Third Servile War

ever.

It's the slave revolt commanded by the Thracian gladiator Spartacus, known to historians as the Third Servile War.

And in reality, the Third Servile War plays a really sidebar role in this story.

The only reason it really matters in the question of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic is it becomes just another one of those crisis opportunities.

Those situations that seem out of the norm, even though they happen so often, they are in effect part of the norm now in Roman history, that allow these hyper-ambitious great figures to come forward and expand their powers in ways that we would call today extra-constitutional.

And then, you know, one or two or three years later, here we are again and you've got Spartacus.

And understand something, Spartacus' move could not have caught the Romans by surprise.

After all, there's a reason they called it the Third Servile War, and that's because Rome had already fought two.

But before he made his name as a politician, Cato was a soldier.

In 72 BC, he volunteered for service in the Third Servile War against Spartacus.

It would have been unconscionable to let someone else serve in his place.

To Cato, it was the actions one took, the sacrifices one was willing to make, especially at arms defending one's country, that made you a philosopher.

Probably within the first three chapters, we get a little bit of backstory, find out who our hero is, and then quickly you come to realize that there's a whole reason why he has been pulled to this world.

During the Third Servile War, Marcus Crassus was tasked with killing Spartacus, and they say that he did that.

However, Spartacus' body was never found.

Just said that Spartacus died.