Nothing written about Spartacus comes from anyone who saw his revolt
Spartacus is one of antiquity's most famous rebels, yet every surviving account was written a century or more after his death, by authors who never met him and never spoke for the enslaved. Even the claim that he fought to end slavery rests on later interpretation rather than any ancient source.
The main witnesses are Plutarch's Life of Crassus and Appian's Civil Wars, both from the second century AD, and they sometimes contradict each other. They agree on the essentials: Spartacus was a Thracian, probably from the Maedi people near the Strymon river, who had once served alongside Roman forces before being captured, enslaved and trained as a heavily armed gladiator at a school near Capua. Plutarch adds that his wife, a prophetess, was enslaved with him. One modern estimate puts his age at about 30 when the revolt began.
In 73 BC around 70 gladiators broke out armed with kitchen tools, grabbed wagons of weapons and retreated to Mount Vesuvius, choosing Spartacus and two Gauls, Crixus and Oenomaus, as leaders. Rome, its legions busy in Spain and the East, treated it as a police matter. When militia besieged the mountain, the rebels climbed down its cliffs on ropes of vine and struck the Roman camp from behind. Herdsmen and rural slaves flocked in until the army numbered an estimated 70,000.
After the rebels beat consular legions in 72 BC, the Senate turned to Marcus Licinius Crassus, Rome's richest man and the only volunteer. He revived decimation to terrify his own troops and pinned Spartacus in the toe of Italy. A deal with Cilician pirates to ferry 2,000 rebels to Sicily collapsed when the pirates took the money and left. With Pompey's army approaching, Spartacus broke out, but in 71 BC his forces were destroyed in the upper Sele valley.
His body was never found. Some 6,000 captives were crucified along the Appian Way between Capua and Rome. Historians still argue over whether he meant only to escape Italy or to change society; nothing in the ancient accounts says he wanted slavery abolished. That has not stopped Karl Marx and Toussaint Louverture drawing inspiration from him, or Voltaire calling the rising the only just war in history.
Source: Spartacus
