Stuff You Should Know - I'm Spartacus!

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

Spartacus was a real dude. He led a slave revolt, and was pretty successful to boot. I'm Spartacus. You're Spartacus. We are all Spartacus. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there.

It's just the two of us. That's okay because you're here, dear listener. Insert your first name after that, and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Stanley Kubrick Edition, sort of. I went to go watch that last night. Oh yeah?

And then I was like, wait, I think that's really long. So I looked up the runtime. I was like, I'm not watching this. So I've yet to see it. Yeah, watch Paz of Glory instead. What was that? Is that the one about Barry Linden? No, that was Barry Linden.

Oh, okay. That's great too. But if you're gunning for early Kubrick, I would say Killer's Kiss if you want to go super early, and then Paz of Glory, which is the other one he did with Kirk Douglas, the World War I trench warfare film that's great, and Barry Linden, which is just a masterpiece.

Wasn't that Ryan O'Neill? Yeah, boy, it's good. Yeah, he's in one of my favorite movies of all time, Paper Moon. That's right, and one of my favorite movies, the main event. What was that? It was a rom-com he did as we played a boxer

opposite Barbara Streisand. Was she a boxer? No, it was not great. I mean, it was fine. It was one of the 70s rom-coms. Gotcha. But not one of my favorite movies by any stretch. Speaking of rom-coms,

but minus the rom part and just the calm, heavy on the calm, have you seen Eliza Schlesinger's sketch show on Netflix? No. It is very good. How do I know that name? She's gotten pretty big as a stand-up in the last couple of years. If you haven't discovered her yet, you're welcome.

She's really great. I'm looking her up now, which is something I don't normally do. I don't think I recognize her. Okay, well, she's got some stand-up specials that are definitely worth watching, and then she just debuted a season of a sketch comedy show that's pretty good.

Definitely worth seeing. We'll have to check that out. Ryan O'Neill's not in it yet, but like I said, it's just one season. We're on a shout-out live science, by the way. We used Halstaff Works article on Spartacus and this great live science article on Spartacus, the real Spartacus, not Kirk Douglas.

I also read an article from a guy named Kenneth- Spartacus? Kenneth P. Chek, C-Z-E-C-H, like the Czech Republic, I guess. Okay. Maybe that's where his family's from, who knows? But he wrote an article back in the 90s about Spartacus that was very exhaustive,

that was helpful. And then there's also a historian named Barry Strauss, who I read some interviews and articles from him too. He's a bit of a specialist on Spartacus. So shout-out to those cats as well. Yeah, so the story of Spartacus, if you've watched the Kubrick film, it is not, I mean, there are bits of truth in there,

but it's definitely not some real, truthful biopic of his life. Good movie, but we're gonna give you the real story of Spartacus' life, which is that of a, and the leader of an uprising of slaves who said, Rome, we're not gonna take it anymore. No, we ain't gonna take it. That's right.

We're not gonna take it. Anymore. Listen, Rome. That was the original title. I think, we met that guy, well, actually, we passed that guy backstage once, remember? D. Snyder. That's right. What show was that? The Whatever Show.

I think it was Jeff Probst, wasn't it? No, no, no. It was the Whatever Show with... Oh, was it with, was that Martha Stewart's daughter? Yeah, she has a first name. Alexis? Alexis and Jennifer. Right, Jennifer and Alexis, wow.

Yes. Remember when we were on TV every now and then? Yeah, we'd be on that. We were on Jeff Probst. Do you remember the Jeff Probst show? He was interviewing us and he zoned out so hard. I almost said like, Jeff, are you okay? While we were talking.

Yeah, and we used to, occasionally we'd be on CNN. They would have us on to do like talking head stuff. Yes. And then everyone just sort of stopped caring about us. It's called Old Moons. Well, we got really popular podcasting. Yeah.

And they just all said, huh, well, whatever. We don't need those guys. Yeah, that's okay though. No, I don't want to be on CNN or any news network. Well, yeah, we were on the Soledad O'Brien show. We were interviewed by Christine Roman. She's like super legit journalist. It was pretty neat.

So was Jeff Probst. Right. The tribe has spoken. Yep. And they said, who else? Isn't that what he said, the tribe has spoken? Yeah. And then he'd kick you in the seat of your pants

on the way out. And you would thank God. Cause what a relief to be kicked off that garbage show. Man, it was good the first season or two, I think. I think I did watch the first couple of seasons, but you know, I'm not going to yuck. Someone's young. There's probably still survivor shows going on.

Oh, no, there are. They, I think the most recent season, they brought together like past champions or past people who got kicked off one of the two and said, who's going to win this time? Yeah, I don't, the only one I do like that is Top Chef, which has still maintained its integrity after all these years and never became dumb.

