What Was Done to Them
72 BC · Spartacus, leading the revolt, with several hundred Roman prisoners held in his camp
The army has grown past counting. Most of them were property last year. A great many of them were bought, sold, branded, and worked until they were replaced, and seventy-eight of them were trained to kill each other for an afternoon's entertainment.
There are Roman prisoners in the camp now, several hundred, taken when the last praetor's column broke.
The men have asked for the games.
Not an execution. The games: pairs, sand, a ring of people watching, exactly the form they were made to perform, with the Romans in the middle of it and the people who used to be in the middle standing around the edge. Somebody has already marked out the ground.
He was a gladiator. He knows precisely what the ring does to the person inside it, and precisely what it does to the person watching, which is why they want it.
He can forbid it. He can also count how many of them there are, and how much of what holds this army together is the fact that he has never yet told them that something they were owed is not for them.
Let them have it
Forbid the gamesOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Appian records that the rebels forced Roman prisoners to fight each other to the death (in one account, several hundred of them, staged as funeral games for a fallen commander). No ancient source suggests the revolt aimed to end slavery; it aimed to get out. The army sacked Italian towns for two years. Spartacus led it to the foot of the Alps, which was the way out, and then turned back south, and no source explains why. He was killed in Lucania in 71 BC and his body was never identified. Six thousand of his men were crucified along the road from Capua to Rome and left up. Every surviving word about him was written by his enemies.
The philosophers weigh in
Let them"I was born a slave and I will still say it plainly: they are free men now and this is what free men chose. You may call that a poor use of freedom. You may not call it something they had no right to."
Forbid it"The lurch you feel watching a child near a well does not check first whose child it is. If that reflex can be switched off by what was done to you, then it was never the thing I said it was."