Historically High - Spartacus and The Servile Wars

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Escaping captivity, Spartacus and his army eventually reached over 100,000 former slaves, tearing across mainland Italy for two years and beating everything the Roman Republic could throw at them. Eventually they would be defeated by a man named Crassus, who would eventually go on to share power with Julius Caesar. Thanks for listening and don’t forget to hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating and write a review. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What are you doing over there? Come on. No, it's staying in. Nope. It's part of the charm. Yeah, well, we got it recorded, right? I'm not going to lie. You haven't F that up.

I don't know if you've ever done that. A lot of time. This is like me forgetting to hit record on somebody's mic, and then we have to be like, hey, we're already 20 minutes in. It's rare, but it has to happen. We can't be 100% all the time. Yeah. Boy, oh, boy. diving back into the Roman, Roman Republic this time.

It just never ceases to amaze. There's always something that comes out of this. The fact that this is almost like a secondary storyline in what's going on in the Roman Republic at this time is nuts. Yeah. I don't know how many, I text you a couple times about it. It feels like for as big as the Roman Empire Republic, all of that was, there's like a period of a hundred years. that that's all of like the most well-known stuff. And then you feel like because it's been around for so long,

you're like, oh, that had to do of like pieces of my knowledge have to span the entire 400 or whatever it was, 800 years that the Roman Empire existed. No, it's like, no, you just know a lot about like a 100-year period. And I think the 100 years is so hot and heavy. It went on for longer than 100 years. But this yearly consulary change, where you're,

you're electing new consoles every single year. Yeah. It's got everything going in so many different directions because not only that, you have consoles that are going out and conducting wars during that time. And if they're doing great, he might win the consul ship again.

But if he does shitty, he has to disband his army and then they have to send another console out. It's the most effective way to like re-up or to get into that position. Because you could sit there and try to make, try to make, you know, stuff happen in Rome, try to pass laws, get stuff done. Regardless of how successful you are, you have a year to do it, which is a much time.

And at the same time, you have to campaign during that year. If a guy goes out and just gets battlefield glory, that's his campaign. And then that alone, bringing back that glory for Rome, that's what's going to beat anything that you're going to do. That's why Gaius Marius goes on like a four-year run from 104 to 100. why Caesar does too. Well, he then makes himself the dictator. He makes himself the man, but... We're not far away from that, though.

No, and that's just it. So much of these servile wars play into either a console going out and trying to quell the rebellions, and that happens mostly in this third servile war that we're going to talk about. Spoiler alert, that's the Spartacus one. But you also have situations in the first two servile wars where they don't look at this is necessarily that big of an issue in the slave revolts while still being able to maintain their power, but it's because they only have a year to do something. So it's, do you go put down the slaves in Sicily? Or do you try to fix something in Rome that everybody can see? And secretly,

when you're not trying to fight anyone, which I don't know if that ever occurred during that time, there was always someone to fight. But at the same time, are you just hoping for when it comes your time to try to kind of like boost your standing. You're just like, okay, who are we fighting with right now? Who's someone that can, I can beat pretty easily. I don't got to hire a lot of guys, but I can still kind of like boost my standing by, by, you know, gaining glory for Rome. And then it comes to the Servi Wars and you're just like, oh, come on, especially the third. Yeah. I think if you're going to choose a big win, though, or an easy win, slaves should be the easy wins. But in all three of these occasions, the slave revolts were so immense and so large that

it becomes a problem for just regular praetors or governors or anything like that to put these things down. And then they get replaced on a smaller level. Well, and it's weird how it works too, because you would just assume like, oh, you're a guy in Rome. You're like a senator or something like that. So when you go, you're obviously taking like the Roman army with you. It's like, no, actually, because you're a private citizen, you're a senator, yes. But if you want to go try to, you know, perform a war, do whatever, you kind of have to fund that. The city's not doing that.

What you gain from that, you get to keep, like with Caesar and Germany and all that kind of stuff. But you're hiring the guys that are kind of like, what, mercenary-esque? Merzenaries, militias. Like part-time militias. And you're just throwing these guys together and hoping you can fund the equipment and all that kind of stuff.

It's only when shit gets really bad that they're just like, okay, we need to send somebody with like the Legion. Well, not only that, these mercenaries and militias aren't going to raid towns and villages and make a bunch of money. They're fighting people that had nothing

to begin with, and that's why they revolted. So even winning, there's no spoils of war to putting down a slave revolt. So you're having to pay them. Yeah. It's like, hey, guys, we're going to fight slaves. you guys can keep all the loot. They're like, what loot?

Whatever they stole from all the other houses in the countryside, I guess. I guess that, yeah, it's sort of addition by subtraction done by somebody else. Okay, well, before we get too far into it, remember patreon.com slash historically high bonus content every week. We're going to pair up a, we're going to pair up gladiators with this, right? Yeah. Okay, so when you listen to this, this will be the week that Gladiators comes out on Patreon because we were doing some pre-show talk and we got some theories about gladiators.

But anyway, this gladiators take place in this. Yeah, sort of a war. The third gladiatorial war. Ratings, five stars, if you can spare them, thank you very much. It does so much for us in the algorithms. Reviews, we love seeing what you like. We love seeing the recommendations that you make for other episodes. Keep subscribing.

Numbers are through the roof. Thank you. And let's find out what the Servile Wars were. I'm Chris. That's Adam. Oh, yeah. It counts. It counts. No, no, no, no.

I heard you going into it for the music and I was like, well, I can't see it now. So as soon as we could. Yeah, well, I'm counting it. We're still there. We still got the street going. Our big through line for all three servile wars in this story is, going to be the story of Roman slavery. And...

Serbile. Yeah. I didn't put really... That word makes a lot of sense for slavery. I didn't quite come to that conclusion until a little ways into this. But slavery's something that... I mean, slavery predates records,

written records. Yeah. It's been something for as long as there have been people, there have been people trying to put people into bondage. Mesopotamians. Mesopotamians. had slaves, uh, from war, from family members selling other family members into slavery during times of financial desperation. So is, oh, this is going to be, you know, when they say prostitution

is the world's oldest profession? Is it, is it actually slavery? Slavery is not really a profession. You're not a professional slave. You're a piece of, slave er. Oh, slave er. Maybe. Yeah, I can see that. I don't know. Oh, ooh. Because I'm sure that... You cannot be a slave without the slaver. Yeah. You got to be owned by cell. That's what dictates the whole slave thing.

The difference with Mesopotamia is that away from the Roman slavery was it was kind of like a common localized institution. Like there wasn't this mass, large, slave-based economy. These were just in certain areas where they had gone. and taken slaves from war and we're like, all right, we're just going to sell them here. There's not one big slave market in the middle of Mesopotamia that everybody's being sent to. It's not like a pillar of the economy isn't the slave trade.

Egypt, slavery consists of foreign campaigns. Again, you have these slaves that are toiling as domestic servants, temple laborers in the mining fields. So they are putting them into some domestic servitude, but at the same time, temple laborers and mining are all going to be kind of slaves of the state.

Then in Tatouine, you had Jabba the Hut who used slaves as entertainment, servants, they were guards in his palace. Some of these slaves were used as food. They were dancers. Dancers, yeah.

One of them was a princess. It was just that. I love that you added that in there. And technically, if we're being, you should have put that first, because that was a long time ago in a gallery,

Alexi far, far away. So that could have been even further back. I had to hide it. I couldn't start it up at the beginning, and I thought that I hit it well enough. No, you didn't. The first thing my eyes went to, and I saw it was like, he had a tattooed reen written up there. Slavery in the Roman Republic was kind of foundational. They believed that this practice had dated all the way back to the times of Romulus and Remus when Rome was first founded.

When Romulus took Remus as his slave. Well, yeah. But it was an incredible economic driver. Their footprint is expanding and as they're winning these wars, military conquest is just bringing all of these people in. And they had kind of a weird rule about this as far as if you went and captured a place, you took slaves. But if they surrender, they most likely weren't being taken to slaves.

but at the same time, if they're willing to surrender, they can be used as a vassal state or a protectorate possibly. I don't know if there was... I think it was Lucy Goosey. I think it was Wild West. Like, places that didn't have anything of value simply had value because they had people there. Yeah.

And that was always going to be a form of currency. That's why, what did they say was the percentage? Wasn't it like 20% of Italy or like 15% of Italy was non-fuscary? slave? Roughly one and three people in Italy were enslaved. One in three were enslaved or one in three was not enslaved? One and three were enslaved.

Okay. So you had 33% of the population. And I think that that sort of plays into the Roman benefit is because when you get into other places like I believe it was Sparta where your slave numbers and maybe Athens, your slave numbers are close to 50% of the population or being the majority. that's when things are really going to start to get fishy, because if everybody revolts and you don't have even enough population

to be able to control it. I think, and it was probably kind of a little bit different depending on where in Italy you were, like in Sicily that we're going to talk about a lot more. So that's where you might get a 60% enslaved population versus the other part. And that's exactly it. They had these huge numbers in the agricultural labor fields.

There was household work. There was the Serviai Publi, which were slaves that were owned by the state. state. There were slaves that worked in temples, but there's these higher concentrations in these rural areas. The reason there's higher concentrations in the rural areas is just because there's less Romans there. And there's land to work. Yeah. So Sicily is basically the breadbasket of like Rome and the Roman Republic because while you can grow things like olives, grapes, things like that on more of the terrain that like makes up the actual.

what you call it the shaft of Italy just Italy itself I guess yeah I thought the boot was at the very end or is the whole thing the boot I think the whole thing's a boot okay shaft of Italy Sicily had much better like actual farmland to like grow grain

and everything like you could grow like cattle and stuff like that on the mainland but they had to have so many more slaves on Sicily just because that was where it was one guy for like every five people that were on the land actually farming it. And the thing about Sicily, we'll talk about it here in a second, is the amount of the amount of the land that gets taken up

is eventually taken up because they were able to kick the Carthid, the people from Carthage out. Yeah, Carthaginians. Carthaginians. So that way it allows all these Romans to just buy these huge tracks of land. just to put a little kind of bow on slavery as terrible as that sounds. They were classified as property. They lacked legal personhood.

They could become free. They would become Roman citizens with restrictions. But if you were a free slave who had a child, that child would be granted full rights. The slave stigma is always going to say a lot of these people were branded with either I've escaped or something horrific. branded onto their bodies. So even if they were free slaves or freedmen,

they still bore the marks of slavery pretty much all over them. There were times that we get a little Thomas Jefferson-ish, whereas slave owners died, they would write in their will that they could free slaves. The Romans didn't much like that system because they actually came up with a percentage. So like if you had 10 slaves, you could only free two slaves when you died.

Your slaves go to the state or some shit Go to the state, go to a family member, something like that So even at the behest of these slave owners The Romans were like, whoa We can't have you guys releasing all your slaves Into the public at once Hey guy, what you doing? Yeah Not so fast, buddy

So the first civil servile war That Chris was just talking about in the beginning The final kind of purge of the Carthenegeans Carthage people were expelled from Sicily after the second Punic War. These Romans rushed into the island just taking up as much of this newly

free land as possible and they're getting everything at really, really low prices. Because again, at Sicily, you have to get there, you have to get all of your stuff there just to be able to make a buck so they're not going to be charging premium prices. It makes these Roman basic like mega farms,

what are they called? The Latifundia. Is that what they were? Yeah, that's what they, I probably completely butcher that name, but it said that you would basically have like, because people like, you know, crassists that we're going to talk about would have so much money. It's just like, oh, I actually own one sixth of the farmland in Sicily. I own one sixth of that island over there. Along with Sicily's just perfect environment for growing things, you also had a situation where they're placed kind of strategically. where the flood of slaves that's coming in from northern Africa, you have the flood of slaves that's coming from Asia Minor and in the Middle East,

and Sicily sitting right down below the boot is going to be a place where those slaves are going to be brought in. So the markets are going to be flooding in Sicily with slaves, which is a really, really, really bad thing. There was a conquest of Macedonia that again kept pushing them further and further into Sicily. Now instead of just being around the shoreline, it's interior Sicily working on these farms. These new landowners are buying up so many cheap slaves that they're providing very little food and clothing.

Their property. So you still have to do something for these people, but at the same time, if you have so many of them, it's not going to be, quote unquote, horrible to say again, cost effective. Yeah, that's what it, that's what, fuck, that's like the ugly part of it. All of it's fucking ugly. But when it boils down to the math of being like, well, it's actually cheaper.

There's so many coming in that it's cheaper for me to just continually lose them. It's like the fucking Pablo Eskbar thing where he just had money he was going to lose to like water damage and rats and shit. It's just like, oh, the cost of doing business is I just slowly kill them over time. And then I just replenish them at the same rate. And that's so much due to the fact that that large number of slaves, I mean, if you worked a slave to do, death, you could go replace him for much less than it would be in the mainland. So it just becomes kind of this situation where these slaves are working their asses off. They're being worked to death.

