Thracians: The People of Legendary Gladiator Spartacus

The Thracians were famous as fearsome warriors, hired as mercenaries by ancient Greeks and Romans, also known for the legendary gladiator Spartacus.

Ancient Thrace was a territory between the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea. It occupied the region that now forms parts of Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, extending to the Danube River. They settled there around the 2nd millennium BC and there are references about them in Homer’s epics.

Today, much of Thrace or West Thrace is situated in the northeastern part of Greece, comprised of the Xanthi, Rhodope and Evros prefectures and borders Bulgaria to the north and Turkey to the east. The Turkish part is called East Thrace and the Bulgarian part is known as North Thrace.

According to the Greek historian Herodotus, they were the world’s largest nation after the Indians and would have been invincible if unified under one king.

The Thracians were Indo-European people and spoke an Indo-European language of which there is no historical documentation. It was the ancient Greeks who named the indigenous tribes settled in the eastern region of the Balkans, Thracians.

Their society was tribal in structure with no inclination towards cohesion. It was only when they were facing external danger that the tribes would come together to defend themselves. The Greeks considered them barbarians as did the Romans.

Herodotus writes that in the Archaic period, the Thracians started to export cereals, leather, metals, wood, and slaves.

It was only in the early 5th until the early 3rd century BC and later in the 1st century BC that several tribes united under the Odrysian tribe resulting in the formation of the Odrysian kingdom. The first known Odrysian king was Teres I, according to Thucydides.

Interaction with ancient Greeks

Both Greeks and Thracians were Indo-European peoples, but similarities end there. Interaction between the two peoples started in the 8th century BC and by the 7th and 6th centuries, much of the Thracian coast was settled by Greek colonists who founded numerous towns in Thrace, namely Thasos island, Byzantion (later Constantinople) or Odessos and Varna in the Black Sea.

The political history of the Thracian tribes of this age is virtually unknown, although there is a reference that in the late 6th century, Athenian settlers interacted with a “king of Thrace” residing north of the Chersonese peninsula. However, there is no evidence of interaction between the two peoples north of the Rhodope Mountains since there are no artefacts to confirm it. Likely, the Thracians north of the Rhodopes remained largely isolated from the Aegean trade until the late 6th century.

Despite the lack of artefacts indicating direct exchanges between Greeks and Thracians in that era, there are general analogies in terms of nutriments, the exploitation of natural resources, and technological development between the east Balkans, the north Aegean coastal regions ,and mainland Greece that are more significant as evidence of interaction than artefacts. The tools and weapons used, the choice of agricultural crop, the form of domestic structures, and the shape of ceramic vessels in the Greek coastal hinterland of the Aegean have great similarities with the ones used in the northern Thracian plains in modern-day Bulgaria. This is a strong indication of direct or indirect interaction between the two peoples.

A clear indication of interaction between ancient Greeks and Thracians is the influence of Ionian fabrics and styles and also the setup of such manufacturing workshops in the Black Sea coastline (Odessos) or in the hinterland (Istros, in the mouth of the Danube).

Another incentive that makes interaction and exchange a principal incentive for interaction between indigenous and incoming groups was access to resources. Thracian coastal settlements flourished because the settlers wanted to sell their agricultural produce, minerals, and manpower to markets where these products and services were in demand. Some provided moorings and water for long-haul ships travelling further along the north Aegean and Pontic coasts. Others were exchanging commodities, whether on a local or regional scale.

In the mid-4th century BC, King Philip II of Macedon subjected Thrace and founded Philippopolis in the land of the Bessi (modern-day Plovdiv, Bulgaria). In 335 BC, his son  King Alexander the Great crossed the Danube, spreading Hellenism in the region. Recognizing their great fighting skills, Alexander incorporated Thracian cavalrymen into his army, as they are mentioned in the accounts of the Battle of Gaugamela.

In 194 BC, Thrace was conquered again by another Hellenist king, Antiochus III the Great, a descendant of one of Alexander’s generals.

Spartacus and the Third Slave War

Spartacus is probably the best-known name of an ancient Thracian. He was the protagonist of the Third Slave War, or the Gladiator War – or the Spartacus War, as Plutarch called it – between rebelling slaves and Romans, that lasted from 73 to 71 BC.

The revolt of the Thracian gladiator Spartacus in 73-71 BCE was the most impactful slave revolt in the history of Rome. It was the third and last rebellion of this kind that Rome suppressed after several bloody battles.

In Roman history, slaves were an important factor in the economy. Slaves were either bought from foreign merchants or by the enslavement of foreign populations through military conquest. Tens or hundreds of thousands of slaves at a time were imported into the Roman economy from various European and Mediterranean acquisitions. They worked as servants, craftsmen, miners and farmers mostly.

Under Roman Republican law, a slave was property, not a person. Owners could abuse, injure or even kill their slaves without legal consequence. While there were many types of slaves, most of them worked in the fields and mines, subject to a life of hard physical labor.

The oppressive treatment led the slave population to rebellion. As their numbers were growing gradually, their force was becoming more and more substantial. The first revolt took place in 135 BC and the second in 104 BC. The First and Second Servile Wars erupted in Sicily, where small bands of rebels found thousands of willing followers wishing to escape oppressive slavery. Both wars ended victoriously for the Romans, subduing the slaves for decades.

The Third Slave War was different, though. This time the revolt started in Capua and the instigators were slave gladiators who were fighting to the death in the Roman arenas for the entertainment of the spectators.

According to Plutarch, the Revolt of Spartacus – or the Third Slave War – began, more or less, as an accident; not because the slave gladiators wanted to end slavery and be free, but simply because a group of gladiators in Capua wanted to escape. But, once that plan was discovered, they had no choice but to fight for their freedom or be executed.

The rebel army led by Spartacus met with the legions of commander Marcus Licinius Crassus in southern Italy. The slaves were crushed by the Romans and Spartacus presumably died on the battlefield. He was later immortalized in film, literature, art, and television. The rebellion also later took on a political dimension. For example, Marxists interpreted the slave revolt as the revolution of the proletariat.