A History of Rome During the Later Republic and Early Principate. A. H. J. Greenidge
sea of hostile faces and accusing eyes. He attempted a defence and was listened to in silence—nay, with approval, for many of his auditors were visibly stirred by his words. But some bolder spirits were tired of the show or fearful of its issue. Hermeias and Zeuxis, two of his bitterest enemies, shouted out that he was an Impostor[275] and rushed upon him. One of the two thrust a sword through his side, the other smote his head off with an axe. It was then the women's turn. Megallis's female slaves were given the power to treat her as they would. They first tortured her, then led her up to a high place and dashed her to the ground. Eunus avenged his private wrongs by the death of his own masters, Antigenes and Python. The scene in the theatre had perhaps revealed more than the desire for a systematised revenge. It may have shown that there was some sense of justice, of order in the savage multitude. And indeed vengeance was not wholly indiscriminate. Eunus concealed and sent secretly away the men who had given him meat from their tables.[276] Even the whole house of Damophilus did not perish. There was a daughter, a strange product of such a home, a maiden with a pure simplicity of character and a heart that melted at the sight of pain. She had been used to soothe the anguish of those who had been scourged by her parents and to relieve the necessities of such as were put in bonds. Hence the abounding love felt for her by the slaves, the pity that thrilled them when her home was doomed. An escort was selected to convey her in safety to some relatives at Catana. Its most devoted member was Hermeias,[277] perhaps the very man whose hands were stained by her father's blood.
The next step in the progress of the revolt was to form a political and military organisation that might command the respect of the countless slaves who were soon to break their bonds in the other districts of Sicily. Eunus was elected king. His name became Antiochus, his subjects were "Syrians." [278] It was not the first time that a slave had assumed the diadem; for was it not being worn for the moment by Diodotus surnamed Tryphon, the guardian and reputed murderer of Alexander of Syria?[279] The elevation of Eunus to the throne was due to no belief in his courage or his generalship. But he was the prophet of the movement, the cause of its inception, and his very name was considered to be of good omen for the harmony of his subjects. When he had bound the diadem on his brow and adopted regal state, he elevated the woman who had been his companion (a Syrian and an Apamean like himself) to the rank of queen. He formed a council of such of his followers as were thought to possess wits above the average, and he set himself to make Enna the adequate centre of a lengthy war. He put to death all his captives in Enna who had no skill in fashioning arms; the residue he put in bonds and set to the task of forging weapons.
Eunus was no warrior, but he had the regal gift of recognising merit. The soul of the military movement which spread from Enna was Achaeus,[280] a man pre-eminent both in counsel and in action,[281] one who did not permit his reason to be mastered by passion and whose anger was chiefly kindled by the foolish atrocities committed by some of his followers.[282] Under such a leader the cause rapidly advanced. The original four hundred had swelled in three days to six thousand; it soon became ten thousand. As Achaeus advanced, the ergastula were broken open and each of these prison-houses furnished a new multitude of recruits.[283] Soon a vast addition to the available forces was effected by a movement in another part of the island. In the territory of Agrigentum one Cleon a Cilician suddenly arose as a leader of his fellows. He was sprung from the regions about Mount Taurus and had been habituated from his youth to a life of brigandage. In Sicily he was supposed to be a herdsman of horses. He was also a highwayman who commanded the roads and was believed to have committed murders of varied types. When he heard of the success of Eunus, he deemed that the moment had come for raising a revolt on his own account. He gathered a band of followers, overwhelmed the city of Agrigentum and ravaged the surrounding territory.[284]
The terrified Siceliots, and perhaps some of the slaves themselves, believed that this dual movement might ruin the servile cause. There were daily expectations that the armies of Eunus and Cleon would meet in conflict. But such hopes or fears were disappointed. Cleon put himself absolutely under the authority of Eunus and performed the functions of a general to a king. The junction of the forces occurred about thirty days after the outbreak at Enna, and the Cilician brought five thousand men to the royal standard. The full complement of the slaves when first they joined battle with the Roman power amounted to twenty thousand men; before the close of the war their army numbered over sixty thousand.[285]
