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Updated: May 31, 2025
Great Victories of Spartacus In Rome people were with reason apprehensive as to the destructive conflagration which was daily spreading. It was resolved next year to send both consuls against the formidable leaders of the gang.
Spartacus now attempted to force his way towards the Alps; and Cassius who "was the governor of Gaul upon the Padus, met him with ten thousand men, and a battle was fought, in which Cassius was defeated with great lose, and with difficulty made his escape.
This they agreed to do, and were paid in advance by Spartacus, though it is probable that he relied less upon that payment for their assistance than upon the palpable fact that their interests were the same as his own. The pirates were on the sea what the gladiatorial army was on land. They were the victims of Roman oppression, and had become outlaws because the world's law was against them.
Spartacus too as well as Hannibal had traversed Italy with an army from the Po to the Sicilian straits, beaten both consuls, and threatened Rome with blockade; the enterprise which had needed the greatest general of antiquity to conduct it against the Rome of former days could be undertaken against the Rome of the present by a daring captain of banditti.
These were naturally in great part brave men captured in war, who had not forgotten that they had once faced the Romans in the field. A number of these desperadoes broke out of one of the Capuan gladiatorial schools , and sought refuge on Mount Vesuvius. At their head were two Celts, who were designated by their slave-names Crixus and Oenomaus, and the Thracian Spartacus.
"I admit that," Pollio said, "and though, since Nero came to the throne, there has been an increase in these gladiatorial displays, methinks there are fewer now than in the days before the Empire, when Spartacus led twenty thousand gladiators against Rome.
The armies met on the Silarus, in the northern part of Lucania; and the battle which followed, and which was to finish this remarkable war, was fought not far from where the traveller now sees the noble ruins of Paestum. Spartacus made his last speech to his soldiers, warning them of what they would have to expect, if they should fall alive into the hands of their old masters.
From every quarter the hard-worked slaves flocked to the standard of Spartacus, and soon he found himself at the head of a large army. His plan was to cross the Alps, and find a place of refuge in Gaul or in his native Thrace; but his brutalized followers thought only of the present.
The army of Spartacus numbered forty thousand men, but it was poorly armed, and its discipline was very imperfect. It still lacked, to use a modern term, "the baptism of fire," never yet having been matched in the open field against a regular force. Its arms were chiefly agricultural implements, and wooden pikes that had been made by hardening the points of stakes with fire.
More than half the rim of the ancient crater that had enclosed Spartacus and his men less than two hundred years before had been torn away and destroyed, its remaining portion on the landward side retaining the old name of Mons Summanus.
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