In the timeline below, the events surrounding the 3rd Servile War, led by Spartacus are laid forth in detail. An interesting piece of information which I would like to divulge into more would be the use of "decimation" by the Roman army. The word decimation is derived from Latin, meaning roughly "elimination of 1/10".
Plutarch writes on decimation in his "Life of Antony":
"Antony was furious and employed the punishment known as 'decimation' on those who had lost their nerve. What he did was divide the whole lot of them into groups of ten, and then he killed one from each group, who was chosen by lot; the rest, on his orders were given barley rations instead of wheat."
Why is this significant to slave revolts and the public perception of Spartacus? I argue that Crassus' use of this on his troops in the 3rd Servile War actually made them fear him more than the rebel Spartacus. They would not be cowardly or mutinous if the threat of decimation wars real. Thus, Crassus garnished more fear, from his own troops, than did Spartacus.
Maintaining a steady supply of slaves was crucial to the Roman economy and the need for more slaves was a key motivator in the decision to go to war. The notion of going to war for aggressive reasons such as obtaining a supply of slaves was first presented by William Harris in 1979 with his book War and Imperialism in Republican Rome 327-70 B.C. War generated a cheap supply of slaves, slaves which transformed Italian agriculture. Without this cheap supply of labor, the growth of the Roman Empire would have been hindered. In this case, imperialism serves as a somewhat perpetual mechanism in which the act of going to war to secure supplies of slaves provides amble amount of slaves which were central to the growth of the empire. As the empire grew, the demand for slaves needed to support such growth also grew.
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