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]