The new commander-in-chief began by treating the first division, which again threw away its arms and fled before the banditti, with all the severity of martial law, and causing every tenth man in it to be executed; whereupon the legions in reality grew somewhat more manly.

Spartacus, vanquished in the next engagement, retreated and sought to reach Rhegium through Lucania.
Conflicts in the Bruttian Country Just at that time the pirates commanded not merely the Sicilian waters, but even the port of Syracuse;( 26) with the help of their boats Spartacus proposed to throw a corps into Sicily, where the slaves only waited an impulse to break out a third time.

The march to Rhegium was accomplished; but the corsairs, perhaps terrified by the coastguards established in Sicily by the praetor Gaius Verres, perhaps also bribed by the Romans, took from Spartacus the stipulated hire without performing the service for which it was given.

Crassus meanwhile had followed the robber-army nearly as far as the mouth, of the Crathis, and, like Scipio before Numantia, ordered his soldiers, seeing that they did not fight as they ought, to construct an entrenched wall of the length of thirty-five miles, which shut off the Bruttian peninsula from the rest of Italy,( 27) intercepted the insurgent army on the return from Rhegium, and cut off its supplies.

But in a dark winter night Spartacus broke through the lines of the enemy, and in the spring of 683( 28) was once more in Lucania.