It looks like, from what we know, that to start with, although they send down three thousand guys, am, it's just a slave break at. The romans are quite often a bit hopeless at stage one in their military responses. What you see happening later in the later sources is that after a kind of mis prision about spartcus importance, he becomes a kind of second hannibal am and he might have destroyed rome. And whether if we were sitting in roman, 73 b c, we would have thought that, i don't know.
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life of Spartacus, the gladiator who led a major slave rebellion against the Roman Republic in the 1st century BC. He was an accomplished military leader, and the campaign he led contributed significantly to the instability of the Roman state in this period. Spartacus was celebrated by some ancient historians and reviled by others, and became a hero to revolutionaries in 19th-century Europe. Modern perceptions of his character have been influenced by Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film - but ancient sources give a rather more complex picture of Spartacus and the aims of his rebellion.
With:
Mary Beard
Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge
Maria Wyke
Professor of Latin at University College, London
Theresa Urbainczyk
Associate Professor of Classics at University College, Dublin.
Producer: Victoria Brignell.