They're being provided with little to nothing, causing them to have to go out and rob and steal and do whatever they can to try to feed themselves and anybody else that's going to go out and work another 12-hour day the next day? Yeah. So the way they track this back is to this guy, he was an extremely crucial. rule wealthy landowner name. Is it Damphilis? Demophilus? I believe. That sounds right.

And this guy, his name was Eunice, actually. He was a Syrian slave who had claimed to be a prophet and oracle. He famously used, like, sleight of hand to breathe the fire to convince followers of, like, his divine power. And he declared himself Antiochus. So I guess that would be his Greek name, his Roman name. Assyrian name I thought his Syrian name was Eunice wasn't it

So basically the way that Eunice comes into this 135 BCE This man named Antigenus is that what you were talking about As a slave owner I thought it was a damophilus Maybe that was his second name In Anna in Sicily employs Eunice and uses him as

Entertainment at parties He's doing these sleight of hand tricks He believes that he's a bit of an oracle. So he's going around the room and predicting these different things. And he's telling all of these Sicilians that are at these parties, one day I will be king. And all of you will fall to my sword.

And these people are so far off in their belief that this would never happen, that they're just laughing their asses off. And Eunice, at one point during these parties is saying, those of you who do not tip me will be the ones that I kill first. Those of you who tip me well, I might spare. your lives. And everyone's like, this dude's a fucking clown. This is never, ever

going to happen. And then all of a sudden, one day, um, yes, Demorphius, you're right. Was a very, very bad man. He ended up punishing his slaves in a way where they ended up going and talking to Eunice, who believed

himself a bit of an Oracle, into figuring out how this was, or how this was going to solve itself. Eunice being an Oracle is like, well, I keep telling myself I'm going to be king. Now I have all these slaves coming to me saying that we need to rise up and revolt. The express way for me to become king is for me to lead this revolt and take over this area. He's like, yeah, no, no, no, I follow my prophecies.

I'm going to make sure that everything is okay. And he ends up gathering up 400 slaves into this band and he ends up storming in a, they capture an unsuspecting city because nobody is seeing a slave revolt that's going to be coming through there. They end up sacking the city. They execute all the inhabitants. So even if somebody did tip Eunice well,

he apparently didn't give two shits about that. Does is it when Cleans? Okay, so he's got like this second in command who's kind of like the military guy. You have basically like almost a spiritual figurehead in Eunice. And then you have this Cleon who's a field commander. Yes. He's a, I'm trying to, it's not Sicilian, but when I look at it.

Salician. Silesian. It's so. I know, I want to say it's Sleician. But it sounds so much cooler too. Yeah. And all it is is you're just basically missing the S in the front of it, it's turned to Cilician.

So he's a Silesian slave and he became, becomes like his military general. And they come together in the weirdest of ways. And just to wrap up Eunice becoming Antiochus, The Morpheus is captured and he's tortured and killed. His wife is tortured and killed. They spare the daughter because the daughter was always very kind to the slaves and they actually took her on safe passage to another city and dropped her off without messing with her or anything like that.

The people in the city that, the people in the city that they didn't kill were all the iron forgers because they needed somebody to make them weapons to go lay siege on everybody else. Yeah. So they bound them all up. They kept them working in the forges. Eunice crowns himself, Antiochus, as you were saying, he was a Seleucid king. It was a Seleucid royal family in his home of Syria. He ended up calling his follower Syrians. So no matter where they were from, as long as they were under Antiochus, they were going to be Syrians.

Their revolts spreading quickly, they're going around and raiding all of these other places. they're bringing in more slaves. And as you were just talking about, there's this separate slave revolt that pops up. 5,000 slaves were led by Cleon, and they end up capturing a town Argentium that was on the south side of the island. So you're looking at, I'm going to pull your clocks out here.

You're looking at maybe 7 o'clock for Enna, and this is sitting probably right around like 5 o'clock. Okay. they end up coming and meeting up together, and Cleon is talking to Antiochus. Like, wow, dude, you are an Oracle. You must have known that we were going to rise up as you were going to rise up.

I pledge my loyalty to you. Excuse me, as Chris said, he becomes this field commander. And this is where I have a major problem with these stories. I love these stories. They're fantastic. but you always have to look at where this is being written from, like whose perspective it is,

and these are Romans that are writing this. Yes. The army supposedly grew to between 10,000 and 200,000 rebels. I had 70,000 to 200,000. Even that, like, you always get the numbers that they say, then you get the numbers that, like, 500 years later, they're like, they didn't have that many people, and they revised their own number,

and then we have the number that we have to realistically look at, now, you could probably say if it's going to say 70 to just say 70. That's the max. The max is going to be the minimum, I think, in a lot of these situations. But the same time as a Roman historian and you're telling this great victory of Rome, does it sound better if you beat 70,000 or 200,000 slaves? Oh, I know. Like, it's, because no one's going to question afterward, be like,

oh, my God, you guys defeated 200,000 slaves. They're like, yeah, we didn't. And no one's going to be like, well, then what did you guys do for slaves afterward? And he's like, there's always more slaves. There's a Sicilian praetor We go on campaign Yeah Yeah

We're just so fucked up That that's exactly what they do Well we're running low on slaves We better go conquer another area And bring them back in The Sicilian praetor He was They're magistrates

They're kind of army commanders They're a little bit everything As Chris was talking about earlier As a praetor You kind of have to have the ability To have the money To raise your own army There's a certain rank right

And I can't remember What episode we talked about it but there was, because we went through pretty detailed, that you have to reach that rank before you're able to like field your own army, right? Is that what it was? I remember something about it, but I don't. I thought there was something about that. I know that they can be forced out because he will be before this is all over.

He takes his forces to meet this revolt. They're squashed and routed very quickly. Another bad thing about getting people by a slave revolt is, is they are going to strip you naked and they're going to take all your weapons and all your armor and then use them against the next people. So not only do you lose,

but your battlefield is just covered with naked dead soldiers. As you send in soldiers, you're basically sending them supplies. You're resupplying them. Yes, that's, yeah. By the end of the year, they had beaten forces of three other praetors

that were on the island to Sicily. They occupied most of the island. So we're talking about a slave revolt that's now taken over pretty much all of Sicily, besides the port cities. Which I mean makes sense because even though it's just the Strait of Messina

right there, there isn't like, hey guys, load up 10,000 guys in boats and send them. You have to basically be like, what militia do we have on the island? Okay, start sending people over militia people from the mainland because all the professional soldiers are up in Rome.

It's going to take them a while. Yeah. But we need to try to squash this thing now because then it gives us the glory. And if Rome has to, to intercede, they're going to be pissed. If they have to intercede, they're going to be pissed because they're out taking lands and bringing in more slaves instead of going to kill the slaves that then would have to be replaced. They're not going to want to do that. We're talking about slavery pretty fast and casual here.

It's not because it's not that big of a deal. It's just because it's really tough to live through it. To live through talking about it. I didn't realize it up until this. Well, I did. but that's just the underlying theme of the three wars way prior to these three wars and for the Roman Empire and everybody else way after these three wars. But these three things were like all within the span of what is it 10 years?

Does it end up being 10 years? These were right around 60 years, these three servile wars. But what happens after the third servile war is a decade. Okay. They were so confident. Eunice was so confident what he had done that they actually began to mint their own coinage by the end of the first year.

They had taken over so much of Sicily and were in such a comfortable position that he began starting to mint his own coinage as king. That's a pretty far step into the hold that they had on Sicily, that that was the thought process. And that whole time, they're just building up, getting ready to launch like an invasion. Yeah, at 134.

the Senate sends the consul Fleckis down with his army. Little is really known about the results except for they needed a new consul in 133. Consul Lucius Copernius, or yeah, Calpurnius, Piso, is to go to Sicily to do the job, finally right. Piso ends up recapturing the city of Masana. He takes 8,000 slaves back. he's unsuccessful of a full recapture of this northern city called pteramianium and he ends up fizzling out 132 new roman consul steps in publius repilius ends up capturing terramanium and eunis i want to try to say that it's yeah publius publius publius rapilius that's a goddamn harry potter spell that's just somebody that's what it sounds like Severus Snape

No, that sounds like something Yeah, it speaks for itself What it sounds like So Terramanium and Eunice Are both captured at this point in time Now we have Cleon That has to kind of step in And take that roll over

The problem was he was able to take Terramanium because he had had Slave spies inside That he had promised freedom to That allowed them to get inside the city these occupying slaves were not only tortured after they were tortured they were just thrown off of a cliff so that feels pretty unnecessary

you could have just thrown them off the cliff before you tortured them because it's not like you're trying to stop them from doing it again if the ultimate goal is to kill them right but if they were working they were trying to get information out of them yeah could be um I have to play advocate for the publius's next move is going to be on and uh

It was basically the capital of the revolt at that point in time. Cleon has held up inside of Anna and ends up dying as he tries to burst out of the gate to break this siege to be able to escape the city and get out. Yeah, he was going to what? So basically they pulled the reverse on him. So once he came here, they besieged the stronghold, took him back basically by starving the defenders. And then like you said, exploiting traders how the same way they flipped it, they just did the same thing to try to get within the city walls. There were around 20,000 remaining slaves that were crucified after this. Or thrown from cliffs.

Make no mistake about it. A very Roman way of punishment of these kind of people was crucifixion. They seem to repeat this with a lot of big names after that as well. Interestingly about this whole first servile war is Eunice actually lives to see the end of the war. Um, he's held in prison and he's awaiting judgment. The Romans have a problem. Because if they kill Eunice, they create a martyr. And if this guy who was claimed to be an oracle that he was going to become king and actually

did get pretty close to king, there was a little spookiness within the Romans. Well, I mean, his people knew him as a king. So according to everybody else that would actually follow his cause, yeah, he was a king. They were a little spooked by the idea of maybe a, uh, a deity ghost that was going to So they just end up putting him in prison and letting him die, right? Yeah, he just dies a disease. When you say dies of disease,

you pretty much mean that they're just like throwing diseased bodies in with him and being like, oh, you got sick, did you? The disease also could have been arsenic. Yeah. He could have died from arsenic. He could have died from a... Died from a...

What would it be lead poisoning? Yeah. Why does my... cup keep rubbing black onto my lips when I drink it. Don't worry about it. Just keep using it. Our second Servile War comes in 104. This is at the beginning of this run of consulship for Gaius Marius. And this is where we get into just the craziness of this timeline.

Because we're going to be talking about so many names that we talked about during the Caesar episode. Caesar, I believe, is born in 100 BCE, so this is four years before this happens. But consul and future uncle to Caesar, Gaius Marius, requests soldiers to go fight up in Kim, or to go fight the Kimbre, the Simbri and the Tutans. He goes to Bethinia and speaks to the Bethenian king, Nicomides the third, and he says, we need army men to come up and fight. He's like, okay,

little snag here, weirdly enough Roman tax collectors have illegally enslaved my people to pay off debts that you say it I owed, so I don't have anyone to fight for you. I'd love to give you guys.

I really would because I think it would look good for me. We're supposed to be allies here, but somehow you're enslaving my people. This ends up leading to the Roman Senate ordering that any enslaved citizens of allied nations are to be freed. Now, the governor of Sicily,

which was this guy, Licinius Nerva, complied and freed about 800 slaves. I like this guy, because this guy, very rarely do you have a chance to piss every single person

off with a decision. And this guy makes decision after decision after decision until everybody's like, fuck you, we're done with this. You aren't going to do anything. thing anymore. And think of it this way. It is, you're a slave down

in Sicily, but your nation, because this is allied nations. Your nation, you're not, the only reason you're probably not already free is because you're not close enough to your nation for people to know you're from there. And in Sicily, they're like, no, you're not. Be quiet. Don't talk. And so, when the governor, this Licinius Nerva,

ends up complying, frees about 800 slaves, a bunch of the wealthy landowners are just like, no, no, new, new, new, new. And he's like, wait, okay, not a good idea. So he halts the process and orders the slaves that he had just freed from these allied countries to go back to work. And they're like, you know what? No.

How about we don't? And they end up the immediately revolt. Well, and in the meantime, you have these 800 slaves that are like, yeah, we're free. Everything's good. The rest of those slaves are like, what the hell, man? Yeah. I'm from another different country. How do I know my country's not allied with Rome?

Why can't we be freed? What's going on? And then... It pissed off everybody. Yeah, that's what I mean. That had to stay because they were like, they almost got to leave. And I didn't even almost get to leave. Then it also pisses off the landowners.

