Original subtitles

Ancient Rome is powerful and

violent.

Its people pack amphitheaters to watch gladiators fight and die

for entertainment.

The arena for the Romans was a cinema.

You think you've seen spectacle.

It's way bigger than you might expect.

Over time, These nameless warriors become icons.

They're symbols of manhood could attain.

As the empire expands, the games grow increasingly more important to Rome.

It was a staging of Roman power.

The obsession of the people and the excess and ruin of emperors. The

emperor holds your life in his hand.

Before Rome became an empire, one gladiator stood above the rest.

Spartacus. The story of Spartacus tells us about a moment in gladiatorial

history. An innocent man condemned to a gladiator's lot.

Thousands died fighting in the arena, and we don't know most of their names.

But we do know the name of Spartacus.

Once a soldier.

He's captured by Rome and forced into gladiatorial combat.

But where most accept their fate, Spartacus defies, leading one of Rome's

largest and bloodiest rebellions. The future of the Republic lies in the hands

of one man and his army of courageous gladiators.

The term gladiator is able to stir the imagination, the thrill of the games,

crowd roars, that very fancy gladiatorial armor.

The word gladiator comes from the Latin word gladius, which means a sword. So a

gladiator is simply a swordsman.

Ultimately, they were people who faced death.

They were...

People that were hired to do a job. They are purely swordsmen for entertainment.

But there is a great mythology that surrounds gladiators.

So the fact that Spartacus is associated with the gladiator gives him a certain

amount of mythos.

Unlike many other gladiators, we know a lot about Spartacus. He became a

celebrity and a bogeyman in his own lifetime.

He's probably one of the most famous gladiators from all of ancient Rome.

In fact, he's probably one of the most famous characters from ancient Rome full

stop. Most people have heard of Spartacus.

The sources that we do have aren't interested in him for himself, but

what he does and for the impact that he has on Rome.

Our sources actually are all from the Roman side.

And a lot of them are much later, more than 100 years later.

So by then he's become this mythical figure.

Although Spartacus earned his fame as a gladiator, he honed his deadly talents

long before he set foot in the arena.

Spartacus is a soldier. He comes from a military background.

He had something of an aura of being kind of a tough, rogue figure.

Spartacus was a free man born in Thrace, which is in the eastern part of the

Mediterranean, modern -day Bulgaria.

It was a barbarian land, and Roman influence was penetrating to those

Rome was conducting military campaigns in the Eastern Empire in the 80s and 70s

BCE.

The Thracians were particularly hardened warriors.

They had a reputation for being quite difficult to deal with.

They were tenacious, and the Romans admired their courage in battle.

Spartacus is a skilled and fearless warrior.

But the Roman army overwhelms him.

He is captured.

Prisons of war become property, and they therefore can be sold into slavery for

whatever purpose their enslaver requires.

They had no say in what happened to them.

And Spartacus was brought to Rome to be sold into slavery.

Spartacus is taken to the slave market where he could face a life of hard labor

in the fields and farms or join the back -breaking construction of Rome.

But instead...

He finds himself in the sights of a man called Lentulus Batiatus, who has a far

more brutal purpose in mind.

Lentulus Batiatus is a lanista, an owner of gladiators.

So if you wanted to put on a gladiatorial show, you didn't just go

yourself, you went to a middleman.

And that's what Batiatus does.

He trains up gladiators, sources them, and then he hires them out to people who

want to put on games.

Lentulus Batiatus had a large number of gladiators and was attached to a

training school in Capua.

He is quite a wealthy man. He can afford to invest in a couple of hundred

gladiators, which would not come cheap.

Those who look healthy and strong are highly prized by Lannisters like

Not everybody could just become a gladiator.

You have to be physically impressive. You have to be that exception.

Spartacus is already probably fit.

He's used to hand -to -hand combat.

He's used to handling weapons.

Before making the investment in these gladiators, they had to be fight

and so perhaps there was a test fight.

They had no option.

