In Our Time - Spartacus

Episode Date: March 6, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life of Spartacus, the gladiator who led a major slave rebellion against the Roman Republic in the 1st century BC. He was an accomplished military leader, and the campaign he led contributed significantly to the instability of the Roman state in this period. Spartacus was celebrated by some ancient historians and reviled by others, and became a hero to revolutionaries in 19th-century Europe. Modern perceptions of his character have been influenced by Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film - but ancient sources give a rather more complex picture of Spartacus and the aims of his rebellion.With:Mary Beard Professor of Classics at the University of CambridgeMaria Wyke Professor of Latin at University College, LondonTheresa Urbainczyk Associate Professor of Classics at University College, Dublin.Producer: Victoria Brignell.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. UK slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In 1960, the American director Stanley Kubrick made a film starring Kirk Douglas, which was widely acclaimed by the critics and won numerous awards. Spartacus was based on the story of an enslaved gladiator who mounted a rebellion against the Romans in the first century.

B.C. During the course of this slavery revolt, he managed to defeat the mighty Roman legions on several occasions before Rome was finally victorious. Much of Spartacus' life is contested, and the ancient texts that give accounts of Israel are often contradictory, but a coherent figure does seem to emerge, and is one of a few figures from the ancient world who could be named by most people in Britain today. Over the last few centuries, Spartacus has provided inspiration for those trying to escape oppression, whether slavery or the existing political order and has become an icon for many people in the modern world in capitalist and in communist societies.

With me to discuss Spartacus and Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Maria Weik, Professor of Latin at University College London, and Theresa Urban Schick, Associate Professor of Classics at University College Dublin. Mary Beard, Spartaghert's revolt began in 73 BC. It's also known as the Third Servile War. before we talk about him, could you tell us what life was like

in that part of the first century BC in Roman world? Well, the important thing I think to get straight is that Rome at this point is no longer just a little city-state in central Italy. For decades, even centuries, it's had a series of extraordinary, an extraordinarily bloody military victories, which has essentially given it control of the Mediterranean from modern Spain to modern Turkey.

And that's had enormous consequences on what's going on or what life was like in Italy itself. The first thing is it's brought untold wealth into Italy in terms of gold, coin, bullion, art, literature, culture, but also the kind of human wealth that comes with imperialism really hundreds and thousands of slaves have been one of the big prophets of Roman Empire. People estimate probably more than a million slaves in Italy

at the time of Spartacus' rebellion. But in some ways the puzzling thing about it is that although this is clearly a big and exploitative empire, it doesn't have an emperor yet. The idea of a single ruler is still decades away and Rome is still effectively governed by its own traditional republican, old-fashioned institutions, major decisions are taken by popular assemblies, and Roman leaders are still elected on a yearly basis by the people.

Well, I think one of the problems about Rome right at this point is really that, that it's trying to run a vast empire. on the kind of infrastructure of a little city-state. Would you describe it as politically unstable at this time, to put it mildly, it still is a question. Well, the Romans talked about the first century and late second century BC at the time when daggers came into the forum because it was decidedly unstable,

partly because of the vast expansion that was going on. And 20 years before Spartacus, there had been what was effectively a civil war in Italy when the allies of Rome, the long-standing allies of Rome, went to war with Rome itself, were eventually bought off by getting full Roman citizenship. But even more, really, in the internal politics of Rome itself, it was becoming a time of really high-stakes competition

between individual big men, who are sometimes competing with each other. Are these generals always, you? They were generals and politicians because part of the point of the way Rome ran itself is there was really no distinction between a military leader and a political leader. So if you really, traditionally, if you wanted military power, you had to be elected as a state official. So there was huge competition between these guys who were wanting this sort of access to power.

And they were wanting this access to power because the stakes had got so big. You know, this wasn't a time when, you know, you would go up and bash up your neighbour tribes and come back with a few cattle. If you got a big command to go and fight an Eastern King, you came back, wealthy, beyond belief, and also a kind of leader of the world. Maria Weike, what do we know about Spartacus' background and how he became a slave? Well, quite a contrast to what Mary just said about the opportunities of the Roman aristocrat. in their conquests in the Mediterranean.

