Spartacus (34 page)

Here was where the knowing was combined with hating. He became a receptacle for hatred, and day by day the receptacle filled. He lived alone in the hideous bareness and hopelessness of his cell; he turned inward upon himself. He no longer believed in God, and when he thought of the God of his fathers, it was only with hatred and contempt. He said to himself once,

“I would like to go into the arena with that damned old man of the mountain. I’d pay him back for all the tears and broken promises he brings on men. Give him his thunder and lightning. All I want is a knife in my hand. I would make a sacrifice for him, all right. I’d teach him something about wrath and anger.”

He had a dream once, and in the dream he stood at the throne of God. But he wasn’t afraid. “What will you do to me?” he cried mockingly. “I have lived twenty-one years, and what more can you do to me than the world has done? I saw my father crucified. I labored like a mole in the mines. For two years I worked in the mines, and for a year I lived in the filth and the bilge water, with the rats running across my feet. For three years I was a thief who dreamed of his homeland, and now I kill men for hire. Damn you to hell, what will you do to me?”

That was what he became in the second time of his life, and during that time, a Thracian slave was brought into the school at Capua, a strange man with a gentle voice and a broken nose and deep dark eyes. That was how this gladiator came to know Spartacus.

 

 

In that peculiar, pain-ridden
forever,
the mind of the gladiator fell apart, and the power of organized reason gradually ceased. Recollection turned into hallucination. He lived again through much of his life. He spoke to Spartacus again for the first time. He was playing over what he most desired to rescue from the meaningless ruin that was his life, the unimportant life of a nameless slave in the sweeping current of time.

(He looks at Spartacus. He watches him. He is like a cat, this man, and his green eyes increase his resemblance to a cat. You know the way a cat walks, with an everlasting tension. That is the way this gladiator walks, and you have the feeling that if you were to throw him up into the air, he would land easily on his two feet. He hardly ever looks at a man directly, though; instead, he watches from the corners of his eyes. That way, he watches Spartacus, day after day. He could not even explain to himself what quality in Spartacus commands his attention to this extent; but it is no great mystery. He is all tension, and Spartacus is all looseness. He talks to no one, but Spartacus talks to all, and they all come to Spartacus and bring him their troubles. Spartacus is injecting something into this school of gladiators. Spartacus is destroying it.

(All except this Jew come to Spartacus. Spartacus wonders about that. Then, one day, in the period of rest between drills, he goes to the Jew and talks to him.

(“Do you talk Greek, man?” he asks him.

(The green eyes stare at him unmovingly. Suddenly, Spartacus realizes that this is a very young man, hardly more than a lad. This is hidden behind a mask. He is not looking at the man himself, but at the mask.

(The Jew says to himself, “Greek—do I talk Greek? I think I talk all languages. Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek and Latin and many other languages in many parts of the world. But why should I talk in any language? Why?”

(Very gently, Spartacus urges him, “A word from me and then a word from you. We are people. We are not alone. The great trouble is when you are alone. It is an awful thing, indeed, to be alone, but here we are not alone. Why should we be ashamed of what we are? Did we do terrible things to bring ourselves here? I don’t think we did such terrible things. More terrible things are done by those who put knives in our hands and tell us to kill for the pleasure of the Romans. So we shouldn’t be ashamed and hate each other. A man has a little strength, a little hope, a little love. Those things are like seeds that are planted in all men. But if he keeps them to himself, they will wither away and die very quickly, and then God help that poor man because he will have nothing and life will not be worth living. On the other hand, if he gives his strength and hope and love to others, he will find an endless store of such stock. He will never run dry of those things. Then life will be worth living. And believe me, gladiator, life is the best thing in the world. We know that. We are slaves. All we have is life. So we know what it is worth. The Romans have so many other things that life doesn’t mean very much to them. They play with it. But we take life seriously, and that is why we must not let ourselves be alone. You are too much alone, gladiator. Talk to me a little.”

(But the Jew says nothing, and his face and his eyes do not change at all. Yet he listens. He listens silently and intently, and then he turns around and walks away. But after he has walked a few steps, he stops, half turns his head, and watches Spartacus from the corners of his eyes. And it seems to Spartacus that something is there which was not there before, a spark, a plea, a gleam of hope. Perhaps.)

This was the beginning of the third period of the four times into which the life of the gladiator might be divided. This could be called the time of hope, and it was in this time that the hatred went away, and the gladiator knew a great love and comradeship for others of his kind. It did not happen all at once and it did not happen quickly. Bit by bit, he learned to trust a man, and through that man, he learned to love life. That was the thing in Spartacus which had captured him from the very beginning, the Thracian’s enormous love of life. Spartacus was like a guardian of life. It was not merely that he relished it and cherished it; it absorbed him. It was something he never questioned and never criticized. To some extent, it seemed that there was a secret pact between Spartacus and all the forces of life.

From watching Spartacus, the gladiator David took to following him. He did not do this ostentatiously; he did it almost secretively. Whenever the occasion arose and it was not too directly noticeable, he placed himself near Spartacus. His hearing was as keen as the hearing of a fox. He would listen to the words of Spartacus; he would take those words with him and repeat them to himself. He would try to learn what lay within those words. And all this time, something was happening inside of him. He was changing; he was growing. In something of the same way, a little of change and a little of growth was happening inside of every gladiator in the school. But for David it was singular. He came of a people whose life was full of God. When he lost God, there was a hole in his life. Now he was filling this hole with man. He was learning to love man. He was learning the greatness of man. He did not think of it in this way, but this was what happened to him—and to some extent to the other gladiators.

