Ben Kane
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Or if they did, it wasn't high enough or there weren't enough sentries.
They just ran off into the night, basically abandoning their camp and all their arms and equipment.
Now, presumably some of them were killed, but it didn't really matter because suddenly Spartacus's men had the arms and armor potentially of 3,000 soldiers.
And at this time, the slave population of Italy is estimated to be over a million, at least a third of the population
And in that rich, fertile area full of farms and estates, high density of slave population, you can bet your boots that the gossip around the well or the gossip in the marketplace of slaves meeting each other on the road with wagons or
you know, whenever there was a point for slaves of one estate to talk to others, it would have just gone around the country like wildfire.
Everybody, the citizens would have been talking about it.
The citizens would have been terrified, but the slaves, importantly, would have said, do you hear what happened?
And I mean, literally, from that point on, the slaves were flocking to his army because...
some slaves lived in manacles but mostly they didn't or if they did it was at night if they were agricultural and in domestic cases they probably were never chained up so they could just run away and actually their fetters even if they did come to them in fetters they then later used them to make weapons I mean the weapons part I'd like to ask a bit more about because you mentioned how early on they fortunately come across that wagon of weapons for a gladiator school
The gladius used by gladiators was the same as in a military one.
Yeah, and the spear that the Gaul used, we don't know, but it was probably just the same as any other spear.
Now, the Thracian gladiator used a sicca, which is the curved Thracian blade.