And then for a little while I did that discovery had a show, I cannot remember the name of it, where it was like a post-apocalyptic scenario where they would put people in this area and like occasionally they would send in these Mad Max type people to mess with them and take their stuff. And they had to build things and defend themselves.

God, what was that called? It was really awful and great. Were the people naked? Cause I can tell you the name of the show if they were naked. I have watched more than one episode of Naked and Afraid. I haven't. Did they just like blur out their parts

where their bathing suit covers? No, they're completely naked and it's just shows dong out the whole time. No, it doesn't. Like the Voyager Golden record. Is blurred out and the kind of the first thing that the ladies do is fashion some sort of Eve-like covering on her bits.

And the men either do that or they're just like, hey, whatever, he's the guy at the gym that has a towel over his shoulder, but not around his waist. Oh yeah, that guy. That guy. Wearing tennis shoes with no socks. Yes, AKA men who are proud of their genitals.

Dong out. So I'm guessing Spartacus was probably dong out. Oh, sure. Are we back to Spartacus now you think? Yeah. Okay, so Spartacus was this guy who everyone knows the name of. And you may even know that he was a gladiator.

Maybe you know that he led a slave revolt, but this guy was really nuanced, really detailed. And actually even after a couple of thousand years of history analysis, you know, falling in and out of favor of different cultures that come and go, he stands the test of time pretty well. Even after being draped in, you know, a lot of people's hangups and like, you know,

held up as a prime example of the ideals of whatever group are revering him. Like even after you strip all that stuff away and look at the historical figure, he was still a pretty interesting and kind of upstanding guy as far as leaders of slave revolt go. That's right. And that's a good way to put it.

He was Thracian, which means he is from Thrace. We don't know a ton about his early life because they just didn't bother recording the history of nobody slaves in ancient Rome. Why would they? It took him to do remarkable things for historians to take notice with their quill and paper. And the Romans at the time, this was an area

that Thracia was in Southeast Europe, where they were always trying to subjugate this area of Europe and first century BC. And it was just, it was just not a good scene if you weren't sort of upper echelon Roman at the time. No, and Thracia was, I get the impression that it was not really one to live under Roman yoke. But I think I also have the impression that they were,

they were in league with the Romans, but it was kind of like one of those, we can either be an ally of yours or you can conquer us kind of thing. And so I think there was a bit of a tense truce. And there was a, I don't think any contemporary text about Spartacus is still around today. Most of the earliest stuff we know about him

comes from at the earliest, the first century CE. And he was living in the last century or the first century BCE. So people were writing about him 100, 200 years later. But one of those old texts says that he wasn't born a slave and that he actually was a Thracian soldier who was an ally who worked in the auxiliary

or fought in the auxiliary for Rome. So he was a soldier under Roman command at some point. And they think that he was drummed out of the army for some reason unjustly, this ancient author says, and that that kind of led on this path to him becoming a bandit and a criminal. Yeah, he was like the guy in the new Star Wars movies. Which one?

The guy that was a stormtrooper and then said, you know what, I'm not a stormtrooper anymore. I wanna kill stormtroopers. Okay, I haven't, I've seen the, is the last Jedi one? Yeah, that's one. Okay, so, but that was like a side story, right? That wasn't one of the actual canon.

No, so the last Jedi was, they made three main ones a part of the canon and then of Star Wars fans, you have words for all these things. Rogue One was the one that was outside and then the Han Solo movie was outside and not outside canon, just not part of the whatever of those movies.

So Rogue One is the one I'm thinking of. That was really good. Yeah, I enjoyed that one quite a bit. The other ones, I don't think I've been able to make it through a single one yet. Oh yeah. Yeah. I like them, but they're Star Wars movies.

I don't expect greatness. I just think they're kind of fun. Yeah, I mean, I love the first three. Yeah, sure. But not the first three sequentially, you know, the first three that were released ever. You liked one through three sequentially, or not sequentially?

Yeah. Good God. I'm talking about a fan of Menace. He's the best of the bunch. All right, so he's like the Stormtrooper guy in these new movies that is no longer a Stormtrooper and wants to kill Stormtroopers. He gets captured at one point

and he gets sold into slavery in Rome. And then there was this man that, I love this article says a man referred to at times as Vachia. I guess that's his name, or maybe he just had a bunch of names, but the upshot is this guy had a gladiator school in Kapua, about 120 miles southeast of Rome,

and that's where Spartacus was sent to train to be a gladiator. Yes, in Hawaii. Right, and I feel like we should take a break and get our Star Wars fact straight and come back. Oh goodness. Okay. All right, we'll be right back.

All right. We'll be right back. On the podcast, Peydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug,

chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug. So when we left off, Chuck, Boba Fett had left the army. You know, I'm not even gonna do that to us. Have you watched Mandalorian? No, huh? It's good. The one with Amy Sideris?

