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Spartacus was a heavyweight gladiator called murmillo. A man ‘of enormous strength and spirit’, as the sources say, he was about thirty years old. Murmillones were big men who carried 35- 40 pounds of arms and armour in the arena. They fought barefoot and bare-chested, rendering all the more visible the tattoos with which Thracians like Spartacus proudly embellished their bodies. Murmillones each wore a bronze helmet, a belted loincloth and various arm- and leg-guards. They carried a big, oblong shield (scutum) and wielded a sword with a broad, straight blade, about a foot and a half long. Called the gladius, it was the classic weapon of the gladiator. It was also the standard weapon of a Roman legionary.
Although we know nothing of Spartacus’s record in the arena, we can imagine him locked in combat one afternoon. Fans that they were, the Romans have left masses of evidence about the games, and recent historical reconstructions enrich the picture. We know, for example, that Spartacus would have fought just one other man at a time, despite Hollywood’s image of mass fights. Real gladiators fought in pairs, carefully chosen to make an exciting contest - but not a long life for the contestants.
A murmillo like Spartacus never fought another murmillo; instead, he was usually paired with a thraex. Thraex means ‘Thracian’, but Spartacus did not represent his country in the arena, perhaps because his owner feared stirring up his slave’s national pride. The thraex was also a heavyweight but he had to be quicker and more agile. His arms and armour were similar to the murmillo’s but the thraex carried a small shield (parmula) that made him lighter and more mobile. And the thraex carried a curved sword (sica), like the one used by Thracians in battle.
Gladiatorial matches usually began with a warm-up with wooden weapons. Then the ‘sharp iron’ arms were brought in and tested to make sure they were razor-sharp. Meanwhile, Spartacus and his opponent prepared to die - but not by hailing the sponsor of the games. The famous cry, ‘Those who are about to die salute you!’ was, as far as we know, a rare - and later - exception. Instead, a match usually began with a signal from the tibia, a wind instrument like an oboe.
The contest unfolded with a combination of elegance and brutality. Gladiators attacked but rarely crossed swords, since their blades were too short. Instead, they thrust and parried with their shields, pushing an opponent back, drawing him forward, or - with the shield turned horizontally - hit him with the edge. The crash and boom of shields, rather than the metallic clank of swords, marked the sound of combat.
With his 15-pound scutum, a strong murmillo could hit harder, but a fast thraex could get in more blows in rapid succession with his 7-pound parmula. Knowing how much damage the curved sword of the thraex could do, Spartacus guarded his flank. Instead, he tried to keep the battle on a vertical axis, constantly standing with his left shoulder and left leg forward, thereby denying his foe an opening while keeping up the pressure. He held his shield close to his body to prevent the thraex from rapping at it with his parmula and destabilizing it. Every now and then Spartacus would bring his shield forward in a sudden, powerful thrust to shift the thraex off balance.
Denied Spartacus’s flank, meanwhile, the thraex might have ducked and lunged at Spartacus’s unprotected right leg. He might even have attempted the more difficult move of leaping up, powering his right arm over the top of Spartacus’s shield and stabbing him with his curved sica. If these murderous manoeuvres failed, however, they would have given Spartacus a sudden opening. The smart move for Spartacus would have been to feint, thereby tempting the thraex into thrusting towards him - only to find Spartacus ready to parry and deliver a deadly riposte.
Every so often during a fight a glancing blow got through, leaving a man bleeding but not fatally wounded. Pumped up on adrenaline, he would have to keep fighting, however bruised, tired and sweating, all the while continuing to think on his feet, always shifting tactics. Although it appears that most bouts lasted only ten to fifteen minutes, there was no time limit; the fight went on until one man won. Meanwhile, each fighter had to close his mind to the noises of the crowd and the brass instruments accompanying the match and focus solely on combat. He also had to try somehow to keep the rules in mind. Gladiatorial bouts were no free-for-alls. A referee (summa rudis) and his assistant (secunda rudis) enforced the regulations. The most important rule was for a fighter to back off after wounding an opponent.