If they don't throw themselves into it, it's the end for them.

There was no saying no.

He would have been tortured and killed.

So all they can do really is try and impress their new owner that they're

to be a great gladiator.

Spartacus shows potential.

He may make a good gladiator, but before he's thrust into the arenas...

He will have to endure months of brutal training at a school in Capua, 130

miles south of Rome.

Capua is the heart of the gladiatorial history.

This idea of gladiatorial fights really is cemented and rusted onto the culture.

It was a microcosm of the Roman world.

It was a plethora of people from all parts and walks of life of Roman

Somewhere that's known for having gladiatorial schools and for being a

training gladiators.

What better way to develop gladiators than having professional schools to

them?

A gladiatorial school that's called a ludus.

The ludus would hold 250 men.

The gladiators are locked up, kept behind bars.

It had an armory, it had a medical center, it had a kitchen, an exercise,

area, and that is where the gladiators would do all of their training.

Kind of like a small military camp in a way.

They weren't pleasant places.

Gladiators were shackled to the wall.

They could sit and they could lie down, but they could hardly even stand up.

When Spartacus arrives into the lute, he's probably assigned into a cubicle.

He will have some comrades who settle him in.

Cryptus is one of Spartacus' cellmates.

They're comrades in arms.

They look after each other.

They help train each other.

These folks were thrown together.

They're living in very, very close quarters and having the same horrific

activity thrust upon them.

Bacchiatus doesn't do all of the training himself.

He's got a team of doctores who are trainers.

They're learned men in the skills and the arts of being a gladiator.

Experts in specific areas, whether it's attacking stroke, defense, fitness,

and most of them are probably former gladiators.

They're the kind of people who would be the real experts in all the skills that

they would need to survive in the arena.

They did a lot of exercises against a big wooden stake in the ground.

It's called a palace.

And so he could strike at this foe, which is the equivalent, I suppose, of a

punch bag in a gym, and practice his sword strokes against that.

And he would have been learning combinations, as you do in boxing.

How to parry, how to attack by driving against this wooden stake.

But also...

A big part of your training would have been how to put on a good show.

The point is not to kill. The point is to entertain.

It's no good simply hacking your opponent to death. No one wants to see

They want to see something that's exciting.

You've got to draw the fight out.

So there would have been a great amount of aerobic training.

These guys have to fight in the Mediterranean heat.

And the implements they're using for training are heavy.

So they're trying to get them used to spears, heavy swords, tridents,

all of which they'll be using later on in the arena.

Spartacus is caught in a grueling routine of training.

But the comrades he trains with and the captors who guard him have no idea that

this new gladiator will soon leave a mark far beyond the walls of the Ludus.

It's hard to know how long Spartacus would have trained for.

A gladiator has got to get fit.

They've got to build up muscle.

They've got to acquire skills in the particular weapons that they're going to

use. It must have taken at least six months until you were prepared to go

the arena.

Lentulus Batiatus would try to monetize these individuals to the max.

No tea break.

No lunch break.

Spartacus is being pushed to the limit to survive in the arena.

Spartacus will be forced to fight for the crowd's amusement in gladiatorial

combat, one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the Roman Republic.

We're pretty sure that the Romans didn't come up with gladiatorial combat

entirely by themselves, but which culture they're drawing from?

we're really unsure.

Some theories point to ancient rites practiced by an Italian people known as

Etruscans. Other sources suggest they may be of Greek origin or from a nearby

region, Campania.

The Romans were innovators. They weren't inventors. They took great ideas from

the cultures they encountered and they amplified it.

In the tombs of Paestum, we have 4th century BC images, and they depict

the first images of gladiatorial combat in Italy.

In 264 BCE, we have our first recorded gladiatorial event in Rome.

An aristocrat thought it would be a great honour for their dead father to

some prisoners of war fight to the death.

To demonstrate the great things your ancestors had done and these are another

form of celebration.

And this is something which the crowds find fascinating and they are

hooked almost at once.

