Ben Kane

He's decided... He's decided, you know what, actually, I'm not going to take orders probably from you anymore.

And he'd split away from...

Spartacus by this point and they, his army, which they think was between 20 and 30,000 strong.

So potentially a big chunk of Spartacus's army, it went over to the east coast of Italy and was, was presumably pillaging its way through settlements and towns up there because nothing would have been able to stop it.

But by this point, the Romans had realized, the Senate had realized that they had to face this with proper force.

And so both consuls were mobilized and sent to deal with it.

And one of them, who interestingly was a man in his 60s with not much combat experience, called Gellius.

Gilles publicola, he was 62 years old.

So that's really old for Roman.

And he encountered Crixus near Mount Gargano.

Now, if you're, if you look at a map of Italy and you go up from the, the heel of the boot and the toe of the boot on the Adriatic side, about a third of the way up, there's a bump like a callus.

Yes, yep.

And it's near the town of Bari.

And that callus or bump, if you zone in on it on Google with your looking at the terrain, it's a mountain called Mount Gargano.

Maybe it was a volcano a very long time ago, but that's on the slopes of that mountain is where...

The Romans put their forces, so they took the high ground.

They were outnumbered significantly, 10,000 roughly soldiers, two legions with maybe some socii or auxiliaries, we don't know, but about 10,000 soldiers.

Yeah, I mean, or maybe the legion was 5,000 strong then, you know, because who knows how big a legion was and all that.

About 10,000 Romans, a lot, but about 30,000 slaves.

And they attacked up the slope at Gellius' army and apparently attacked three or four times and were beaten back.