It seems that he comes from Thrace, which is a territory that we would now pinpoint in the area of northeast Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, that sort of area. And it was very clearly part of the slave roots that would come into Italy, in addition to those that came from the eastern Mediterranean in Syria, slaves coming in from Germany

and from Gore. We're told that he was captured, along with his wife, and brought to Rome to be sold as a slave. We're told even that she was a prophetess, and that she found him on one occasion with a snake curled up on his face and interpreted it as a sign of the enormous importance that he would have in the future. But before that could happen, he was sold as a gladiator, to be trained in the school in Capua. And one interesting feature of that information is we're told particularly that he was not sent there as a punishment

even though customarily gladiators were criminals who were being punished by being sent to the arena. So we would imagine that going to be a gladiator for no good reason, but simply the cruelty of your owner would have had some impact on his plans for revolt. Can I ask you,

everything you've said is extremely here. Is a lot of it contested, or are we in the clear about all those facts? Probably the snake on the face is an anecdote that comes up with a lot of people in the ancient world where they are found with snakes or other interesting eagles and things like that that indicate their importance. So that obviously I think is an anecdote to make him as important as other people. But apart from that, the... his background in Thrace seems very likely,

and certainly obviously he was in Capua. There are one or two writers who say that his experience of military, his extreme military competence might have been accrued from having first been a mercenary in the Roman army, but that's not so clear. Mary Beard referred to the mass of slavery, slavery in the Roman Empire. Can you tell us about the nature of slavery?

I've read that it was rare that you have a slave, state in history, but this was a slave state, Roman. Rome was a slave empire or state or outfit, whatever it is like that. Republic, let's call it for the sake of a word. Well, it becomes a slave economy and is based on the social structures that involve mass enslavement. This happens in the late third century and on into the second century. This is new for Italy. It's a result of what Mary described as all the conquests in the Mediterranean. But there have been slave states, states with slaves in way before that, back as far as we can say, what made Rome different? Well, this is systematic. It's economic. It's about bringing in prisoners that you've conquered in your foreign campaigns and placing them on the land.

The aristocracy accrues wealth. One of the ways that they utilize that wealth is to buy up land. We find Italy is full of huge agricultural estates. and slave labor is what is used to run those estates. So they like agricultural plantations, if you like. And within the context of Roman society, there is a clear hierarchy of slavery. You could, for example, if you had technical cultural skills,

end up very close, very intimate with a Roman aristocratic family, perhaps even the tutor to their children. You might then have the chance later in life to buy your freedom, or to be manumitted to be freed once the master has died. But the majority are working on the estates. The majority are, for example, if they're working, the fields are under constant surveillance, are pending at night,

really strong vigilance over their conditions which were incredibly harsh, and it became very difficult to resist against those sorts of structures. Drozzo Urban Shoe, what previous... There have been a couple of significant slave revolts before Spartacus. Can you briefly tell us what happened there? Yeah, when I was looking at this whole subject of Spartacus, what I found the most fascinating was that he wasn't the most successful.

I mean, he's the most famous, and you could say famous a kind of success, but he wasn't the most successful in terms of long-lasting. So we have an ancient writer who says, if Scratus hadn't killed Spartacus hadn't killed Spartacus, he would have done as much damage as Eunice, who was one of the leaders of the first Sicilian slave wars. So there's a massive uprising in Sicily in the 130s, and that could have lasted as long as 10 years.

Now, modern scholars say, no, it can't be, because that's far too long for a slave revolt. It must have been five years. But the way Diodorus accounts, he seems to be applying that he lasted about 10 years. So that was very successful. And at the same time as that, there's an uprising in Pergamum.

