Soon after, Cleon, a Cilician slave, stormed the city of Agrigentum on the southern coast, slaughtered the population, and then joined Eunus' army and became his military commander.

Eunus and Cleon were able to repel several Roman attempts to quell the rebellion until an army commanded by consul Publius Rupilius arrived in Sicily in 134 and besieged the cities controlled by the slaves.

Speculators from Italy rushed onto the island, buying up large tracts of land at low prices, or occupied estates which had belonged to Sicilians of the Carthaginian party.

The Roman conquest of Macedonia, in which thousands of the conquered were sold into slavery, the slave-dealing of the Cretan and Cilician pirates whose activity was practically unchecked at this time, as well as the oppression of corrupt Roman provincial governors, who were known to organize man-hunts after lower-class country provincials (to be sold as slaves)—all contributed to a constant supply of new slaves at very cheap price, which made it more profitable for their masters to wear them out by unremitting labor, harshness, exposure and malnutrition, to be cheaply replaced, than to take proper care for their nourishment, health, and accommodation.

[2] Accordingly, the plantation system which took shape in Sicily led to thousands of slaves dying every year of toil in the fields from dawn to dusk with chains around their legs, and being locked up in suffocating subterranean pits by night.

[1] The Roman Senate failed to take measures to curb this dangerous tendency, which converted one of the most beautiful and fertile provinces of the Republic into a horrible den of misery, brigandage, atrocity and death.

[4] In 135 BC, the plantation slaves in Sicily finally rose in revolt, having as their head a certain Eunus of Syrian origin, who, as a conjurer and self-proclaimed prophet, had long foretold that he would be king.

[citation needed] The spark which would end up starting the revolt came when a group of slaves, who were suffering under the severe cruelty of their owner Damophilus, sought out Eunus for advice on what to do about their situation.

Declaring that his prophecy was now to be fulfilled, Eunus organized about 400 slaves into a band and stormed the prominent city of Enna located in the interior of the island and the home of Damophilus.

The unprepared town was captured and savagely sacked by the insurgents, who executed every inhabitant but the iron-forgers, who were chained to their smithies and put to manufacturing arms for their captors.