Uh, yeah, she is the Mandalorian. She's in it though. She gets to like hang out with Baby Yoda, I think. No, she is in it, and it's a, you know, I love seeing her in anything, but it does take me out of the moment just a bit, but it's a fun show. It's kind of like the A-Team.

You'd like it. Oh, well, yeah, I probably would like it then. It's like a week to adventure of the week type of thing. Okay, cool, yeah. I might actually check that out. I've been looking for something new. I started at Ozark, and I'm like, man, this is really dark.

Yeah, where are you now? I have a fifth episode, I think, of season one. Oh, okay. Just starting. Just starting, burn through season one or anything. No, I've been taking it slow. I don't like that. Yeah, I mean, you've been taking in small doses here or there.

Yeah, I think I'm through like the first four of the latest season. Okay. And by the way, correction, I think I said it was like Hartwell. It is like Allotuna. Oh, okay, that makes way more sense, because I was thinking, is that Allotuna?

Yeah, Allotuna is, you know where Allotuna is. Mm-hmm. Hartwell's up. It's where they're due for damage. Yeah, Allotuna, or Hartwell's up in New York, South Carolina, it's not at the same lake. Yeah, because we have friends who have a place on Hartwell, and I was like, I don't recognize it,

but then I thought, I probably wouldn't recognize just about any lake. So, I just kind of went with Hartwell, it was fine. Or it was Allotuna. Did you know that? From what I learned, there was no such thing as a natural lake in the state of Georgia. That's right, they're all, and most of them

were from the Georgia Power Company. Yeah, it's so creepy to me sometimes too, when you're swimming in a lake, if you start thinking about what's beneath your feet, it makes you want to get back on the boat sometimes. You mean like a former town? Yeah, a town, or the woods or something. Yeah, a car.

Oh man, why do we get so off track? Okay, so we're talking about Spartacus, who has, he left or was drummed out of the army, became a bandit, is captured, and when he's captured, he's taken to that gladiator school that you talked about, owned by a man sometimes called this, sometimes referred to as Vadia. And the thing about gladiators is

thanks to movies like Gladiator, or I don't know, other movies about gladiators, airplane, the original airplane, we have this conception of gladiators is kind of like this awesome thing. But if you were living in Rome, around the turn of the last two millennia ago, you did not think of gladiators very highly. There were some that rose to incredible prominence,

like the rock stars, sport heroes, all mixed together of today, gladiator could rise at that level, but it was incredibly rare. For the most part, they were criminals, prisoners of war, slaves, and they were considered the lowliest of the low, where the owner, their owner, in this case, Vadia, who owned Spartacus, basically said,

the only way for me to make money off of you is to make you fight for these gladiator battles, and either bet on you, or license you, or something like that, and that was it. But as far as even the cast of slaves went, you were at the bottom if you were a gladiator. Yeah, and gladiators, if you've seen the movies, it's almost always depicted as a fight to the death.

That's not necessarily the case. You could kind of tap out, or if they drew blood sometimes, that would be the end. But if they drew blood, that might also be the end of you pre-antibiotics, either way, you might end up dead, but it wasn't necessarily always a fight to the death. And like you said, sometimes they would, if you were a great gladiator and a great warrior,

they didn't know what your face looked like, but you had this cool mask that you were identified by, kind of like wrestling or something like that, or I guess the lucha libre, the ones who always had the mask. But I can't believe we did an episode on that, it's so funny. It was a good one too. But you could be, if you won a lot and you had a cool helmet,

you could be a pretty big deal to the point where you might have slaves taking care of you, and you might lead a bit of the better life, but you're still owned by someone else. Yeah, you were a slave, you were a prisoner of war, you were a criminal, and but when you were taken to gladiator school, it wasn't like you were just kept there

and then you were thrown into the ring to fight. Like you were trained, you were put on a diet, you were basically put through boot camp and you were introduced to the specifics of certain types of gladiatorial combat. And apparently there were a handful of different types, and one type of gladiator only fought one or two other types of gladiators.

And the type that Spartacus was was a Mermillo, which meant that he fought with a helmet, a very long, tall shield, kind of like the Roman centurions used, and then a short sword called the gladius. And that's what he would have fought with. But there were other kinds of gladiators too. I ran across this super cool one, the Rediarius,

and they would have a trident and a net and a dagger. So you know, like those gladiators that fought with a net, I think it might have been in Mad Max or something like that. Yeah, that's based on an actual type of gladiator that used to fight back in the day. And again, here in the 21st century, we can sit there and think like, wow, this is really interesting stuff,

but you have to stop for a second and think, these people were being forced against their will into fights to the death sometimes in front of spectators for the sheer bloodlust of the crowds. That was it. And you can't really forget that because it really puts you in the mind of somebody like Spartacus,

who has been captured as prisoner, potentially unjustly according to an ancient text, and being forced into this life of fighting sometimes to the death for the joy of the wealthy crowds who came out to see everybody. That's right. And that's why Spartacus looked around one day and said, guys, we're here at Gladiators University.

