The Romans, still in camp, never saw them coming. Spartacus took the initiative, having his newly liberated slaves build rope out of wild vines so they could move down the mountainside to a spot the Roman had neglected to defend. Instead, they blocked off the main route up Vesuvius, pitched camp and tried to starve him out. Glaber’s ad-hoc army didn’t even try to attack Spartacus. This man, and another person named Publius Valerius, whom they despatched later, “did not command the regular citizen army of legions, but rather whatever forces they could hastily conscript on the spot,” wrote Appian, a writer who also lived in the second century A.D. The Romans despatched a praetor named Gaius Claudius Glaber to form an army to crush the slaves. Furthermore, a group of escaped slaves were not seen as posing a serious challenge to Roman soldiers. At the time of his breakout, the Republic’s military was fighting in Spain, southeast Europe and Crete. Rome did not respond to Spartacus’ growing force seriously. On their way, Spartacus and his co-leaders, Crixus and Oenomaus, raided for supplies and recruited slaves in the countryside. The writer Plutarch, who lived in the second century A.D., wrote that she “was a prophetess who was possessed by ecstatic frenzies that were part of the worship of the god Dionysus.” After Spartacus woke up with a snake coiled around his head “she declared that this was the sign of a tremendous and fearsome power that would bring him to an unfortunate end” (translation by Brent Shaw, from the book "Spartacus and the Slave Wars: Brief History with Documents," Bedford/St.Martins, 2001). One of the people Spartacus escaped with was his wife, a Thracian woman whose name is lost to history. While at the school, Spartacus helped organize a breakout that led to more than 70 gladiators escaping armed with knives, cleavers and other makeshift weapons they got from the kitchen. At some point he was captured, brought to Rome and sold as a slave to a man referred to at times as “Vatia.” This man owned a gladiator school in Capua, about 120 miles (193 kilometers) southeast of Rome. He appears to have served in a Roman auxiliary unit for a time, deserted and became either a bandit or insurgent against the Romans. This is SpartacusĪccording to the surviving sources, Spartacus was from Thrace, an area in southeast Europe that the Romans were often trying to subjugate during the first century B.C. Accounts from only about a dozen ancient writers survive to this day, and none of the surviving reports was written by Spartacus or one of his supporters. Also, while Spartacus was a real person who has inspired revolutionaries and filmmakers, scholars do not have an abundant amount of information about him. A favorite character in popular fiction, he was not crucified, and there was no “I’m Spartacus!” moment as seen in the famous 1960 Stanley Kubrick film.
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