan Hughes?

  And so what happens after this? So Mummius's

• 1:01:53Tristan Hughes?

  Attack has not gone well and they've had this brutal punishment. But it seems like Spartacus, he's getting nearer and nearer Sicily of all places.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Correct, yeah. So he ended up going down into the toe of the boot to near Regium, which I think.

• 1:02:09Tristan Hughes?

  Regio.

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  Regio today, yeah. And listeners and viewers will know that it's really close to Sicily. You can see it's a mile, about a mile, which is near enough to see details. But that distance in ancient times is as far as the moon when you haven't got ships. Because the waters, and we're now into autumn time, would have been very uncertain. You had the myth, obviously, of the whirlpool Choribidus and the mythical beast, the skilla, that killed sailors that would try to go through it. But Roman ships in general were pretty, pretty bad.

• 1:02:40Tristan Hughes?

  Also, so that episode from Odysseus.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Tristan Hughes?

  The skilla and cryptus is the Strait of Messina.

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  Correct, yeah. It's right there, yeah. And so at this point, some pirates come into the equation. Because pirate activity in the Mediterranean at this time was, was rife. I mean, Crete particularly, but also Cilicia, which was an area of Turkey, were known for their piracy. And there was no royal navy, there was no American navy, there was no navy to patrol the sea. So the pirates really, they in fact helped to drive the slave trade. And they, they did what they liked. We know that Spartacus met with some of these pirates and, and paid for two thousand of his men to cross over to Sicily. Now, there wouldn't have been maybe enough money or ships or time to get his whole army over, but presumably what they were to do was to cross over and get a

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  a beachhead and maybe get some ships and come back for the rest. But pirates do what pirates do and they took his money and they sailed away. Now, maybe did the Romans pay them off? You know, if Crassus heard, they could have got two payments, one from Spartacus and then a bigger one from Crassus.

• 1:03:45Tristan Hughes?

  I think Crassus can pay more.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, Crassus can pay more. So I, I, you know, it's so long since I wrote those novels. I think I might have had the pirate captain go up and do, do a deal with the Romans. You know, hey, if you pay me more, I won't go and do this. I can't remember, but certainly possible. What, what we do know is that Spartacus's men then tried to build some. And were unsuccessful, likely some of them drowned and they had just had to give up on crossing to Sicily. By this point, Crassus' legions were really close. They were in the the the point of the boot. So the route back to mainland Italy was blocked. Now, any of you who've ever been that part of the world, you know that it's there's there are mountains going all the way down to Reggio. And they're really high. I mean, they're up to a thousand meters, I think, and winter was here.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  And so it's recorded that Crassus built a wall from one side of the point of the boot to the other. In other words, from the Ionian, no, from the Ionian Sea to the Adriatic. Now, that's about fifty K, thirty five miles. Even when they built the siege in Numantia, that was only a fraction of that distance of fortifications.

• 1:04:51Tristan Hughes?

  And they've had precedent for it because the Greek tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius, I think he did something similar. He built a wall over that, across that area as well. So people had done that before.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  But as as an as academics that I've read have pointed out, if you go to that area, a lot of it's completely impassable with cliffs and so on. So there's actually only a few areas, the coastline on each side. And the ridge at the top of the mountains, which is only about three quarters of a mile wide or just over a K. So the fortifications that Crassus had his men built may not have been that big, but he was still able to defend it. And so Spartacus was basically trapped during the winter. In this inhospitable area where there would have been very few settlements, very little food other than what they could hunt. And when they tried to break through the Roman fortifications, ditches, ramps, walls and everything, they failed initially.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  And it wasn't until in utter desperation, then in late winter seventy two, early seventy one B C. They filled the ditches with wood, animal carcasses, and even the bodies of the dead. And this was having crucified a Roman soldier in view of the Roman defences. To show his own men, this is what would happen to them if they gave up. They smashed through the Roman fortifications and broke away. They managed to get away. Now, some sources say it was only some of his army, some say it was all. We don't know, but they did get away. Certainly a substantial amount of them got away.

• 1:06:19Tristan Hughes?

  So they managed to get the north side, I guess.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  The north side, yeah. And that's where you had another force of slaves break away, maybe as many as 10,000 under the leadership. This is where we have two other names, so rare with the Spartacus Rebellion, but Castus and Gannicus, who were potentially Gauls, who just had enough, or we don't know. But they broke away from Spartacus's army and they were attacked by Crassus's army, but fortunately were still close enough for Spartacus to come to their aid. And he drove off Crassus's army, but then they split up again. And Crassus waited until he was further away and attacked Castus and Gannicus again. And that's when I mentioned of 12,300 bodies, only two had wounds in the back.

