Ben Kane

will be executed.

In fact, beaten to death in front of the rest of the Legion by his comrades.

So 50 men or 48 men out of a cohort of 480 were beaten to death in front of the army.

And that brutal message meant that none of Crassus' soldiers ran away after that.

So I get asked this a lot.

Well, if the Romans were forever, you know, using the Fusterarium, which is where you beat a few men to death or the decimation, if they were always doing that, then how did they ever have any men to fight?

Because they would have been executing all these men.

You don't have to do something like that very often.

you know, do it once and it'll work for years before men run away again.

It was very rare.

Decimation is only described three or four times in all of the Roman battles that I'm aware of.

Correct, yeah.

So he ended up going down into the toe of the boot to near Regium, which I think is Regio today.

And listeners and viewers will know that it's really close to Sicily.

You can see it.

It's a mile, about a mile, which is near enough to see details.

But that distance in ancient times is as far as the moon when you haven't got ships.

Because the waters, and we're now into autumn time, would have been very uncertain.

You had the myth, obviously, of the whirlpool, Charybdis, and the mythical beast, the Scylla, that killed sailors that would try to go through it.

But Roman ships in general were pretty bad.