And I know that sounds super cool, but I see where the end is for all of us. And that is dying for the entertainment value of rich Romans. And what do you say we get a group of us together, like maybe 70 of us, we get the heck out of here. And let's do it, guys. And they all said, that's a great idea.

I don't wanna go die in a ring. So they got together in 73 BCE, they hijacked a caravan that just happened to have a bunch of Gladiator weapons and armor. And they said, hey, you know what we are? We're a little army troop all of a sudden. Think about the luck that that took. Like they broke out, they overpowered their guards

with meat cleavers that they stole from the kitchen and broke out. And as they were breaking out, they ran across a supply truck of Gladiator armor and weapons. I got the feeling that was targeted. That was not the case. No, it happened to be coming in as they were leaving

and they were like, oh, we'll take this. Or else they encountered it on the road, headed to the Gladiator school. The timing was really fortunate. Well, at any rate, they got all this gear and all of a sudden they were kitted up. And I think one of the people he was with his wife, this lady, sounds very interesting.

Like we said, we don't know a lot about the actual historical record. We don't know her actual name. But Plutarch was a writer who wrote that Spartacus' wife was a prophetess who was possessed by ecstatic frenzies that were part of the worship of the God Dionysus, which, you know, you know what that means, she liked to party.

She did. That was the party cult for sure. And she apparently was one of the priestesses of this cult in Thrace. She was Thracian as well. Ecstatic frenzies? Yeah, I'll bet that was cool. But she, her name apparently is just totally lost.

No one has any idea what her name is or what became of her. They assumed that she probably died alongside with Spartacus. But she being a prophetess, a priestess, apparently foretold his rise to power even while he was a slave in the gladiator camp. Like she lived with him there. I guess while he was sleeping one night or day

or whatever, a snake coiled itself around his head. And she was like, well, that doesn't happen every day. And I'm pretty sure that Dionysus has something to do with this. So my husband's going to be pretty important at some point, but he's also going to have a very unfortunate end too that this snake foretells. And it turns out she was right.

That's right. And then she said, so I'm going to go have an orgy with all these people. And drink some wine with some goat fellas. So these dudes, this little kind of, for lack of a better term, battalion all of a sudden, they start to train for combat. They're near Mount Vesuvius,

which don't be afraid of the volcano everyone. This is about a hundred years before that happened. Isn't that creepy though to think like this historic thing took place and they were tromping all over Vesuvius to have, they had no idea what was coming, just like a century from then. Oh, I like it.

I think it's amazing. But Mount Vesuvius at this time, what we're saying is it was lovely and it was lush and there was, you could farm there. It was very fertile. It was covered with vines and they were down there training and eventually Rome takes a little bit of notice,

although they weren't seriously worried yet. They were hiding out and they were training and one of his co-leaders, this guy, Crixus, who kind of factors in as one of his big co-heads of state, I guess, and Ohana Mouse, Ohana Mayas. No, I think you had it the first time. There was like an extra syllable in there.

Oh, really? Yeah, but the way you said it the second time sounds better. Well, we'll just stick to that. Okay. They would go around and raid for supplies. They would recruit slaves. Eventually, and we'll see later, they got so popular that they could even get

non-slaves to join up in the rebellion. And Rome was not super worried yet. They kind of heard about what was going on, but they were busy. They were fighting in Spain. They were fighting Crete. They were fighting in Southeast Europe. And this little ragtime group of former slaves

wasn't that big of a deal. No, so the fact that they were fighting elsewhere, like Spain and Crete, that meant that their greatest military leaders and those military leaders armies were away. They weren't in Italy. And like you said, at the time, they weren't taking Spartacus

and his runaway slave band seriously at all, but they did take enough notice that they sent a praetor there. And a praetor is like a very high up elected official right under council, which is I think the highest elected official in ancient Rome. So they were really super high up.

And actually they might have been laterals to the councils. I'm not sure, but it was a very important person, but I get the impression that he was a very kind of low on the scale of important people because they sent him with a few Roman soldiers and said, hey, when you get to Vesuvius, just recruit some locals to go fight this band of runaway slaves and be back by dinnertime, please.

Yeah, it was, you know, love the National Guard, not knocking them, but it kind of reminded me of, you know, sort of sending in the National Guard to take care of something rather than the Marines storming the beach. It's basically the story of John Rambo in First Blood. Trust me, I thought of that more than once.

R.A.P. Brian Dennehy, by the way. When? Like last week. What? How did I not hear that? I think it's just sort of been under the radar with everything going on. Was it from coronavirus?