• 1:07:07Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  They were pretty much wiped out. And so by this point, Spartacus's army was presumably quite depleted. Again, we don't know, but still some tens of thousands of men strong. And they were moving north. And I don't know what he must have been thinking, because he knew that 10 legions were on his tail.

• 1:07:23Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  And they were being hounded by Crassus at this point. And there are a couple of places where we think the final battle might have been, again, because there have been no archaeological finds to prove it. It's really, really difficult to prove ancient battlefields, as I'm sure you know, very rare to be able to say with certainty. But a plausible one is near a small town or village, more like, called Oliveto Chitra, which is on the banks of the modern day river Sele, which is the Solarnus in ancient times, which is north of Piestem and before Salerno. So not far from Salerno, modern day Salerno. And I've been there. I mean, I've actually driven this entire route. I've

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  driven from Medina to Regio and almost back. When I was researching the novel, I've been to all the places in the book that we know of. That he was and I've been to Oliveto Chitra and it's a perfect place for a battlefield. It's got mountains on both sides. There's a river in the bottom, but there's a big flat area on one side of the river. It's a big wide area. It's big enough for an army to deploy. And we know that it started with Crassus putting his camp quite close to Spartacus's one, being provocative. And his men were digging ditches when some of Spartacus's horsemen attacked them. Maybe they were trying to panic the Romans. We don't know, but what then happened is both armies deployed. This was something that was very slow in ancient times. It probably would have taken a couple of hours. And that they, two armies then attacked each other.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  Crassus watching from the back of a horse behind the front line, but able to see Spartacus. And again, this is a later source, but I love the scene because I had to put it in the book. And we have evidence of a, of a Thracian leader doing this in a battle later that was recorded. He led out his stallion in front of his army and sacrificed it to the gods. Now, it's horrible. He killed a horse, but what he was doing was giving the, a very powerful blood sacrifice to the gods to request their help. But he was also showing his men, he wasn't going to run away. I'm not running. I am with you no matter what. And as I say, there is an example of a Thracian chieftain.

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  About seventy or eighty years later, fighting a Roman army who killed his own horse in front of the Romans. And told his men that he would eat the Roman commander's intestines if he won the battle. Now, I don't think he did, but anyway, Spartacus didn't promise that, but he led from the front, which is obviously very dangerous. And the ba- the battle was brutal and he went straight for Crassus. Because you cut the head off the, of the dragon and the, the army will run. And we know that he killed two centurions on his way to Crassus. Really? So we were talking in a, in an episode the other day about centurions and how brave they were and how they led.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  They were the, the sort of inspired leaders for the Roman legion. So to kill two centurions is quite something. And then there are two accounts of how he died. One is that he was wounded in the thigh by a spear. And that he he went down on one knee and continued to fight and um until he was overcome. And another one is that he was abandoned by all his men, which I don't think would have happened, but that he fought on until he was until he was killed. And interestingly, to show you that he was a plain, simple man, his body was never found. In other words, he wasn't covered in loads of special armor or, you know, valuable um pieces of equipment. He just looked like another soldier or another slave.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  And so he fell and his body was not found and his army just went to pieces. And the Romans did what the Romans did. They they killed, they only lost apparently a thousand of their own soldiers. Um, which I I I have to say, I think is a low figure. They may have been underestimating it or, you know, lying because it looks better. But they killed thousands and thousands of slaves uh who then fled into the surrounding countryside. Indeed, five thousand of them were met. By this stage, you had Roman generals being called in from everywhere. There was a guy called Lentulus, another Lentulus, who who had landed at Brindisi, ancient Brindisium. And actually, I forgot to say Spartacus had thought about going that way, but heard that Lentulus had landed in Brindisium, so couldn't.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  And and then you had Pompey had been recalled as well. And he came marching down the main road from Rome and slaughtered five thousand uh fugitives from Spartacus's army.

• 1:11:49Tristan Hughes?

  And and how that all links up is that Pompey, the later Pompey the Great, had been fighting.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  Sartorius.

• 1:11:55Tristan Hughes?

  Sartorius, the potential ally of Spain and coming back from that. So it all kind of links up.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  It all links up, yeah, and it it gets political then because Crassus had obviously won the bigger battle and Pompey had just looked upon a small section of the army who was running away anyway. But he was closer to Rome, so he sent a message to to the Senate saying that um he had torn out the roots of the rebellion. And he got more credit than Crassus, who was really angry.

• 1:12:24Tristan Hughes?