And Diodorus says, at the same time as the slave war in Sicily, Almost the same thing happened in Pergamum. Now the leader of that is Aristonicus. A strange thing happened in Pergamum in the 1 30s. A king died, Atlas III, and he bequeathed his kingdom to the Romans. It's a very peculiar thing. I didn't think of this when I was an undergraduate.

I just accepted it. But when you think about it, it's very odd. And obviously, the people in Pergamum, members of the royal family, didn't agree. So Aristoniches is a member of the royal family who wanted to reclaim his kingdom. But anyway, he revolted for, I don't know, three, four years. apparently the slaves. And Dada Dora says because they were so maltreated, they joined Arisaniacus. So this is two

at the same time in the 130s. They are both defeated eventually by the Romans who send out consuls against both of them. And then in the 100s, there's another one in Sicily. Again, four, four, five years. And they seem to have taken over the whole of Sicily. And interestingly, when you look, there are lots more.

When you look closely, it's just our sources are very problematic. They're very scanty. So even before the one in, in the 130s, in southern Italy, there are uprisings and commanders with armies are being sent to southern Italy all the time. And there seem to be some religious element. They're normally referred to as the Bacchanalian conspiracies,

but we know virtually little about them, except that almost every year preters are being sent out to quell them. Can we talk about the business of you're enslaved? We don't quite know, not precisely how he became enslaved, but he is a slave. It's sufficiently authoritative about that. and then he became a gladiator. Now, do we know, was he forced to become a gladiator?

I don't suppose you choose to be a gladiator, do you? No, unless you're already a mind, no. Not at that point, anyway. So the idea of being a gladiator changes. So the film Gladiator is a bit misleading because we get a very glamorous sense of a term gladiator. But that film is set much later. There are two things to say about that.

One is that that's under the later emperors. And also Comedus was, sort of a typically bad emperor. So one of the ways you describe a bad emperor is describing as degenerate. And being degenerate would be that you wanted to be a gladiator because only an insane person would want to be a gladiator. So, yeah, you wouldn't choose to be a gladiator. There are stories that Spartacus had been in the Roman army.

And you could say that's the way that some authors try and account for his success and his military ability. What role did gladiators play in Roman society then? Well, they're the form of entertainment. It started out as games they put on at funerals. and in the mid-third century that people are putting games on in funerals and then they become just public entertainments

and then it becomes very important as a way to get voted into office because people would be very popular. Sorry to interrupt. Are they always fights to the death in arenas large and small across Italy and various other places? They wouldn't have to always be fights to the death

but I think that's why people went along to see the death and they also have wild animals in where they slaughtered. vast numbers of wild animals are killed in these. I have an idea how many gladiators? How many idea of numbers? Well, as we get to the late Republic, the numbers are gradually getting more and more in the people

are putting on bigger and bigger games. So Julius Caesar put on games with hundreds of them. And that's a sign of your wealth, again, is this sort of lavish display of wealth. And we're talking about men who are trained in special camps. and presumably given special food, special privileges, not penned up as Maria was saying, as slaves were. I think they're still penned up.

Yeah, but they are trained. The whole idea of having their school is that you would put on a better display. It's not just slaughtering people. I mean, the Romans were into fighting. They knew about fighting, so they wanted to see skill as well. Mary Beard, can you tell us how insight, and do we know anything about this particular school or camp in Capua, Sparticus was and how he got out of it with the men he took out with him?

No, we know rather little in detail. We know there's a big amphitheatre in Capua. And accounts differ about exactly what happened when he broke out. But in some ways, I mean, I think everything we're going to say about Spartacus today is going to start with accounts differ about, because there are all sorts of variants. But there are interestingly quite a few accounts, aren't there? There are a number of short accounts.

And all of them, almost all of them, basically say that Spartacus got out with about 70 mates from his gladiatorial barracks. Quite how he did that is more interestingly different. I mean, there's one lovely version in one author which says that in order to get weapons to get out, They kind of nick the kitchen equipment and the meat cleavers, and they blasted their way out with the kitchen equipment, and then conveniently found some gladiatorial equipment that itself was going up to another venue, and they hijacked that and used that until they got some good Roman weapons. Quite how they did it, we don't know.

