In 73 BC, about seventy enslaved men broke out of a gladiator school in southern Italy armed with kitchen knives. Two years later, six thousand of their followers hung on crosses along the road to Rome, and the man who had led them was dead somewhere on a battlefield in Lucania — his body never found, never identified, never produced. Between those two moments, a Thracian nobody had recorded the birth of beat eight Roman commanders in a row. He camped on a mountain nobody yet knew was a volcano and escaped it on ladders woven from wild grapevines. He slipped out of a surrounded camp by propping corpses at the gate as fake sentries. He led tens of thousands of people the length of Italy and back, fed them, armed them, and held them together while the most efficient military machine in the ancient world tried to take them apart. This account tells that story straight, and it tells something else alongside it: how little anyone actually knows. Not one person on Spartacus's side wrote a word down. Everything that survives came from Romans, most of it written a century and a half or more after the fact, and much of it inside a biography of the general who finally beat him. Readers follow the campaign season by season while also learning to ask where each detail came from, why a number might be inflated, and which famous scenes were invented much later — including the one everybody can quote. Written for readers aged nine to twelve, with a timeline, a glossary, a cast of characters, and a chapter-by-chapter accounting of what is certain, what is likely, and what had to be filled in.