They quickly become very popular.

People want to be them.

And it doesn't take the Romans too long to figure out that this is a way of

currying favour with the people of Rome to put on these spectacles.

Roman Republican culture was a culture of visibility, of physical visibility.

To be seen was vital for the elite, but more broadly as well,

to validate themselves through various types of performances in front of the

people. The spectacles were a part of political culture.

Gladiatorial combat and its evolution fit within that culture of spectacle.

And it quickly becomes a popular thing amongst the aristocratic class to try

show off their status in society by having more and more gladiators fight at

their unions.

The people are accepting a gift when they come along to the games.

And those people who are putting on the games are gaining a reputation. And

Romans love building their reputation.

For 700 years, Rome has been growing in size and strength.

Countless wars drive its expansion.

Thousands of enemy soldiers are captured.

Some of these enslaved men become gladiators, forced to perform their

again and again as entertainment for the Roman citizens.

In the early Republic, second century, first century BCE, the majority of

gladiators were prisoners of war, captives from Rome's wars of conquest.

They've armed their enemies and then put them on as entertainment or as

displays.

The arena was a chance to witness and experience what the Romans only heard

about.

the different groups wore different types of armor.

So in gladiatorial combat, those different identities through armor are

stage.

There were the M -Knight gladiator, there was a gladiator known as a gallant

gall, and there was a gladiator known as a thrite, a Thracian gladiator.

Now over time, of course, the gladiatorial combats become hugely

It's a funerary show, but it's also a popular public spectacle. And in the

Republic, these two sort of start to merge.

There's a gradual growth in the size of the game.

So by 183 BC, we've got 120 pairs of gladiators fighting.

A hundred years later, we hear of 320 pairs.

Over the next 200 years, the funerary links fade as the games become regular

spectacles. Gladiators become one of Rome's favorite obsessions.

As the upper classes compete to stage the most dazzling shows, seeking men

Batiatus, to hire their fiercest fighters.

You want to get the best gladiators in there that you can?

You want this spectacle to go beyond the spectacles that people have seen

before. So there is a constant sense of one -upmanship.

Alinistar, he's the person that people probably approach in order to rent out

the gladiators under his control.

It is not long until Spartacus is called upon to fight.

He has no choice and will soon face his first duel in the arena.

In a community like Capua, Lentulus Batiatus would have rented his

to important local officials.

They've been elected to high office.

And this is a way of rewarding the people of the town for their election.

And so they would want to impress them.

It's an expensive exercise.

Only the rich are really capable to do this.

So there's probably a few thousand in the crowd.

It's not like the massive games we have later in the Colosseum.

And tickets are kind of handed down through patronage.

The wealthy will definitely have a portion of those tickets and they will

some out to their friends.

And then their friends would hand them down to their kind of supporters and

their clients.

But there's a whole bunch of tickets that are reserved for the common people.

Small business owners, day -to -day farmers, people earning their trade

petty crime, who knows?

We're not necessarily having the citizens divided up by their class in

period. This is something that tends to happen later.

So there is a mingling of all sorts of people jamming themselves into the

a bit like a sports stadium.

This is what's great about the amphitheatre.

Whoever you were outside the amphitheatre was irrelevant.

When you were in it, you were in a joined spectacle where you all spent the

together.

The crowd is here to be entertained.

A fast fight and swift death is unacceptable.

Spartacus and the other gladiators have been trained to deliver a spectacle.

You would want them to be fighting one -on -one so that the audience can

appreciate their skill level because it is a show.

One of the things that we tend to get wrong about gladiators is that everybody

dies.

It's not necessarily to the death.

If a gladiator died, the giver of the games would have to pay the cost of

replacement.

Gladiators were very expensive.

About 10 % of gladiators die.

That might seem quite low, but if you're fighting three or four times a year, it

probably means you've got a one in three chance of dying every year.

was, in fact, one of the most compelling aspects of the gladiatorial spectacle.