Let us imagine that Spartacus had driven his enemy off balance, knocked the man’s shield out of his hand, and stabbed him in the arm. Spartacus would then withdraw from the wounded man. Whether to finish off the thraex was not up to a gladiator or referee; it was up to the producer (editor).
The producer, in turn, usually asked the audience. A decision about a fallen fighter was the moment of truth. If the crowd liked the losing gladiator and thought he had fought well, they would call for letting him go. But if they thought the loser deserved to die, they wouldn’t be shy about shouting, ‘Kill him!’ They made a gesture with their thumbs, but it was the opposite of what we think today: thumbs up meant death.
In that case, the loser was expected to kneel - if his wounds allowed - while the winner delivered the death blow. At the moment that the loser ‘took the iron’, as the saying went, the crowd would shout, ‘He has it!’ The corpse would be carried away on a stretcher to the morgue. There, he had his throat cut as a precaution against a rigged defeat. Burial followed.
Spartacus, meanwhile, would climb the winner’s platform to receive his prizes: a sum of money and a palm branch. Although a slave, he was allowed to keep the money. After climbing down from the podium, he would wave the palm branch around the arena as he circled it, running a victory lap, taking in the crowd’s approval.
It was an unlikely school of revolution. Yet fights like this steeled the blood of the men who would start the ancient world’s most savage slave revolt.
Let us go back to where it all began, to the place where Spartacus lived and trained, the gladiatorial barracks owned by Cnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia. Vatia was a lanista, an entrepreneur who bought and trained gladiators, whom he then hired out to the producers of gladiatorial games. Vatia’s business was located in the city of Capua, which sits about 15 miles north of Naples. It is a part of Italy renowned for its climate, but Spartacus was not likely to appreciate the 300 days of sunshine a year.
He had come to Capua from Rome, probably on foot, certainly in chains, likely tied to the men next to him. In Rome he had been sold into slavery to Vatia. Imagine a scene like that of the slave sale carved on a Capuan tombstone of the first century BC, possibly marking a slave trader’s grave. The slave stands on a pedestal, most likely a wooden auction block, naked except for a loincloth - standard practice in Roman slave markets. It was also standard to mark the slave by chalking his feet. Bearded and broad-shouldered, with his long arms at his sides, the slave in the relief looks fit for hard labour. And the artist uses a size imbalance to suggest a power imbalance, because he makes the slave smaller than the freedmen on either side of him.
Spartacus’s first view of Capua might have been neither its walls nor temples but its amphitheatre. The building rose up outside the city walls and just to the north-west of them, beside the Appian Way. The structure had the squat and rugged shape of one of Italy’s first stone amphitheatres, built in the Late Republic.
Most of Spartacus’s life had unfolded on the broad plains and winding hills of the Balkans but now his frame of reference was no wider than the walls of Vatia’s establishment, with occasional glimpses of Capua. The city and the business had much in common. Neither was respectable in Rome’s eyes and both depended on slave labour. Each occasionally offered a ladder of mobility to slaves. But there was one difference: outside the house of Vatia, the ladder sometimes led to freedom, but inside, it usually led to death.
Spartacus had taken the long route to Capua. In his native Thrace, young Spartacus had served in an allied unit of the Roman army. The Romans called these units auxilia (literally, ‘the help’) and its men were called auxiliaries. These units were separate from the legions, which were restricted to Roman citizens. Although they were not legionaries, auxiliaries got a glimpse of Roman military discipline. Spartacus’s later military success against Rome becomes easier to understand if he had seen first-hand how the Roman army worked.
As an auxiliary, Spartacus was probably a representative of a conquered people fulfilling their military service to Rome; that is, he was probably more draftee than mercenary. As a rebel he would display the eye of command, which might suggest that he was an officer under the Romans. In all likelihood, he was a cavalryman.
