Today, he might be best known for the Academy Award–winning movie about his life, Spartacus (1960). But the Roman slave, played by Kirk Douglas (1916–) in the movie, was a real historical figure—and the leader of one of the largest slave uprisings in the Roman Republic.
Spartacus was born free in Thrace, in modern-day Bulgaria, before being enslaved along with his wife by the Romans. They were taken to Capua, a city in southern Italy near Naples, where he was forced into training as a gladiator. Despite the hardships Spartacus endured at the school—gladiators were kept in prisonlike conditions and allowed outside only to fight—he would soon put the combat training to good use.
In 73 BC, Spartacus and about seventy other gladiators escaped from the school, using meat cleavers stolen from the kitchen as weapons. The small contingent, which hid atop Mount Vesuvius to train and gather weapons, formed the core of a rebel army that would eventually grow to more than 100,000.
Initially, the Roman authorities didn’t take the uprising seriously and sent an inexperienced officer to suppress the revolt. Spartacus and his men easily defeated the Romans, a victory that convinced more slaves to join the uprising.
Although Spartacus had nominally been elected the leader of the rebellion, in reality the rebels were disorganized and internally divided. Spartacus, a superior military planner, hoped to march the troops to Gaul to join up with another rebel group, but was overruled by other leaders of the rebellion.
In 71 BC, after several more humiliating defeats, the Romans dispatched General Marcus Licinius Crassus (c. 115–53 BC) to battle the rebels. Crassus chased Spartacus and his followers to southern Italy and defeated them at a battle near the Silarus River. Contrary to the depiction in the movie, Spartacus was killed in the battle. Thousands of his followers were then crucified—a gruesome punishment meant to scare off any other would-be rebels.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Rome’s initial defeats by Spartacus were considered so disgraceful that the legions responsible were decimated, a rarely used punishment for battlefield cowardice in which commanders randomly selected one out of every ten soldiers and had him killed.
- The 1960 film by director Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) starred Douglas as the rebel leader and Laurence Olivier (1907–1989) as Crassus, his Roman nemesis. The film won four Academy Awards and was nominated for two others.
- In Roman history, Spartacus’s uprising is often referred to as the Third Servile War. Two previous slave uprisings—the First Servile War (135–132 BC) and the Second Servile War (104–100 BC), both fought on the island of Sicily—had also ended in Roman victory.
