the soldiers, vehemently as they had demanded battle a little before, fought ill; Varinius was completely vanquished; his horse and the insignia of his official dignity fell with the Roman camp itself into the enemy’s hand.  The south-Italian slaves, especially the brave half-savage herdsmen, flocked in crowds to the banner of the deliverers who had so unexpectedly appeared; according to the most moderate estimates the number of armed insurgents rose to 40,000 men.  Campania, just evacuated, was speedily reoccupied, and the Roman corps which was left behind there under Gaius Thoranius, the quaestor of Varinius, was broken and destroyed.  In the whole south and south-west of Italy the open country was in the hands of the victorious bandit-chiefs; even considerable towns, such as Consentia in the Bruttian country, Thurii and Metapontum in Lucania, Nola and Nuceria in Campania, were stormed by them, and suffered all the atrocities which victorious barbarians could inflict on defenceless civilized men, and unshackled slaves on their former masters.  That a conflict like this should be altogether abnormal and more a massacre than a war, was unhappily a matter of course:  the masters duly crucified every captured slave; the slaves naturally killed their prisoners also, or with still more sarcastic retaliation even compelled their Roman captives to slaughter each other in gladiatorial sport; as was subsequently done with three hundred of them at the obsequies of a robber-captain who had fallen in combat.

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 (682) to send both consuls against the formidable leaders of the gang.  The praetor Quintus Arrius, a lieutenant of the consul Lucius Gellius, actually succeeded in seizing and destroying at Mount Garganus in Apulia the Celtic band, which under Crixus had separated from the mass of the robber-army and was levying contributions at its own hand.  But Spartacus achieved all the more brilliant victories in the Apennines and in northern Italy, where first the consul Gnaeus Lentulus who had thought to surround and capture the robbers, then his colleague Gellius and the so recently victorious praetor Arrius, and lastly at Mutina the governor of Cisalpine Gaul Gaius Cassius (consul 681) and the praetor Gnaeus Manlius, one after another succumbed to his blows.  The scarcely-armed gangs of slaves were the terror of the legions; the series of defeats recalled the first years of the Hannibalic war.

Internal Dissension among the Insurgents