Third Servile War

The Third Servile War, fought from 73 to 71 BC, was the last and largest of Rome's slave uprisings and the only one to seriously threaten the Roman heartland of Italy itself. It began when roughly seventy gladiators, led by the Thracian Spartacus along with the Gallic gladiators Crixus and Oenomaus, broke out of a training school at Capua and took refuge on Mount Vesuvius, where escaped slaves and rural laborers swelled their ranks into an army eventually estimated in the tens of thousands. Spartacus's forces repeatedly defeated Roman armies sent against them and ranged across much of Italy before Spartacus was killed in battle in southern Italy in 71 BC, when the Roman commander Marcus Licinius Crassus finally cornered and broke the rebel army. In the war's aftermath some six thousand captured survivors were crucified along the Appian Way between Capua and Rome, a mass execution meant as a lasting warning against further slave revolts.