Spartacus Trivia
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60 free Spartacus trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Spartacus trivia quiz covers the Thracian gladiator who broke out of a school near Capua in 73 BC with about seventy comrades and kitchen knives, humiliated a string of Roman armies, and led an army of some 70,000 escaped slaves before Crassus crushed it in 71 BC. It also covers what came after: Kubrick and Kirk Douglas's 1960 epic, the I'm Spartacus scene, the ballet, the football clubs and the revolutionaries who took his name. The easy questions cover the outline: where he came from, what he was, who beat him, what happened to the survivors and who played him on screen. The harder half is for readers of Plutarch and Appian: the type of gladiator he was, the ropes of vine on Vesuvius, the two Gauls elected alongside him, the pirates who took the money and sailed away, decimation, the general who stole the credit, the blacklisted screenwriter, the director who was fired after three weeks, the football crowd that recorded the shouting, and the actor who impersonated Olivier for the restored bath scene. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for Spartacus, the Third Servile War and the 1960 film before publishing. If you enjoy this, try our Julius Caesar, Roman Empire and Stanley Kubrick quizzes next.
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Q 01Spartacus came from which ancient region, largely in what is now Bulgaria?
Thrace
Thrace: Plutarch calls him a Thracian of nomadic stock yet 'more Hellenic than Thracian', crediting the slave with a wit and culture above his fortune.
Q 02Ancient accounts say Spartacus had been what before he was enslaved and made a gladiator?
A soldier with the Romans
A soldier with the Romans: Florus says he went from mercenary to soldier, then deserter and highwayman, before his strength made him a gladiator, so Rome may have trained the man who routed its armies.
Q 03According to Plutarch, Spartacus's wife, who escaped with him, was what?
A prophetess
A prophetess: when a snake coiled on the sleeping Spartacus's face as he waited to be sold in Rome, Plutarch says, she declared it the sign of a great and formidable power.
Q 04The gladiator school Spartacus broke out of was based at which city?
Capua
Capua: when the city sent troops after the runaways, the gladiators beat them, took their army weapons and threw away their own arena gear as dishonourable.
Q 05Who owned the gladiatorial school from which Spartacus escaped?
Lentulus Batiatus
Lentulus Batiatus: Plutarch blames the breakout on his injustice, saying he kept his gladiators in close confinement through no misconduct of their own.
Q 06Historians usually call Rome's war against Spartacus by which name?
The Third Servile War
The Third Servile War: Rome's two earlier slave wars were fought overseas, but this one broke out in Italy itself, and it took eight legions to end it.
Q 07What stopped most of the 200 gladiators planning to escape with Spartacus?
A betrayal
A betrayal: someone informed on the 200 plotters, Plutarch says, and only the 78 who got wind of it in time managed to break out.
Q 08Per Plutarch, what did Spartacus and his fellow gladiators grab as weapons to break out of their school?
Kitchen utensils
Kitchen utensils: they seized cleavers and spits from a cookhouse, then came upon wagons hauling gladiator weapons to another city and armed themselves properly.
Q 09On which mountain did Spartacus and the escaped gladiators first make camp?
Vesuvius
Vesuvius: its summit could be reached by only one narrow path, which made it easy to hold, and the volcano would not erupt and bury Pompeii for another 150 years.
Q 10Per Plutarch, what did Spartacus do when his horse was brought before the final battle?
Killed it on the spot
Killed it on the spot: drawing his sword, he told his men that if he won he would have plenty of fine Roman horses, and if he lost he would not need one.
Q 11How did Spartacus's men escape the Roman force besieging their mountain camp?
Down ropes woven from vines
Down ropes woven from vines: they lowered themselves off cliffs the Romans had left unguarded, circled round and stormed the camp from behind.
Q 12Which praetor led the first Roman force, a militia, that besieged Spartacus on the volcano?
Gaius Claudius Glaber
Rome treated the outbreak as a policing matter, its legions being busy in Spain and against Mithridates.
Q 13By Appian's count, Spartacus's 70 or so gladiators grew into an army of what size?
70,000
70,000: by then the rebels had beaten two Roman forces and even captured a praetor's horse, and the same writer later puts the army at 120,000.
