Spartacus - Ioakim Ioakim

He was a slave. He became an army.

In 73 BCE, a Thracian gladiator named Spartacus walked out of the ludus at Capua with seventy-three men and a handful of kitchen implements. Two years later he commanded over one hundred thousand people, had defeated eight Roman military forces, and had brought the most powerful empire in the ancient world to its knees.

This is that story - told from the inside.

Spartacus: The Slave Who Defied Rome enters the consciousness of the man behind the legend - the Thracian warrior who understood Roman military method from the inside and used it against Rome, who built an army from nothing using discipline, intelligence, and the specific ferocity of people who had decided the condition imposed on them was no longer acceptable.

The book follows the full arc of the rebellion: the years in the ludus at Capua, where Spartacus watched and planned and waited for the moment. The breakout with seventy-three men. The first victory on the slopes of Vesuvius, using twisted grapevines as ropes to descend the cliff that the Roman commander had assumed was impassable. The building of the army - a hundred thousand escaped slaves, organized with Roman military discipline, fighting with Roman weapons taken from the Romans they defeated.

The march north toward the Alps and the freedom that lay beyond them. The army’s refusal to cross. The turning south toward the final confrontation. The wall that Crassus built across the entire width of southern Italy. The crossing of the wall on a winter night. The last campaign. The final battle in Lucania, where Spartacus killed his horse before the fighting began so he would share the ground with his men to the end.

The six thousand crosses on the Appian Way. The body that was never found. The name that has never stopped meaning what it meant the moment he walked out of the kitchen with a meat cleaver and seventy-two others and refused the condition that had been imposed on him.

Spartacus is the second book in I. Ioakim’s Warriors series - full-length literary historical fiction that enters the minds of history’s greatest warriors and stays there long enough to understand what it cost, and what it meant, to be that particular person in that particular world.