Spartacus's Slave Revolt

The Third Servile War began in 73 BCE when Spartacus, a Thracian gladiator held at a training school in Capua, led a breakout of roughly seventy fellow gladiators who armed themselves with kitchen implements seized during their escape and fled to the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, where their numbers rapidly swelled as escaped slaves and rural laborers across Italy flocked to join the revolt. Spartacus and his fellow leaders, including Crixus and Oenomaus, repeatedly defeated the Roman forces initially sent against them, at one point commanding a rebel army numbering in the tens of thousands that ranged across much of the Italian peninsula for nearly two years. The revolt was finally crushed in 71 BCE by legions under Marcus Licinius Crassus, who cornered and defeated Spartacus's forces in Lucania, killing Spartacus himself in the final battle, and Crassus ordered some 6,000 captured survivors crucified along the Appian Way between Capua and Rome as a lasting warning against further slave uprisings. Though it ultimately failed to overturn Roman slavery, the revolt remains history's best-known slave rebellion against Rome and later became an enduring symbol of resistance against oppression.