Proceeding to the south, Spartacus fell in with a great Roman army led by Arrius, and a battle was fought near Ancona, in which victory was true to the gladiator. The Romans were not only beaten, their army was utterly destroyed; a result which they seem to have felt to be so shameful, that they made no apologies for it. Why, after this signal victory, Spartacus did not forthwith carry out his grand design of attacking Rome,--a design every way so worthy of his genius, and which alone could give him a chance of achieving permanent success after he had abandoned the idea of forcing his way out of Italy by a northern march,--can never be known. It is supposed to have been in consequence of information that circumstances had now placed it in his power to effect a passage into Sicily, a project which he had regarded with favor at an earlier period.
At this time the Cilician pirates had the command of the Mediterranean, which they held until they were conquered, some years later, by Pompeius. It was by the aid of these men that Spartacus expected to carry his army into Sicily. They had shipping in abundance, and in a few days they could have conveyed a hundred thousand men across the narrow strait that separates Sicily from Italy. This they agreed to do, and were paid in advance by Spartacus, though it is probable that he relied less upon that payment for their assistance than upon the palpable fact that their interests were the same as his own. The pirates were on the sea what the gladiatorial army was on land. They were the victims of Roman oppression, and had become outlaws because the world's law was against them. A union of their fleets, which numbered more than a thousand vessels, with the army of Spartacus, in the harbors and on the fields of Sicily, would perhaps have been more than a match for the whole power of Rome, contending as the republic then was with Mithridates, and bleeding still from the wounds inflicted by Marius and Sulla, as well as from the blows of Spartacus. Sicily, too, was then in a state which promised well for the design of the Thracian. Verres was ruling over the island,--and how he ruled it Cicero has told us. Had the victorious Thracian entered the island, both the free population and the slaves would have risen against the Romans. A new state might have been formed, strong both in fleets and in armies, and compelled from the very nature of its origin to contend to the death with its old oppressors. Whatever the result, it is certain that a long Sicilian war, like that which the Romans had been compelled to wage with the Carthaginians, would have changed the course of history, by directing the attention and the energies of such men as Crassus, Pompeius, and Caesar to very different fields from those on which their fame and power were won.