No one knew what was going to happen.

So you've got to assume that if you don't give a good performance or you

fight well, that you are going to die.

From backstage, Spartacus can hear the roar of the crowd.

He is about to make his debut as a Roman gladiator.

Spartacus fought at Thracia.

That's where he comes from.

So he has a sword, he has a shield.

He's probably going to be up against other swordsmen.

Usually they were from the same barracks, and so you would be fighting

someone you'd trained with.

Which is a particularly cruel aspect of Roman games.

The fights were fought in rounds, and it was a point of them.

They're just trying to score points against each other, a bit like modern

fencing.

You have two referees, the guy in the middle of the action and the guy in the

outside.

This is quite dynamic, very fast, ruthless.

The Thracians were particularly hardened warriors.

The Romans admired their courage in battle, which is not a surprise then

they would take the idea of the Thracians and put them in the arena

the pleasure of the Roman crown.

He was enormously charismatic.

You've got to entertain the audience.

You had to be spectacular.

It was a spectacle.

It doesn't matter if you can quickly dispatch a guy in a couple of minutes.

You want him to go all around, you want him to almost be losing, you want him to

come back at the end, and you want a successful triumph.

So if a gladiator couldn't go on, his only option was to appeal for mercy.

And so he would raise his finger.

And it's up to the giver of the games whether he gives him mercy.

And people would either shout out, let him go, or they'd say, kill him.

And then the giver of the games would signal with a turned thumb whether there

was going to be mercy or death.

In Latin, the term is polykeverso, which just literally means a turned thumb.

we would use it that thumbs down was death and thumbs up is they stay alive

it's not actually clear in the sources what they mean it could mean that thumbs

down was turning down the request to have them killed thumbs up was actually

sort of sticking the sword up in their throat

Or it might even be that it's a kind of turning of the thumb into the palm,

which seems to have been some sort of symbol of mercy that you find in some

religious context.

The sponsor of the games really has to make the crowd happy.

That's why the games are on. So if you're offside with the crowd as a

your time in the arena and your time in life is really, really numbered.

If Spartacus forced his opponent into submission, the host of the games would

decide on the fate of the fallen fighter.

This idea that a loss meant death, it is an exceptionally rare form of fighting,

just because the cost of the gladiator.

had to be recouped. You had to have somebody who was willing to pay out the

gladiator's contract to the minister.

And in one law we have a figure that that cost would be 50 times the cost of

hiring them.

And if in the first fight Spartacus was to meet death or kill another gladiator,

somebody's lost that investment.

Spartacus has won his first contest.

But there is little to celebrate.

He will return to a cycle of training and combat.

Freedom, just a distant hope.

Having won his first bout in the arena, Spartacus is returned to his training

school, where his wounds are treated.

The medical care of gladiators was amongst the best in the Republic, not

compassionate reasons, but because their owners wanted them in fighting shape.

You're probably only fighting three, perhaps four times at most in a year.

long periods of training, recovery, recuperation, and then you're in this

and death situation again.

Gladiators had quite serious injuries, including cuts,

bruises, head injuries.

So doctors come into the Ludus to look after them.

Because of the state of medicine at that point in time, it would have been

difficult for them to arrest an infection, you know, if it got in

to the leg or something like that.

That was probably riskier, in a sense, than breaking a bone.

There will be gladiators who get injured either in the fight...

Or in training.

There will be others who die in the arena.

So there's going to be always a steady sort of trickle of new recruits coming

into the looters.

For years, Spartacus' life is consumed with nothing more than training,

fighting, and recovery.

He dreams of finding a way out.

If you really impressed the crowd repeatedly as a gladiator, you could be

your freedom.

You could be given a rudis, a wooden sword, which was a sign that you were no

longer risking your life with real weapons, that you could retire and

But statistically, it must have been a very small number.

Most gladiators either died or were so badly injured that they couldn't fight

on.

Spartacus must have enormously resented his absence of freedom and terrible

conditions in the training school.

