Historical accounts suggest that the rebellious gladiator Spartacus met his demise in 71 B.C. after his uprising against the Roman republic was defeated. But on cable television, “Spartacus” is coming to an end in A.D. 2013: On Monday, the Starz cable channel announced that the epic action series’ coming season, beginning in January, would be its last.

Steven DeKnight, the show’s creator, said the new season, called “Spartacus: War of the Damned,” would depict the conclusive confrontation between the armies of Spartacus and Roman general Marcus Crassus. The decision to end the series, he said, was one that he, his fellow producers and Starz executives arrived at mutually after several months of discussion.

“I think the best-case scenario for a show — this may not be the best financial scenario, but creatively the best scenario — is to end your show and leave the audience wanting more,” DeKnight said.

Looking over the last years of the real-life Spartacus, DeKnight said, “it’s basically a series of senators dispatched from Rome to quell the rebellion, and one after another get defeated until finally Marcus Crassus goes after Spartacus.” Rather than risk repetition, he said, he wanted to “get to our main guy faster” and “try to do 10 episodes that were the best we could possibly make.”

When it made its debut in 2010 “Spartacus,” whose first season was subtitled “Blood and Sand,” was among the first original series to gain traction for Starz, drawing more than 1 million viewers for new broadcasts of its final few episodes. But plans for subsequent seasons were shifted when actor Andy Whitfield, who played the title role, was given a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Whitfield died in September.

A 2011 prequel series, “Gods of the Arena,” did not focus on the Spartacus character, and Liam McIntyre took over the role in the next season, “Vengeance,” which continued the story from “Blood and Sand.”

The March 30 finale of “Spartacus: Vengeance” drew 1.45 million viewers, a strong showing compared with the audiences that Starz has seen for series like “Boss” and “Magic City.”

Carmi Zlotnik, the managing director of Starz, said in a telephone interview that it was best to end “Spartacus” now, to “honor the show, its accomplishments and the storytelling.”

Pointing to other new series that Starz has commissioned, including “Da Vinci’s Demons” (about the early life of Leonardo), “Marco Polo” and “Black Sails” (a pirate adventure produced by Michael Bay), Zlotnik said, “Those are shows that have that huge and epic scale associated with them, and we think we’ll deliver on some of those same programming values as what ‘Spartacus’ achieved.”

DeKnight, who has a development deal at Starz, said a new project of his own would probably be announced in the months ahead.