Q 21What did Crassus do with the 6,000 rebels captured after Spartacus's final defeat?
Crucified them
Crucified them: the crosses lined the Appian Way all the way from Rome to the city where the revolt had begun.
Q 22Plutarch says Spartacus wanted his victorious army to do what?
Cross the Alps and go home
Cross the Alps and go home: he judged that Rome could not be beaten for good, but his men, flushed with success, refused to leave and went on plundering Italy.
Q 23Fresh from defeating Spartacus, Crassus and his rival general both won which office for 70 BC?
The consulship
Q 14Which co-leader split from Spartacus and was killed by a Roman army near Mount Garganus?
Crixus
Crixus: he had led some 30,000 Gauls and Germans away from the main army, and the Romans caught them on their own; Appian says two-thirds died with him.
Q 15Crassus, the general who crushed Spartacus, was killed in 53 BC while invading where?
Parthia
Parthia: his legions were destroyed at Carrhae, and a later story says the victors poured molten gold down the throat of Rome's richest man to mock his greed.
Q 16Which ancient punishment did Crassus revive for legions that ran from Spartacus?
Decimation
Decimation: the men who had fled drew lots and one in ten was put to death in front of the army, so that the legions feared Crassus more than they feared the enemy.
Q 17Per Plutarch, Spartacus paid which seafarers to ferry 2,000 men across the strait, only to be abandoned?
Cilician pirates
Cilician pirates: they came to terms, took his gifts and then sailed away without him, leaving his army stranded on the shore as Crassus closed in.
Q 18Crassus walled in Spartacus's army after it tried to cross to which island?
Sicily
Sicily: the island had a history of great slave revolts and Spartacus hoped to rekindle them, so Crassus sealed him in with a ditch and wall dug from sea to sea.
Q 19Whose legions, returning from Hispania, made Crassus rush to finish off Spartacus for fear of losing the credit?
Pompey's
Pompey's: he mopped up the fugitives, then wrote to the Senate that Crassus had beaten the slaves in battle but he himself had ended the war.
Q 20What happened to Spartacus's body after the final battle in 71 BC?
It was never found
It was never found: Appian says he fought on from one knee after a spear wound to the thigh, until he and the men around him were surrounded and cut down.
The consulship: neither general would disband his army first, and once in office the two quarrelled over almost everything until the people begged them to make peace.
Q 24Which Enlightenment writer called the war of Spartacus the most just of all wars, 'and perhaps the only just one'?
Voltaire
Voltaire: the line comes from his article on slavery, which notes that the peoples proudest of their own liberty, Athenians and Romans among them, passed the harshest laws against slaves.
Q 25Which Haitian revolutionary leader has been called the 'Black Spartacus'?
Toussaint Louverture
Toussaint Louverture: born into slavery, he led the revolt that broke it in Saint-Domingue, but was tricked into arrest and died in a French prison months before Haiti declared independence.
Q 26Adam Weishaupt took the code name Spartacus as founder of which secret society?
The Illuminati
The Illuminati: Weishaupt founded the order in Bavaria in 1776, and because its members hid behind classical aliases he signed himself Brother Spartacus.
Q 27Which philosopher called Spartacus a 'real representative of the ancient proletariat'?
Karl Marx
Karl Marx: he wrote it to Engels in 1861 after spending his evenings reading Appian in Greek for relaxation, adding that Spartacus was 'the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history'.
Q 28The Spartakiad, named after Spartacus, was the Soviet Union's rival to which sporting event?
The Olympic Games
The Olympic Games: Moscow shunned them on ideological grounds and staged a workers' Spartakiad of its own in 1928, then reversed course and sent its first Olympic team in 1952.
Q 29Which NHL team's mascot, Spartacat, is named after Spartacus?
The Ottawa Senators
The Ottawa Senators: a team named after lawmakers borrowed the rebel who defied Rome's own Senate, and the lion Spartacat has been its official mascot since the club's first season in 1992.
Q 30Which Soviet composer, best known for the Sabre Dance, wrote the ballet Spartacus?
Aram Khachaturian
Aram Khachaturian: his ballet reached the stage in Leningrad in 1956, and its sweeping Adagio became famous in Britain in the 1970s as the theme of the BBC drama The Onedin Line.