No, just, I think it was like in his early 80s and just passed away. Well, R.A.P. for sure. He was good. But I definitely thought of Rambo a lot while I was reading this. The difference is was that Spartacus had a team to aid in his uprising,

and Rambo was, of course, a one-man army. An A team, if you will. But at any rate, they didn't send the best of the best because they were all busy. Glaibers' little army, they said, you know what, we're not even gonna attack Spartacus. We'll just block off the route up to Vesuvius.

We're gonna pitch our tents. We're gonna hang out and get drunk, and he's gonna starve to death, and that's gonna be the end of it, so we think. Yeah, you said Glaibers. Glaibers, that parater, his name was Claudius Glaibers. He sounds like an inept kind of person that you would send to take care of.

I'll send Glaibers. Exactly. His name is just too close to Glaibin. I think so. So Glaibers said, yeah, it's exactly what you said. He posted a couple of guys on the road to Vesuvius. The only road in or out up the mountain. And then the rest of the group is at camp.

And so Spartacus and his band are, they know that they can't get down this road, but they're also not about to starve at the hands of a guy named Glaibur. So they actually fashion rope and rope ladder out of the vines that are growing up on Vesuvius, and they climb down the mountain to a different spot, and they come up behind the guys who are guarding the road,

kill them, sneak into the Roman camp, kill all of them while they're bathing and sleeping, and have done two things. They just wiped out the soldiers of a parater, a very high elected official, and they just captured a Roman camp with all of its supplies, all of its weapons, all of its armory, and these were really,

two really big first strikes, if you'll allow that. And I will, so noted. Thank you, thank you. It was a really big deal because word gets around, and for the first time, slaves in Italy were thinking, wow, there's actually some place we could go. It's not like in America where there were slaves in the South, mainly, and they could escape to the North.

It was just like that all over Italy, so they had nowhere to go. They had no safe harbor, no quarter, if I'm allowed. I will allow that as well. And they said, wow, we got a place we can go. We can go join up with this guy Spartacus. He's out there sneaking up on Glabers and killing them while he's taking a bath.

Right. And they're like, that sounds pretty good to me. I wanna get in on the fun. Yeah, I don't know if it was this historian Irwin from Murray State, or if it was part of the article, but somebody says at some point that, and I'm sorry, not Irwin, Aaron Irwin is the name of the historian,

but somebody says at some point that those slaves, because they had nowhere to go, like you were saying, but also because of the way that slave uprisings were brutally dealt with, that they very frequently didn't even require supervision, that there were whole rural areas and towns that Spartacus was moving around to, where the slaves vastly outnumbered the freed people,

and they were able to sustain that disproportionate population distribution because the slaves in Rome had such little hope of any different life than what they had. And so, yeah, like you were saying, Spartacus provided hope and something different, and all of a sudden his little ragtag band of slaves and their slave uprising suddenly became

a very large slave uprising in a really short time. They attracted something like 40,000 slaves from these rural areas up around Vesuvius and in northern Italy, I think northeastern Italy, that they would just run away and now they had a place to go, i.e. Spartacus' camp, and they would join up there and show up with kitchen knives and farm tools and stuff like that,

and they would be trained in combat. And now all of a sudden it goes from this ragtag band of gladiator slaves who had escaped to something that looked a lot like an actual rebellion. And that's what Rome started to think that maybe they were dealing with. Yeah, and I get the ideas around this time that Spartacus becomes kind of an idea,

even more so than an actual human being because when the word is getting around, it's not like the newspapers, head front page headlines or anything. You get these whispers and you get these stories and the spark of hope among the slaves. And this idea that there is this rebellion and he's a great boss, he splits everything

right down the middle and he's not some awful leader, he divides all the spoils equally and he's getting non-slaves to join up because even if you're like a, you know, you might not be a slave, but if you're a very poor farmhand or something, it might look appealing all of a sudden because you're not part of the elite Roman

kind of upper echelon class. Yeah, so the idea that he was splitting the spoils with people, like that's huge. And apparently that stands up that basically all of the ancient sources agree, like this guy took all his plunder and distributed, he didn't keep it for himself, he didn't turn himself into a king

and he was running around freeing slaves. And that, you know, that's one of the reasons why he did, like you said, become a hero or an idea and a hero that's still to the state groups kind of latch onto. So he's attracting more and more people. One of the things and one of the ugly truths about this is that when they were going around to these small towns

and these rural areas, freeing slaves, getting them to join their ranks, there was also a lot of plundering going on and they were not merciful with the slave owners who own these big enormous estates that they were plundering. They would engage in rape, they would engage in torture, they would engage in murder.

And from what I saw, it wasn't Spartacus that was doing that, that he actually commanded against that, but that his army had a mind of its own in a lot of cases and that they would be pretty merciless and brutal with the freed people whose stuff they were taking. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure they were like, no, you rape and pillage, that's what you do, right?