But I think for me the puzzle is, well, quite how surprised are we supposed to be at this? because Theresa has already mentioned, and Maria, the idea of sort of penning them up. But, you know, Roman security systems are not like ours. You know, there aren't CCTV cameras and barbed wire. And one's capacity for actually managing to hold in a group of actually trained fighters, because they're trained fighters because that's where they've got to be in order to get the audiences and get the money.

I mean, anybody looking at this now says this is an explosion waiting to happen. You know, 70 plus strong honking lads who were actually really good at fighting and well-trained. You know, they can blast their way out of anywhere if they want to. Their difficulty is what to do next. Getting out, I reckon, is always the easy bit for the slave rebel.

Well, they got out, Mary Weik, and there's a bit of dispute whether they had three leaders, but they ended up going one leader. Quickly it was Spartacus, and they're headed for Mount Vesuvius. Now, why did they choose to go there? Well, I think perhaps Mount Vesuvius was a possible place of refuge because they seemed to have chosen to go up the mountain about halfway up. It was not volcanic at this point and hadn't been for centuries.

It was very lush. It would have been quite easy to. to hide out there, and I think that perhaps was their first purpose, was to escape from those Romans who were now chasing them to get them back to the school. So they hid out on a ridge about halfway up Mount Vesuvius. And here they demonstrate their first example of extraordinary intelligence and ingenuity, because they hide out on a ridge. So the Romans go after them.

Yes. Sorry, yes. We told about 3,000 Roman troop soldiers went after them. Let's assume there's 70, but let's assume more people have gathered around them, just to make it a bit more fun. Anyway, the Romans went after them, and there we are on Mount Vesuvius. Okay, so they're on Mount Vesuvius. They're hiding out there.

They're surrounded by a sheer cliff face all around them, except for one narrow pathway up to where they are. We know that some troops have been sent out, as he said, about 3,000, which is rather a lot for an escape from a gladiatorial school. so clearly the magistrate who was sent, Claudius Glaborus, was regarded as of sufficient authority with a big enough troop

to be able to deal with this breakout. And what they planned to do was simply to starve the gladiators out from this place because of the only one pathway up to that point. So they simply encamped at the bottom of the mountain and waited for them to starve to death. However, the area where they were hiding

was full of, vines and what they did was pull up the vines and wrap them up into rope ladders and abseil down the cliff face and then on the other side away from the unsuspecting romans away from the unsuspecting romans and then they then they attacked the camp total surprise the romans were not expecting anything like that they overrun the camp and they seize all the weaponry so now at last they don't just have kitchen implements they no longer have gladiatorial weapons which are partly display objects and ones that they despised, they now have Roman army supplies.

Theresa, can you at one point the rebels split into two sections? So Sparticus and his men, and we're now allowed to say rather less frivolously than I said earlier on, that people are gathering around them. They're magnetic, they're attracting, they're disaffected from all over the place. numbers are always difficult at this time. A lot more people than 70. And they split into two groups. Do we know why that happened and what happened as a result of it?

Yeah, of course we don't know why. But just to go back to what you were saying about people joining them, I just wanted to say that free people joined in all the slave revolters, which is quite an interesting idea, which often people find that unexpected. So we're explicitly told that free people joined Spartacus as well. Yeah, Plutarch says that there were campers. separately due to their insolent arrogance. They'd had a disdain