Almost all of Rome’s cavalry were auxiliaries. None made fiercer horsemen than the Thracians. The Second Book of Maccabees (included in some versions of the Bible) offers a powerful image of a Thracian on horseback: a mercenary, bearing down on a very strong Jewish cavalryman named Dositheus and chopping off his arm. The unnamed Thracian had thereby saved his commander, Gorgias, whom Dositheus had grabbed by the cloak. That happened in 163 BC. In 130 BC a Thracian cavalryman decapitated a Roman general with a single blow of his sword. Fifty years later the Romans still shivered at the thought.
According to one writer, Spartacus next deserted and became what the Romans called a latro. The word means ‘thief’, ‘bandit’, or ‘highwayman’ but it also means ‘guerrilla soldier’ or ‘insur gent’: the Romans used the same word for all those concepts. We can only guess at Spartacus’s motives. Perhaps, like many Thracians, he had decided to join Mithridates’ war against Rome; perhaps he had a private grievance; perhaps he had taken to a life of crime. Nor do we know where he deserted, whether in Thrace, Macedonia or even Italy. In any case, after his time as a latro, Spartacus was captured, enslaved and condemned to be a gladiator.
In principle, Rome reserved the status of gladiator for only the most serious of criminals. Whatever Spartacus had done, by Roman standards it did not merit such severe punishment. He was innocent, as we learn from no less a source than Varro, a Roman writer in the prime of his life at the time of the gladiators’ war. Knowing that he was guiltless would have added flames to the fire of Spartacus’s rebellion. In any case, Spartacus had become the property of Vatia. The next and possibly last act of the Thracian’s life was about to begin.
Capua was known for its roses, its slaughterhouses and its gladiators. It was fat, rich and a political eunuch. In 216 BC, during the wars with Carthage, Capua had betrayed its ally Rome for Hannibal, Carthage’s greatest general. After the Romans reconquered Capua in 211 BC they punished the town by stripping it of self-government and putting it under a Roman governor.
Yet Capua had bounced back, richer than ever. The city was a centre of metalworks and of textiles. It was also the perfume and medicine capital of Italy as well as a grain-producer and Rome’s meat market, providing pork and lamb for the capital. Capua sits at the foot of a spur of the Apennines, Italy’s rugged and mountainous spine. To the south lies a flat plain, hot and steamy in the summer when the fields are brown, alternately rainy and bright in the winter when the fields are green. Some of the most fertile land in Europe, this was Campania Felix, ‘Lucky Campania’.
Lucky, that is, except from the point of view of its workers. Capua was in large part a city of slaves, both home-grown and imported. The number of slaves made Capua differ only in degree, not kind, from the rest of Italy. The 125 years of Roman expansion after 200 BC had flooded Italy with unfree labour. By Spartacus’s day, there were an estimated 1-1.5 million slaves on the peninsula, perhaps about 20 per cent of the people of Italy.
It was the heyday of exploitation in the ancient world, the zenith of misery and the nadir of freedom. Yet it was also an era of large concentrations of slaves, many of them born free, some of them ex-soldiers; of absentee masters, and of few or no police forces. Add to that the freedom given to some slaves to travel and even carry arms. Finally, consider the many possible refuges provided by nearby mountains. It is no accident that, within the space of sixty years, Sicily and southern Italy would explode into three of history’s greatest slave uprisings: first in two separate revolts on the island (135-132 BC, 104-100 BC) and then in Spartacus’s rebellion.
In the countryside, masses of slaves worked on farms, often in chains, usually locked up for the night in prison-like barracks. Others, employed as herdsmen, were left to fend for themselves or starve. Meanwhile, in town, slaves worked in every profession, from the shop to the school to the kitchen. In Capua, there were even slaves to collect the 5 per cent tax owed when slaves earned their freedom. A lucky few made it to freedom and some prospered; some, astonishingly, went into the slave business, turning their back on their humble origins. One Capuan freedman, for example, did not mind getting rich by manufacturing the rough woollen cloaks that were issued to slave field hands - issued once every other year, that is.