It's like, hey, you're freeing my slaves. We don't really like that around here. And then you're like, oh, okay, well, I got to make you guys happy. Because I go to replace them. In order to make you happy, I'm going to go ahead and send those 800 slaves back. So I've pissed off everybody in this circle of anger. And they end up rising up. you also have

those 800 as they're being returned to bondage and things are going wrong there's a large group of slaves that end up a revolt in Herculaea and the response to that is a detachment of 600 soldiers who were slaughtered and then robbed

of their armor and weapons so we're doing the same thing all over again where you have these areas that are being overthrown by praetors that are making poor decisions but then these other slave uprisings that don't have really anything

to do with that are still springing up on Sicily. So the key players in this one, a guy named Salvious, who we were talking about strains like Thracian something. Salvious has got to be something too. I think it's too close to Salvia. Is that what it is? Possibly.

So anyway, this guy is a flute player and a diviner who's actually elected king by the rebels. Now you also have this guy named Athenion, who is a brilliant, like, military commander and also astrologer from Cecilia, who joins forces with Salvia. So we have the same recipe going on in this. You have kind of a more charismatic. He's a goddamn flute player.

Not only that. Just plays himself on to stage. We have Athenian who also fancies himself a bit of an Oracle. That's when they just called him astrologers, remember? Yeah, okay. These two follow, it's so crazy how similar these slave revolts happen. because not only is Siluvius

rising up, just like Eunice did, he's also taking a Syrian name. He ends up taking the Assyrian name God, it was right there. Trifon, who was from Diadotus,

Trifon, who is a Seleucid ruler. So you have another Seleucid king having their name being taken up on another revolt in Sicily. Well, you knew that the inspiration from that because they would have heard stories from generations ago or however long it was ago that there was a revolt and that it was from you know the syrians and everything so yeah uh salivius salvious salvious sounds better takes his revolt to morgentina nerva ends up leading troops down

there to meet them before uh selvius ends up taking morganina he just turns around and basically swats down nervous forces. Just, no, you made everybody mad up north. Don't try to come down here. Let us do our thing now. This is our deal. Puts them down. Salvius then turns and takes over the city of

Morgantina and his ranks are growing to more than 20,000 soldiers. He also has a pretty large group of horsemen because Morgantina had a bunch of horses in it. So now not only do you have slaves that are fighting on foot, you have cavalry. Cavalry, yes, which

and scouts and all the stuff that goes with it. Only beneficial. The west of Sicily, as you were talking about, breaks out with Athenian. Man, Cilician. Is that what we were going? Silesian. Silesian, yes. Which is just this group of people that was off of Asia Minor.

And apparently they were very, very good sailors. Athenian wasn't a good enough sailor to run out. He had to know that, but that's why he had to know about the stars. So he can navigate. Where do you think Athenian got his name? Sounds pretty Greek, right? Yeah. I'm pretty close to that.

He sees these visions, and he's hearing of the successes of Salvious, and Athenian ends up marching his forces to see how popular he was, and he sees that he's this adequate leader. And just like Cleon did, drops to a knee and pledges his loyalty to Salvious. 103, Prater, Lucius, I love this, Lucius,

Licinius, Lecoles, God damn, Triple Lels. Lucius Licinius Lecullis is sent by the Senate. He was just off squashing a revolt in Campania. So this wasn't a slave revolt. These were just the people in Campania. He was on Campania.

He was on Campania. Campania and Campania. Huh? If you pronounce campaign. Oh, yeah. Campong and Campania. So he was already pretty much dialed into where he needed to be to fight troops. He takes about 17,000 Roman soldiers and marches to Sicily.

Well, then sails to Sicily. Yeah, it's tough to march across the water, I guess. They head to this place called Triokala. where Salvious plans to basically dig in, and Athenians says, no, no, no. We must meet them in the open. Very, very good strategy because the revolt ends up camping

about 12 miles away from the Roman camp, and they'd line up the next day for this pitch battle. And Lucullis takes out about 20,000 rebels. The rebels fall back and dig in at Triocala, and Lucullus begins a seat. but what it does was it pushes his timeline back. Because again, Lucullis, being a consul is fighting this war of, I need to make something happen because I would like to be console again next year.

Well, and also that could have been a delay tactic because, like, if we just let him start a siege, then we're just, it's from that standpoint. But if we delay him and battle him a little bit as we fall back. Also, if we take out a fairly large chunk of their siege, siege abilities. Yeah. It's all going to help out. At this point in time,

Luke Hollis' number, his time runs out. He begins this siege. He ends up getting being replaced by a guy named Gaius Servilius. And he is

some sort of sour about it because he hears news that Sirvilius is going to take over his position. He just torched his own camp. It's my stuff. He destroyed all of his siege weapons. He burned everything that he could.

Yeah, he's not going to help the next guy. He then retreats and just disbands his army. So now we're going to stick around to try to help this guy. No. Fuck him. We're going to burn the house down. That's what's so crazy about. That's exactly what he's like, oh, you're taking me off.

You know what? Nope. That's like going through and ripping out all the internet cables from like an office building. Guess what, guys? You're starting from the ground floor, bitch. You're not building on anything. infrastructure my ass Athenian

ends up taking over as the slave king just like Cleon had in 102 after Salves's death. They end up attacking Servillus's camp and Servillus loses everything. It's just one of those things where they showed up to this

camp and there's nothing there. Athenian sitting there looking at like, hey, is their camp just smoldering? When the new guys show up, Let's just go out and get them. Yeah. They're not going to be prepared for any of this. And it works.

I do think that their story, Servilius kind of gets housed in this situation. I'm not ever going to say that about a Roman prince or a Roman consul. But they both end up getting recalled back to Rome and they both end up getting exiled for this. Guys didn't do anything wrong. Guy showed up and there wasn't anything there to work on. What's he supposed to do? Yeah.

What did he exist? respect. Yeah. I feel like he kind of that's what I'm saying they're competing. They have inner competitions that they're not trying to do their replacement any favors. Because then the replacement already comes in with a leg up. They complete it. It makes them look even more inept of being like, you want that guy to fail so fucking hard. Yeah.

No victory speech. You send a message over to Antheon is like, this is probably where they're going to land. Why don't you guys just follow us and watch us get on the boats and you guys can just get prepared? There's never been a console in history that's ever thanked the previous console

in his speeches for setting up. On the Italian side, he's just like, good luck. Landing zones totally clear, man. New Roman consul. Anius Achilles is sent down to Sicily in 101 to crush a revolt. His senior consul, guy is Marius, still sitting in there, gave him some of his soldiers that had just been on campaign in Gaul. So they've been up there fighting all of those Gaulic savages, they're ready to go.

It only takes one engagement for Achilles to basically squash the rebellion. Well, I think he ends up killing Athenian in like single combat. during the battle and seeing their boss strike down your boss, that pretty much just snuffs out any of like the momentum that the resistance have. Again, the other guy had already been killed. So like this is their last person of leadership, or at least of significant leadership. I still feel like it's pretty convenient in Roman writing

to say that Achilles was the one that killed Athenian. Like it's He probably got killed from somewhere else And okay well I don't want to give spoilers But I'm sorry Spartacus dies at the end of this So because I need this to make a point Then why didn't they just say that Crassus killed Spartacus

Fair because Well we'll talk about What would get you more Yeah At the same time though We don't ever know that Spartacus was in the fighting There's an alternate history here where Spartacus might have slipped

out the back door and just gone and lived another life. No. He went out fighting? No, yeah. We'll find out. Oh, yeah. At this point in time, they end up taking a thousand slaves to go back and fight the beasts. A little prelude to

Back to Rome. Glatitorial stuff. This thousand refused to go. They ended up killing one another basically in a... Oh, in the arena? A long... It happened in like a almost like a domino's like fashion, right? They kind of lined up and one guy stabbed the other guy

and then the guy behind him stabbed him. I think they just ended up kind of like, because it said like rather than giving the Romans the satisfaction of like watching them die during this, they committed like a mass suicide in the arena just by cutting each other down. And then the last guy just kind of had to be like, yeah, I don't know.

But I mean, I get the point. Like we're not going to give you the satisfaction of fighting these animals, like treating ourselves like animals. Well, we were slaves. Then we took back some of our freedom. Then you guys took us and now we're supposed to be entertainment. Yeah.

We found almost a lower form of slavery. This is our last, what is it? What am I trying to say like protest of our own, like judgment that we get. Yeah, I can see that. That's the end of the second servile. war. Now we get into the big guy. Yep. Before we do that, let's take a bathroom break. Okay.

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All right, and now we come to Yeah, like you said, it's the Spartacus one. Yeah, we got to get into the star of the show here. And by saying we got to get into the star of the show, Spartacus is one of those guys in history who becomes famous, and we really don't have shit about him prior to. Enough so. He was born probably sometime in between 103 and 101 BCE.

I saw a lot more stuff leaning towards 101, but there was enough 103s to be like, well, I can't say for sure. he was born in kind of this northern greeceish more in current day Bulgaria area known as Thrace and Thrace is maybe one of the coolest places that I've ever heard to come from Thrace sounds badass

that sounds like a very cool place I'm trying to kind of picture what Thrace so it's still Mediterranean right so it's like at the top of the Aegean Yeah, it's landlocked. But you're still kind of in that same area. You don't have any kind of solid one-party rule.

It's very tribal. So you get a lot of kind of how we have Native American tribes, iron sharpening iron and becoming kind of crack fighting forces. Yeah. Thracians are known to be some badasses on the battlefield. Probably why they're not already conquered or Rome with that. Or they might have been because there's some talk about. about like Spartacus actually, as he gets a little bit older, prior to actually being taken as a slave,

possibly serving in like the Roman auxiliary, or as I'm guessing some type of forced, like, yeah, forced into the military. I have a feeling that the Roman auxiliary is a little bit of a justification, or not a justification, but this is why he was so good at what he did. Wait, so you're saying that like he, because I see where the like the line connects

he knew how, because he does he does a lot better as far as any other slave revolt did against you know, military commanders. Yeah, so if you can say that he was a part of your Roman legions. Well no, but what I'm saying is like in the same

sense of hey we just came in, the thing that happened in what was the country we just talked about? Sicily? No, the one that the guy was like, hey, I'd love to loan you some soldiers, but you took all my people's slaves. Oh, um, anyway, the same type of deal, like if that happened with Thrasia. Yeah.

He was forced to serve Rome, so he kind of developed an idea of like what their tactics would be. I could definitely see that. There's just the questionable story to slavery. The Romans give him credit by saying that he could have been a part of the Roman auxiliary. Thracians were just great fighters. And also there's kind of the weird part of him and his wife are. both sold along the same lot, which if you get drafted into the military and then you become a

slave after you're in the Roman military, your wife's probably not coming along with you to these stops. Well, what they were thinking is that it could have been for like desertion. And they knew where his tribe was because they'd come and recruited him. They said he was part of a tribe called like the Maidai. And if he deserted and then went back, because he's not, not going to like just not go back to his wife. So if he goes back to her and then all of a sudden a Roman patrol shows up looking for deserters and they see him there, they're going to take him and her. That's, yeah, that makes sense.

I had never seen that or looked it that way. But yeah, he, I'm sure. And then I'm pretty sure that they would be split immediately at that point, just probably taken at the same point. They end up basically being sold in the same slave lot and end up both being enslaved outside of a place called Capua. Spartacus becomes a part of the gladiator school, the ludus of Lintullis

Badiya, oh, fuck. It's Neas Cornelius. Neas, Cornelius, Lentulus, Batyades. Okay. We'll just go with Batyatus. That seems like the easiest name out of there. This Badiatus group of gladiators

were pretty prominent entertainers in the region. These gladiator schools, like I said earlier, for the Patrions, we're going to dive pretty deep into this come Friday. But as far as these schools go, you have gladiators who begin their lives as working basically like gladiatorial games at funerals as like a nod to the man going to the afterlife. Not saying that that's where you like cut your teeth, but the act of like the business of gladiators and of like fighting as entertainment gets it star based upon like funeral rights or homages that are paid during.

And then it grows from there as people are just kind of like, hey man, did you did you go to the Johnson funeral last week? And they're like, they had guys fighting. Like man, I wish there was other places we could watch guys fight. And then... Why did somebody have to die for us to watch people fight? Yeah. These schools.

or become kind of these thriving buildings of churning out entertainers. While at the same time, you kind of have to come to grips with all of these gladiators being slaves, yet their station of slavery is so much higher than everyone else's that they are basically given diets to be able to sustain themselves through training and fighting because they're moneymakers. Yeah, but it's all as a business. So you have this guy Badiatus who runs the school or the schools of Lutis. Anyone who ever watched the Stars series is very familiar with these names. God, I'm trying to remember when that series came out.