Pluthor doesn't like anyone who disagrees with Spartacus. He's a big fan of Spartacus. But they had large numbers. So Crixus, who is the person who's supposed to have split off, he's supposed to have had 30,000 men with him, so it would be difficult to camp with such huge numbers in any case. So, yeah, they split off. And there's another incident when the slaves

separated away from Spartacus, and that's when Crassus is involved. And again, both times the slaves are, defeated by the Romans. So that's the way that the story is told anyway is that the Romans can't defeat Spartacus directly but they can, when the slaves split, then they can

defeat them then. So after that he heads up towards the Alps and there's a disagreement about whether some people wanted to cross the Alps and just go home is what our sources say that Spartacus wanted, which is kind of from the Roman point of view, it's a sensible solution. Please just go home and leave us alone. And the

slaves who had been encouraged by all the success and slaughter of Romans didn't want to do that. So there's that idea that there's a distinction. No, no, Ben. The underlying problem here is just how we make sense of Spartacus, isn't it? Because nobody, neither any ancient sources nor any modern sources have the foggiest clue what was going on in the head of these guys. So all you can do, and this starts back in the first century AD,

if you're trying to tell the story, you look at what is supposed to have happened and then you say, well, so why did they do that? And there are a variety of different explanations that you can come up with to explain things. So you say, so why didn't they go over the Alps? Well, maybe that's because they changed their mind. Maybe there were guys who were contesting Spartacus' control.

And so the whole story of motivation comes terribly circular because you're inferring it from what is supposed to have happened. Can I, before you go, which obviously I'd like you do, I'd just like to tie what might be a loose end from what you said. The Crixus split from Spartacus, and he was defeated, and then Spartacus went on one another victory, one of several victories, so he's back in the ascendant, Spartacus with his gang, and presume some of Crixus's men have joined him.

So, Mary, they're moving up and down. They seem to be moving up and down. Well, they are moving up and down. You were telling us what you think is going on? Heaven only knows. We haven't got heaven, man. We've got usury. The basic method here is to plot where Spartacus went

and where ancient authors say he went. And if you do that, you get this sort of mad, dash up to the top of Italy and then total return to the bottom. So he goes, oh, what's your constructionary? Well, I think it's rather more honourable to say, look, we do not know why he did that. we can make various guesses about why he might have done that. And one is the one we've been talking about,

that there are differences of opinion, so they go all over the place. Another is that actually, in order to get enough food and supplies for these people, they have to keep on the move. Because there's scavengers, basically. Yeah, and so, you know, you exhaust one place and then you move on. So it's a kind of migration rather than our march. The other idea is that,

they're trying to get more supporters and that as you move, you can pick up more allies. That also may be true, but I'd much rather, I think, say, look, the mad movements may be caused by any of those, but the bottom line for me is that they illustrate the real basic problem of the slave revolt,

which is breaking, you know, the beginning is easy, you know, the first stage out of the gladiatorial camp, up to Vesuvius, nearest place to go a bit of dustedly, rather ambitious strategising. That's easy, is what do you do next? And there you come into all kinds of, again, problems about motivation. Do they just want to go home? Or are they, in a sense, trying to offer a rather more coherent and systematic attack on Roman power? Mary, why can we check it up?

Because it's one of the most interesting parts of the story. There have been various theories put forward. Spartacus was out to end slavery. Spartacus was out to perhaps overthrow Rome. Spartac was out to take over Rome. Can we just, can you rummage around in that area? That's an interesting way of putting it, I guess. Following on on what Mary was saying,

the options have often been for us in the modern era to make a choice between Spartacus wanted to go home to Thrace or Spartacus wanted to attack Rome. Spartacus wants to free himself from slavery or he wants totally to overthrow the slave system. And I think one of the things that Mary's drawing attention to is precisely the sense that perhaps the ambition that Spartacus may have had may have well developed over time.

One thing that's very clear is that when he escaped, he didn't try to escape on his own. He escaped with a community of gladiators. It's also clear that they did recruit. Can you just, can I pause that? Can you tell me why you think that's significant? Well, because if you want to go home, you would try and escape on your own at the dead of night, and you would then immediately reach one of the coastlines of Italy and try and get on a ship and sail away. And you would probably cross Italy west to east rather than all the way up north and south hundreds of miles with, you know, 100,000 followers.

