73 BC
About seventy gladiators break out of the school of Lentulus Batiatus at Capua, armed with kitchen knives and spits. Plutarch says seventy-eight got out, Livy's summary seventy-four, Appian about seventy, Florus thirty or so. They take a wagon of arena weapons on the road and choose Spartacus, Crixus and Oenomaus as leaders.
They camp on Vesuvius and are besieged by the praetor Glaber with three thousand men raised in haste, because Rome does not yet think of this as a war. They climb down the far side on ladders of vine and destroy his camp. A second praetor, Varinius, sends his officers Furius and Cossinius against them; both are beaten, Cossinius is killed, and Varinius himself loses his lictors and his horse. Slaves and herdsmen from all over the south come in, and by winter the band has become an army. Oenomaus dies somewhere in these first fights.
72 BC
Crixus separates with about thirty thousand men and is destroyed near Mount Garganus in Apulia by the consul Gellius, or by the praetor Arrius; the sources differ. Spartacus holds funeral games for him with three hundred Roman prisoners as the gladiators.
Spartacus marches north. Appian says he defeated both consuls, Gellius and Lentulus, in Picenum. Plutarch says he beat Lentulus, and then, at Mutina, the governor of Cisalpine Gaul, Cassius, with ten thousand men. The Alps are open and he does not cross them. Instead he turns south with an army Appian numbers at seventy thousand and later more. Rome gives the war to Crassus, praetor, with eight legions. Crassus decimates the first troops of his that run.
71 BC
Spartacus is hemmed into the toe of Italy behind Crassus's wall, fails to buy passage to Sicily from the pirates, and breaks out through the wall on a winter night. The Gauls and Germans under Gannicus and Castus separate from him and are killed at Cantenna: twelve thousand three hundred by Plutarch's count, thirty-five thousand by Livy's.
Spartacus turns to fight Crassus at the river Silarus in Lucania and dies in the battle, his body never found. Six thousand prisoners are crucified along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome. Pompey, returning from Spain, kills five thousand fugitives in the north and claims to have finished the war. Crassus is given an ovation, not a triumph. The two are consuls together in 70 BC.
What it was not
No ancient source says the war was fought to end slavery. The rebels enslaved nobody and freed nobody but themselves, and the only recorded aim, Plutarch's, was to get home across the Alps. The idea of Spartacus as a liberator belongs to the eighteenth century and later, and it is a good idea; it is just not a Roman one.
Sources
- Plutarch, Life of Crassus 8–11.
- Appian, Civil Wars 1.116–121.
- Livy, Periochae 95–97.
- Florus, Epitome 2.8.
- Orosius, Histories 5.24.
- Frontinus, Stratagems 1.5.21–22, 2.4.7, 2.5.34.
Checked against the sources on 2026-09-07. Where two ancient authors give different numbers, both are given.