But, man, oh, it was right around like when 300 was really popular. That's why I did like the stylistic stuff. But that just show had a lot of hump in it. So like two, probably 2010, 2011-ish? Probably somewhere around there. So he runs this Lutus, but his prestige in the city as a businessman is completely tied to the success of the fighters in that. So if you want the best fighters,

you have to feed them the best diet. You have to have the best trainers or doctorate. And so it's this constant thing of like just trying to. And that all comes to, like, ahead. And that all comes as a result of what is seen in the arena. Was it the best show? Do you have the most survived fighters? Like, have you, does the crowd like your guy best?

If you can have a gladiator school that is prominent in the region and can send all of these different gladiators out to fight for all of these shows in the area. You're renting out gladiators. Yeah, you're going to be able to make a lot of money the next time you need to go rent out more gladiators. So it really only behooves you to take care of the slaves in your school because they're the ones that are going to draw the crowds that are going to get you paid. It's just so weird to think that we're talking about slaves in a sense to where, like, they have masseuses that will rub them down after training. and be taken care of, and then go back and basically live in, like, these prison cells based upon...

Because it's all about, like, performance. So we're going to train our prisoners, but we're never going to give them any sort of weapons that they can turn on us and kill us. I mean, we do. We give them training stuff that they have to work with. It's like wooden swords, though. Yeah, but at the same time, these guys are perfect... You think they couldn't kill some guys with wooden swords?

True, yeah. I think they said the wooden swords. We're going to get off this glad I think because, again, we're going to record the other episode. But these things would weigh like four times the weight that the metal swords would weigh just to build up strength of being able to like swing these things. Swing with a donut on. Just subscribe to the Patreon. It's going to be an awesome episode.

Okay. So, Spartacus is bought by this guy. And the ludus, like you were saying, was like a barracks, a fortress and a high security prison. That just is there to churn out. market is what it is turn out the best fighters Capua the ones that you know that were at Capua were kept kind of in close confinement not because they had like committed any crimes at the school but apparently body honest was just a huge dick so out of the multiple ludices that

were probably around Capua which was a pretty big city I think it was like what 120 miles south of Rome yeah it was pretty big summer this this school was known for more of its like cruelty. So you're still bringing in a whole bunch of guys. You just don't have the expansion that you need to not have them sleeping on top of one another. And it works. That's the shitty thing. The bad trainer is the guy who seems to be getting the results.

Yeah. And ultimately that treatment starts to foment this feeling of we have to do something about this. We have to try and break out. except for the first two survival wars that we talked about, boom, Sicily, you're out on the island, you're not going to be taken as seriously because you are out on an island that's kind of a new possession of Rome. It's kind of like you automatically have, like, guys, here's the big pitch for the revolt. If we can take control, we have a minimum of a year before they can actually respond to this and bring a force over that can try to challenge us.

think of what we could do in a year. Here, you're in the middle of like a city or close to a city. And not one that you probably have enough guys at at the Lutus that even if you could get the mall to revolt at the same time would have enough to overtake this city. You'd have to immediately leave. Yeah. And they did. I mean, to their credit, this whole plane that gets hatched in 73 BCE,

there's a group of 200 gladiators at this Badiatus Lutus, who were planning this revolt. Well, I got some Spartacus facts real quick before we get into that real quick. So we're going to talk about it more again during the gladiators said, but there's many types of gladiators. So Spartacus is trained as what's called the Mormillo,

and this was like a heavyweight class of gladiators styled after Roman foes. So he was Thracian and everything like that. So they would have them fight in fighting styles that they would be able to use in certain games or contests where the heroes would be, you know, Roman soldiers or they'd be fighting against like looking like they were Romans.

He would have fought wearing like a thick, large-brimmed helmet featuring this like fish-shaped crest, thick leather or metal sleeve like on his right arm or a sword arm. And then you would have the kind of like the shin bracers. Apparently like none of this stuff was just like, hey, pick your stuff out. It was all like a set of rules for this guy was fighting in this style. This was what he had to wear. So that way when you were fighting and planning a match And you had two separate types of fighters

You would know who was who They would have specialized weapons in like their strengths and disadvantages Quite possibly I As I was looking at these Buildouts Yeah I guess you can call it for these gladiators The thought of just having

Because the kind that Spartacus was They have a fairly hefty shield like a shin to shoulder shield. It's what you would think of like a legionaire shield. Yeah. Would almost be able to, yes. So because you have that, he's not wearing a chest piece. He's not wearing anything but these braces on his legs.

He doesn't have any protection on his left shoulder or his left arm because that's what sits behind the shield. And then he also has, but he has a gladius, which is like more of a short sword. Yeah. The ones you're probably more familiar with from like the movie Gladiator and everything. so he doesn't have, and I think they said that was like 18 inches. So everything was planned how they had these fighters.

It couldn't be too long of a sword because you couldn't give him too much reach to be able to hide behind the shield. And then on the exposed arm, they're just like, we'll wrap it in leather. That's where they had the act, yeah, the leather of the middle, like sleeve type of thing. So you just have like a shooter sleeve on your sword arm?

I mean, it could still deflect something. And that goes to when we talk about the survivability of these guys, how it wasn't like, hey, you're fighting to the death every time. No, these guys were meant to put on a show. And kind of contrary to like the lean, like just jacked dudes that you always see in these shows, these guys were fed like a high-carb diet.

Mostly I think they said they were vegetarian. And consisting like mostly of like barley and beans, it would build this thick layer of like subcutaneous fat, which would bleed a lot and make it look really good when they got cut. but it's not cutting the muscle down below. It's not cutting any organs or anything. So they were able to take more damage or to make it look like they were, which again,

that's going to lead to us talking about these fights that probably to a degree could have been like practiced or stage to really like hype the fuck out of people. But it worked. But yeah, I mean, this allowed them to basically, imagine if you're just like totally like jacked, you get cut. That's going right through the muscle.

that's a lot harder to heal from because the muscle is not going to be repaired like it would be if it was just skin and fat. And so this allows them to basically be bleeding. Hogan style taking the razor blade. Blading? Yep, blading themselves just to look like they took the steel chair right in the head, but without actually dying.

How, obviously they're slaves, so you don't have to pitch them a whole lot, but they're like, why are you feeding us this diet? We're going to build this subcut. Taney is fat, so that way when you get cut, it's not going to kill you. Like, it's still going to hurt. We don't give a shit about hurt. We want a good show for the crowd.

Yeah, it'll heal, and it'll keep you from dying. Yeah. I guess that is the pitch. No one's going to be like more food and less of a chance to die, but I want my six back to show. These women are wanting to fuck these guys regardless. Yeah. Dadbod was a safety feature back then, and it was also attractive with what you could do with.

I feel like this is more than Dadbod. I feel like this is almost, if you're thinking about it, kind of more like powerlifter. Okay. Yeah, not really a Burr-Krecher type body. You're cultivating mass. Yeah, you're wanting to move mass. Because every bit you can, that's also going into your strikes and you're blocking.

All right. So getting back to 73 BC, like you said, about 70 to 80 gladiators plotted and escaped. There were more initially. Yeah, 200 initially. 70 to 80 actually go through with the plan. Somebody got cold feet. A lot of people got cold feet. Somebody actually went to Badiata's.

They're going to rise up. And in true, I guess, gladiator fashion, trying to make something work, they all ran towards the kitchen. Oh, yeah. You got to cut shit, right? Now, these houses actually had like house guards or little garrisons.

So they had guys there that were wearing armor that were trained soldiers or former soldiers. And there weren't weapons left out. When they were training again, they're trading with these wooden sticks. Weapons are kept in like, especially at times when there's multiple guys out in the yard, they don't give them all weapons.

There might be like, hey, two of these guys can go out and actually fight. We're going to have more guard stationed around it in case they get any ideas. You guys just need a pair of swords. We're not going to give you all a sword. Yeah, exactly. And so they end up rating the getting meat spits, kitchen knives, fighting past the guards, which you know what these guys are capable of because you've been watching them trained.

You have probably gone and watched them at the arena and you're guarding this house. You've seen these guys do some crazy shit, take damage, take cuts. As soon as you saw one of these motherfuckers and you're like, oh my God, he's got a knife. He has a spit in his hand. He has a lemon zester. And he's going to fuck me up with a lemon. has any man ever met his end by lemon zest you're kind of hanging back as a guard you're like okay

all the guys with the knives are out all the guys with the spits are out next guy that gonna or next guy that comes out i'm grabbing him he fucking comes out with a meat hammer and just brains you i do hope that it happens and occurs like it does in the series where they just there's like a party going on at the same time and they just just wreck everybody all this like Roman high society. Oh, so not even just security, but the bystanders too. All of them.

Because they're there for like a demonstration of, I'm going to dip back and forth. This is the show. But he has brought everyone, he suspects Spartacus applauding. So he has this plan set up to where, oh, and Crixus is banging Body Otis's wife. Yeah. So he has it set up, sorry, where Crixus gets poisoned. and he's going to have him fight Spartacus because they're the two most popular gladiators in Capua,

which again, Spartacus was a fighter in Capua, so people would have known who he was and watched him fight. He fought Crixus. Yes. So he basically, Badiotis sets it up to where Crixus is going to be killed for all of these people,

and Spartacus has been trying to convince him. He's like, you got to join this revolt, man. All of the Gauls will join us if you join us. And so, like, at the last moment, Crixus realizes what was up and gives Spartacus this little tap on his shield that they did from a move

when they were fighting this guy earlier on the season and he jumps off it up to the balcony and goes to like stab body audis and he pulls a guy in front of him and it stabs him through that but then that like launches into like the the actual takeover. Huh.

Probably didn't happen like that. They probably just walked out killed a few guards and walked out at night. But they did end up walking basically right into a wagon full of gladiator weapons and they were like oh, thank you. Now we're alarmed. If you can have a basis in reality that's as insane as a slave revolt, you can do magic with it in the writing room.

It's just such a perfect story to be like, okay, we have to punch this up, but we have to punch this up in a way to where it's just cool. Less brutal. Them escaping is going to gain the same punishment as them escaping, but murdering all the people that had been. tormenting them at the same time, right? Yeah, there's... So no reason not...

Yes, no reason not to do that. It's got to be the luckiest time in history because after they end up breaking out of this school, they just run tip first into a baggage train that's carrying all of these gladiatorial weapons and armor off to some other school or an arena. Tell me that's not the luckiest thing in the world that a group of gladiators runs into a baggage train

that's carrying all of their equipment. I think they would have been happier to run into a baggage train carrying military equipment. That comes. It does, but at the same time, because guess what? Some of these guys are like, there's only partial pieces of armor.

Who's this fighter? Who's this? And they're just patching it all together. I never trained in that gladiatorial style. Yeah, exactly. I can't use a trident. But still, much better than kitchen knives and like spits. You can make something work.

You can figure out something. So something they did. Yes. So they end up choosing Spartacus, and a guy named Anameas as the leaders. They defeat a small force of troops that are sent after them from Capua. And as they are just beating these guys,

they're then just like, thank you for the better equipment. We will take this. And then they're just continuing on their way. If you're also sending out a force, you're sending them out with like rations, possible camping equipment if they're pursuing a force or anything like that. And you're, again, this is just a constant

resupply. As you're sending these smaller forces to try to take out professional fighters. And not to get too deep into this, I feel like we're going to get into some very common sense talk later on as to why things maybe didn't happen or why things did happen the way that they did. But if you're a slave that becomes a gladiator and it's really the only weaponry and armor that you know how to fight in and where, do you think that there were guys that just bypassed the army equipment that they just stole off these guys.

We're like, I know how to fight in this get up. I think they would fight with maybe the weapons that they were used to, but I think that they would have a chess piece and leg braces and all that kind of stuff. Because for them, what good does that do? They're not putting on a show. It's all about survivability and trying. In the arena, it is about giving the crowd not a quick death or anything like that. And like we're going to talk about.

So few of these actually led to death. but it was entertainment. It was putting on a show. And so you were meant to draw it out to make these feints, to make these moves, to make it look good. On the battlefield, it is about me surviving and me killing that other guy as quickly as possible. And as safely as possible for myself. So it would maybe almost be a hybrid to be like, I'm going to keep the same shield that I know how to use and the same sword that I know how to use. I'm going to swap out the stuff that keeps me alive.

and I'm going to keep the things that kill other people the same. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Now, they kind of went around Capua for a little bit, doing some recruiting, breaking into other, freeing other slaves, basically just growing their numbers. And eventually, after gathering enough resources, they decided to take up a more defensible position on Mount Vesuvius. Now, this was at a time when Vesuvius was very lush,

hadn't erupted, anything like that. It was where a ton of like the vineyards and everything were right out of Pompeii on that side. It erupted to the point where all of the soil was fertile and able to grow different things. But as you climbed further and further up the mountain where it was still just ash and lava, very few things were able to grow up there. But I mean, they were up on the side of it. Yeah, and you just want the high ground and it's the highest ground you're going to get to to try to defend. But it's not the best place to be if you're trying to survive because not a lot to living up there. And it caught me, I think even before we started researching, you remember talking about Spartacus escaping up to Vesuvius when we were doing the Pompeii episode.

