Ben Kane

And let's say Spartacus had...

a couple of hundred men by this point, you know, maybe more, but probably not very many more.

Certainly nothing to compare with 3,000 armed, well-armed, they would have been, Roman soldiers, even if they were of dubious quality.

Now, Vesuvius is pretty big, so Glaber couldn't surround it completely.

But what he did was he blocked the road up to it.

There was only one road up to the top and set up camp and presumably had sentries in and maybe watch posts separated around the base of the mountain.

We don't know.

But what we do know is that he sat and waited to see what would happen.

And one of the things that's pertinent to mention at this point is that generally in ancient times, nobody fought at night.

The night was the domain of gods and demons and spirits, and it was really bad luck.

Now, obviously, they didn't have infrared, they didn't have radios, so it was very confusing and easy to get lost, all those things.

So, Spartacus attacked the camp at night, but how did he get down there?

It's really, really, really cool what he did.

There were, and still are, wild vines growing on the slopes of Mansuvius today, and they fashioned ropes from them.

Now, we're not talking about going down a vertical cliff, because they're not strong enough to take the weight of a man, but...

A lot of the slopes coming down of Vesuvius are really steep and potentially covered in scree and gravel-type surface and would have been very dangerous and difficult to come down, especially if you're carrying weapons.

So they fashioned ropes and came down at night in an area where the Romans weren't watching, and they attacked the Roman camp under the cover of darkness and caused total panic.

I mean, I had such fun writing scenes like this because...

What's likely, I mean, a Roman army on the march, when it finishes, it digs out a two to three meter, six to nine foot deep V-shaped ditch and then uses the earth from that to make a two to three meter high wall if it's doing its job properly.

But maybe Glaber's men hadn't done it properly because, oh, what a weekend, they're only slaves.