Bloodlines · Who it happened to: the plotting, the gods, the beds, the graves.
How it worked, who it took, and the three wars it started.
47 entries · 72 hours · 39 with a written verdict · Australian 16 · British 12 · American 9 · Mixed 1
Perhaps a fifth of Italy was enslaved, the wars fed the supply, and freed slaves ran the imperial civil service. Emma Southon's Servus argues the whole empire was built on it, and the Partial Historians sat down with her to work through what that claim actually means. Spartacus gets the films; the daily arithmetic of the institution is the harder and better story.
I feel like…
when it happens
how it is made
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With a written verdict
Wildly stylised, gleefully bloody, and much smarter about slavery, patronage and Roman social climbing than its reputation suggests. Push through the first few episodes; the show finds itself and then does not let go.
Kubrick's, with Kirk Douglas, and the film that broke the Hollywood blacklist by putting Dalton Trumbo's name on the credits. The history is loose and the politics of the making are a story in themselves.
Part of Our Fake History
Historian Emma Southon's book Not Built In a Day argues Rome's economy was underpinned by the labour of millions forced into slavery, people who literally built Rome yet were rarely recorded by ancient historians.
Part of The Ancients
With Ben Kane
Seventy-six minutes with the novelist Ben Kane, the longest of the show's four passes at Spartacus and the one with room for the revolt itself: the route up and down Italy, the winter at Thurii, the six thousand crosses on the Appian Way.
Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium
Two shows on Spartacus for over an hour, arguing about whether he had a political programme or simply wanted to go home.
Part of The Partial Historians
With Emma Southon
Southon on the fact everything else rests on: this was a slave economy, and the villas, the leisure and the literature were paid for by it. Uncomfortable, unsentimental, necessary.
With Katharine Huemoeller
Katharine Huemoeller on where women appear in the slave wars, which is rarely and then decisively. Sixty-nine minutes on the part of the revolts the sources skip.
Sixty-eight minutes on enslaved people in the early Republic: how many, from where, and the manumission rate that made Roman slavery different from later systems.
With Carey Fleiner
Carey Fleiner on spinning: sixty-seven minutes on the work that produced clothes, sailcloth and rope, done by women and slaves, and almost absent from the histories written by men who wore the results.
Emma Southon on slavery as the engine of the whole system: the mines, the fields, the households, and the numbers Rome needed to keep replacing. Sixty-seven minutes.
Part of Life of Caesar
The year 61, when a city prefect is killed by one of his own slaves and the senate applies the old law: all four hundred slaves of the household die. Sixty-seven minutes on a rule everyone found monstrous and nobody dared repeal.
Forty-nine minutes on the revolt of 73 to 71 BC: how a gladiator from Thrace held Italy for two years, and why the Roman writers who recorded it were more frightened by the slaves who joined him than by the man himself.
Khachaturian's Soviet ballet, in which Spartacus is a proletarian hero and Crassus dances. Forty-nine minutes on what each era needs him to be.
Part of Emperors of Rome
With Zachary Herz
Forty-eight minutes on the law that condemned every slave in a household when the master was killed by one of them, and on the senate debate that upheld it in AD 61. Four hundred people died under a rule the senate itself called monstrous.
Forty-seven minutes measuring the 1960 Kubrick film against the sources, which for Spartacus are Appian, Plutarch and Florus writing generations later and disagreeing with each other. The show ran it again in 2024 at the same length.
The show's 2024 pass at the same question, in forty-seven minutes. Same ground as the 2020 episode, same running time; take whichever your app offers first.
With Gillian Shepherd
Forty-four minutes on a punishment reserved for slaves and rebels, designed to take days and be watched.
Kubrick's film, the blacklist it broke, and the famous scene that no source supports. Forty-four minutes on how one movie fixed the story.
Jo Ball on what happened to the losers: enslavement, ransom, display in a triumph, or execution at the end of it. Thirty-nine minutes.
Thirty-nine minutes on the institution the economy rested on, including the manumission rate that made freedmen a class of their own.
Part of The History of Byzantium
Thirty-seven minutes on what the sack did to the people in the city, which the political narrative usually passes over in a sentence.
Thirty-six minutes placing the revolt inside Caesar's own lifetime, which is the detail most tellings drop: he was in his twenties while it happened.
Crassus raising his own legions, reviving decimation, and building a wall across the toe of Italy. Thirty-three minutes on the reply the Republic eventually found.
Part of The Ancient World
Thirty-three minutes on Solon of Athens cancelling debts and freeing the enslaved, read from his own surviving verse. Part of the long run before Rome.
Thirty-one minutes on Valerian, the only Roman emperor taken alive in battle, deported into Persia in 260 with tens of thousands of his men.
Thirty-one minutes on Eunus, enslaved in Sicily, who renamed himself King Antiochus and led the first Servile War against the Republic.
Part of Tides of History
A composite life assembled from scattered evidence, following one enslaved man through the institution around 200 BC. Thirty minutes, and the method is declared out loud because no single such life survives whole.
Half an hour of listener questions from the eleventh century, the decades where every explanation of the collapse is still argued over.
What happened to the Romans after 1453: enslavement, ransom, flight west, and the families who did well out of Ottoman rule. Twenty-eight minutes on an ending that kept going.
Twenty-six minutes on Patrick, who was carried off from Roman Britain by raiders and wrote about it himself, which almost nobody enslaved in antiquity got to do.
Twenty-six minutes of preview for their longer series, useful mainly as a map of what the sources for the revolt actually are.
Part of The History of Rome
Twenty-six minutes on the Roman property ladder: the census classes, the equestrian line, and what a senator was legally forbidden to do for money.
Six thousand crosses along the Appian Way, and two thousand years of everyone from Marx to Hollywood claiming him. Twenty-five minutes on the afterlife.
Twenty-four minutes on the man himself, which is mostly a study in how little is known: a Thracian, an auxiliary, possibly a deserter, and after that nothing certain.
Twenty-one minutes on the actor who produced Spartacus as well as starring in it, and who insisted the blacklisted writer be credited.
Twenty minutes on the Spartacus revolt as a war, with consular armies beaten and six thousand crucifixions at the end.
Nineteen minutes on the rising: seventy gladiators out of a school in Capua, then seventy thousand, then two years of defeating consular armies.
Part of The Pax Romana Podcast
Sixteen minutes on the institution the whole economy rested on, including the manumission that turned enslaved people into citizens.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
Nine minutes on the ugly mechanics of enslavement after a battle: separation, movement, sale, and the deliberate breaking of any group that could act together.
Everything else
Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes
Part of Cost of Glory · Alex Petkas on Plutarch, 45 hours
With Barry Strauss
Part of Rome Retold · T.E. Sarma, narrative history by season
Part of The History of Ancient Greece · Greek history in order, from the Stone Age forward; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Greeced Lightning · Myths and movies with a doctor of classics; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow on history's defining moments; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; only the Roman episodes are indexed