And it just completely clicked through again that they don't happen anywhere around the same time. Vesuvius hasn't erupted and covered Pompeii yet. but it puts you in a place to where we can kind of understand and be able to explain. And if you have listened to the Pompeii episode, where they're running roughshot around there is all this vacation area for all of these rich Romans where they have all of their houses. A bunch of rich perverts. Yes.

Yeah. So it's a situation where now they are free and loose. They've grown their numbers. And they're in an area where all these rich people back in Rome that may either be in the Senate or have friends that are in the senator saying, hey, there's a slave revolt around my vacation city. Yeah. I would like you to maybe make haste and get on this a little faster than you want me to contribute to your campaign or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah, I didn't give too much of a shit about what was going on in Sicily with those guys, but that's going to ruin my jet skis. So after taking up a position on Malmusuvius, this guy named Praetor Gaius, Claudius Glabber. Yes, he is a bad guy in the show. You really get to know him. Him and Spartacus have like a relate, not in reality because he wouldn't know this guy. But basically he is able to gather this 3,000 man militia force and is like, how many of them can there be? 70 to 80 of them escaped from the lootus. We probably have a rough estimate of how many people

have like also gone with them. So 3,000 actual trained, even militia should be able to take out 70 or 80 gladiators. Now, he also basically is like, I'm not just going to go meet them in battle though. There's one path going up the way that they came. I'm going to basically just block that and set up camp down here and starve them out. So when they do come down here, they'll be nice and weak. Smart. It's the tactically correct decision to make. I'm going to look so good. I'm going to have so many. men come back and I'm going to be just like oh they were so easy to beat like look how many my guys are uninjured I don't fault labor in the slightest for this strategy of course not I just think of it differently because he's such a dick in the show okay I'm just like you fucking pussy go up there and fight him but yeah in a a TV show you want the fighting to happen but in true fashion like that like the character on the show he didn't bother to build like a fortified camp because he assumed that they were actually trapped up there

he had blocked the only one with like probably like a palisade and like guard posts and stuff like that but the camp itself he was just like nah we'll notice them coming down here we'll be able to get everyone roused and then we'll be able to fight them well sparticus basically has them gather a shit ton of like these vines and weave these really long ropes and where they were at it was like cliffs on each side and they use these vines to basically repel i'm not sure how many of them there were think they said that there was something like a small rebel force between like 70 and a few hundred based on how many people they'd also taken with them yeah brought them down these sheer cliffs and circled around the mountain and ambush the camp while it was sleeping they pulled the

most famous Greek counteroffensive of all time the pompey switcheroo it took them from the rear yeah as soon as they take them from the rear while they're asleep what you may the tactically correct decision, you just didn't count on the guy up on the mountain being smart enough to build ropes to climb down on the cliffs and come up and get you from behind. That's where you get into that mindset of being like, we're the technologically advanced, civilized Roman militia, Roman army and everything. We have this hemp and rope that we use or whatever it is.

No, they're not going to think that they're going to make shit out of vines. Oh. They think these people are savages that fight for, you know, entertainment in the arena. Apparently they know how to weave rope Yeah Out of vines It's just such a quick sheer Swift defeat of the first

On land Not on an island group of soldiers They get taken out by these slaves And when we're talking about those numbers down in Sicily Even on low estimates If we're talking about 20,000 rebels Fighting against the militia That's a pretty fair fight

Yeah But if you're talking about 2,000 or 200 slaves, maybe roughly 300 at most, against if it's true 3,000 militiamen. Yeah, well, how many militiamen count if they're sleeping? Yeah, maybe, but still even one and a half. If you can catch on average one and a half guys. They got no weapons on them. They got no armor. It's in the dark.

Like, that's why these guys are able to slaughter nearly the entire 3,000 man militia with minimal casualties. And now guess what? All of that supplies goes right to them. They go from basically wearing, like you said, their gladiatorial stuff and everything, to being like, oh my God, we now have tents for camping,

stuff for cooking food, all of the rations that they had sent here because they were planning on keeping us up there as like a blockade from getting down the mountain. So all this stuff is able to not only outfit themselves, they got 3,000 guys, worth of this. So any other slave that now comes in there that's able to fight, they're just like

and here's some armor for you, sir, and here's some weapons for you, sir, and here's your tent. How much of that makes it back to the next group of Roman soldiers that are coming to fight them? You're showing up on the battlefield, expecting to fight these slaves and maybe gladiators armor, and then you show up

and these guys are wearing the exact same build out as you? Well, and not just that is, when you're fighting, it's not just like infantry, dude, dude. You have people that specialize in different things. So you're not only getting like short swords, you're getting heavy javelin. So now you're being able to attack from range. You're getting spears so people will be able to stab when they're making a shield wall.

You're basically now creating the way that you fight because you found it so effective. You're giving them all of the tools to then fight you in the same way and not fight you as they already know how to fight. These are professional fighters. Now you're giving them the tools that you need to even be decent at it. The worst thing that you can do is come to just a one-on-one fight with one of these gladiators. These guys just work out all the time. Lifting shit and trying to kill each other or kill each other. But yeah, they also get like chain mail bronze helmet, curved wooden shields.

So now, even more defensible, they had, yeah, like I said, they had prepared for like a long starvation siege. Now also hearing this from all around the area, you get all of these agricultural slaves that just are like, what just happened? Not only is there a revolt going on, not only did he just beat Prador, but if we show up now, they're talking about like food, shelter, a chance to fight back. And he just arms these people that are just flooding toward Vesuvius now kind of where they're camped out. And it ends up swelling up to an estimated, again, this is 70,000 to 120,000 with rural slaves, herdsmen and these impoverished, like, slave laborers. He is providing so much confidence that there's actual freedmen that are poor, that are stacking their chips with Spartacus and saying, I'm not a slave, but I'll come fight for you. that's what they're doing to these Romans that are showing up to try to fight them is they're just like well I'm poor and you're the best chance at me to stop being poor potentially even though you're a slave

I'll take your my chances we'll see what can go on fighting with you guys I it's incredible to think I mean 70,000 again the roman empire is huge there's a lot of people there 70,000 seems like a pretty big number 120,000 to me is when I start sniffing a little bullshit. 70,000, I believe. And he's going to continue to bring people in as they move through new areas that have a whole bunch of slaves, because it's not like after they get done raiding these estates, they're going to be like, by the way, you're all still slaves. They're going to be like, no, come with us. You guys look really tough. Like, here, have some swords.

So basically following this, you know, embarrassing defeat by the first commander, Rome sends this guy, Publius. Is it Publius or Publius? Publius, Verinius, who gets dispatched by the Senate with a larger force of a few thousand men and they're still not taking this seriously enough they just think that this glabber guy got backdoored by like a surprise attack and it was a fluke

so they're not sending like veteran legions they're just like hey Vernius go ahead and march down and as you're marching south do a little bit of conscription or hiring people will give you some money and just again get like a militia together, you know, don't worry that they haven't fought together or anything like that or that they might be from different parts of the country. They don't fully understand. Just hire him and get it done. And as he's marching down south trying to get these people together,

this is also someone that might not be really apprised of the situation and also maybe that militarily competent. Yeah. Because they're not taking it seriously. They've seen these slave revolts before. This is a small one. I just don't know how you. And it's on the mainland. So they're just like, it's not going to get that crazy. They're not going to have time to build up strength.

How do you prepare for it, though? I mean, there's no. If you're fighting other revolts that happened that weren't slaves and they were just like other areas that were trying to rise up and try to free themselves from being a part of your empire, you're fighting against soldiers at that point. These guys aren't fighting against soldiers. They're getting better. They're turning more into kind of soldiers themselves as a group.

But in the end, you're still fighting a bunch of guys who were trained in a completely different style of fighting than you are. You're just hoping that your military strategy is sound enough to be able to beat something that you have no idea where it's going to be fighting from. But you have to have people that understand that strategy. Like veteran legions, like going in there and knowing how to do like shield walls and things like that. Yeah. that have been in war are much different than like militia who haven't fought together, who probably don't have the best equipment. And quite frankly,

are looking across and seeing these crazy-ass former gladiator dudes that are huge just, just freaking. And they're just like, no, fuck it. I don't want to do this. And we do have to say, too, that the amount of gladiators out of the 70,000 is not all 70,000 gladiators. It's not 70, no. There's like a lot of people, a smaller portion, but you now have 70, even if you just have the 70 to 80 gladiators, you have 70 to 80 extremely capable fighters now training other people to fight. That had almost an entire winter to be able to just focus on training up all these dreams.

There might have been a little fracture in the group. I think a lot of it is kind of when it comes down to what their ultimate goal is. Oh, hold on real quick. We got a little bit more. Okay. Well, we still have what happened to Vernius when he ends up walking down there. Yeah, just kind of setting the stage, maybe get into a mindset of why. I guess, like, start trying to plant your head.

All of these things are coming up for the gladiators, for the slave revolt. Yeah. But at the beginning, if you don't have an ultimate goal of where to go, there kind of becomes this time of like, yeah, we're winning and we're doing well, but what are we going to do with it? They're kind of figuring it out. They're like, so now we got this far.

Okay, what's the next step? They're not trying to plan too many steps ahead until they get into a position where they kind of have to confront that. So when Vernis ends up going down there because he has to march down there so quickly, after he reaches southern Italy, he basically's like, okay,

what we're going to try to do is I'm going to split my forces and I'm going to out maneuver them. And all Spartacus does, he's like, okay, he's splitting his forces. Well, we're not going to try to wait in the middle where they're supposed to be scheduled to get here at the same time. We're going to go attack one weaker side,

defeat them, and then turn around and go attack the other side. So he just ends up picking off these detachments one by one before they could merge together. I don't understand that strategy. Why, if you may have a numerical advantage, and they might not have had a numerical advantage?

Oh, I think they did. Okay, so they do. Why split yourself in half? You're underestimating. Yeah. Because, again, this is the first guy sent afterward. Okay, so I guess the surprise attack, you don't really know what you're dealing with. Yeah.

So he ends up ambushing him routing. He had an advanced force of 2000, this Vernius guy that he sent with his legate Lucius Furious, Furious, maybe. Furious is better. Right after that, Spartacus. again, that's when he circled back. Another deputy named Lucius Cassinius completely caught off guard and while his troops were encamped by a river, he ends up getting killed in the fight and his entire camp and all of its

supplies. Again, as they're knocking these guys out because they're sending larger forces, they're still getting their asses kicked, but they're just sending them more and more equipment. Basically, at this point, Rome is funding the slave revolt. And we talked about with the Mongolians. Their whole goal was don't bring a baggage train. We'll just continue to live off the land as we advance. Whereas the slave revolt's just like, they'll bring it to us.

This guy, he eventually manages to actually corner the slave army because, again, it's winning, but it's not growing as large as it does up to that 70. It didn't like just all of a sudden jump to 70,000. It's slowly getting there. And so he ends up cornering the slave army. with his remaining forces. Basically, Spartacus, seeing that he was trapped, they didn't have enough equipment to out, you know, outfit everybody. At the same time, they hadn't established themselves to have, like, a source of food.

They just were still on the move at that point, kind of surviving as they came into other areas. They had to end up buying time to sneak like this massive following of men, women, and children out of the camp at night. So as they're kind of camped within range, he has them take bodies and tie them to stakes, has them burn fires all night in the camp, and then has them blow like horns every so often

to like announce watch changes and everything like that and basically sends all like the women and children and as much of his army as he can out of the camp at night. Just ghost armies it. Yeah, exactly. And so by the time Vernius realizes it's a ghost camp, storms in the lines the next morning, they'd already vanished into the darkness.

they end up finally clashing in like a full like pitch battle the result was a complete disaster for rome vernius basically gets or all of his men are scared shitless of the gladiators after they this like first initial clash and just end up fling the battlefield makes sense well yeah and you're putting those guys 100% in the vanguard in the front where they're charging straight at the teeth for the leader well verney oh yeah that's what ends up happening so verneus ends up getting pulled off his horse, has to escape on foot, is nearly taken prisoner, loses his Fassi, which is that bundle of rods and the thing that was the ultimate like symbol of authority in Rome, which Spartacus then takes and parades around the camp, making fun of it the whole time. This, I mean, this gives them control over like almost all of southern Italy during the winter of 73 to 72 BC.

You just, you can't help but be cheered for them. You can't help to be so happy. I'm sure that even the townspeople that weren't being robbed by them, there was probably a little bit of like, yeah, fuck yeah. Yeah, and as you are able to kind of get yourself stationary, knowing that you're not going to get marched on in the winter, then you can kind of take stock and be like, what do we need? How many people do we have?

