One of the things that happened to me after coming home from the service is that I got obsessed with military history. And I think a lot of veterans will know exactly what I mean. You pick up these books about ancient battles and great commanders and part of you is doing something — I don’t know — almost therapeutic with it. You’re trying to make sense of something through the distance of history that you couldn’t quite make sense of up close.
Spartacus is someone I keep coming back to. Not the Starz version with all the glistening flesh and the crazy wire work, though honestly, who knows, maybe the real guy was something like that. The thing is — we just don’t know. And that gap between what we know and what we can only guess at is a big part of what makes the story so interesting to me.
So this episode is me doing what I do — thinking out loud about a figure who I think deserves a lot more serious attention than Hollywood has given him.
Who Was He, Really
The main sources we have on Spartacus are Plutarch, Appian, and Florus. And here’s the thing about all of them — they’re Roman, they’re writing a hundred to two hundred years after the events, and they have every reason in the world to frame this guy as either a monster or a curiosity. There’s no account from him, no account from anyone who followed him. We’re reading his story through the eyes of the people who killed him.
With that caveat out of the way, here’s what seems to be true. He was almost certainly Thracian — that’s roughly modern-day Bulgaria — and at some point before he was enslaved, he served in the Roman auxiliary forces. That detail matters a lot, and I’ll get back to it. He ended up at the gladiatorial school of a man named Lentulus Batiatus in Capua. He was trained. He was conditioned. He was good enough at combat that they kept him around.
His wife or companion — also Thracian, also enslaved — was apparently a prophetess in the cult of Dionysus. And there’s this one detail that Plutarch records, which I find almost unbearably human: when Spartacus first arrived at the school, she saw a serpent coiled around his face while he slept and said it was a sign of great but tragic power. That’s it. That’s one of the most personal things that survived two thousand years about this man. A woman watching him sleep and seeing something in it that frightened and amazed her.
Plutarch was great at telling a story, and I love the Roman obsession with omens.
The Thing That Actually Impresses Me
Okay, so here’s where I’m going to get a little bit into veteran-brain mode, because I think this is something that doesn’t get talked about enough when people discuss Spartacus.
He fought in the Roman auxiliaries. And I know that might not sound like much, but think about what that actually means. Auxiliaries weren’t line infantry standing in a block and following orders. They were scouts, skirmishers, cavalry, the people doing the dirty creative work — the flanking, the harassment, the river crossings. They were expected to improvise. And Spartacus was learning all of this while also, essentially, studying the Roman military from the inside. He knew their doctrine. He knew what they were optimized for. He knew where they were arrogant.
And then on top of that, he spent time in a gladiatorial school, which is basically a brutal laboratory of one-on-one combat psychology. So by the time he escapes with seventy-some-odd gladiators and a bunch of kitchen implements, he is not an amateur.
The first engagement tells you everything. Rome sends a militia force up to Mount Vesuvius to blockade the one path up the mountain and starve them out. Textbook. Spartacus has his men make ropes out of wild vines, rappel down an unguarded cliff face, come around behind the Roman camp, and attack from the rear. The Romans run. Now, you have to understand — he scouted that. He knew that cliff was there. He knew that whoever Rome sent would set up exactly where they set up. He read the situation before it happened and he planned for it.
Over the next two years he does this again and again. He uses terrain. He uses deception — there’s a story about him propping a dead body on horseback at the entrance to his camp to fake out the Romans while his army slipped away in the night. When Crassus builds a massive fortified ditch across the entire toe of Italy to trap him — like, thirty-five miles of ditch and rampart — Spartacus fills a section with timber and dirt and dead horses and punches through in a single night.
He was, by any honest measure, one of the great military minds of the ancient world. And he built it from the ground up, with no cultural baseline to draw on, training people who hadn’t eaten well or slept well or been treated like human beings. That’s not a small thing.
What He Must Have Said to Them
This is the part where I have to speculate, because we have nothing. No speech, no letter, no manifesto. The Romans had no interest in recording what a slave rebel told other slaves.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. Rome deliberately mixed its slave populations. Different languages, different cultures, different gods — that was a tool of control, right? You can’t organize people who can’t talk to each other, who maybe even hate each other. Gauls and Thracians and Africans and Germans, all thrown together. And yet Spartacus holds them together. For two years. Through victories and catastrophic splits and the loss of commanders and the loss of hope.
I think about what I know about unit cohesion from my own time in the service, and I can tell you — shared hardship will cement people together harder than just about anything else. That’s real. But you still need someone to point at and believe in. And Spartacus apparently was that person.
My best guess, reading between the lines of what we know? He wasn’t promising survival. He probably couldn’t. What he was offering was something more immediate and more profound than that — a weapon and a purpose. You’re not property anymore. You’re a soldier. Here’s what that means, and here’s what we’re going to do with it. Whether you live or die, you do it as something other than what they made you.
The Body
This is the part that I can’t stop thinking about.
Plutarch says Spartacus was wounded in the thigh by a javelin in the final battle at the Siler River in 71 BC. He fought on. Killed two Roman centurions in single combat. Was surrounded. Went down still fighting. And then — his body was never found.
Crassus wanted it. Rome wanted it. They needed that closure in the way that Roman victory culture always needed it — the parade through the streets, the public execution, the visual proof that the threat was finished. They crucified six thousand of his followers along the Appian Way. But they couldn’t produce him.
Maybe it’s just the chaos of a massive ancient battle. Bodies stripped and unidentifiable. No portrait of him that any Roman soldier would have recognized. That’s probably the honest answer. But there’s another possibility — that his people hid him. That someone, while they were themselves fleeing a catastrophe, took the time to make sure Rome didn’t get to use his body as a statement. And if that’s true, I don’t know, that says something to me about what he meant to them.
Here’s my history headcanon, for whatever it’s worth: there had to have been stories. Whispers passing through the slave population of the empire. Spartacus got out. He’s somewhere. He’s coming back. The same way there were people when I was a kid who were absolutely convinced Elvis was still alive. That’s just what happens when someone that powerful disappears without a confirmed ending. You can’t kill a ghost.
And in a weird way, Rome’s attempt to erase him created the opposite of what they wanted. They erased enslaved people constantly, systematically — no names in the record, no histories, no faces. And in the end, Spartacus dissolved back into that same anonymity. He became unidentifiable. Just another body among the people Rome had spent centuries refusing to see. Which is maybe the most subversive ending he could have had.
Two thousand years later, here I am saying his name. That’s probably not even what they called him. Could’ve been his slave name. And still, he’s immortal.
Writing Update
The Heart of the Wasteland rewrites are about halfway done. I’m expecting to finish the second draft by the end of the first week of March, and then it’s off to the editor. I’m calling the publication date at end of March — no official date yet, but that’s where I’m putting my money.
Wyrm Rider is complete and sitting in the queue waiting for its second pass. I’m planning to start drafting Storm Rider the second week of March once the Heart of the Wasteland rewrites are done. And I’m still looking at a Kickstarter for the Dragon Rider series sometime this summer, so keep your ears open for that.
If you’re out there listening — thank you. Really.
Free Books — March Promo
The March Madness fantasy and sci-fi promo is live. No romance, no shirtless covers, just classic genre fiction from a bunch of great indie authors including yours truly. Go grab something free:
If you’re seeing this on the last day of February, that promo will still be live at the same link.