Spartacus was a captured prisoner of war.

To be free, he wants to not be a gladiator.

Badiatus is buying enslaved people as part of a broader slave trade.

He will want to make as much money as he can from these people, so he has no

intention of letting Spartacus go.

It's possible a gladiator like Spartacus will have to fight until he dies.

And it is this horrifying fact that we really have to keep in mind when we

of what's happening to Spartacus.

We could speculate that what he would like to do is return home to escape

itself, but he's trapped there.

They can't get out of Italy.

And this starts something that no one is expecting.

Spartacus manages to convince...

A bunch of his fellow gladiators said it was time to bust out of this place.

That now is their chance to fight for themselves, rather than to fight for the

entertainment of the Romans.

They were highly trained and highly skilled fighters.

That presents a problem with the Lannister, because you have people that

fight against you.

But they were not equipped with weapons.

The weapons were kept strictly separate from the men living there.

However, Spartacus was an opportunist.

He managed to see an opportunity to escape, and he took it.

They were having something to eat, and he manages to get his hands on some

weapons.

Utensils from the kitchens.

Cleavers and stakes.

And they overwhelm the guards.

What he'd learned fighting as a gladiator would have helped him escape

lunatics.

It's a daring escape, Spartacus and his companion Crixus pull.

It goes to show the gladiators, in fact, were trained to such a high level they

could out -fight the guards one -to -one.

Over 70 of these gladiators in training escaped.

His rebellion doesn't stop there.

He doesn't just get out and think, great, I'm free, off I go.

They would have had the opportunity to leave Italy, to cross the Alps and to

head homeward.

But they don't.

It's a difficult path. It is this very narrow peninsula of a place.

Because you've got to go over those mountains, and there's not many paths

those mountains.

It's tough going, and you could be cut off really easily.

Possibly that was what he was trying to do, but certainly it seems that he

changed his mind.

Spartacus wants to take on Rome for all that it's done, of exploitation of the

enslaved and of gladiators.

Spartacus decides to fight Rome in various different ways.

Spartacus's days of fighting as a gladiator are over. Instead of making

dangerous trip home, he remains in Italy. Soon, he will come face to face

the Roman forces that first enslaved him in a fight bigger than simply his own

freedom.

and his men have escaped the ludus.

The Romans severely underestimated the threat of this break in Capua.

Six dozen gladiators would not have seemed an immediate threat to the state,

boy were they wrong. And a lot of it had to do with the terrain.

What they do first is actually go and hide up on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius,

which is in the highlands, south of Capua.

There were plenty of places for Spartacus and his compatriots to hide,

to build support.

People from the Italian countryside begin to join Spartacus, who are

disenfranchised, who are upset with Rome in various ways, having difficulty with

their land, facing extreme poverty, who are maybe enslaved as well or had

formerly been enslaved.

His rebel army is drawn initially from the gladiator, but it's more of a slave

rebellion than a gladiator rebellion.

There is a regular trade in enslaved people that is happening throughout

Italy in this period. The Romans and the Italian people generally...

are building their societies through enslaved people. That is happening and

traveling throughout all of Italy.

The Roman Republic wages countless wars and with every victory prisoners are

captured. The cities swell and enslaved people now make up more than a quarter

of the population of Rome.

According to our literature, if the enslaved population of Rome were to

They'd have either a numerical advantage over the rest of the population or

something that's not far off that.

It was speculated that the population of Rome might be somewhere around a

million and between 30 -40 % in Rome is enslaved.

That's an awful lot of people.

Traditionally, Rome has not put a lot of stake or value in conflicts with the

enslaved.

The enslaved are not valued as honourable opponents.

This is to change with Spartacus.

Spartacus is seen as a very good organised leader.

What he'd learned before as a soldier would have helped him plan a campaign,

organise men.

skills that made you a really successful gladiator, which is really becoming a

showman, will have helped him provide leadership to what becomes effectively a

very large army.