Coarse and rapacious, Capua was destined to become the centre of gladiatorial games. Its sunny climate was considered ideal for training fighters and so Rome’s impresarios came to scout talent. Julius Caesar himself would own a gladiatorial school in Capua.
And yet, by 73 BC, not Capua but Rome - the capital - put on Italy’s greatest gladiatorial games by far. Rome’s cautious elite refused to allow gladiators to be housed there, though. Violent and dangerous, gladiators would have been foxes in the Roman henhouse. It was safer to keep them outside the capital. Capua was ideal: only 130 miles away, and connected to Rome by the most famous highway in the world, the Appian Way, as well as by another great road, the Via Latina.
After travelling one of those highways or perhaps, even before, in the chain gang along the way, Spartacus was introduced to his new colleagues. They were a motley group. Almost all were slaves, whether from birth, by civilian capture and sale, or as a result of becoming prisoners of war. Many were Thracians. Thrace provided Rome with a steady stream of slaves, thanks to the endless wars with Rome’s bordering province of Macedonia. And thanks too to the Thracians’ burning passion for war.
Thracians loved three things: hunting, drinking and fighting. They were born brawlers with a reputation for brutality. Thracian cavalrymen, for example, fought ‘like wild beasts, long kept in cages and then aroused’ when they defeated the Romans at a skirmish at Callinicus in 171 BC. They returned to camp singing and brandishing the severed heads of their enemies on their spears.
Another people in the Roman world who were similarly spoiling for a fight were the Celts. The Celts ‘are absolutely mad about war’, says the Roman writer Strabo. ‘They are high-spirited and quickly seek out a fight.’ And Celts made up the second large group of Vatia’s gladiators. The sources call them Gauls, and surely some of them came from Gaul, that is, modern France. They might have been taken prisoner in one of several small Roman military operations in Gaul in the 80s and 70s BC. They might even have been the sons of war prisoners taken in Marius’s great victories in the West in 102 and 101 BC. But most had probably been sold into slavery by civilians: the going rate for a Gallic slave was as little as an amphora (large jug) of wine. The Romans exported an estimated 40 million amphorae of wine (about 2.64 million gallons) to Gaul in the first century BC and got back in return perhaps as many as 15,000 slaves a year.
But some of Vatia’s Celts may have came from the Balkans, a Celtic population centre and scene of wars with Rome in the 80s and 70s BC, and so a rich source of slaves. The Scordisci, for example, lived on the plains south of the Danube, in what today is north-eastern Serbia, and were Celts who had mingled with Thracians and Illyrians (another warlike people of the ancient Balkans).
If Vatia or his agents indeed had bought Scordisci, they had chosen the wrong Celts. Thracians and Scordisci shared a border and a hatred for Rome. In 88 BC the Scordisci and many Thracians supported Mithridates in his revolt against Rome. A joint army of Thracians and Scordisci invaded the Roman province of Greece in a major raid; both peoples later suffered in Roman punitive expeditions.
We probably ought to add Germans to the mix of gladiators in the house of Vatia. Germans too played a prominent role as Spartacus’s soldiers. Many of Italy’s slaves were German or children of Germans who, like Celts, had been captured in large numbers by Marius thirty years earlier; others had been sold into slavery by civilians. Besides, there was no clear distinction between Celts and Germans in 73 BC: boundaries blurred. In any case, both Greco-Roman writers and archaeologists agree that the ancient peoples of today’s Germany were warlike, like Celts and Thracians. ‘Peace is displeasing to [their] nation,’ wrote the Roman historian Tacitus, who stated that the Germanic economy rested on war and plunder. We don’t hear of Germans until Spartacus’s revolt spread, but maybe a few of Vatia’s gladiators were German.
