Ben Kane

And he wasn't going to go north again because he would have heard of Crassus' army and that's where they'd come from anyway.

So they would have been raiding farms and towns for food and equipment and so on.

And Crassus pursued him down towards southern Italy and his army would have been moving in different parts and

A leading part of his army was led by an officer called Mummius.

And he was given very strict instructions to get close to Spartacus, but not to engage with him.

So he had a force of two legions under his control.

And in the way that often happens when men's blood is up, he got too close to Spartacus and troops started fighting.

Maybe they were scouts and maybe he deployed some legionaries.

It developed into a battle and they got beaten.

And they came with their tails between their legs back to Crassus' camp, and Crassus decided that he had to lay down a really certain deliberate message that you do not run away from the enemy in battle.

And so he ordered, it's thought, a full cohort to be decimated.

Right, okay.

This is gruesome stuff.

What is a decimation?

So I'm quite pedantic, as your readers might have ascertained, or readers, sorry, viewers and listeners might have ascertained by this point.

Decimation, the meaning of decimation is actually different today.

And it's happened because of ignorance.

Because decimation today, if you hear news reporters talking about it, it means annihilation.

If a town has been decimated or an army unit's been decimated, almost none of them survive.

However, it comes from the Roman punishment, so this is the correct interpretation, which is one man in ten