Spartacus (24 page)

For once, he was blind to the smell and the sound and the sight of his beloved Rome. Gracchus was city born and bred, and the
urbs
was his habitat. It was part of him and he was part of it, and he nursed a consummate contempt for far horizons and green valleys and babbling brooks. He had learned to walk and run and fight in the twisting alleys and dirty gutters of Rome. He had scrambled like a goat in his childhood over the tall roofs of the endless tenement houses. The smell of charcoal fires, which pervaded the city, was the sweetest perfume he knew. This was one area in his life where cynicism never conquered. To go through the narrow market streets, with their rows of pushcarts and stalls, where the merchandise of the whole world was displayed and sold, was always a new adventure for him. Half the city knew him by sight. It was “Ho, Gracchus!” here, and “Ho, Gracchus!” there, with no ceremony or bother about it, and the venders and cobblers and beggars and loafers and draymen and masons and carpenters liked him because he was one of them and had fought and clawed his way up to the top. They liked him because when he bought votes, he paid the highest price. They liked him because he put on no airs and because he preferred to walk rather than ride in a litter and because he always had time to greet an old friend. That he offered no cure for their increasing misery and hopelessness in a world where slaves were driving them to become loafers and beggars who lived on the dole of the state, made little difference. They knew of no cure. And he, in turn, loved their world, the world of gloom where the towering tenements almost met over the dirty alleys and had to be propped apart with timbers, the world of the streets, the noisy, dirty, wretched streets of the world’s greatest city.

But on this day which he remembered so vividly, he was blind and shut off from all that. He walked through the streets without heeding the greetings. He bought nothing at the stalls. Even the tasty morsels of fried bacon, stuffed derma and smoked sausage which cooked on so many pushcarts did not attract him. Usually he could not resist the street cooking, the honey cakes and smoked fish and dried salted sardines and pickled apples and cured roe; but on this day he was unaware of it—and sunk in his own gloom, he returned to his home.

Gracchus, who was almost as wealthy as Crassus, never permitted himself to build or purchase one of the private villas which were going up in the new part of the city, among the gardens and parks along the river. He preferred to occupy the ground floor of a tenement in his old ward, and his doors were always open to those who desired to see him. It must be remarked that many well-to-do families lived in these ground floors. They were the choice tenement dwellings, and in a Roman tenement, the price decreased and the misery increased as one mounted the rickety stairs that led to the upper stories. Uusually it was only the two lowest floors which had water piped in and any toilet or bathing facilities to speak of; but the old tribal commune was not so far in the past that an absolute separation of rich and poor had been achieved everywhere, and many a wealthy merchant or banker had a veritable nest of poverty towering for seven stories over his head.

So Gracchus remembered how he had come back to his home that day with never a word of cheer or greeting for anyone, and how he had gone into his office, giving his slaves the rather unusual request that he be left alone. His slaves were all women; that he insisted upon and would have no man share his quarters with him; nor did he overdo it, as so many of his friends did. Fourteen women did for all of his needs. He kept no special harem, as bachelors frequently did; he used those of his slave women who attracted him at the times when he wanted a bedmate, and since he desired no complications in his home, whenever one of his women became pregnant, he sold her to a plantation owner. He reasoned that it was better for children to grow up in the country, and he saw nothing either immoral or cruel in his procedure.

He had no favorites among his women—since he never was capable of anything more than the most casual relationship with any woman—and he was fond of saying that his was a better ordered and more peaceful household than most. But now, as he lay in bed at the
Villa Salaria
and recalled that day, his memories of his household had no joy or warmth. A moral measure had taken hold of him, and it sickened him to think of how he lived. Yet he pursued the incidents of that day. He saw himself from a vantage point, a fat, gross man in a toga sitting all alone in the bare room he called his office, and he must have sat there for better than an hour before there was any interruption. Then a knock at the door.

“What is it?” he asked.

“There are some gentlemen to see you,” the slave said.

“I don’t want to see anyone.” How childish he was being!

“These are
fathers
and honorable persons from the Senate.”

So they had come to him, and he was not lost and cast out of their circle. What had made him think that he would be? Of course, they would come to him! He lived again. His ego returned. He sprang up and threw open the door, and he was the old Gracchus, smiling, assured, competent.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “Gentlemen, I bid you welcome.”

There were five in the committee. Two of them were
consulares;
the other three were patricians of distinction and shrewdness. The committee had come less in terms of the present emergency than to re-cement whatever political breaks Gracchus might be in the process of making. So they were bluff and intimate and they scolded him.

“Why, Gracchus? Have you been sitting there this whole year waiting for an opportunity to insult us?”

“I have neither the wit nor the grace to beg your pardon properly,” Gracchus apologized.

“You have both. But that is beside the point.”