So I do think there is some significance in the scale of the, of the, you know, the movement and on its movement up and down Italy. It also seems to me significant that at one point, when they are in the toe of Italy, they seem to be looking to a possible shipment over to Sicily. And as Theresa said earlier on, Sicily was where the earlier wars were. Is there perhaps some sense then than in looking in that direction,

which was nowhere near any of their homes, that what they were looking at was that the history of revolts that had already taken place in the... the past. Were they aware of those? Were they thinking that they two could try setting up what we know as as maroon communities in an alternative society for the slaves?

I mean, it's nice to speculate about all these things and in a sense the gaps and the sources allow us to think about what these options might have been. Theresa, can you tell us what victories Spartac has achieved during the course of his about two years of revolt? You mean military victories?

Yes. Yeah, I mean, because in some sense, just by surviving he gained a huge victory. sort of psychological victory. Yeah, if you count up from the different reports, he won at least nine major victories against Roman armies, which was kind of astounding. Sometimes the sources say he beat this Vrinius in many battles, so it's difficult we can't sort of say exactly how many there are.

But he's supposed to have defeated them nine times that we can actually count perhaps more, which took the Romans by surprise. they thought they were going to deal with this quite easily. But on the other hand, he had huge numbers, according to the sources. But he had huge difficulties being on the mainland. It's all over being over in Sicily, as it were. You're quite a distance away, and they've got to ship boats over and such,

and you know Sicily better than they'll ever know Sicily. But you're on the home ground here. You're playing away. Well, you're playing on home turf, really, aren't you? So that's many more difficult for it. Is that taken into account in your assessment of these victories? Yeah, you could say that's why it didn't last so long. That's why the Romans managed to finish it off sooner, I suppose.

I mean, it's quite astonishing that he was able to march up and down Italy. And one of our sources says that's because the Italians hated the Romans so much, because they'd just been at war with them. So the idea that the Italians actually let them march through, because presumably if the Italian citizens had stood with the Romans, they could have stopped it earlier. So there's some kind of support going on there. Were there any, do we have reports of spectacular victories?

We'd all like to know about a spectacular victory too. Are there any of those? there were these just victories that one would have expected him with the numbers and skills that we know he had to win? Well, the sources seem to describe them as spectacular victories.

They often have little sort of like tricks because they're trying to account for how Spartacus was so successful. So, for instance, the vines. There's another little trick that he played on Varinius where he let them think that they were still encamped and they put corpses on stakes

and lit fires so that the Romans thought they were still in their camp, and meanwhile they'd sort of snuck off. And the only reason why the Romans realized they weren't there was because they weren't hurling abuse and stones at them in the morning to wake them up. And it was this strange silence, and then they realised that they weren't there.

So there's kind of trickery is sort of constant in the accounts of the battles. It's a continuation of the Odysseus notion of the man being cunning and ingenuity. Yeah, well, he's like a Greek hero for Pluto. Or the cunning slave. You know, that's what, you know, slaves don't have fire,

but they're smart. Mary, what are they thinking back in Rome or around Rome? This man is going up and down in Italy with a lot of people. It varies from 30,000 or 100,000, even more in some accounts. They're massive people. They're causing a lot of...

They're causing a lot of embarrassment, at the very least, to the Roman army, defeating them, as Maria said, on several occasions. Nine, it's sometimes been said, around that number. What are they thinking? How are they working out what to do with this man? Well, it looks

like, from what we know, that to start with, although they take it reasonably seriously, as you said, they sent down 3,000 guys, it's just a slave breakout. And, you know, to be honest, the Roman first response is not terribly

efficient. Now, that's not so unusual, actually, because the Romans are quite often a bit hopeless at stage one in their military responses. what they're good at is seeing when the writing is on the wall and getting stage two into action, which is in the end what they do here.