That's how it is right now. Even in the movie, Spartacus, he refuses to take part in that. So there are a few things that Kubrick, he didn't write the screenplay, that was actually Dalton Trumbo, but he had that in the movie. So there were bits of truth throughout for sure.

Right. So this is going on. Rome finally is like, all right, we got to really deal with this guy. Can someone please go kill Spartacus for me? Right. Glaibers sucked so bad at you guys. We got to get a non-Glaiber in there

to take care of business. And they did, they sent Publius Vareneus. And he- Get that Publius guy. He was another praetor. So they're sending like pretty important guys along with their soldiers. And Vareneus, he was almost nearly captured,

which would have been enormous. He was so close to being captured that I believe Spartacus himself stole the guy's horse. He got his horse. Which guy was this? Vareneus, Publius Vareneus. And that was a huge black eye to Rome, that like, not only is this, you know,

a band of runaway slaves, you know, like able to engage Rome in battle, but he stole your horse and your insignia and almost got your guy. That was a big deal. And so all of these victories, with each victory, Spartacus' legend just grows and he's able to attract more and more people.

I think within a year that historian Kenneth Chek says within a year, maybe a little more than a year, there was as many possibly as 125,000 freed slaves, escaped slaves and commoners who had joined Spartacus' army. 125,000 and he started with 70 gladiators the year before. Yeah, 70, not 70,000. Right.

Just to reiterate. Yeah, no, that's worth saying. So spring of 72 BC, Spartacus has these troops. Some of them stay in the South with his buddy, Crixus. And then he said, the rest of you come with me. We're gonna head toward the Alps because it's lovely this time of year. And I think at the time, who are they?

These guys have great names. Rome sent armies led by Lucius, Galeus, Publicola. Publicola and Neus, Cornelius, Lentulus, Claudianus. Those are great names. Wow. Those guys were councils. So they were the highest elected officials in Rome. Yeah, they may have had as many as like 20,000 guys

put together. Like this is serious business at this time to go take care of Spartacus. Yeah, I think when he almost captured Varinius, that was that really caught Rome's attention for the first time. Unfortunately, these two councils, what were the names again, Chuck?

Let's just call them Publicola and Claudianus. Okay, fine. They were no better equipped to fight Spartacus either. I think by this time, he hadn't come close to 125,000 people yet, but he was up to 40,000. And both of the- Peaches and herb. Yeah, peaches and herb, nice.

They underestimated how many troops he'd had. They also were unaware that he had wintered in the, I think the north of Italy and had spent the winter stealing horses and building up a cavalry unit, which they had no idea he had this. And one other thing he put to good use. So remember, this guy's potentially a Roman army veteran

from Thrace, which means he's familiar with guerrilla warfare that the Thracians practiced and conventional warfare, which the Romans practiced. And he's like commanding tens of thousands of troops to great effect, built a cavalry. And he also, so like some of those commoners who joined up who weren't slaves, but they were not well off and they wanted to fight the power.

So they joined, they were usually like herdsmen or shepherds or something like that from local areas who knew the areas really well. So he used them as scouts. And peaches and herb had no idea that this, again, this band of runaways slaves had turned into an actual like legit army under the command of somebody who knew what they were doing.

And he ate both of them alive. Yeah, well, it actually was, it was kind of tough because peaches went down there to the south where Crixus was and killed him with a lot of the rebels. And then herb came in from the north of Spartacus where he was headed toward the Alps came, you know, he was ahead of him. So he came south from the north and he came in

and Spartacus was basically trapped between these two armies that had better equipment, better weaponry, better armor, more munitions and food and water and everything and wine. And they had no idea that this Calvary was waiting for him that he had been working on. It was kind of his little Trojan horse in a way. And they had never seen anything like it. And he beat peaches, I think, or was that herb?

Now I'm all confused. He beat herb. Okay, he beat herb and got all the supplies that Herb's army had. And then it was on in a big, big way. So I misspoke by this time. Yes, he probably had close to 75 to 125,000 people in his army, but they had split off

because Crixus, who was one of the gladiators that you just mentioned, one of the original gladiators he broke out of the gladiator school with and who basically co-operated the army with him. He apparently wanted to split off and take it straight to Rome, wanted to attack Rome. And Spartacus' whole thing was like, no, no, no, let's go north to Thrace out of Italy.

We can build our army up even better there and either just hang out in Thrace and be great. Or maybe then we can come back to Italy. And they had a disagreement. They had a falling out and they split up and Crixus took 30,000 men. And like you said, I don't remember if it was peaches or herb who got him, but the Crixus and his men were killed.

