The Spartacus Road

A classicist retraces the ancient journey taken by the Spartacus and his army of rebels through Italy in the first century BC Gladiator War.

In the final century of the first Roman Republic, an army of slaves undertook a historic revolt. Led by the gladiator Spartacus, its success was something no one before had ever known. The Spartacus Road is the route along which this rebel army outfought the Roman legions between 73 and 71BC, bringing both fears and hopes that have never wholly left the modern mind. It is a road that stretches through 2,000 miles of Italian countryside and out into 2,000 years of world history.

In this inspiring and original memoir, the former editor of The Times, Peter Stothard, takes us on an extraordinary journey. The result is a book like none other: at once a journalist’s notebook, a classicist’s celebration, a survivor’s record of a near fatal cancer and the history of a unique and brutal war. As he travels along the Spartacus road—through the ruins of Capua to Vesuvius and the lost Greek cities of the Italian south—Stothard illuminates conflicting memories of times ancient and modern, breathing new life into one of the greatest stories of the ages.