In 135 BC, on a Sicilian estate whose owner had grown rich from the grain that fed Rome, a Syrian prophet named Eunus announced himself king. Within weeks, the island's enslaved pastoral workers had followed him into open revolt. What they built in the years that followed was not a rebellion ? it was a state. Complete with coinage, a royal court organized on Hellenistic lines, a functioning administrative apparatus, and a military force that defeated three Roman armies before the Senate finally committed its full consular power to the suppression, the rebel kingdom of King Antiochus stood for four years at the center of the island Rome depended on to eat.

The First Servile War is the full story of Rome's most significant internal military crisis before Spartacus: the four-year struggle between a self-organized enslaved population and the most powerful republic in the ancient world. It traces the life of Eunus from Syrian prophet to Sicilian king; the military genius of Cleon, the Cilician herdsman who built the rebel army; the paralysis of Roman provincial governance that allowed the revolt to ignite; and the methodical campaigns of the consuls Piso and Rupilius who finally, at enormous cost, put it down.

Drawing on Diodorus Siculus, Posidonius, the archaeological record, and a century of modern scholarship, Cannon Mac Reed recovers the full scale of what was achieved ? and what was lost ? on the plateau of Enna in the second century BC.