What is very hard to distinguish is what the reaction was actually at the time from how it's later played in Roman writing. And that a bit depends on how many people we think Sparctica's had with him. Everybody agrees that 120,000 is a vast overestimate. but nobody can agree on what a good estimate is of the people he's got. But certainly what you see happening later in the later sources, and that's all we've got, is that after a kind of misprision about Spartacus' importance,

he becomes a kind of second Hannibal. And he might have destroyed Rome, and there's the story that, you know, like Hannibal, he gets very close to the city of Rome itself and thinks, shall I go and attack that? and both of them, for different reasons in a kind of mythological way, decide they've got something better to do and pass Rome by. So he certainly is written into Roman history as a big enemy. Whether if we were sitting in Roman 73 BC, we would have thought that,

I don't know, we thought those pesky slaves, I suppose. And then they got hold of a statesman, they determined they tried to do a serious statesman, seriously rich, who's supposed to have said, no one can call himself rich unless he possesses an army. And I couldn't resist saying that. It's in one of you, the notes from one of you. So there, I said supposed to.

Okay, Mary. But you're talking about Marcus Likinius Krasis, and you're giving him the benefit of the doubt by calling him a statesman. He was a big, brutish, rich thug, basically, but extremely efficient. Well, we didn't a lot of statesmen, big British rich thugs in those days. You said earlier on they were, right?

Yes, you did. Absolutely true. I was just picking it. up on the use of the word statesman. You said it earlier on. You said a lot of these Roman generals had to be statesmen in order to be bullies and go and conquer countries all over the place. That's what you said.

Your very words. Anyway. He was, can I just turn around? He was defeated by the Krasas army, which was we're told much bigger than his and he was defeated in a heroic fashion. Can you just briefly tell us

about that defeat and a subsequent event after that defeat? Well, he He's defeated by the army of Krasas. It takes a little while. There's one point in which Krasis traps him in the tow of Italy and he's meant to have made a huge phenomenal siege trench all across the tow of Italy in order to hold Spartacus there.

But yet again he shows his ingenuity and is able to escape across it and to get out of this besieged territory. We're told in one of the sorts of. is that of Plutarch, who's actually writing a life of this thug, Krasis. Statesman. Yes, and interestingly, because I'm just picking up on Merrick, interestingly, this Greek source certainly wants to describe Krasis as avaricious and cruel. And as a sort of passing example of how that worked, he tells us the story of Spartacus,

and Spartacus is defeat by Kras. and he ennobles Spartacus because he says that at the point when there was going to be the final showdown, at the point when Spartacus knew that the end was coming, he then had his horse killed so that literally he could be on the same footing as his fellow soldiers, and that he then attempted to find Krasis on the battlefield in order to be able to fight him hand to hand. But unfortunately he could not reach him in time. He was surrounded by the Roman enemy and he died fighting to the end. as an imperator, it was said, wasn't it?

Yeah, that's from Flores. Yeah, and that word means general, but it also means emperor, and Flores was writing at the time of the emperor, so that's a very extreme statement for Flores to have made, yeah. So did this intervention by Crassus indicate that they now saw Spartacus a very serious threat to the state? Well, it must have been. They had eight legions, I mean, to send out against them.

I mean, they pull out all the stops. Yeah, and then they were recalling Pompey and Lucullus. It looks like they really were taking it seriously. and just to go back to what Mary was saying, if I was in Rome and 73 and the slaves rebelled, I think I would be really frightened because when you go home you're surrounded by slaves. You've got slaves in your

bedroom sort of making your bed. They might just stab you. They might revolt. Well, the first thing they'd do is kill you, I think. But let's just go back to this TV. Eight legions, can you tell the listeners what that means in terms of power? Well, he took six of his own and then he took over the two of the consents.

So what numbers are we talking? About four and a half, nearly 5,000 men. Per legion? No, all in all. Yeah. So that makes the sort of overwhelming superiority of... No, in a legion, sorry, nearly 5,000 per legion, sorry. Yeah, so we're talking about, hold on,

about 40, 45,000 men. Yeah, that's right. So he takes that, he, they're very disciplined, so, and there's somebody, married, said, there's Pompey behind him, and so that they're really after this matter. After the defeat, there's this famous Appian describes that he crucifying the 6,000 survivors along the Appian way.

