Spartacus

He Reached the Alps, Then Turned Back

Spartacus was Thracian, may have served in the Roman auxiliaries and deserted — no source says how a deserter ended up enslaved — and was sold to a gladiator school at Capua. In 73 BC about seventy men broke out of it with kitchen knives and meat spits, captured a wagon of gladiator weapons on the road, and took to the mountain. Within two years the army around him numbered somewhere between seventy thousand and a hundred and twenty thousand people, and it destroyed one Roman force after another — praetors first, then consuls. He led it north to the foot of the Alps, where the way out of Roman Italy stood open. Then he turned around and marched back south into Italy's heartland. No source explains why, and every one of them is Roman, with no reason to make him look good.

Betrayed by the Pirates He Paid

Crassus, the Roman politician given command against him, dug a wall and ditch across the toe of Italy to pen him in. Pirates took his money for ships to Sicily and never came. The last battle was in Lucania in 71 BC. The historian Appian says that before it he killed his own horse, on the grounds that if he won he would have all the horses he wanted, and if he lost he would not need one. His body was never identified. Six thousand of his men were crucified along the road from Capua to Rome, one every thirty-five meters, and left up.