Do you think Rome would have called it quits if Spartacus won the last battle?
I personally believe that Rome would have kept on hunting down the rebellion until they satisfied.
Everybody is a sombody but it's on you if your a nobody.
The movie did a pretty good job, but the actual history is a little different than is depicted. There was no way the slave army was going to win, and Spartacus knew it. In reality, Spartacus tried to negotiate a truce with Crassus, but was refused. Crassus was rivaled by Pompey for control of Rome, though Pompey was less experienced, and Crassus knew the one way to an "emperor" position was to crush the rebellion (the third major servile war) totally. The end of the movie depicts the 6,000 surviving slaves being crucified along the Appian Way... and this is historically accurate. But, there's no evidence that Spartacus himself had survived the battle or was executed in the manner depicted.
In addition, there's no record of Virinia, a baby, Antoninus, Gracchus, the women who taunted the gladiators at Batiatas' school, or Levantes. These were added for dramatic purposes.
Of course some of the characters are made up just for a storyline. I figured that was a no win war for the slaves and the only way to truly be free is to die trying to go back to their homeland.
Your nobody until somebody kills you.
The Roman Republic didn't back off. Hannibal and the Cimbri and Teutones inflicted much greater defeats on the Romans than Spartacus did but the Romans kept raising new armies and kept coming back until they won. Most determined people in history.
shareI figured that they felt that had they were determined to the point of fight for decades until they conquered whoever.
God has a hard on for marines because we kill everything we see. He plays his game, we play ours.
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In truth, the Spartacus battle was relatively minor, and Crassus's army quite small. At the same time as all this was going on (73-71 BC) Rome had two much larger, proconsul led armies in the field overseas. Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey) was in Spain fighting Sertorius, and Lucius Licinius Lucullus was in the East (roughly modern day Turkey) fighting Mithridates VI. Each of these armies dwarfed Crassus's and were battle hardened against formidable opposition. Pompey's campaign ended at about the same time as Crassus's. He was returning to Rome and his army encountered some remnants of the slave army. He made short work of them and tried to claim some credit for putting down the revolt, much to Crassus's fury. It took the skills of Caesar to broker a peace between them and get the three of them working together in the first triumvirate.
To summarise, if Spartacus had won that battle then Pompey would have crushed them.
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Pompey and Lucullus also took the field against Spartacus.
shareAs I mentioned, Pompey mopped up some survivors from the battle. Lucullus didn't return from the Eastern campaign until 67 BC. The scenes in the film suggesting the two generals and their armies were ready to take the field are a fabrication.
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No, not as long as Spartacus remained in Italy, which was Rome's home ground. Spartacus's only chance was to get out of the country, and this was his aim, both historically and in the movie. Unfortunately the geography of Italy made that a difficult task, being a somewhat narrow peninsula with the Alps at the northern edge of it. Hence the effort to come to an arrangement with the Cilician pirates, to escape by sea. Spartacus most likely never thought he could beat Rome, i.e. conquer Italy and overthrow the Roman system. He could defeat individual Roman armies (and he was lucky that the real legions were abroad at the time and he only had to face ad hoc armies), but the Romans could keep churning out new ones until they won. The Roman military machine couldn't be beaten through attrition. Spartacus could win battles, and he did win many, but he was never going to win the war, and I think he knew that.
shareRome would NEVER give up on crushing a slave rebellion. They'd spend every last dollar in the treasury and then borrow more, they'd put the empire into debt and sell off whole provinces before they let rebellious slaves go free.
The Romans empire was as dependent on slave labor as the Old South of the US, and it wasn't just agriculture that ran on slave labor but public works and s lot of skilled positions. I don't have the stats but it's likely that slaves outnumbered citizens, at least in some areas, and if the slaves rose up en masse it would have meant social chaos, economic collapse, and the end of life as the citizen and patrician classes knew it. The Roman political class would do anything to ensure that didn't happen, which meant they wouldn't allow a slave rebellion to succeed and give hope to the millions still enslaved.
Yet it's a fact that they didn't put down the rebellion nearly as quickly as they could. Historians aren't sure why Crassus and his pals delayed the final assault on Spartacus's rebels, I like the films theory that all the power players were seeing what political advantages they could get out of the situation.
"I don't have the stats but it's likely that slaves outnumbered citizens, at least in some areas"
I don't think so, no. Slaves were about a third of the population of Italy, most likely less in the provinces. The importance of slavery wasn't so much in the size of the slave population (which was massive, but never a majority), but in the fact that slavery was the biggest source from which the Roman elite drew their surplus, the immense wealth they amassed.
I don't believe slavery was ever ESSENTIAL to Rome, but it was certainly enormously profitable. Though this profitability eventually declined after the empire ceased to expand and the supply of new slaves largely dried up, raising the cost of slaves. Slaves also had less incentive to work hard than free farmers and workers. Because of these factors, slavery began to decline in the later empire period. But that was much later than the time period this movie is set in.
Also, while slavery was important to the RICH, to the big landowners, the owners of farms and mines and other means of production, it was actually devastating to the non-wealthy citizens of Rome. Slave labor devastated the Italian economy because freeholding peasants could never compete with the big latifundia and their armies of slave workers. This resulted in a collapse of the smallholding economy that had originally made Rome rich and powerful. The latifundia gobbled up all the small farms, and the dispossessed peasants flocked to the cities in search of whatever work they could get. Unemployment, inequality, poverty and crime were horrendous. This resulted in massive discontent which gave rise to fierce class struggle in the late republican period, expressed in the conflict between the populares and optimates, which began with the rise of the Gracchi brothers and their campaign for land redistribution, and ended with the final collapse of the republic and the rise of the principate which suppressed the contradictions of Roman society by force.
Spartacus would have still gone the way of Carthage even if he had won his last battle, Rome would have never stopped and never relented. Rome needed slaves, allowing Spartacus to escape would have been unthinkable.
shareIf Spartacus had won that last battle, though, there would have been nothing between him and the city of Rome itself. Wasn't that the point of why Spartacus walked into the trap? He had no choice and knew that the 1 in 1,000,000 shot was to put a stranglehold on the capital.
Rome couldn't have stopped, though, or else the underclasses would have all revolted against their tyranny.