The Rest Is History - Spartacus and Gladiators, with Mary Beard

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Where did gladiatorial combat originate? Who was Spartacus, the legendary gladiator? How did he come to lead the most famous slave revolt in all Roman history? How did the rebellion unfold? And, what was Spartacus’ fate..? In the grand finale of our thrilling series on four of classical antiquity’s most notorious subjects, Tom is joined by the world renowned classicist Mary Beard, to discuss gladiators and the famous gladiator turned rebel Spartacus. Sign up to The Rest Is History Club to get the whole episode! _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Exec Producer: Dom Johnson Senior Producer: Theo Young-Smith Producer: Tabby Syrett Assistant Producer: Aaliyah Akude Video Editor: Jack Meek Social Producer: Harry Balden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to the restishistory.com and join the club. That is, the rest is history.com. Hello, everyone, it's Tom Holland here, and I have teamed up with the great Mary Beard to bring you four episodes on what we together have decided are the four most iconic themes in ancient history. And today, we're looking at gladiators. Here's a short extract of that episode. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the last of our sensational, classically themed

bonuses for you, our beloved members. The Great Mary Beard is still here. Obviously, her main focus This at the moment is Instant Classics, her sensational podcast with Charlotte Higgins. But back in the mists of time, she co-authored a book on the Colosseum, probably the most iconic building in the whole of Rome, the kind of great emblem of the Roman Empire. And so for our final episode, what else could we do but gladiators? We've done an episode on the Colosseum and the rest of history. We've done one on gladiators. But what we haven't done is an episode on the most famous of all gladiators, namely

Spartacus. So I thought that that's what we would structure today's episode around. But Mary, before we come to Spartacus, can I just ask you, suppose you had the opportunity to go back in a time machine and to watch a gladiatorial show, do you think you would avail yourself of that opportunity? I don't know. I mean, it puts you on the spot, isn't it? You know, I've written about gladiators, I've researched them, and then am I going to say,

no, I wouldn't go and have a look. I think that when it comes to kind of morals, I'd have to say to myself, look, you went to see Gladiator 1 and the movies, and you went to see Gladiator 2. Now, okay, those weren't real. The kind of violence that you saw was staged, CGI and all the rest. but it sure looked real. So I wonder what the difference is between watching that at the movies and watching it in the open air with real human beings.

And I think that's a slightly more profound question than it might sound. Do you think that the obvious fascination that people have for the idea of gladiators, what's that, is that telling us anything about what people find interesting in, in ancient Rome per se, do you think? It's quite difficult people. If you quiz people and put them on the spot just like you put me on the spot, they will say, oh, you know, this is one of the, there are many blots on the national record of Rome,

but gladiators comes pretty high in the list of the unacceptable about Rome. I think that you have to weigh that against the fact that thousands hundreds of thousands of little model gladiators are still bore outside the Coliseum that until the photograph trade was banned, people paid a lot of money to have their own photographs taken outside the Coliseum with people pretending to be gladiators. I think that we probably need to look quite carefully at our own fascination. Right. So, I mean, the implication of that is that the interests, that people feel, we're gladiators, the obvious fascination, is speaking to something perhaps

that is deep within all humans rather than being culturally specific to Rome, do you think? Well, I'm trying to avoid saying that, but I can see why you lost my answer in that way. I think that one of the things, and I don't know whether this is universal or culturally specific, One of the things that attracts people to Rome is that sense of over-the-topness. And that's over-the-topness when it comes to sex, when it comes to violence, when it comes to cruelty. And maybe Rome remains a place where we can explore that side of ourselves, but safely, under the kind of alibi that this is all about ancient history. Yes, yes. I think that's very nicely put. A very quick overview of the life and career of Spartacus for those who may not know it. He is a gladiator who escapes, who inflicts a number of

defeats on the Romans. He is finally cornered by Crassus, who we were talking about in our previous episode, one of the triumvirate with Julius Caesar and with Pompey, who also plays a role in the defeat of Spartacus, as we will see. And if you believe the Kirk Douglas film, he doesn't die in battle, but is one of a number of slaves who get crucified along the line of the Via Appia, the great road that leads south from Rome towards the heel of Italy. And what do we know about him before he becomes a slave? I know that he's a Thracian, so he comes from Bulgaria, doesn't he? Because I went to Bulgaria in the summer, and there's a town called Sandansky, which has a bitter feud with a neighbouring town over where

Spartacus come from, and they both claim that they were his birthplace, but Sandansky has built an enormous muscle-bound statue of Spartacus. So I think they now have bragging rights, but presumably we don't know for sure where exactly he was born right. And ancient writers agree that he was from Thrace. I've always thought it a bit odd that one of the special gladiator talks, because gladiators come in various varieties with different armour. One is supposed to be a Thrax, a Thracian, and you think, is there some confusion here about where he came from and his gladiator type? But ignoring my skepticism, everybody says he's from Thrace.

There's a sense that he might have been a mercenary. He might even have served even for the Romans as a mercenary, but at this point it all all gets very murky. But he ends up, doesn't he, in Campania, which is the area of Italy around the Bay of Naples. And it has particular links, perhaps, with the origins of gladiatorial combat. It's famous for its gladiatorial schools. But before we come to gladiators, could we just focus on the process by which, if he did come from Thrace, he might have ended up in Italy, because he is just one of hundreds of thousands of people from the Eastern Mediterranean who were following that road, aren't it?

I mean, euphemistically, we'd say he was a prisoner of war. What that means is that he's sold into slavery. He's either kept by the soldiers, the Roman soldiers and the general, but more often, they are literally taking into slavery, enslaving, vast numbers of the conquered populations of the eastern Mediterranean. I mean, the process of enslavement followed by the transportation of those slaves to Italy to fulfill all the kind of tasks that slaves do from agriculture to domestic service to gladiatorial combat or whatever, it is one of the biggest movements of people, enforced movements of people that there has ever been. I mean, it is one guess would be that you've got a million slaves in Italy. Yeah, so almost maybe a quarter of the population, something like that.

And one of the things about this population transfer is that it's not just Thracians or people whom the Greeks would have classified as barbarians and therefore, according to Aristotle, fitted to work as slaves, but Greeks themselves. I mean, that's what they really find offensive, isn't it? Yes, I mean, and the kinds of tasks done by slaves are not all what we think of as menial tasks. I mean, some of them are, you know, forced labour in the fields, but quite a lot of teachers, doctors in Rome would be slaves. And those presumably are captured members of the Greek. the Greek towns that were taken by Rome.

Yeah, and so Delos, small island in the Eegean and roads, which preserves a kind of precarious semi-independence. Both of these become great centres of the slave trade. And the descriptions of the number of people who are passing through the slave markets there gives you a very vivid sense of the kind of the dislocation that Roman power is bringing to the East. People visit Delos now. It's one of the glorious islands of the Mediterranean. Its past is absolutely admired in slavery and its prophets. And certainly a lot of that comes from war. But when we were talking about Julius Caesar, we talked about pirates. I mean, one of the ways that the pirates in the Mediterranean are making their living is they kidnap.

up someone, they might kill them in the end. More profitable if they can't get a ransom to just sell them into slavery. Thanks for listening. You can subscribe to The Rest Is History Club at the rest is history.com to hear the whole episode, to hear the whole series, in due course, and to get a massive, insanely brilliant range of other benefits. Thank you.