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Ancient World
Spartacus
c. 111–71 BCE · Slave revolt
Property that stood up and fought.
A Thracian forced into the arena, Spartacus led some seventy gladiators out of a Capuan training school in 73 BCE and turned them into an army that humbled Roman legions for two years. Rome called it a servile war; it was also a claim on the simplest freedom of all, that a person is not a thing to be owned. He died in battle, but the revolt permanently unsettled the assumption that slavery was a fixed feature of the world.
Why it matters for freedom
He proved the machinery of slavery runs on fear, and that fear can be broken by people who refuse together.
Who they stood against
the Roman republic, which called itself free while owning the people it worked to death