Brent D. Shaw is professor of Classical Studies and chair of the Graduate Group in Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been published in many major historical, sociological, and anthropological journals, including Past & Present, American Historical Review, History Today, Journal of Roman Studies, Man, and American Journal of Sociology and is editor of the collected papers of Sir Moses Finley. He is the recipient of the Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and has been Commonwealth Scholar at Cambridge University, honorary visiting Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and Goldman Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His study of violence in Roman society, especially in civil conflict in the later Roman Empire, helped inspire this volume.

In 73 BC, in the heart of Rome's Mediterranean empire, a slave named Spartacus ignited one of the most violent episodes of slave resistance in the history of the Roman Empire, indeed in the world annals of slavery. This volume organizes original translations of 80 Greek and Latin sources into topical chapters that look at the daily lives of slaves trained as gladiators and those who laboured on farms in Italy and Sicily, including accounts of revolts that preceded and anticipated that of Spartacus. In a carefully crafted introductory essay, Brent D. Shaw places Spartacus in a broader context of first and second century BCE Roman Italy and Sicily and explains why his story continues to be a popular symbol of rebellion today.