The Roman government exhibited its usual slowness in realising the gravity of the situation; yet it may be excused for believing that it had only to deal with local tumults such as those which had been so easily suppressed in Italy. The force of eight thousand men which it put into the field under the praetor Lucius Hypsaeus may have seemed more than sufficient. Yet it was routed by the insurgent army, now numbering twenty thousand men, and in the skirmishes which followed the balance of success inclined to the rebels. The immediate progress of the struggle cannot be traced in any detail, but there is a general record of the storming of Roman camps and the flight of Roman generals.[286]
The theatre of the war was certainly extending at an alarming rate. The rebels had first controlled the centre and some part of the South Western portion of the island, the region between Enna and Agrigentum; but now they had pushed their conquests up to the East, had reached the coast and had gained possession of Catana and Tauromenium.[287] The devastation of the conquered districts is said to have been more terrible than that which followed on the Punic War.[288] But for this the slaves were not wholly, perhaps not mainly, responsible. The rebel armies, looking to a settlement in the future when they should enjoy the fruit of their victories, left the villas standing, their furniture and stores uninjured, and did no harm to the implements of husbandry. It was the free peasantry of Sicily that now showed a savage resentment at the inequality of fortune and of life which severed them from the great landholders. Under pretext of the servile war[289] they sallied out, and not only plundered the goods of the conquered, but even set fire to their villas.
The words of Eunus when, at the beginning of the revolt, he claimed Enna as the metropolis of the new nation, and the conduct of his followers in sparing the grandeur and comfort which had fallen into their hands, are sufficient proofs that the revolted slaves, in spite of their possession of the seaports of Catana and Tauromenium, had no intention of escaping from Sicily. Perhaps even if they had willed it, such a course might have been impossible. They had no fleet of their own; the Cilician pirates off the coast might have refused to accept such dangerous passengers and to imperil their reputation as honest members of the slave trade. And, if the fugitives crossed the sea, what homes had they to which they could return? To their own cities they were dead, and the long arm of Rome stretched over her protectorates in the East.[290]
It was therefore with a power which intended a permanent settlement in Sicily, that the Roman government had to cope. Its sense of the gravity of the situation was seen in the despatch of consular armies. The first under Caius Fulvius Flaccus seems to have effected little.[291] The second under Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the consul of the following year, laid siege to Enna,[292] and captured a stronghold of the rebels. Eight thousand of the slaves were slain by the sword, all who could be seized were nailed to the cross.[293] The crowning victories, and the nominal pacification of the island, remained for Piso's successor, Publius Rupilius. He drove the rebels into Tauromenium and sat down before the city until they were reduced to unspeakable straits by famine. The town was at length yielded through treachery; Sarapion a Syrian betrayed the acropolis, and the Roman commander found a multitude of starving men at his mercy, He was pitiless in his use of victory. The captives were first tortured, then taken up to a high place and dashed downwards to the ground. The consul then moved on Enna. The rebels defended their last stronghold with the utmost courage and persistence. Achaeus seems to have already fallen, but the brave Cilician leaders still held out with all the native valour of their race. Cleon made a sortie from the town and fought heroically until he fell covered with wounds. Cleon's brother Coma[294] was captured during the siege and brought before Rupilius, who questioned him about the strength and the plans of the remaining fugitives. He asked for a moment to collect his thoughts, covered his head with his cloak, and died of suffocation, in the hands of his guard and in sight of the general, before a compromising word had passed his lips. King Eunus was not made of such stern stuff. When Enna, impregnable in its natural strength, had been taken by treachery, he fled with his bodyguard of a thousand men to still more precipitous regions. His companions, knowing that it was impossible to escape their fate (for Rupilius was