Let's train. Let's get everyone equipped. Let's try to scout some estates to see if there's any people we can free and any supplies we can take. And that's kind of what they use, that whole winter for is to prepare for like full-scale war. They can only go north. They don't have the ability to, you know, take off across the Mediterranean or anything like that. So Spartacus kind of has, and I think this comes down to the splitting thing that you were talking about, there's some debate on

what the end goal of this was going to be. Now, they had to come south initially because they were coming from Capua. They couldn't go up past Rome when they were still weak. But now that they had this larger army, they had the option of trying to fight their. way north get over the Alps. And then all the people could either go back to Gaul, could go back to Thrace, could go make a life for themselves and try to get out of, you know, where the empire was or the Republic was at that point. And that kind of seems like that's the goal initially when they first come out of the winter.

I don't think you're wrong in any of that thinking. I just, part of me wonders if that is the plan and if that is the goal to get up into cis alpine gall and then spread out to where you were from before if those areas are still taking not gall and everywhere but if those areas like in thrace or any of the the places that have already been raided and held by the romans yeah going back to those places is probably a non-starter right but you don't know what they're remember what like caesar would do he would go ahead and come completely out of an area leaving like a skeleton crew and then stuff would always flare back up that was the thing he was dealing with for the longest time so if you were just going in

there to fight and then you left just kind of like a token party there to kind of hold it you could go into that country and live somewhere where they weren't or go even further or something you would much rather be someplace where you could communicate or where you might have friends or like resources and then make your play from there i just wonder if it's almost going up into Gaul in that area if it's almost like you're just always going to be on the move

like you're going to be on the other way anyway if you don't get up there at least you're what I'm saying and there's less of them up there you're on the other side of the Alps they really have to

want to try to come fuck with you at that point and you're just walking into foreign territory though you don't know what's up in Gaul that could be another fight waiting on the horizon

usually when those Golic tribes see a group of Romans coming towards them it's not that's when like you're taking off the arm They avoid attacking any, like, heavily fortified cities so they don't take losses and basically do their lack of, like, siege engineering. They just raid, like, little agricultural states and small towns, understanding that they can't just rely on, like, stolen gear.

They set up manufacturing operations in, like, the winter camps. So Spartacus is, like, no gold or silver within the camp, but if you can acquire, like, raw bronze and iron, because gold's not going to keep us alive. getting our army equipped and having them ready to fight is what's going to keep us alive and what will eventually get us gold if we want to try to go out for that stuff. They use traveling merchants and local blacksmiths to like forge thousands of brand new shields and swords. So they're not just, they're not being reliant on the Romans to basically provide them this stuff. Sure, they're taking stuff as they raid these estates, but they're full on making themselves

self-sufficient and being able to kind of supply their own forces. as they keep gaining them. And it's the reason why it was done in the first servile war and they cleared out that first city and they kept the iron workers is the same logical reason why they're doing it in the third servile war. Not necessarily that it was the example. It was just the most common sense thing that the most valuable people that you could have that weren't slaves were going to be somebody that can make you weapons.

Well, yeah. And as you're taking these estates, you are capturing these massive granaries filled with wheat, barrels of olive oils, sellers of wine. and you're able to then feed your growing force as well. And we've talked about in so many different episodes that we've talked about like small forces trying to rebel rebel. Half the time, fuck, it's against Rome.

The big thing is, is they can't keep themselves supplied for long enough. They end up breaking up and then they go and pick them off one at a time after they have to, you know, split up. So being able to keep everybody well-supplied, well-fed, Southern Italy is like apparently they're herding country, so they would seize herds of cows, sheep, and pigs to provide like a steady supply. of meat, captured baggage trains, gave them access to military rations. Apparently there were mobile,

I didn't even think about this, mobile mills to grind the grain that they would take and like armies would send with him and everything like that. And his method of like dividing the loot and resources equally among his people, basically that was a universal way of establishing everyone on a level playing field. So regardless, if it was Thracians, Celts, Germans, anything like that, it wasn't playing favorites with anyone. Everybody got equal loot, equal resources, and that just made it to where there wasn't any tension

between any of these groups that would normally probably not be like super keen on getting along with each other. I think there's still that ultimate unifying factor, though, that they're all slaves. Oh, definitely. So even if it's only two cents, whatever they were getting and they were rationing out, they still were kept on the same playing field.

They were still looked at as equals, even though they've broken their bonds of slavery. And it's huge as a recruitment tool too, because as they're moving here and you get these local poor, even free peasants that, you know, didn't necessarily weren't behoven to anyone, but their life, they couldn't get any leg up or anything like that.

They're looking at this as well as again, all these other runaway slaves, the new they would be fed and be treated fairly if they joined up. What do you have to lose? Exactly. And I mean, most of the runways had spent their entire lives working on the farms. They're now basically coming back to Spartacus and being like, we're from the area. We know where everybody grows everything.

We know where all the estates are and all that kind of stuff. Let us show you. And then we also know what it's going to take to manage these fields or to like gather the crops and we can do all that. We also know where all the mean slave owners are Yeah, so 100 Just all the It doesn't yeah anybody But yeah

I mean they knew where the best water sources were As well like in the areas So they would be able to like move around their camps and everything When the cripes would be ripe for harvest And then also they didn't have to worry About people not knowing how to tend to the livestock It's a network that they're uncovering That they didn't even know existed

But it's so beneficial What is every work? boil down too. Logistics. They're creating a full sustainable like logistics network. And I think that's also kind of where it differs from the other Servile wars as well

because while they could just do that on Sicily, now you're able to do that in a lot of different places in Rome or at least the southern portion right now. And you can only do so much in Sicily. The population's only so big and the island's only so big. Whereas if you're cruising around the mainland, there's just going to be more people. people. Yeah. Roma's going to be resupplying you more often. Yeah. Yeah. So we come to spring of 72.

And along the lines of spring of 72, it's this is where the accounts kind of start to differ and get a little bit muddy. I kind of went through two different accounts, Appian and Plutarch. It just kind of bounced back and forth between them because they kind of fill in different gaps also they kind of run counter to each other uh it's pretty much agreed upon though that there were kind of two slave armies that were to kind of separate it now yeah crixus sort of had his forces that he had walked away with a lot of the indications are that he took about 30,000 slaves that came with him and then you have Spartacus who has his own forces of everybody that stayed and decided to be with him. Yeah.

You have two consuls that come on board, and each one of these consuls are given legions. So now you actually have Roman army. We've beaten up all of the militias. Everybody doesn't want to come play. Now we have to bring Roman soldiers that are full on trained to do this. Well, and what's, what's everybody been hearing in Rome for the entire winter? And what have you been having to gear up to do? They know that the, you know, Spartacus and all of them haven't been defeated.

They hear reports of what's going on down there. They're gathering their forces. They're gathering their strength. So it's not, you can just be like, hey, when spring rolls around, let's send a few more of the volunteer forces down there. You've got to be very well organized. Also, kind of a crazy move to send both consoles, right? Because you have Lucius Gellius and Neus, Cornelius, these were both consoles.

These were the two leaders of Rome that were sent down there. So we're not just getting one consul with the other guy staying back and running the politics. We're coming at them with both barrels at this point. And I think kind of where the split between the, you know, Spartacus, Crixus and everything, kind of just comes along like you said. It finally came down to the point of like, what are we going to do? Spartacus, as it kind of sounds like, is like, I'm going to go ahead and head for cisalpine gall. I'm going to get over the Alps, and then we're just going to try to make a break for it.

Or at least the people that we've freed that aren't a legitimate army, but we've been trying to train them to be soldiers. We're bringing on women and children and all these people from these estates that we're doing. Let's try to get these people out of here. He might have wanted to turn around after that point and come back, and he's like, then I'll come back and I'll help you completely fuck up Italy. But let's get these people out now. Crixus seemed pretty comfortable in this little breadbasket that they've built.

No, definitely. And I mean, Crix has kind of had the loyalty, I think, of mostly like the Celtic and the Germanic slaves, because that's who ends up kind of going with his group of like 30,000. And as he's going to kind of stay down there. And when you're thinking about Italy, too, I mean, Spartacus has to go all the way up north, past Rome. I mean, you can go far to the east if you need to. But you're still going up past that. And Crixus kind of serves as almost a little bit of a distraction being like, we're also going to stay down here and kind of mess with shit.

So it's going to draw, this is also where they think we are. So if they're going to send people down here, you guys can maybe have a shot to get north while we're staying down here and plundering and messing up more of these estates. And Gellius takes his legion, and I believe they end up besieging them around Mount Gorgannis, which sounds like a pretty big mountain. They end up killing Crixus in like two-thirds of his forces. So it's a pretty big route if you're talking about if Crixus had taken about the three-third of his forces. talking about if Crixus had taken about 30,000 of his men. Pretty big loss. Plutarch kind of accounts the following happenings of Spartacus' forces end up coming up,

and they squash Cornelius's forces. Oh, man, you were skipping over so many details about this stuff. I think that's Appian is the other one that gives a lot of the other details. Oh, do you have it separated by that? Go ahead with Appian stuff. Okay. Because I like Appians look at this better. Okay. So as Spartacus, and I'll jump back to Crixus here in a second, the 30,000 down south. So as they moved up the Italian peninsula, they traveled through the Apennine Mountains,

and then also along the way Spartacus forces engaged and defeated the Roman consulius, Lentoulos, is it Clodianis? Yeah, that's Cornelius. I forgot that Lentunis call Lianis or his last two Roman names. So we'll go with Clodianis. And the governor of cis alpine gual who's Gaius, or Gaius Cassius, Longinus, at what's modern-day Medina. Now, as they were going up there, so basically from his perspective, Spartacus' gateway is open through Siss alpine gall. So going back to where Crixus is actually, you know, fighting down south, the Roman Senate ends up, like you said, dispatching the two full consular armies. and they're sent to intercept Crixus at Mount Garganus, like you said.

And it was Lucilius, Gellius, Publicola, and his praetor Quintus Arias was sent with like 12 or 10 to 12,000 armored, like heavily armored and armed soldiers. So these are like what you would see at the beginning of Gladiator, like the full-blown army, the artillery, the catapult, marching in lines, not getting through the shield wall, that kind of stuff. Professional soldiers. Like these guys, each of these guys is worth like three of these, like, militia guys.

Rome has stopped playing. Yes. Now, according to kind of like historical accounts and everything, what this guy does, Gellius, is he deploys like all of these heavily disciplined army that's used to find together defensively along the crest of like this mountain slope and is used to essentially or has heard that basically these guys will just charge in based upon how they've defeated all of these other forces and the you know the con of that is that for croixus and his men it has worked yeah every single time and so despite like the strategic disadvantage and despite having

more people, Crixus has been charged like directly up the slope. It says they fought, you know, of course with incredible bravery and desperation, launching three separate assaults, but just being up there with those shields, probably having arrows and javelins and everything like that ran down on you, superior equipment, organization of the Roman legions, they just systematically like just piece up the army. And like you said, out of his 30,000 followers, 20,000 were killed on the field. Crixus is slain during it and 10,000 of them end up kind of heading north to try to meet up with Spartacus.

They finally came up against a professional force where regardless of the new fighting styles or tactics that they were taking, the reason why the Roman army was so good is because they were surgical when they got onto a battlefield in that situation. And they had a refined tactic going against all these other countries

in open warfare for what, how many hundreds of years? Yeah, in the end, Crixus might have been an awesome gladiator. Yeah. He was never charged to lead an army. Yeah. And you're going uphill against a more defensible. I mean, in every war that we've discussed something like that, it doesn't turn out well for the people going against the defensive positions.

Never. After Crixus is defeat, the consuls. So, you know, like with guys we were talking about, Lucius, Gellius, I hate that they have multiple names, so I never know which one to refer to him as. So Lucius and Neas, they attempt to squeeze Spartacus's forces between their two armies. Now, I would assume that they probably try to follow the people that are heading north. And around this time, Spartacus, I think, has already decided that he's going back south. They end up trying to squeeze his army between their two armies.

And Spartacus just kind of like does the same thing and says, if you guys are going to split, I'm going to go take you out one of the at a time instead of waiting for you both to converge on me. He defeats both of them in open battle. And around this time, I want to say he had between like 1680 troops capable of fighting. The Romans had roughly 40,000 between the two armies, but again, highly experienced. 60 to 80,000 against 40,000? Mm-hmm. That's, whenever I see legions, it throws me off, because I always thought that legions were like 5,000.

Yeah, I'm not sure. And I think it differs depending on what, like, era of time you're. I thought this part was pretty cool. So to honor Crixus. Yes. Yep. So Spartacus forces between 300 and 400 captioned Roman soldiers to fight to the death as gladiators in funeral games for Crixus. He says that he's sending him up with reinforcements.

