Ben Kane

You know, hey, if you pay me more, I won't go and do this.

I can't remember, but it's certainly possible.

What we do know is that Spartacus' men then tried to build some rafts and were unsuccessful.

Likely some of them drowned and they just had to give up on crossing to Sicily.

By this point, Crassus' legions were really close.

They were in the point of the boot.

So the route back to mainland Italy was blocked.

Now, any of you who've ever been that part of the world, you know that there are mountains going all the way down to Reggio, and they're really high.

I mean, they're up to 1,000 meters, I think, and winter was here.

And so it's recorded that Crassus built a wall from one side of the point of the boot to the other.

In other words, from the Ionian, no, from the Ionian Sea to the Adriatic.

Now, that's about 50K, 35 miles.

Even when they built the siege of Numantia, that was only a fraction of that distance of fortifications.

But as academics that I've read have pointed out, if you go to that area, a lot of it's...

completely impassable with cliffs and so on.

So there's actually only a few areas, the coastline on each side and the ridge at the top of the mountains, which is only about three quarters of a mile wide or just over a K. So the fortifications that Crassus had his men built may not have been that big, but he was still able to defend it.

And so Spartacus was basically trapped during the winter in this inhospitable area where there would have been very few settlements.

very little food other than what they could hunt.

And when they tried to break through the Roman fortifications, ditches, ramps, walls, and everything, they failed initially.

And it wasn't until in utter desperation then in late winter 72, early 71 BC,