He called for chairs, and they seated themselves in a circle around him, five men of age and dignity, wrapped in the fine white togas which had become the symbol of Roman rule the world over. He had wine brought and a tray of sweets. The
consularis
Caspius became the spokesman. He flattered Gracchus and puzzled him, for Gracchus did not see the occasion as being one of such monumental crisis. He had often dreamed of playing the part of consul, but that was not his dish and he had none of the talents or particular family connections required. He tried to guess what they were after, and could only presume that it was connected with Spain, where the revolt against the Senate—and Rome, of course—led by Sertorius, had turned into a contest for power between Sertorius and Pompey. Gracchus had his own estimation of this. He despised both the rivals, and was determined to sit by and allow them to destroy each other. As were, he knew, the five gentlemen who faced him.

“You see then,” said Caspius, “that this revolt in Capua has enormous implications of danger.”

“I don’t see that at all,” answered Gracchus flatly.

“Taking into consideration what we have suffered from slave revolts—”

“What do you know about this revolt?” asked Gracchus, more gently now than before. “How many slaves are there involved? Who are they? Where have they gone? How real is your worry?”

Caspius answered the questions one by one. “We have maintained constant communication. Initially, only the gladiators were involved. There is one report that only seventy escaped. A later report has it that over two hundred escaped, Thracians and Gauls and a number of black Africans. The later reports increase their numbers. This may be the result of panic. On the other hand, there may have been disturbances on the
latifundia
. They seem to have been responsible for considerable damage, but no details are available. As to where they have gone, it would seem that they are moving in the direction of Mount Vesuvius.”

“Nothing more than
it would seem,
” snapped Gracchus impatiently. “Are they idiots at Capua that they can’t assess what has happened in their own courtyard? They have a garrison there. Why didn’t the garrison put an end to this thing quickly and expeditiously?”

Caspius looked coolly at Gracchus. “They had only one
cohort
at Capua.”

“One cohort! How many troops do you need to pull down a few wretched gladiators?”

“You know as well as I do what must have happened at Capua.”

“I don’t know, but I can guess. And my guess would be that the garrison commander is in the pay of every filthy
lanista
operating in the place. Twenty soldiers here, a dozen there. How many were left in the city?”

“Two hundred and fifty. There it is. No need for righteousness, Gracchus. The troops were defeated by the gladiators. That is what is so worrisome, Gracchus. Our feeling is that the City Cohorts should be dispatched immediately.”

“How many?”

“At least six cohorts—at least three thousand men.”

“When?”

“Immediately.”

Gracchus shook his head. This was precisely what he might have expected. He thought of what he intended to say. He thought it over very carefully. He gathered in his mind all that he knew and had known of slave psychology.

“Don’t do it.”

He had a habit of opposing them. They all demanded to know why.

“Because I don’t trust city cohorts. Leave the slaves alone for the time being. Let a little rot start in them. Don’t send city cohorts.”

“Who will we send?”

“Recall one of the legions.”

“From Spain. And Pompey?”

“Let Pompey rot and be damned! All right—leave Spain alone. Bring the Third down from Cisalpine Gaul. Don’t rush. These are slaves, a handful of slaves. It will not be anything unless you make it something . . .”

So they argued, and in his memory, Gracchus lived the argument again and lost again and saw them, in their incredible fear of slave revolt, determine to send six of the City Cohorts. Gracchus slept just a little. He woke at the break of dawn, as he always did, regardless of time and place. He took his morning water and fruit to the terrace to eat.

 

 

As Gracchus sat there, he was joined by the others of the company which graced the
Villa Salaria
. It was an extraordinary group of men and women who had gathered there for the night, and they enjoyed the knowledge that they were remarkable and very important persons. It put them at ease with each other, and it underlined their trust in Antonius Caius, who never made the mistake of mixing people improperly at his plantation. But in general terms of Roman country life, they were not too unusual. It is true that among them were two of the richest people in the world, a young woman who would become a remarkable whore of the ages, and a young man who through a life of calculated and cold intrigue and plotting would remain famous for many centuries to come, and another young man whose degeneracy would become a matter of fame in itself; but at almost any time, similar folk would be found at the
Villa Salaria
.

This morning, they grouped themselves around Gracchus. He was the only one among them who wore a toga. He was the immovable senior magistrate, sitting there with his scented water, peeling an apple, and granting a word here or there. “They recover well,” he said to himself, looking at the well groomed men and the carefully painted women, their hair done expertly and beautifully, their lipstick and rouge so artfully placed. They made conversation about this thing and that thing, and their conversation was clever and well-rehearsed. If they spoke about sculpture, Cicero took an official position, as might be expected:

“I am tired of all this talk of the Greeks. What have they done that the Egyptians did not achieve a thousand years before? In both cases, you have a particular degeneracy, a people unfit for growth or command. Which their sculpture reflects. At least a Roman artist portrays what is.”

“But what is can be very boring,” Helena protested, the prerogative of youth and an intellectual and a woman. It was expected of Gracchus that he should deny knowing anything at all about art. However, “I know what I like.” Gracchus knew a good deal about art. He bought Egyptian art, because it struck some chord in him. Crassus had no strong opinions about art; it was remarkable how few strong opinions he had, yet he was a good general as such things went. At the same time, he resented Cicero’s cocksure statement. It was all very well to talk about degeneracy when you didn’t have to fight the so-called degenerates.