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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2220177" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, I wouldn't want to peg him with an exact number, but yeah, he certainly seems to have been very charismatic.  He also managed to create an aura of success due to the very badly managed Roman responce to the revolt in its early days.  Most slave revolts got to nothing like the scale of the Spartacus revolt, and all the big ones occurred in the Late Republic when Rome was at its maximum rate of expansion.  Rome during this period had a tendency to take whole populations (in the 10's and 100's of thousands) into slavery and send them back to Italy and Sicily to work the big farms that fed the army.  So during the time of the big three revolts, you had really large slave subcultures of Greeks or Gauls living in Italy that did not consider themselves Roman the way the same Greek or Gaul might have one or two hundred years later. I'd guess that as the Marius reforms of the army began to really have thier impact, and more and more of the empire began to see themselves as Roman, the difficulty of raising up a revolt on the level of the Spartacus revolt got alot harder.  As the army became less and less centralized, the need for the big plantations declined, and associated practice of hauling populations off to Italy as part of the booty of war diminished.  Certainly no big slave revolts ever happened again.</blockquote>