But simultaneously, even though Spartacus later beat both of those guys, he had just lost 30,000 of his troops, which is a pretty big troop reduction, especially basically overnight. Yeah, but he still won in the end in that battle. He did. He fought very bravely. He rushed either peaches or herb, broke them down,

captured their supplies. And then we don't know for sure if he defeated herb or not, or if they just retreated. But at any rate, that was sort of the end of them and they were allowed to go onto the Alps. Right. So you want to take another break? Yeah, let's take our last break

and we'll wind it up here with the last stand. Okay. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, The 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. So Spartacus is not only now beaten praiders that the Romans sent.

He's beaten councils in their armies. And Rome is flipped out. I don't know if they knew that Crysis, who, by the way, was a kelp, which I find immensely interesting, But Crixus, I don't know if they knew that he was coming toward Rome and that they just narrowly avoided

being attacked by that contingent. But it was definitely on their mind that Rome was left unprotected because remember the best generals and their best armies were in Spain and Crete. And there was a really, really angry group of impoverished and escaped slaves who had assembled themselves

into a pretty respectable army, possibly coming toward Rome. Yeah, and Rome was on thin ice at this point. I mean, they were still super powerful obviously, but they make a good point in this article that they kind of relied on the fact that everyone thought they were great and was super scared of them

and they had these big scary armies. And once they started getting these defeats and once they started getting defeats, especially at the hands of a former slave who was leading this kind of ragtag team that was revolting against them, there was a little chink in that armor and Spartacus is about their winning battles

and everyone hears about this. And that's a big, big deal to Rome. All of a sudden they seem like they're defeatable. Yeah, which if your society includes slaves and the slaves are kept in line by the idea that you are undefeatable. That's right. And so they seem like they're defeatable now.

They're best armies in generals are away and they couldn't really find anyone to really take care of Spartacus until this guy stepped up. He was a wealthy parater named Marcus Crassus. And he said, you know what? I've got the dough and I'm a pretty brutal leader in my own right. Maybe you've heard of me.

And so I'm gonna finance this army and I'm gonna go kill that guy. And so if there's a villain in this story, it is Crassus. He was a terrible, terrible person. Possibly the richest person Rome has ever seen. I read somewhere that he would go to places that had caught fire with his own personal fire brigade and would negotiate with the owner of the house

or whatever to buy it. And if they would negotiate at just an extremely cheap rate to sell their house that was on fire, then Crassus would have his fire brigade put it out. If they didn't negotiate or sell, then he would just leave with his fire brigade and let it burn. Here's that kind of guy.

Crassus was like, hey man, this place is on fire and I'm offering to buy it from you. Right, it's a fire sale. You should take this. Yeah, but if they wouldn't, if they'd be like, no, this is completely unacceptable and immoral, he'd be like, all right, see you later. And his fire brigade would leave.

That's just not good stuff. That's the kind of thing that if you do that, people continue to talk about it in a negative like 2,000 years later. On some dumb podcast. So Crassus, you also might recognize his name. He was part of the first triumvirate with Pompey and Caesar. He was the third guy.

Yeah, I remember that name. So Crassus steps up and he says, you know what? My father got a triumph, which is basically like a military parade for a great military victory. And I've always been envious. I want mine. I'm gonna make mine the defeat of Spartacus.

I'm gonna go get them. I'm gonna finance this army. I'm gonna go pick up some of the other armies that have been defeated and kind of left scattered around Italy and reassemble them. And there was one in particular, I think it was the army of the praetor who was almost captured, Varanius.

Some of his people ran away and Crassus got them together. I believe 500 people who had been accused of desertion and running away during battle. And he brought out of the old steamer trunk an old technique for keeping your troops in line called decimation chuck, which is a word that we've misused for years

on this podcast, but this is the real deal that he was doing. Yeah, and I don't think we've been misusing it for years. I think it's now part of popular terminology, just not necessarily reduced by 10. Okay, fair enough. But what he did was he said, okay, all of you 500 break up into 50 groups of 10.

And in every group, all 10 of you draw lots. Whoever draws the shortest lot gets executed. And he executed 50 out of 500 deserters in front of his troops to basically say, hey, let's get that morale up, everybody. This is what happens to you if you don't fight valiantly. And that was the kind of leader that he was. So he's a real jerk in business

and a real jerk on the battlefield too, even with his own troops. And a very selfish lover from what I hear. He really was. He'd be like, well, that's it for me. Good luck to yourself. So he had a real being as bonnet to get that victory parade.

He goes and chases Spartacus all over Italy. And there was some infighting going on, which is what can happen a lot of times in a rebellion. If you don't keep everyone's spirits up. So that kind of weakened his army a little bit. And so in a last ditch effort, Spartacus said, you know what we need to do is we need to go kill Crassus in front of everybody.

