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Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives. Others say that Aeneas and some of his followers escaped the fall of Troy and established the town. Regardless of which of the many myths one prefers, no one can doubt the impact of ancient Rome on western civilization.
A people known for their military, political, and social institutions, the ancient Romans conquered vast amounts of land in Europe and northern Africa, built roads and aqueducts, and spread Latin, their language, far and wide. Use these classroom resources to teach middle schoolers about the empire of ancient Rome.
Julius Caesar was a Roman general and politician who named himself dictator of the Roman Empire, a rule that lasted less than one year before he was famously assassinated by political rivals in 44 B.
On March 15, 44 B. Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. He defeated Roman forces over half a dozen times, marching his people up and down the Italian peninsula until he was killed in battle in April 71 B. Also, while Spartacus was a real person who has inspired revolutionaries and filmmakers, scholars do not have an abundant amount of information about him.
Accounts from only about a dozen ancient writers survive to this day, and none of the surviving reports was written by Spartacus or one of his supporters. According to the surviving sources, Spartacus was from Thrace, an area in southeast Europe that the Romans were often trying to subjugate during the first century B.
He appears to have served in a Roman auxiliary unit for a time, deserted and became either a bandit or insurgent against the Romans. While at the school, Spartacus helped organize a breakout that led to more than 70 gladiators escaping armed with knives, cleavers and other makeshift weapons they got from the kitchen.
One of the people Spartacus escaped with was his wife, a Thracian woman whose name is lost to history. The writer Plutarch, who lived in the second century A. Martins, Spartacus and his small band of escapees acquired gladiator weapons from a passing cart and made their way to Mount Vesuvius. On their way, Spartacus and his co-leaders, Crixus and Oenomaus, raided for supplies and recruited slaves in the countryside.
Furthermore, a group of escaped slaves were not seen as posing a serious challenge to Roman soldiers. The Romans despatched a praetor named Gaius Claudius Glaber to form an army to crush the slaves.
Instead, they blocked off the main route up Vesuvius, pitched camp and tried to starve him out. Spartacus took the initiative, having his newly liberated slaves build rope out of wild vines so they could move down the mountainside to a spot the Roman had neglected to defend.
The Romans, still in camp, never saw them coming. This success resulted in new recruits flocking to the force of Spartacus. Throughout his rebellion, his army spent much of its time in rural areas and small towns, places that were poorly defended but had an abundance of slaves. Additionally, according to ancient sources, Spartacus insisted on equally dividing the spoils, something that made recruitment all the more easier.
In time, he even succeeded in getting non-slaves to join his rebellion. Spartacus continued to ambush and defeat Roman units while freeing slaves in the countryside and gathering supplies. Each man may have commanded 10, troops. By the spring of 72 B. This did not work out well for the rebels. Spartacus was not the only leader of the uprising in 73 BC, and indeed, his relationship with his fellow commanders may explain the ultimate failure of his fight against Roman rule.
The Death of Spartacus by Hermann Vogel According to historian Keith Bradley, little is known of Spartacus and Crixus outside the context of the Third Servile War, the name by which the revolt is now known.
It is believed that Spartacus was a mercenary from Thrace who deserted the Roman army and ended up in a gladiator training camp in Capua.
It was here that he encountered Crixus, a slave thought to have hailed from Gaul as his name is of Celtic origin, meaning curly-haired. Life as a gladiator was hard, and usually short. Conditions in the training camp were squalid, and by 73 BC, the enslaved fighters were desperate to escape. One night, following a foiled escape attempt, Spartacus, Crixus and around 80 gladiators seized weapons from the training camp and fought their way to freedom.
The group immediately elected Spartacus, Crixus and another gladiator named Oenomaus as leaders. Escaped slaves would meet with little mercy from Roman authorities. Late 3rd century gladiator mosaic from a private residence in Kourion, Cyprus. Photo by Klaus D. According to Bradley, earlier slave revolts had been brutally put down by the Roman army, and so Spartacus and Crixus knew that they would need to fight their way out of Roman territory.
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