He's going to make sure that some of these guys that killed him are headed up there too. Well, probably headed down there, depending on the religious beliefs. Yeah. As Crixus is ascending, he's sending 300 of these soldiers to the underworld. Mm-hmm. I mean, this cause, you know, the disrespect, the Rome, like, this is massive outrage and massive terror in Rome. Because now at the same time, it's not just about going out and fighting. These are consul armies.

Like, this is Roman army that went out there and just got beat. What's going to happen if you guys just lost, you know, and they didn't lose all 40,000? They were like, again, where the captured ones, the killed ones. But at this point, is it going to be an assault on Rome? That's got to be the fear of everyone right now. And there comes this abandoning of the plan of headed to Salpine Gaul. And beginning dead south, you're going to be, in a way, headed kind of right by Rome. But just like you talked about earlier with them working.

against going against fortified cities Rome's going to probably be the most fortified city in the world at that point you would say I would imagine so your lack of seed weapons that stop you from going after these other cities it's only common sense to say you don't march on Rome at the same time how many places surround Rome that aren't behind that wall

yeah there would just be and then the force of people it maybe wouldn't take them sieging and getting through in the city but imagine you drive everybody from all the outline areas into Rome you then just not even a siege to attack

but a siege to hold them in there who's going to come march to your defense if you have that position it's true but what do you do if you take Rome sack the shit out of it there's still their people are going to fight back they are

and if you have around a million people in Rome, regardless of of how many of them are slaves, that's still going to be enough people to squash out your rebellion. No. How many of those slaves are going to be like, we're free? Yeah. I don't even know if I think everybody, all the slaves

get killed before they end up knocking on the gates. I just, I don't know what you do with Rome at that point in time because it was not necessarily too big to fail. You burn it, probably burn it down. Yeah. I don't know. It's, I don't see the strategic point

of Rome, but also interestingly enough. You destroy Rome. Can you imagine what they like, what a dent? You're trying to bring the whole thing down. The whole system that's keeping the slavery thing going. You're going to do as much damage as you possibly can. It's great for slavery, but doesn't that throw

kind of the whole empire into war? Right. Then everyone can rise up and gain their independence back and everyone's happy. I don't. I feel like it's a big piece to fall. You're also showing everybody they're not invincible. Yeah. Yeah. Regardless. If you get beat by a slave revolt, you're pretty invincible.

I mean, regardless of this point, because they are so terrified that it's actually going to happen, the Roman Senate strips the failed consuls of their command, and they basically hand supreme military authority over to Marcus Lucinius Crassus. So we're just going to say Crassus for now, who is the wealthiest man in Rome, and raises an army of eight legions, so roughly another 40,000 soldiers. Before we get to Crassus, why is it that everybody that has a, shot at taking Rome ends up deciding just to go south

because we have Hannibal that forced his way across the Alps marched down into Italy cleared everybody out had a chance at going to Rome and then just went and camped out in south yeah and I think Hannibal had the intention of I think maybe Hannibal was just kind of like

hey I need to see where this thing ends but I think for Spartacus, based on what they do, and I don't know if they do it out of desperation or not, when they are trying to get over to Sicily, I think based on knowing what happened during the, or at least at this point, he's definitely heard what happened during the last. He's like, there's a ton of them in Sicily.

If we can get over there and we can get our force combined with theirs, we just defeated a consular, two consular armies. They're going to command us with more of them. It's like when you're in a GTA, and you get the rating, the stars, they're at force, there's no going down. They can go chill out in Sicily. They can gather those forces.

They can train those people to fight. And then it's good luck, Rome. Come on to the island. We control all the food. I think that eventually becomes his game is, if I'm going to go back down south and keep this revolt going and make it something big, there's one place I can draw like an army from.

It's not going to be if I get over the Alps. Because everyone's going to scatter at that point. I don't know what causes this change. And if he's like, my boy, Crixus, I'm going to do this for you, Crixus, or whatever it is. Or it's just like, I never know what happened to his wife. She doesn't get mentioned besides she's with them when they escape. Yeah. So I don't know if maybe at this point she's died or something like that.

But he decides that he's going to kick this thing off. And he has to do so by getting all of these new reinforcements. And it's, to me, this is the only logic. play that he has. Because if you want to try to have a successful servile war, if you go to the two places that had some pretty good measures of success before in these first two servile wars, you're going to come back with a fighting force that's going to be ready to go. And what's going to happen to where, yeah, even just doing the revolt on the island during the first two, they didn't get taken down for like a year or even responded to. If you could get Spark

Kisses forces, we've already set Rome back quite a ways for what they can use for militia, for what they can gather for an actual army. If we can get ourselves across the Strait of Messina have access to all these people, for them to build up enough strength to come at us, it's going to be some time in which we can then just reinforce ourselves and entrench ourselves and try to keep this island. And what stops us from this becoming a freeman state? Yeah. They're eventually going to have to get to transport everyone to us. They can't invade us in mass. If they need the agriculture that's still on this island and we take it over, eventually they're going to have to play ball.

I don't think that Rome is the piece that it sounds like it is, but Sicily to me is a very like, if we get a hold of this, we kind of got them by the balls. There's not much that they can do. I wish that that's what happened. I wish that they had made it down there. 71 BCE The Senate kind of puts this slave problem As Chris was talking about In the hands of Marcus Licinius Crasses

Now if you're thinking Hey I've heard Adam and Chris say Crassus's name a lot He seems to have played a pretty big part In that Caesar episode It's because Crassus played a massive part In Caesar episode PCP

Huh? PCP Yeah Pompey Oh no it's CPC Crassus, Pompey, Caesar Or CCP CCP

CCP Ccassus had seen action as a field commander under Lucius or Lucius Cornelius Sulla Sulla being the man who forced Caesar

to either divorce his wife or go on the run sending Caesar on the run where he was then captured by pirates which piracy leads to a lot of slavery. Go listen to the Caesar episode. It's wild.

Yeah, it's so intertwined. So also, the same guy who fights the civil war against Caesar's uncle, Gaius Marius, he was known as the richest man in Rome. And part of the reason why he was the richest man in Rome, because he owned the fire department. And he seems to have owned a whole lot of stock. Little Ben Franklin, huh? Yeah. except for this guy

may have been going around and starting the fires because his business motto was I'll show up to a house I'm going to buy a lot of real estate if this house is on fire and I have the fire department he'd start offering the people next door that and he would say

okay I'll give you this much for the people like no the house is worth that much he goes okay well wait a half hour until it burns down further and then we'll renegotiate he had I mean if he was the richest man in Rome good chance he was a richest man in the world at that point.

Well, I mean, he had some pretty fucked up business models because that went over to how he commanded his troops too. Because when a portion of them actually fled in cowardice during like an early skirmish with Spartacus, Krasis revives this like brutal punishment called decimation that Rome used to do. I like this. And he forces the soldiers to draw lots and beats to death one

out of every 10 men in the disgraced units to ensure that they fear him more than the enemy. So it could have been, one of the units could have fled and one of the guys in the unit was like, no, I'm staying. He could have been the one to stay. He still might have been the one pulled out of the unit and killed. Well, this, depending on the Appian or the Plutarch versions of this, he took in six legions himself. He absorbed the two legions from Lucius and Neas, who had failed before.

I believe it's Plutarch that says for punishment because of the first. two failed legions, we're just going to go through and decimate now. And like you were saying, they draw lots. And whoever draws the shortest lot is the one that dies. But the way that he dies is the other nine guys in that group beat him to death. So everybody... So they get to see what they could be in store for. And then, as you were talking about, the other version is the retreat.

The Appian version is the retreat and then the decimation. I like yours more. It's one of those things where regardless, this happens so far in the, beginning of Crassus's run, that he sets the tone that there will not be any tomfoolery anymore. He systematically wins several engagements against the slaves. Spartacus has forced to retreat all the way to like the toe of the Italian peninsula. And whether it was the plan originally or whether he was going to keep trying to fight his way toward Rome or north, he tries to strike a deal with these, has almost said Sicilian. No, it's Cilician.

the, again, the Silesians are back, the Silesian pirates to ferry 2,000 of his men across the Strait of Messina into Sicily to ignite a new slave revolt there. Because if they could do it there, regardless if they lost a bunch of the men on the mainland, they could always then, you know, create that revolt and have a new army on the island. And I don't think they were doing it selfishly. It was just like, hey, if we want to try to keep this thing going, we got to try to get across with as many people as we can. Unlike we were just talking about, I got to lose it on the island.

you don't even have to come back to Italy. Yeah, but the fact, I mean, he was trying to get as many of his people because he had a lot more than 2000. Yeah. Unfortunately, the pirates pretty much take his money, give him the finger, and abandon the rebels,

leaving them stranded on the coast. So now they're even in more of a isolated, you know, area. You never trust a pirate. Nope. So to basically starve the rebels out, crass his orders, he doesn't pull a glabber and just try to block the path

and then hope that they can't sneak around. He orders the legions to build a mass, 35 mile long wall and ditch system. So the ditch is 15 feet wide and 15 feet deep across the entire isthmus of this place called Regium that basically cuts off Spartacus from the rest of Italy. So they were out on a little spit of land, 35 miles, and then on the other side of this ditch

is where they would actually comprise like the wall that would be like a wooden palisade or reinforced with stone or like an excavated earth. Did we skip over mummius? Did we skip over Mummius? What happened with Mummius? My favorite name out of this whole entire thing, Mummius. Mummius was the Legget for Crassus.

And Crassus at the beginning of some of these engagements, I want to say it might have been the first engagement. He says, Mummius, go ahead and circle to the rear of Spartacus's forces, and I need you to scout out, see what you can see. in no point in time do you engage. Do not engage at all. Report back. Do not engage their rear.

I know that it sounds fun. I know that the Greeks made it sound awesome. Don't engage their rear. Moneus goes, got a moss, not going to happen. As Mamius shows up, he sees that the cheeks, if you will, have been spread, and there is a weakness that he can exploit from the rear. So Mamius goes ahead and launches the attack that. Crassus said, don't do. I'm going to be a hero.

They end up getting handled pretty swiftly, and it's just basically a route of, I want to say that he had two legions that he had taken with him. And so these six legions that Crassus attacks with end up taking, as you were talking about, about a fifth of the forces that were with him. And I don't know the exact numbers, but a fifth is, it's a hell of. a lot of forces. I mean, it's a ton. Krasis starts to push these engagements and win these engagements. And we already saw kind of a, I don't know, split in ideals that you could say between Spartacus and Krixus that kind of split this first slave revolt up.

But they weren't always held together well as they were winning. Now they're losing. Now you have basically groups of this revolt, these rebels. that are trying to break off and kind of go hand to hand with some of Crasis forces, and we're talking about Roman legions. So this isn't a deal where you can just peel off 100 slaves and go try to fight this small force that's coming up on your left because you're just going to get wiped out.

And it's kind of death by a thousand cuts at this point in time because he's not losing in these big full-scale engagements, but these defectors are getting picked off. And whether they're defecting or not, they're still fighting on the same side. So this was the one-third because it's only the one-third that makes it through the fence, right? Or to makes it through the... I believe that happens prior to them building the fence, prior to them getting screwed on the boat deal. Because as the fence goes up, I have some contention with the fence story.

Because I'm sure you heard it too, allegedly, as they were trying to push back against this fence, and they couldn't get through and they couldn't get through. Finally, this last desperate act that Spartacus takes happens on like a winter's night, that they're able to fill in this moat and then cross to try to break through up into the center. Well, I mean, it's, okay, so if you figure if it's 35 miles long, you find an area that's not, like, super well defended.

And how well could you build defenses for 35 miles that quickly for crassas? And what's said is that they ended up packing it with, like, brush, wood, earth, and then also, like, dead prisoners that they had had, that they had taken, and a bunch of, like, pack animals and everything. And you only have to fill up, you know, it's 15 by 15. So, I mean, you just have to do it to where you're able to kind of get up and over the other side. And then as they tried to breach this section, they ended up overwhelming the guards,

but he was only able to lead about one-third of his army through. And then the reason that they think that it was more likely that that could have occurred is they discovered, as they discovered, they've discovered portions of the wall, like small ones that had been built to like stone, but they had found like high concentrations of broken iron weapons, including like gladiator blades, sword handles, Roman javelin points at like a specific point. So there's just a line that you can trace out these little pockets. That you can basically say like there obviously had to be clashes and like a battle here at this section that wouldn't have taken place anywhere else because like a

bunch of weapons were dropped. How cool would that be is your retirement goal to retire to Italy and just walk that line with the metal detector? Yeah. And see what you can find along there. That would be cool. Eventually, he does get the breakthrough that he needs. They begin trying to kind of move up north towards this Alpine Gall.