Perhaps other ethnic groups from around the empire contributed men to Vatia’s enterprise. Anatolia and the Black Sea region both provided Rome with many of its slaves, and Vatia’s establishment possibly included representatives of those lands. But one last important group to consider was not foreign at all: free Italians, even Roman citizens. Both poor and rich citizens volunteered as gladiators, whether out of desperation, boredom or a search for adventure. In the first century BC such forays into the Italian underworld had already become fashionable.
And so we have the 200 or more gladiators owned by Vatia: Thracians and Celts, with a likely admixture of Germans, Italians and odd-lot others. Spartacus’s colleagues were a multi-ethnic group. This was no accident. Roman authors advised mixing nationalities as a deterrent to solidarity. They recognized the deadly seriousness of a business that armed slaves.
Surprisingly, the Romans called a gladiatorial enterprise a game: in Latin, ludus. Ludus is often translated as ‘school’, and indeed it trained beginners but, with few exceptions, there were no graduates. Most gladiators lived and died in the ludus where they started out.
Romans also described a ludus as a familia, which means ‘family’ or ‘household’. As in any household, the ludus attended to the basic needs of food and shelter but it also offered medical care. Gladiators had to limit wine intake and eat a high carbohydrate diet, heavy on barley porridge. Like sumo wrestlers they were encouraged to put on fat around the middle, in their case as a protective layer in case of wounds. Like pampered racehorses, gladiators ate well. ‘Tell your masters to feed their slaves!’ was the acerbic advice of a bandit in the Roman Empire as to how the Romans could stop crime. He would have been preaching to the choir had he addressed lanistae since they had to treat their gladiators well in order to succeed.
But a ludus was also a barracks and a prison. Gladiators were not free to come and go as they pleased. The best evidence comes from Pompeii, where two ludi from different periods have been excavated. Both stood at the edge of town. The earlier ludus was virtually a fortress, isolated by a raised, sloping pavement and additional steps, bringing the interior a full 10 feet above street level - all unusual for Pompeii. Other security measures were found inside: an extra door and a sealed courtyard. Pompeii’s second, later ludus was more open but it did contain a small jail, complete with iron stocks, and it may have held a guard post as well.
Vatia’s ludus too would probably have been built around an internal court, surrounded by stuccoed columns that were, in turn, covered with graffiti, such as these from Pompeii: Celadus advertised himself as ‘the one the girls sigh over’. Florus reports that he won on 28 July at Nuceria and on 15 August at Herculaneum, both nearby cities. Jesus (sic) says, punning, that the murmillo Lucius Asicius stinks like cheap fish sauce (muriola) and is as weak as a lady’s drink (also called muriola). Some gladiators record the name of their owner, while the gladiator Samus, who fought both as a murmillo and on horseback, says simply that he ‘lives here’. The gladiators Asicius, Auriolus, Herachthinus, Philippus and the ‘fearsome’ Amarantus scratched their names and positions into the white stucco.
Ludus might mean ‘game’ but life there was serious. A new recruit took the most sacred oath imaginable - and the most terrible: he swore to be ‘burned’ (perhaps tattooed, tattoos being the mark of slavery), chained, beaten and killed with an iron weapon. It was, says the Roman writer Seneca, a promise to die ‘erect and invincible’, because facing death calmly was the height of the gladiatorial art. After his oath-taking, the new gladiator then followed a training schedule that was, in its own way, as pure and strict as a Spartan’s.
Being a gladiator was a special privilege in Roman eyes, and not merely because gladiators were treated better than the average slave. Not that the Romans were simply positive about gladiators. Instead, they considered gladiators to be both good and bad. To be forced to be a gladiator was demeaning; to volunteer as a gladiator was depraved; to become skilled as a gladiator was dangerous, but to die as a gladiator was sublime.