  He must be pissed with that.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  He was so angry, yeah. And then he was later not given a triumph, whereas Pompey was of because of his victory over Sartorius, which he shouldn't have been because Sartorius was a citizen. But he was given a triumph because you can bend the rules. And Poro Crassus was only given an ovatio, which was one step below a triumph. And you were only allowed to wear a myrtle wreath, not a laurel wreath. But he petitioned the Senate because a myrtle wreath wasn't good enough. So they allowed him to have a laurel wreath crown, even though it was only an ovatio.

• 1:12:56Tristan Hughes?

  I'm sure he could have paid for it if he wanted to.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Well, he wanted the praise.

• 1:13:00Tristan Hughes?

  And ovatio, that's where we get ovation from today.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, ovation, yeah.

• 1:13:04Tristan Hughes?

  So it sounds like then there's no real I'm Spartacus moment, although it's still a testament to, you know, the fact that how charismatic he must have been, how it all fell apart when he died. But for the people that aren't killed, for the slaves, for the rebels that don't die at that battle or in the aftermath, and have the misfortune of being taken alive by the Romans, what is their ultimate fate?

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  Not all of them were crucified, but 6,000 of them were. And this is the largest mass crucifixion of ancient history. It was equaled once by Octavian Augustus after the Battle of Actium, but never even came close with any other crucifixions. So the prisoners were marched to Capua, which is about 70 miles from the battlefield. And the main Roman road, which was via Appia, which had run from the south, but continued through Capua to Rome. It's about 130 odd miles between the two cities. And I worked out the maths. It's about one crucifix every 40 yards or 40 meters for more than 130 miles.

• 1:14:09Tristan Hughes?

  So you would be able to see countless numbers of them.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  If you were a merchant or a traveller, 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 B.C. and was to have been indescribably awful. 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 rebelling.

• 1:14:50Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, you have so brilliantly retold this story that I know you delve into so much detail about you've created in your, in your novels. What do you think then was the ultimate significance of the revolt of Spartacus? It sounds like the Romans. Quite harshly, but they do learn their lessons from it.

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, they learned their lessons and and you know, modern historians and and modern people took Spartacus to their hearts. 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.

• 1:15:32Tristan Hughes?

  The Haitian Revolution, yes.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  Who 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 in through into the 20th century, you had a 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 the American Republic.

• 1:16:16Speaker 02

  And it sold five 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. Thracians had slaves, Gauls had slaves, Germans had slaves. Having a slave, no disrespect meant, was like having a washing machine in your house. You don't say, oh, look, you've got a washing machine when you go around to your friend's house, because everyone has a washing machine. If you could afford it, you had a slave. So maybe you didn't want to be a slave, and I'm a trained soldier and gladiator, so I'm not going to be a slave. I'm going to fight for my freedom. But he didn't want to end all slavery, he just wanted to be free.

• 1:16:56Tristan Hughes?

  So that's not the reason why he went back south rather than going back to the.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Not at all, no, that and and if you ever read that or see that, that's just modern interpretation. There's no, people back then didn't want to end slavery. I mean, you had Roman authors talking about slaves being human beings and having feelings and you could like them and so on. And you should treat them well and so on and so on, you know, to varying degrees. And we know of many slaves who were freed by their owners and given lots of money. But those owners did not try and abolish slavery. They just treated individual slaves really kindly, so.

• 1:17:29Tristan Hughes?

  Ben, this has been absolutely fantastic. Last but certainly not least, you have written a couple of books that talks through the story of Spartacus.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  Indeed, indeed. It was supposed to be one, and then I got so excited and so involved in it, I said to my editor, can I write a second one? And she said, go on, sure. So one's called Spartacus the Gladiator, the second one's called Spartacus Rebellion. They're in English, Polish, Italian, German, French, not French, sorry, quite a few languages, if you're not English speaking by native, and available in all good online bookstores or in real bookstores. And I hope I didn't justice. It was really enjoyable writing them. I wanted him to survive.

• 1:18:10Tristan Hughes?

  Well, as you've explained throughout this episode, this story is full of amazing tales that, you know, for writers like yourself, it must be amazing to bring to life. So I'm sure they're brilliant reads and you can buy them wherever, you know, all good bookshops and online and everything as well. Ben, it just goes to me to say once again, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast.

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  Thanks, Tristan. It's always great fun.

• 1:18:35Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr Ben Kane talking you through the story of Spartacus, one of the most famous rebels of ancient Rome. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Now, if you want to listen to more of Ben, well, you can. He's been on the show several times before. Our latest episode with him before this one was all about the Roman centurion. But Ben, he's also done episodes before on the Roman legionary soldier, the Roman auxiliary soldier, and how to survive in ancient Rome. We'll put a link to several of those episodes in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us. You'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, we'd really appreciate that. Lastly, don't forget, you can also sign up to History

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