Modern authors who write about gladiators and their violent profession often make the point that, once these individuals had been captured, condemned, or otherwise recruited, they had no choice but to train and fight. They were watched and guarded day and night in their barracks and anywhere else their keepers allowed them to go. So, escape was all but impossible.

Indeed, in general, this bleak scenario was true throughout the long centuries in which the Romans maintained the gladiatorial institution, with one major exception. An unusual and dramatic series of events occurred in a roughly three-year period beginning in 73 B. C. A group of slaves at a ludus run by a procurator named Lentulus Batiatus near Capua, in Campania, broke out and began terrorizing the surrounding countryside. From the ranks of these escapees rose an unusually capable leader...