Gladiators didn’t have friends. They had allies, rivals, bosses, hangers-on, punks, spies, suppliers and double-crossers. The new gladiator learned whom to trust and whom to watch out for, who would cover his back and who would steal his food. He quickly took the measure of the men: the strong, the agile, the tough, the ruthless; the weak, the clumsy, the soft and the kind-hearted. A pecking order of leaders and followers would emerge, as brutal and as status-conscious as in any prison. One night a man shared a pre-combat meal with his comrades, the next day he killed his table-mate, and shortly afterwards arranged for the victim’s tombstone.
Maybe some gladiators deserted because life in the ludus was hard, but by Roman standards life there was not especially harsh. Discipline in the Roman legions, for instance, could be nearly as strict. Unlike gladiators, soldiers could not be tortured but they faced severe punishment for crimes ranging from theft and engaging in homosexual acts to loss of weapons and failure to keep the night watch. These punishments included whipping and execution by being clubbed to death.
Some of Vatia’s slaves might even have liked the discipline. They could hardly have minded the rewards. Victorious gladiators got glory, cash, celebrity and sex - which was better than what other slaves faced. And yet 200 gladiators decided to break out of Vatia’s ludus. If it was ironic that they, of all people, should spark a slave uprising, it was also typical. Throughout history, privileged slaves have often led revolts, maybe because they have high hopes. Did the gladiators explode because Vatia tightened the screws? Possibly; or perhaps theirs was a revolution of rising expectations.
Hollywood made one of Vatia’s trainers especially brutal, but we know next to nothing about Vatia and even less about his trainers. Even Vatia’s name is uncertain, since the sources call him either Lentulus Batiatus or Cnaeus Lentulus. According to a plausible theory, ‘Batiatus’ is a mistake; he was really Cnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia, a Roman citizen from a rich and noble family known to have owned gladiators in Capua. The man was crude and thick-skinned enough not to mind having a job description - gladiatorial school owner (lanista, in Latin) - that Romans compared to butcher (lanius) or pimp (leno). Perhaps he kept his distance and left the management of the ludus to others, while he stayed in Rome. Maybe he never even met Spartacus before the revolt; who knows?
According to one ancient author, the gladiators decided ‘to run a risk for freedom instead of being on display for spectators’. It was humiliating to have to fight to the death for the entertainment of the Roman public. A certain greatness of soul runs through the whole story of Spartacus, from Capua to his last battle. One ancient writer says that Spartacus was ‘more thoughtful and more dignified than his circumstances, more Greek than his race’. Another says that Spartacus had the support of an elite few men of prudence and a free soul - in a word, of the nobles.
There is a chance that Spartacus himself had been born an aristocrat. Straws in the wind: the name Spartacus is found in a Thracian royal family; the ancient sources say that there were a few ‘nobles’ among the insurgents, which probably means slaves of noble birth or descent; two contemporary Roman writers admired Spartacus, which would have been easier for them if he were patrician. Even among gladiators, the glamour of a noble name might have helped Spartacus to draw in supporters.
As Spartacus and his allies gathered support for the revolt, they might have spoken of profit and vengeance as well as freedom and honour. They might also have pointed out that the time was ripe. They might have noted that Mithridates was still carrying the torch of Roman resistance high in the East and that Sertorius’s revolt still smouldered in the West. And perhaps they knew of some of the many earlier slave rebellions against Rome: a dozen uprisings in Italy during the second century BC, two massive uprisings in Sicily (135-132 BC, 104-100 BC), and an anti-Roman coalition of slaves and free people in western Asia Minor between 132 and 129 BC. When in 88 BC Mithridates sponsored a massacre of Romans and Italians in western Asia Minor, he offered freedom to any slave who would kill or inform on his master. With so much revolt in the air, only a hermit could have remained ignorant.
