Ben Kane

a really big force.

Now, obviously, most of them would not have been trained soldiers.

And so despite the size of this army, which now came down off Vesuvius and started moving south because they needed food.

So tens of thousands of men, whether they're slaves or regionaries, they need an awful lot of food.

You're talking hundreds of tons of food every day.

And so they're like a plague of locusts.

So

God forbid you were a Roman citizen in Forum Aniae, for example, which was a small Roman town near Nola and Nuceria, which are two other towns which were probably attacked by Spartacus, which was descended upon by Spartacus's army at that time.

And basically, you just imagine what they did.

They did everything horrible that you can imagine, killed and raped and murdered.

And it's thought that Spartacus didn't want that to happen.

Interestingly, some of the sources describe him as a man of great, not just great strength, but of intellect and someone who was not a savage.

Right, okay.

You could argue that they did that because it was common, just like descriptions of Hannibal Barca,

When you've got somebody who's basically handed the Republic its own backside on a plate multiple times over, you can't denigrate him and make him out to be useless and stupid and a savage.

It's the noble barbarian.

So the noble barbarian, because how else could he have beaten us?

Yes, they do it with everybody.

Because the Romans, let's face it, everybody, the Romans were racist, misogynistic, and homophobic for the most part.

So if you were non-Roman, you really were looked down on.