to surround
and capture the robbers, then his colleague Gellius and the so recently
victorious praetor Arrius, and lastly at Mutina the governor
of Cisalpine Gaul Gaius Cassius (consul 681) and the praetor Gnaeus
Manlius, one after another succumbed to his blows. The scarcely-
armed gangs of slaves were the terror of the legions; the series
of defeats recalled the first years of the Hannibalic war.

Internal Dissension among the Insurgents

What might have come of it, had the national kings
from the mountains of Auvergne or of the Balkan, and not runaway
gladiatorial slaves, been at the head of the victorious bands,
it is impossible to say; as it was, the movement remained
notwithstanding its brilliant victories a rising of robbers,
and succumbed less to the superior force of its opponents than
to internal discord and the want of definite plan. The unity
in confronting the common foe, which was so remarkably conspicuous
in the earlier servile wars of Sicily, was wanting in this Italian
war--a difference probably due to the fact that, while the Sicilian
slaves found a quasi-national point of union in the common
Syrohellenism, the Italian slaves were separated into the two
bodies of Helleno-Barbarians and Celto-Germans. The rupture
between the Celtic Crixus and the Thracian Spartacus--Oenomaus had
fallen in one of the earliest conflicts--and other similar quarrels
crippled them in turning to account the successes achieved,
and procured for the Romans several important victories. But the want
of a definite plan and aim produced far more injurious effects
on the enterprise than the insubordination of the Celto-Germans.
Spartacus doubtless--to judge by the little which we learn
regarding that remarkable man--stood in this respect above his party.
Along with his strategic ability he displayed no ordinary
talent for organization, as indeed from the very outset
the uprightness, with which he presided over his band and distributed
the spoil, had directed the eyes of the multitude to him quite
as much at least as his valour. To remedy the severely felt want
of cavalry and of arms, he tried with the help of the herds of horses
seized in Lower Italy to train and discipline a cavalry, and, so soon as
he got the port of Thurii into his hands, to procure from that quarter
iron and copper, doubtless through the medium of the pirates.
But in the main matters he was unable to induce the wild hordes
whom he led to pursue any fixe