Only thirty years before, Capua’s slaves had risen in revolt - twice. Old-timers in town might still have talked about it. In or around the year 104 BC, 200 slaves at Capua rebelled and were quickly suppressed; no other details survive. Another Capuan revolt in 104 BC was more serious. T. Minucius Vettius, a rich, young Roman, in love with a slave girl but buried under debt, rose in revolt from his father’s estate outside Capua. He formed an army of 3,500 slaves, armed and organized in centuries like a Roman legion. The Roman Senate took this threat seriously. They appointed Lucius Licinius Lucullus to restore order; he was a praetor, a high-ranking public official who was a combination of chief justice and lieutenant general. Lucullus raised an army of 4,000 infantry and 400 cavalry but he beat Vettius by cunning, not brute force. Lucullus offered immunity to Vettius’s general Apollonius (the name suggests a slave or freedman), who turned traitor. The result was mass suicide by the rebels, including Vettius.
The uprising failed but it left encouraging lessons to insurgents. Slaves could form an army, and one that was well organized and well armed. Rome was sufficiently impressed that it used treachery instead of attacking the rebels head-on. It was striking too that Roman forces barely outnumbered the slaves. Maybe Rome didn’t send more troops because it couldn’t send more troops. In 104 BC the Roman army was otherwise engaged.
The year before, in 105 BC, an army of migrating Germans and their Celtic allies had humiliated the legions at the Battle of Arausio (Orange) in southern France and killed tens of thousands of Roman soldiers. Not until 101 BC were the migrating Germans and Celts finally defeated. The two revolts in Capua c. 104 BC, therefore, challenged a regime that already had enough trouble.
Now, in 73 BC, the legions were abroad fighting Sertorius and Mithridates. At home a police force was all but non-existent. Maybe a new uprising could succeed where the old one failed. Opportunity beckoned but something more basic may have inspired rebellion: survival instinct.
A gladiator’s life expectancy was short. The best evidence comes from a cemetery at Ephesus, in Turkey, where 120 skeletons of gladiators have been excavated and studied. Almost all of them died before the age of 35, many before 25. Between a third and a half of them died from wounds violent enough to cut or shatter their bones - and about a third of those wounds were blows to the head. The other skeletons show no sign of bone damage, but the men might have died violently nonetheless, from dis embowelment or a severed artery or an infected flesh wound, for example.
The Ephesus gladiators lived during the period of the Roman Peace in the second and third centuries AD, when the games were a state monopoly. During Spartacus’s era, in the Late Republic, the games were run by private enterprise, and that probably made things worse for gladiators. Sponsors were usually rich men in search of popularity, and the crowd loved bloodshed, so they might have tried to outdo each other in the number of gladiators they sacrificed. It would not be surprising if many gladiators died in their first match.
And that match might have been looming on the horizon. The gladiators’ revolt began in the spring. It has been suggested that Vatia’s men were being trained for the annual Roman Games, also known as the Great Games, which began on 5 September. Gladiatorial contests were part of this two-week festival. With all Rome watching, the producer would have to give the crowd at least some blood. A number of Vatia’s gladiators could expect not to be coming home.
Still, the life-expectancy argument can go only so far. Thracians, Celts and Germans prided themselves on their contempt for death. They believed in the afterlife and they preferred to think of themselves as fearless fighters, not cowards. Spartacus had to convince them that there was a better fight waiting for them as fugitives than inside the ludus.
Gladiators wanted neither to flee nor to free others. But standing and fighting in Italy, killing Romans, stealing their wealth, and attracting supporters from the local slave population - that would have appealed to the men of the Familia Gladiatoria Lentuli Vatiae, Lentulus Vatia’s Family of Gladiators.
And yet, this catalogue of reasons somehow fails to explain Spartacus’s success. Surely, his personal authority has to be added to the equation. When Spartacus spoke, men listened. It wasn’t just his prowess in the arena, or his experience in the Roman army, or his possible reputation as a bandit. It wasn’t simply his royal-sounding name or his communications skills - although those were doubtless considerable. Something else, some ‘X’ factor, multiplied his authority. But what?
To answer that question, we will have to ask his woman.