This was not anything which could be encompassed by the understanding of either Batiatus or the senators at Rome. To them, the revolt sprang full blown and unpremeditated. To their knowledge, there was no preparation and no prelude, and so they had to record it. There was no other way for them to record it.

But the prelude was there, subtle and strange and growing. David never forgot the first time he heard Spartacus recite verses from the Odyssey. Here was a new and enchanting music, the story of a brave man who endured a lot but was never defeated. Many of the verses were wholly understandable to him. He had known the frustrating agony of being held away from a homeland he loved. He had known the tricks capricious fate plays. He had loved a girl in the hills of Galilee whose lips were as red as poppies and whose cheeks were as soft as down, and his heart had ached for her because she was lost to him. But what music this was, and how splendid that a slave, a slave who was the son of a slave and never a freeman even once, could recite endless verses of this fine story all by heart! Was there ever such a man as Spartacus! Was there ever a man so gentle, so patient, so slow to anger!

In his mind, he identified Spartacus with Odysseus, the patient and wise Odysseus; and forever after the two were one so far as he was concerned. Boy that he was then, underneath all, he found his hero and pattern for life and for living in Spartacus. At first, he was mistrustful of this tendency in himself. Trust no man and no man will disappoint you, he had said to himself often enough, so he waited and watched and looked for Spartacus to be less than Spartacus. And gradually, the realization grew upon him that Spartacus would never be less than Spartacus—and the realization was more than that, for there came to him an understanding that no man is less than himself, not the whole understanding, but a glimmering of knowledge of the wealth of wonder and splendor that lies in each separate and singular human being.

So when he was chosen as one of four gladiators to satisfy the caprice of the two perfumed homosexuals from Rome, to fight in two pairs to the death, he was torn by such a struggle and unholy contradiction as he had never experienced before. It was a new struggle, and when he conquered in that struggle, he made the first real penetration of the protective covering with which he had encased himself. That moment too, he lived through now on the cross. He was back again, and fighting with himself, and from his parched lips on the cross came the agony of words he had spoken to himself four years before.

(I am the most cursed man in all the world—he says to himself—for see how I am chosen to kill the man I love better than any man who lives. What a cruel fate this is! But it is just what one would expect from a God or gods or whatever they are who have no other purpose but to torture man. That is their whole mission. But I will not satisfy them. I will not perform for them. They are like those perfumed Roman swine who sit at the arena and wait for a man’s guts to roll out on the sand! Well, I won’t satisfy them this time. They will miss the pleasure of watching pairs fight, those miserable and corrupt people who can find pleasure in nothing else. They will see me killed, but it will be no satisfaction to them to see a man killed. That they can see at any time at all. But I will not fight Spartacus. I would kill my own brother first. I will never do that.

(But what then? First there was only insanity in my whole life, and then the life here compounded insanity. What has Spartacus given me? I must ask myself that question and I must answer that. I must answer it because he has given me something of great importance. He has given me the secret of life. Life itself is the secret of life. Everyone takes sides. You are on the side of life, or you are on the side of death. Spartacus is on the side of life, and therefore he will fight me if he must. He will not just die. He will not allow them to put him to death, never saying a word and never striking a blow back at them. Then that is what I must do. I must fight Spartacus, and life will decide between us. Oh what a terrible decision to make! Was ever a man so cursed? But that is the way it must be. That is the only way it can be.)

He lived the thoughts and the decision over again, and he no longer knew that he was dying on a cross, that fate had been kind to him, that it was not his lot to fight against Spartacus. Piece by piece, his pain-wracked mind picked up the past and lived it out again. Once again, the gladiators killed their trainers in the mess hall. Once again, they fought the troops with knives and bare hands. Once again, they marched across the countryside, and from the plantations, the slaves poured out to join them. And once again, they fell upon the City Cohorts at night and destroyed them utterly, and took their weapons and their armor. All this he lived through once again, not rationally or chronologically or easily, but like a ball of hot flame flung back through time.

(“Spartacus,” he says, “Spartacus?” Their second great battle is behind them now. The slaves are an army. They look like an army. They have the weapons and the armor of ten thousand Romans. They are drawn up by their hundreds and their five hundreds. Their nightly camp is a wooden-walled, moated fortress, such as the legions build when they march. They practice for hours at throwing the Roman spear. The fame and the dread fear of what they have done is known all over the world. In every slave hut, in every slave barracks, there is a whisper of someone called Spartacus who has set the world on fire. Yes, he has done it. He has a mighty army. Soon he will march against Rome itself, and he will tear down the walls of Rome in his anger. Wherever he goes, he sets slaves free, and all the spoils he takes goes into a common treasury—as it was in the olden days when the tribe held all and no man had wealth. His soldiers have only their weapons and the clothes on their backs and the shoes on their feet. That is Spartacus now.

(He says, “Spartacus?”

(Little by little, speech has returned to this Jew, David. He speaks slowly and haltingly, but he speaks. Now he speaks to the leader of the slaves.

(“Spartacus, I am a good fighter, am I not?”

(“Good, very good. The very best. You fight well.”

(“And I am no coward, you know that?”

(“I knew that a long time ago,” says Spartacus. “Where is a gladiator who is a coward?”

(“And I have never turned my back on a fight.”

(“Never.”

(“And when my ear was sliced off my head, I clenched my teeth and never cried out in pain.”

(“It’s no disgrace to cry out in pain,” says Spartacus. “I have known strong men to cry out in pain. I’ve known strong men to weep when they are full of bitterness. That is no disgrace.”