And this is where kind of the noose begins to tighten on this revolt. so the people that end up splitting with him the large group consisting of mostly Gauls and Germans or what was left to them that didn't leave with Crixus they end up leaving under this guy named Castas and then also Gannicus they break away

Crassus quickly capitalizes on that split and ends up just massacring that separate force so at this point because they're fracturing there's not a lot of direction to go they're just it's not death by a thousand cuts but as they just branch off there's no one that's going to be equipped enough to be Crassus. Your forces are dwindling.

Yeah. There's not a lot that you can do. And as you're turning back to fight, it's probably not a lot of like the women or children that are turning back. They're staying with you. It eventually comes to do ahead April 71 BCE hemmed in by Crassus and kind of learning

that the Roman general Pompey, so there's where Pompey comes in here, is returning from Spain to basically steal the credit for the victory. Spartacus is like, nope, and turns to face crassus, basically and just kind of, what's going to end up being regardless one way or the other, the final time they're going to meet. And this takes place at the Solaris River in modern, is it, Le Cania? Yeah. Prior to this, I mean, this is how desperate he was. You have Pompey's forces coming from the north.

You have the Macedonian pro-consul named Marcus Tarentius that's coming. coming from the east, or Tarentius, oh, Lucullus. So the other guy that failed from the other Servile Wars, Lucullus, this is like his nephew. So you have Macedonian forces coming from the east. You have Pompey coming from the north. You have Crassus coming from the south. He tried to negotiate a peace deal with Crassus. Yeah.

And at this point in time, Crassus looking at this is saying, well, if I put this down, I'm pretty much on Easy Street when I come back. because I'm the one that's been seeing it through. If I've done all the legwork, I've taken out the splinter, the group that splintered off and everything, and then Pompey ends up coming in, it's not going to matter

if I was the one that got them down to 5,000 troops. It's who's going to take out Spartacus, who's going to get the credit. Yeah, he knows that he's on a clock, and I'm sure when Spartacus came to him for a peace deal, he thought, yes, Pompey's not going to get here in time. I think we're going to be okay. and I mean they were

But he Spartacus polls maybe I don't know how true it is But maybe one of the badass Or most badass moves in history It's equivalent to the Herb Brooks You were born to be hockey player's speech Except it's just a lot more violent

Yeah and there's a horse that dies That's what I meant by the violence Yeah Yeah Before this fight ends up Before this battle End up happening He

Spartacus pulls up in front of his troops He jumps off of his horse Turns around Slays his horse as a sign of There will be no retreat at this point He looks at his guys and he goes If we are victorious We'll have plenty of horses

If we are defeated There's no need for a horse Yeah And as far as what Again this is all coming from You know Roman accounts Victory is written by, or, you know, history is written by the victors and everything.

But it said that he leads a daring charge directly at Crassus. He's like, if we're going to end this battle, we've got to try to break their ranks. And doesn't get to Grasses. His charge was incredibly lethal, though, because he put basically in like a spearhead, basically all of his best fighters to try to get through there. He cuts his way deep into the Roman ranks, ends up personally killing two Roman centurians that are like highly experienced elite, elite officers.

If you're getting to the Centurions, you've... Yes, you've gotten to the outer ring. Uh-huh. Of, yeah, or technically, that's probably closer to, like, the inner ring that's actually... If you've made your way to the Centurians, you've done some things. Yes. That Mighty Ducks Flying V-style attack that you put on these guys is penetrated pretty deeply. Yep.

They had a bunch of Julie the cat Gaffney's back there protecting Crasses. Spartacus is cut down and killed on the battlefield. His body is actually never found. so I'm guessing Krasis did something fucked up to it. That's what I'm saying, man. Maybe he snuck out. Maybe his wife was still alive and they took the back door and ended up escaping and went somewhere else. Maybe Sparkus didn't die on that battlefield.

At what point? I don't know. He killed the two Centurians and then was just like, bye. Maybe he didn't even kill the two Centurians. Maybe that's all fabricated by the Romans. I just got to hope that he was able to sneak out. So Cressus is just like they end up, some warrior ends up getting through killing two Centurians. Cress is just like, this must be Spartacus, right?

Close enough. No, it doesn't really match the description. Nope. This is Spartacus, right? Everybody and everyone's like, yeah, and they're like, burn the body. We've got to get rid of the body. What are the chances that they even knew what Spartacus look like, though? I mean, they would, if he was a gladiator, a good one, he would be famous.

They would have people that had witnessed him. that knew his description that had seen what he looked like. I mean, I'm sure it's not going to be like, hey, he's this tall. They said the average height of those guys was like 5-8, which I can't say shit because like I'm 5-8. Small war. It's nice to, yeah, it's nice to hear that.

A bunch of medium-sized gladiators, just everyone going nuts for it. It's kind of like it would be the equivalent of like boxers that would be in like middleweight class. As the charge is happening, you just hear everybody go, we do I sound like that? No, fuck you. Things get pretty brutal after Spartacus shuffles off this mortal coil.

But our old buddy Pompey tries to end up taking credit back in the Senate because there have been 5,000 rebels that had escaped. And Pompey's forces went and chased down the 5,000 and killed him. And his justification was that while Crassus did kill Spartacus and took out the major forces, he was the one that ended it by killing the final 5,000. Yeah, he plucked the war up by the roots, even though Krasis defeated the slaves. And here's another thing, too. I think that alone, that 5,000 that were killed by Pompey, Krasis was so pissed off about that,

that to ensure another slave revolt never happened again, he takes 6,000 of the surviving captured rebels and crucifies them along a 120-mile stretch on the Appian Way, the most traveled road in Italy, that went from Capua to Rome. So from the location where the Servile War, the third one with Spartacus, started, all the way to Rome, the bodies are left to rot there for years. And that's the most,

not just like a slave traveled road, the most traveled road there. And I think they said there were bodies about every hundred feet. The smell. You knew when you were close to the Appian Way? Yeah. It's just the whole entire way, that whole 6,000 person stretch, and you're just walking into them every single time. 120 miles.

Well, what do you do? How long does that take to do? Yeah, the works project for the Roman. And to make the crucifix. I mean, they were probably pretty good at making crucifixes, but to dig. them to then, yeah, like, you want to be the guy that starts the job. You don't want to be the guy

that's putting up $5,000 through $6,000. Those are going to be disgusting. Oh, I think they're still alive. Oh, you think they were, okay. No, I didn't think about that. Yeah, you're probably right. It's bad all the way down, my man. Yeah, so you're just, you're strapping them up

as you're constructing the, yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's a much darker way to look at it. I just thought they were tossing bodies up there, but the way that you said it's definitely right, where they were live crucifixions were the norm. And I mean, the end result on this is Crassus and Pompey both use this for, you know, public acclaim and basically kind of use, I think this is kind of where Pompey and Crassus kind of start scheming together and everything despite just having to try to steal each other's thunder. This is where they use the threat of their encamp legions to basically bully the Senate into making them joint consens. consoles for 70 BC, which is what set that dangerous precedent of military, military commanders

leveraging their armies that Caesar did when he came down. What was the name of the river? When he crossed the Rubicon. Crossing the Rubicon. Yeah, it's, as we talked about, these timelines are running parallel, and we have these figures that are bouncing back and forth between these. And a lot of Pompey's military acumen and then Crassus being so goddamn rich. coming up with this win in the third servile war,

they can work their way into the consulship, and Caesar is off basically fucking around in Gaul. This is when he's racking up all of his military charges. This is when he's trying to make his money, because, again, this partnership slash frenemy slash rivalry between Crassus and Pompey, this is what pays the way for the first triumvirate with Caesar. And then this concentration of power

leads to the disbandalding of the Roman Republic and the birth of the Roman Empire. Empire. One decade after the third servile war was put down, Crasus Pompey and Caesar formed the first triumvirate. And 27 years later, Caesar is assassinated ushering in this Roman Empire. That was how close this happens to the shift and the change in Rome. And we didn't really have to bring it up during the Caesar episode because there was so much in his timeline. It's why

We talked a lot about Pompey and Crassus during that episode kind of explaining their features But I don't remember talking a whole lot About the Third Servile War with Crassus I remember talking about the crucifixes that went up And I remember talking about the fire stuff But we didn't have to talk a whole lot about this

Because in that history This is kind of a footnote To what happens But This footnote kind of leads to the power struggle that creates Caesars. It gives the momentum to definitely make this happen. And I mean, the war devastated the agricultural landscape of southern Italy,

caused an immediate slave shortage. And I mean, as much as you can say what any benefit that this led to, it was benefits born out of fear and just fearing the inherent danger of amassing, you know, large numbers of like chain gang slaves, a lot of wealthy landowners, Roman landowners, begin kind of shifting toward a system of renting land to freed laborers

and sharecropping to try to kind of keep them more, you know, not complaisive, what am I trying to complacent? Yeah. That they would have some type of... Dossile. Yeah, exactly.

Give them less of a reason to try to, you know, all band together and fuck up the system. But while slavery remains standard historians, you know, like Plutarch and everything like that, basically stated that, the amount of terror that Spartacus struck into like the Roman elite kind of led to this very gradual long-term shift toward more humane treatment to try to, like I said, benefits born out of fear, to try to avoid getting, you know, more of these slave revolts.

Because they just experienced, what, three of them in like you said, a span of like 60 years. Yeah. Yeah. The last one, the last one taking two different groups of consoles to put down. Well, like you say, these large plantation owners that have three, four, 500 slaves that are out there working their fields

are like, ooh, if I can sell this land to other guys and I can keep maybe 20 or 30 of them, what are they going to do? Yeah. I can be as mean to them as possible on a micro scale that they're going to be angry with me

and I might kill a few, but at the same time, they're never going to rise up against me. If we can keep them isolated in these certain different pockets to where they can't get together and they can't start to form these uprisings, it's only going to insulate us from this happening again. But I just...

I don't know quite how to look at... Because obviously slavery still continues. Yeah. And these were a major changer in kind of the way, that Rome looked at slavery, but in the end... It looked at how to do the business of slavery. It didn't look at it in the sense of like, should we be doing this?

It was just like, is there a way to keep them from doing this again? Like, we don't want to quit doing this. We just don't want them to do this again. So, like, born out of this was this requirement to try to find different ways of handling the businesses of slavery. It was still fucking horribly wrong, but it was just like, what can we give them to keep them just content enough

that it sounds like too much work or too much risk to give up what they have. But it's because the Roman Empire thrived. It was a pillar of their economy. Yeah. So there was no option of getting rid of it. It was just like, how do we do it without upsetting the slaves too much? We know this works.

We know this makes this money. For us. We're not going to stop doing this because of a few revolts that happen. Because ultimately the bottom line, is still too good to pass this up. We just have to maybe build in some safeguards to make sure that we don't have this disruption in the economy.

Yeah. But yeah, crazy. I think they said something about like the Serval Wars being the only wars that have ever been justified. And I think this is what the, like the largest slave revolt in history. Followed shortly after by the Haitian revolt, I believe. Who let that one? Um...

that was against the French, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's... It's always the French. It's always the French. It is always the French. It's a story that I feel like

holds so much weight now because Spartacus is a star. Spartacus has been looked to through so many, or from so many revolutionary standpoints. Yeah, so many different, like, man, it's not always the best leaders because, like, Karl Marx is like,

I love Spartacus and everything. but it still stands as one of those figures that that actually stood up for something that kind of everyone should be able to get behind and say like yeah he was fighting for something right it's just the guys that bastardize it that are on the wrong side of history pretty much yeah hoisting them up but at the same time i mean i i think that he's also we're talking about a guy that we don't really have a good picture of but i'm sure it was a smoking hot guy that got to play him in Spartacus, right? On Stars?

There was two of them, actually, because one of the guys died. Oh, that's a bummer. Yeah, not in Hodgkins and Phoma. That's how I know what that is. That's what taught you? Yeah, I was actually pretty broken up out because I really like that show. I was like, oh, man, that guy's really good. And then the other guy came in and it took a little bit to warm up, but he did all right.

You finally got to... Yeah, the first guy was just better because he was the one that was like, you know, he introduced the character. Okay. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, for a guy that didn't have his picture mass-produced, he's... He's never like a chunky looking dude that seems a little over. No, but he was. Like in that, he wasn't chunky or anything, but, you know, he had that subcontaneous fat.

He knew what he was doing. But yeah, just someone that it's one of those rare circumstances of somebody, and we're going to talk about this a little more from the gladiator episode, but like being a gladiator was coming from nothing or being able to come from nothing to being something. And, I mean, there's been a lot of attempts to take out Rome. This was one of the closest ones. So there's something to be said about that. And the guy that got closest before that, again, was Hannibal.

Yeah. Who's an all-timer. And this guy was just the slain. That's the thing I think that most people don't realize is how, like, far Spartacus, like, went toward almost succeeding at that. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. You got anything else?

No. I think we're good here. All right. Well, hope you guys enjoyed this episode. We'll catch on the next one. Peace.