Is there real authority for that? I don't see why we should not believe Appian. It's a very dramatic thing to have done. It's strange to have just made it up. I mean, they certainly wanted to make an example of them. I don't mean to be cynical about all this, But, you know, if we go back to these statesmen again, and I think one of the issues about the way this military danger gets built up

is that Crassus is looking for a big military victory. Pompey, who's actually been in Spain, sorting out a Roman rebel in Spain, is also looking for a big military victory. No doubt there's Lucullus too, wanting military victory. Now, it is in the interests of these statesmen and their PR companies, which effectively is what a lot of Roman history is, to build up the danger of Spartacus in order to make their defeat of him the thing that saves Rome. And so I still feel, I really, you know, if pressed into a corner,

I don't know how many people he's got, I don't know how many, how dangerous he really was, but I do know that it's in Crassus' interest to make it look, as if he has annihilated this shock, horror, mass rebellion of violent slaves. We've got to move on briskly to the legacy because we've enjoyed ourselves too much so far. Maria White, the modern world started taking interest in the Spartagos, if we can fast forward 2,000 years in the 19th century, 18th 19th century. Can you briskly take us through the first time he came back into the consciousness of Europe?

Well, there are two ways in which he comes back. Perhaps the first and the most obvious, well, not the first, but the most obvious, is when there are slave revolts. So in 1791, we start to see a sustained slave war in what becomes independent Haiti, led by Toussaint-Louvature, and he is described as the Black Spartacus. That's followed by the prohibition of the slave trade, ultimately by all the debates about abolition of slavery, This is now in the 1830s, and when abolition comes, a statute of Spartacus is put up to celebrate these victories in Paris. So that's associating him very closely with slavery. But when he first emerges, and most of the occasions in which he's utilized, is more as metaphor, where slavery is a metaphor, where those writing about Spartacus are people who have never been enslaved, but are citizens of the newly emerging nation states,

and who want to use Spartacus as an example of the oppressed fighting against the oppressor. Can Tracea, can you tell him, can you tell us how he inspired Marx and Marxists in the 19th and 20th century? Yeah, I mean, Marx, of course, was a classist, so he knew his ancient history. And just the Communist Manifesto starts off, the history of all societies so far is a history of class struggles. And it starts off freemen and slave, and then partition and plebeian. And so Spartacus is like, and he epitomizes class struggle, if you like, in a very easy way. People sort of want to come in already.

But he's also supposed to have said in the letter to Engels, oh, I've been reading Appian in the evening, and I've been reading about Spartacus, he's one of the greatest generals all time. And he doesn't like Pompey at all. He calls him a real shit, doesn't he? I wasn't going to say that on the radio. Well, that's right.

It is his words. Yeah. And then in another, there's a little, the Victorian sort of party game that they used to the Marx family played. They had to say who their heroes were. Well, one of the things, what's the vice you most despise? And he says, oh, it's civility.

And what's your idea of happiness? It's to fight. What's your idea of misery? It's to submit. And his hero is Spartacus. Can you summarize then, Mayor? I'm sorry to land this on you, but we're reading out of time, unfortunately.

How the legacy continued. We've got in the anti-slavery movement, We've got the Marxists taking it, Rose Luxembourg, and on we go, taking them up. So where are we, and then we've got the Stanley Kubrick film, so where are we now? Well, the key is that the legacy of Spartacus is that myth, which has generated since the late 18th century, and it still goes on. I mean, the BBC TV series outnumbered, finished with the little kid actually in Spartacus, the musical at his school, and it's not just interestingly a myth of the left. And one of the most surprising things about Spartacus is that when Ronald Reagan came to talk to Parliament in 1982, he also used Spartacus as an image both of the West's conflict with totalitarianism, but also of Britain's noble fight against the Argentinians.

So you see, I think that's a great tribute to the myth of Spartacus really, that it's the only thing that Karl Marx and Ronald Reagan have in common is they, both love Spartacus. Well, thank you very much, Mary Beard, Theresa Ermschick and Maria Weik. Next week we will be tackling our talking about the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity. Thank you very much for listening. There are many more

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