The gladiator Spartacus escaped captivity from a gladiator training school, terrified ancient Rome’s elite with raids on plantations and raised a fighting force of 70,000 escaped slaves that repeatedly pummeled Roman armies dispatched to crush their uprising.

His exploits were admired centuries later by French enlightenment writer Voltaire, philosopher and political theorist Karl Marx and director Stanley Kubrick, who made the blockbuster 1960 film Spartacus starring Kirk Douglas. Professional soccer teams from Russia and Eastern Europe are named in his honor.

Spartacus’ feats during the Third Servile War (73 to 71 B.C.) showed that he “was a man of great intelligence, ambition, courage and charisma” until he died in battle, says historian Barry Strauss, the Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a retired Cornell University history and humanistic studies professor.

Here’s how Spartacus became a gladiator and a rebel leader who shook Rome’s foundations:

Little is known of Spartacus’ early life. He was born in the Roman province of Thrace in the Balkans and served in the Roman army as an auxiliary, or non-Roman citizen soldier, before becoming a gladiator, according to the few ancient texts that survive today. 

Gladiators were slaves and how Spartacus became one is lost to history. But he likely committed a serious crime to earn a career as a murmillo, the name for the heavily armored gladiators who carried large shields and short swords and fought to the death in arenas before cheering Roman crowds.

Slavery was common in the Roman Empire, with men, women and children captured in war forced to work on farms, serve in households and perform skilled and unskilled jobs. Most were locked in chains, and scholars have estimated that as many as 1.5 million slaves toiled on the Italian peninsula where the total population stood at about 5 million.

Compared to other slaves, gladiators were “privileged characters,” says Strauss, whose books include The Spartacus War. “They had physical exercise and access to women or whatever. The difference was they were training to die.” 

Their lives often ended with the thrust of a gladius, the standard sword wielded by gladiators and Roman soldiers.

The ancient Roman historian Sallust, who wrote Histories about the early Roman Republic, says Spartacus had “enormous strength and spirit.” It’s possible he might have been an officer while serving with the Romans “because he knows the military art,” Strauss says. “He was certainly adept at guerrilla and irregular warfare.”

In 73 B.C., Spartacus and about 70 other gladiators used kitchen utensils as weapons to escape their training facility called a ludus in Capua, about 25 miles north of Neapolis (modern-day Naples). He served as elected leader, along with the Gallic gladiators Crixus and Oenomaus.

The group raided plantations and ranches owned by wealthy Romans in the verdant Campania region south of Rome along the renowned Via Appia highway and were joined by slaves from across the countryside. Then they took refuge on top of Mount Vesuvius.

To crush what was initially thought of as a minor slave revolt, the Roman Senate dispatched military commander Gaius Claudius Glaber, who ordered his legionnaires to dig in around the mountain. The 3,000 untested soldiers blocked the only trail leading to the peak of the then-dormant volcano, planning to starve the former slaves into submission. 

But Spartacus had his men make ropes from wild grape vines and rappel down an unguarded cliff. The attack surprised the legionnaires and they were wiped out, leaving their arms and supplies to a rebel army that would swell to tens of thousands as more slaves and Roman peasants joined the revolt.

Oenomus was killed in a battle, but Spartacus and Crixus defeated successive armies sent to stop them. With Rome trying to put down uprisings elsewhere against Quintus Sertorius in Hispania, now Spain, and King Mithridates of Pontus in what is now Turkey, most elite Roman legionnaires were away fighting. This left the battles on the homefront to inexperienced guard units and retired veterans.

According to ancient sources, Spartacus wanted to return home to Thrace and knew his army could not last against Rome’s might. Crixus wanted to keep on fighting and pillaging, so the rebel army split in two and headed in opposite directions. 

In 72 B.C., near Mount Garganus in southern Italy, Crixus and his 30,000 troops were crushed by legions led by Lucius Gellius. The Romans then chased after Spartacus, but he defeated them in the Apennine Mountains of northern Italy.

The frustrated Roman Senate turned to the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus to stop the revolt. He took command of an estimated 40,000 well-trained soldiers and enforced discipline with decimation punishment for crimes such as cowardice, desertion, mutiny and insubordination. Soldiers were divided into groups of 10 and one person from each group was picked at random and executed. 

“Crassus wanted his men more frightened of him than Spartacus,” Strauss says.

Spartacus and his rebels retreated down the peninsula and were defeated by Crassus in several battles with both armies reaching the Calabria region. In 71 B.C., Crassus trapped the rebels on the toe of what is now Italy by building a 35-mile-long wall across an isthmus at Rhegium.

Spartacus hired pirates to take him and his army to nearby Sicily, but they were betrayed and decided to try to fight their way through Roman lines in a last-ditch attack.

“It’s clear that Spartacus hopes to defeat the Romans by decapitating their army,” Strauss says. “He takes himself and a small group of commandos directly at Crassus. They don’t succeed. Spartacus is mowed down on the battlefield and his corpse is never found.”

Crassus took 6,000 prisoners and made an example of the recaptured slaves by crucifying them along “the whole road from Capua to Rome,” according to the ancient Greek historian Appian.

Spartacus’ Third Servile War was called “a just war, indeed the only just war in history” by Voltaire, the 18th-century French philosopher who condemned war. The revolutionary socialist Karl Marx considered Spartacus one of his heroes and called him a “great general, noble character, [and a] real representative of the ancient proletariat.”

According to Strauss, the one-time Thracian slave remains an enduring emblem of resistance to oppression: “Spartacus continues to be a symbol of rebellion.”