And that'll do the trick. If everyone sees Crassus is gone, you cut off that head, maybe another one will not grow up in its place. And that didn't work out for Spartacus. He was actually cut down in battle. His army was finally defeated. They hunted down all 6,000 of the survivors of the army

and crucified them. He was not himself crucified like in the movie, Spartacus. And there was never that great moment in the movie, the I'm Spartacus moment. That never really happened in real life, unfortunately. They never found his body, which is sort of a sad end to a leader who did some pretty great things for a little while.

But not really though, because I read he was last seen, he was really close to Crassus. He was headed to Crassus to kill him himself. And he I think killed two Centurions in hand to hand combat on his way to Crassus before he was swarmed on like Hollywood style and cut down by like just a mob of dudes who overwhelmed them.

Which if you- And that's not a sad end? No, if you're living by the sword and dying by the sword, that's the way to go for sure. Okay. I bet you he would have preferred to kill Crassus. Sure, I'll give you that. But if he was never fated to kill Crassus,

if that snake coiled on his head and foretold that he would never kill Crassus, that's the way to go. Well, in the end, he is gone, his rebellion is squashed, but some good comes out of it. Rome kind of says, you know what? This taught us a great lesson, which is maybe we should listen to the lower class a little bit more. It wasn't some huge sweeping reform change

or anything like that. I don't wanna like sugarcoat it, but there were a number of reforms that were passed that did strengthen the voice of the people as a whole. And they had a little bit more say in their government because they didn't want another Spartacus to come along. Yeah, and then over the years, like many thousands of years later, like I said, he was kind of held up

as like this hero, this ideal. So like the abolitionist movement in the United States held him up as a hero because he was known to free slaves. That was how he assembled his army. And he wasn't necessarily freeing slaves for the ideal of ending slavery. He was freeing slaves to help build up his army. But I'm sure there was a certain amount of like,

this is a good thing that these slaves are no longer slaves when they're with me that he must have entertained at least. And then later on, like you said, Dalton Trumbo wrote the script for the 1960 movie directed by Kubrick on Spartacus. And Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted from Hollywood because he was a communist or he wouldn't name names. I can't remember.

And Dalton Trumbo wrote that script based on a novel written by a guy named Howard Fast who had written the novel in jail because he wouldn't name names on the McCarthy hearings. And so Spartacus kind of became like a hero of Marxists because he freed slaves, he overthrew the oppressors but he also took the oppressor's wealth and redistributed it among the lower classes

which Marxists are just bonkers for. Pretty interesting stuff. Yeah, there's plenty more about Spartacus, gladiators, all that stuff. This is really thick stuff. And this is stuff you should know. It's not what we do, we just kind of give an overview. So if this floated your boat at all,

go look up Spartacus, start reading on him and you will be fascinated. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm gonna call this a wastewater operator. Oh, good. Or a former now retired wastewater operator. I see. Hey guys, just finished listening to the episode

on wastewater treatment with a critical ear having worked for over 20 years as both a WW lab analyst and operator. While I understand you were aiming for the least knowledgeable common denominator in your audience, I feel like you did a disservice to all wastewater treatment plants and their employees by failing to mention that every treatment plant

in America must abide by strict regulatory permits issued under the Clean Water Act tailored to the needs of these specific facilities influent. Your words make it sound like we in operations made our own decisions as to how clean the water, how clean is clean enough and that cannot be further from the truth.

I wanna stop here because I don't feel like we did that, did we? We certainly didn't mean to. I don't think that we were just like, you know, it's up to techs who's running the levers to decide what's clean enough. If we did, sorry, we definitely don't think that. No, we didn't think that at all.

In my position as analyst, I performed an average of 30,000 standard laboratory tests per year to maintain permit, compliance and support operations. That number increased dramatically when there were operational upsets, process changes, influent variations, et cetera. In addition, operators collect

and analyze process control samples several times per shift for the same reason. I think we knew that stuff was going on, right? Yeah. I don't wanna sound defensive, but... Do this person listen or just say, oh, I see this title. Here's all the things are gonna get wrong.

No, I think they listened. Okay, good. I wish to thank you for attempting to educate the public on the vital role clean water and sewage treatment play and the health and prosperity of the United States. I firmly believe this is what truly makes America great. You don't hear people saying they need vaccinations and antibiotics to fend off waterborne illness

when visiting the United States. Sorry to rant on, I appreciate your time. Thanks for reading and please put out a big thank you to all wastewater treatment operators about whom nobody is paying attention but whom everyone needs. And that is from Anne Danielson, retired operator and analyst.

Thanks a lot, Anne. That's good stuff. And yes, agreed. If everyone doesn't know that we need wastewater treatment people and they're not paying attention. So hats off to you and your colleagues from us. Agreed, yes. I know that there's a lot of work and analysis and testing

and if we didn't hammer that home enough, then we are now. Yep. Well, if we missed the mark on something or you just wanna add something or just wanna say, hey, you guys nailed it, nailed it. We love that. You can get in touch with us via email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom

and send it off to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.