Spartacus sets up a kind of pseudo -military arrangement where he's got

gladiators from the Ludus who are serving underneath him as kind of his

lieutenants. Crixus is certainly somebody who seems to be a leader

Spartacus.

He seems to be somebody that Spartacus values.

The Roman armies begin chasing them.

So the Romans, to start off with, send a small body of troops, and they get

defeated.

The Romans send a bigger army and a bigger army, but even they are defeated.

Spartacus had military experience, and that was very helpful to them.

They've sent multiple military leaders against Spartacus' forces who have

failed. So it's a huge issue.

The priority, militarily, is to keep this under wraps.

The elite Roman military leaders and commanders are talking about it because

they're like, this is a problem that we really need to deal with. And as an

extension of that, their soldiers know that this is a problem.

And this is how the reputation of Spartacus begins to spread.

And more and more enslaved people join him until he's got thousands of men,

anything from 60 to 100 ,000.

Spartacus enjoys victory after victory after victory.

But when little groups break off from his army that's when they tend to face

defeat or problems of some kind.

Spartacus is caught in a war against the Roman Republic.

As his army tracks north, Crixus has eased

and is defeated by Roman forces.

When news of his death reaches Spartacus, he seeks vengeance.

He has captured soldiers by these gladiators.

What he's trying to do here is humiliate them and to give the Romans a taste of

their own medicine.

So after these various conflicts, Rome is taking Spartacus seriously.

Spartacus really produces an enormous fear in the Romans.

People would have thought, there are a lot of enslaved people in Roman society,

what happens if they all rise up?

They put one of the wealthiest Roman politicians in charge of the conflict.

Marcus Licinius Crassus.

The Roman military has underestimated Spartacus. But with immense wealth at

disposal, Crassus is able to raise a fierce army that could finally crush

Spartacus and his rebel troops.

Spartacus and his army face growing danger.

Having won impressive victories on the battlefield, they now face the powerful

General Crassus, who has been appointed by Rome to end the uprising once and

for all.

Crassus is a very rich man, and he's also a military general.

Crassus was really pursuing power.

Being sent to face this massive army.

And his military strategy does outweigh that of Spartacus.

Crassus manages to pin them down in the very toe of Italy.

Build a wall, shuts them in.

There's a siege at this point.

Spartacus is fighting hand -to -hand combat.

They try to escape, but they can't.

And in the final battle he is killed.

Spartacus has been defeated.

He is killed in battle.

As far as we know, his body is not recovered.

His remaining troops, six thousand of them, are captured.

The Romans made a huge example out of Spartacus and his followers.

Six thousand people were crucified along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome.

Thousands of enslaved and free people were killed in this conflict.

Their corpses would have hung there for months and been a real cautionary tale

to anybody who felt that they could resist Roman power.

The crucifixions mark the end of the uprising.

Rome has triumphed over Spartacus and his army of gladiators.

However, his actions...

will never be forgotten.

The rebellion by Spartacus really shook Rome.

This revolt produces a real transformation in attitudes to the

enslaved and to gladiators and the restrictions on sizes of gladiatorial

training schools.

You can't have too many gladiators in one place rather than sort of risking

breaking out.

The Senate put a limit on the number of gladiators that you can use.

They're worried that this will be a threat to the safety of Rome itself.

What would happen if all of these enslaved people in the Roman world rose

against their masters, as Spartacus does?

It's one of the great mysteries how Spartacus could have his jailbreak

into a full -scale rebellion.

His strategy is testament to his skill as a leader.

He has become such an important symbol for this kind of uprising.

He becomes this really famous name because we have this rebellion.

Spartacus is the only gladiator we know of who has a career beyond the

gladiatorial arena.

And for that he's remembered.

When people mention the name Spartacus, the first thing we think of is Spartacus

the Gladiator.

But he's more famous, I think, as someone who has come to stand for

freedom from oppression, freedom from enslavement.

That's his legacy more in the modern world.

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