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Orosius on Spartacus
Orosius, Histories
5. 24. 1-8
1. In the six hundred and seventy-ninth year after the founding of the City, in the consulship of Lucullus and Cassius, seventy-four gladiators at Capua escaped from the training school of Cn. Lentulus. These immediately, under the leadership of Crixus and Oenomaus who were Gauls, and Spartacus, a Thracian, occupied Mount Vesuvius. Rushing down from there, they captured the camp of Clodius, the praetor, who had encircled them in a siege, and when he had been driven into flight, they turned their complete attention to plundering.
2. Then, going about through Consentia and Metapontum, they gathered together huge forces in a short time. For Crixus was reported to have had a multitude of ten thousand, and Spartacus three times as many; Oenomaus had already been killed in an earlier battle.
3. And so when the fugitives were confusing everything with slaughters, conflagrations, plunderings, and defilements, at the funeral of a captive woman who had killed herself out of grief for her outraged honor, they presented a gladiatorial performance with four hundred captives, that is, those who had been the ones to be viewed, were to view, namely, as trainers of gladiators rather than as commanders of troops.
4. The consuls, Gellius and Lentulus, were sent against them with their army. Of these, Gellius overcame Crixus who fought very bravely, and Lentulus, when overcome by Spartacus, fled. Later also, both consuls, after having joined forces in vain, fled, suffering heavy losses. Then the same Spartacus, after defeating C. Cassius, the proconsul, in battle, killed him.
5. And so, with the City terrified with almost no less fear than when Hannibal was raging at the gates, they became alarmed and sent Crassus with the legions of the consuls and a new complement of soldiers. 6. He presently, after entering battle with the fugitives, killed six thousand of them, but captured only nine hundred. Then, before he approached Spartacus himself in battle, who was laying out a camp at the head of the Silarus River, he overcame the Gallic and German auxiliaries of Spartacus, of whom he killed thirty thousand men with their leaders. 7. After he had organized his battle line, he met Spartacus himself and killed him with most of the forces of the fugitives. For sixty thousand of them are reported to have been killed and six thousand captured, and three thousand Roman citizens were recovered. 8. The remaining gladiators, who had slipped away from this battle and wandered off, were killed by many generals in persistent pursuit.
18-19. Apart from those three very vast wars, that is, the Pamphylian, the Macedonian, and the Dalmatian, although, too, that great Mithridatic War, by far the longest of all, the most dangerous, and the most dreadful, was concealed as to its true character; still, while the Sertorian War in Spain was not yet ended, rather while Sertorius himself was still living, that war against the fugitive slaves, to describe it more accurately, that war against the gladiators, caused great horrors which were to be seen by few, but everywhere to be feared. Because this war is called the war against the fugitive slaves, let it not be held of little consequence because of the name. Often in that war, individual consuls and sometimes both consuls with their battle lines joined in vain were overcome and a great many nobles were slain. Moreover, there were more than one hundred fugitives who were slain.
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