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It stands as a story worn in the hearts of men as they strap themselves up for battle. A story so long told that it is hard to distinguish from the myths of gods and heroes, and yet ingrained in every single one of them - nursed into their hearts as milk from their mother's teats. The edges of the words are worn dull and dusty from use, and as wrinkled and yellowed by time as if they were written on paper, and yet that does not matter when they feel the fire burn inside them.
There once was a man with a roar so ferocious, he could see the might of Rome tremble in its wake.
The story always started the same. Fires crackled and wood was added, and the growing roar of the flame would see children's imaginations borne back to a time so long ago that they thought it might not be real. Everyone huddled closer, but no matter how the wind and snow howled at their backs, they did not huddle now but for warmth, but to hear the story once again.
He had no home, and he had no name, but he had heart. And he had love. And when he spoke, the world listened.
No one quite remembered where the story had come from. No one remembered a broken young man, with hands wrapped in bandages stiff and browned with blood, sunburn and windburn upon his cheek who'd carried it back to them from Rome. No one quite remembered that the man's German had come to bear something similar to a Latin accent from time spent in captivity and living among the very people he spoke against, or the way he leaned heavily on the dark-haired man who'd returned to his side.
They were not a part of the story.
They did not need to be.
It is a story that unites men in one single cause. In its words, tribe and creed are overlooked, and all that remains is a need for justice.
It mattered not whether the listener was Gaul, or Celt or German. Whether they wore the dark skin of Salicia, or the fair coloring of the North. Because he did not speak of race or tribe or lands: he spoke of freedom, for every man, from the tyranny of Rome.
They were not men who had ever stood slaves to Rome. Most of them would never know the lash, or feel the sting of the whip on a hot day, and could never imagine even the heat of the Roman sun. And yet in this story, they found purpose.
In the story of the unnamed man who made Rome tremble, they felt their hearts lit aflame with passion and thirst for vengeance and the justice that he had not lived to see.
It is story that stands in their hearts for three hundred years, growing and festering and inspiring the men East of the Rhine. It endures through harshest winters, when the weak and the old died, and in harshest battles when even the strong fall to the afterlife. It lives and breathes with them all, ebbing and flowing, but as constant as the current in the river itself. It starts as but a trickle, spilling from the lips of one man to the first family that takes him in as he flees the shadow of Rome, and then again to the second and the third, until the flood gates are opened and it becomes an unstoppable force.
When they stand against Rome, unified and united with petty squabbles of tribes and kin forgotten, it is the story that rings through the air, the soundtrack of the day, even if no one speaks the words.
And though the story forgets his name, in their hearts, they all know the man. They all see, in themselves, the legend of Spartacus.