Spartacus (38 page)

“If you have not made plans for today,” Crassus said, “I would like to be your host at a perfume factory. It would seem a shame to come to Capua and not to be inside one of the plants. Especially since our poor city is noted for little else than gladiators and perfume.”

“A rather strange combination,” smiled Claudia.

“We have no plans,” Helena quickly said.

“She means that we have plans, but we will be glad to put them aside and go with you.”

Caius looked sharply, almost angrily at his sister. Crassus explained that of course the older folk were included, but they begged off. Perfume factories were no novelty to them, and the matron of the house said that too much breathing of fumes tended to give her a headache.

A little later, they left for the perfumery. Their litters were carried into the older section of Capua. There the streets became narrower, the tenements higher. Evidently, even the mild housing ordinances of the
urbs
were not enforced here, for the tenement houses climbed up like a crazy jumble of children’s blocks. Often enough, they seemed to meet at the top, where they were braced with wooden beams. Though it was morning and though the sky was clear and blue, these streets were gloomy with twilight. The streets were dirty; garbage was dumped from the apartments and allowed to lie until it rotted, and the foul smell of the garbage mingled increasingly with the sweet, sickening scent of the perfume oils.

“You see,” Crassus said, “why our plants are here. The odor itself serves a useful purpose.”

In these streets were none of the well-dressed, well-groomed house slaves so noticeable in the better parts of the city, nor were there many litters. Dirty, half naked children played in the gutters. Poorly-dressed women haggled for food at the sidewalk stands or sat in the doorways of the tenements nursing their babies. There was a babble of strange speech, and out of the windows came the odors of strange foods cooking.

“What a dreadful place!” Helena said. “Do you really mean that perfume comes out of this cesspool?”

“It does indeed, my dear. More and better perfume than they make in any other city in the world. As for these people, most of them are Syrians, Egyptians, some Greeks and Jews. We’ve tried to run our factories with slaves—but it doesn’t work. You can force a slave to work, but you can’t force him not to spoil what he makes. He doesn’t care about that end of it. Give him a plough or a sickle or a spade or a hammer and you can see what he does, and anyway tools like those are hard to spoil. But give him silk to weave or fine linen or delicate retorts or exact measurements and motions, give him a share of work in a factory, and sure as God, he will spoil the work. And it’s no use to whip him; he still spoils the work. As to our own proletarians—what incentive do they have to work? In any case, there are ten of them for each job. Why should one work when the other nine live better on the dole and spend their days gambling or at the arena or in the baths? They’ll go into the army because there’s some opportunity for wealth if you’re lucky, but even in the army we have to turn more and more to the barbarians. But they won’t go into a factory for the wages we can pay. We smashed their guilds because we had to smash the guilds or give up the factories. So now we hire Syrians and Egyptians and Jews and Greeks, and even they work only until they can save enough to buy citizenship from some ward heeler. I don’t know what the end will be. As it is, factories are closing, not opening.”

They were at the factory now. It was a low wooden building, squat and ugly among the tenements. It was about one hundred and fifty feet square, shabby and run down, the wooden siding frequently rotten, and boards missing here and there. A forest of smoking chimneys poked out of the roof. Along one side there was a loading platform, and a number of wagons were drawn up to the platform. They were piled high with slabs of bark, baskets of fruit and earthenware crocks.

Crassus had their litters brought around to the front of the factory. Here, the broad wooden doors were thrown back, and Caius and Helena and Claudia had their first impression of the inside of a perfumery. The building was one great shed, with wooden beams supporting the ceiling, and much of the ceiling itself was shuttered, so that air and light could be admitted. The place was full of the heat and light of open ovens. Long tables held hundreds of crocks and crucibles, and the maze of condensing coils running out of the stills was like something from a weird dream. And through it all, there was the rich, nauseating smell of the perfume oils.

The visitors also got the impression of hundreds of workers. Small, brown-skinned men, bearded, many of them, naked except for loincloths, they watched the stills, stoked the ovens, stood at the cutting tables and chopped bark and fruit peel, or filled little silver tubes with the essence, ladling out the precious stuff drop by drop, sealing each tube with hot wax. Still others peeled fruit and chopped white strips of pork fat.

The manager of the place—a Roman whom Crassus introduced as Avalus, with no dignity of any other name—welcomed the general and his guests with a combination of unctuousness, greed and caution. A few coins from Crassus made him even more eager to please them, and he led them down one aisle and up another. The workers went on with their work, their faces hard and close and bitter. When they glanced sideways at the visitors, it was with no noticeable change of expression. Of all the things they saw there, it was the workers who were most strange to Caius and Helena and Claudia. They had never seen such men before. There was something different and frightening about them. They were not slaves—nor were they Romans. Nor were they like the dwindling number of peasants who still clung to bits of land here and there in Italy. They were different men, and their difference was worrisome.

“Our process here,” Crassus explained, “is distillation. We have the Egyptians to thank for that, but they were never able to turn the distilling process into mass production. It takes Rome to organize a thing.”

“But was it ever any different?” Caius asked.

“Oh, yes. In the olden times, men had to depend upon the natural production of scents—principally olibanum, myrrh and, of course, camphor. They are all gum-resins, and they exude from the bark of the trees. In the East, I have heard, the people have plantations of such trees. They gash the bark and collect the gum as a regular crop. For the most part, the scent was burned as incense. Then the Egyptians invented the still, which not only gives us brandy and a shortcut to drunkenness, but perfume as well.”

He led them over to one of the cutting tables, where a worker was shaving lemon peel into paper-thin slivers. Crassus held one of these slivers up to the light.

“If you look carefully, you can see the oil sacs. And, of course, you know how fragrant the smell of the peel is. This is the basis—not only lemon, of course, but a hundred other fruits and barks—for the precious quintessence. Now if you follow me—”

He led them now to one of the stoves. There a great pot of bits of peel was being set on to cook. When it was set on the stove, a metal cover was bolted onto it. Copper tubing led out of the cover, twisting round and round to where it ran under a water spray. The end of the tube fed into another pot.

“This is the still,” Crassus explained. “We cook the material, whether it be bark or leaves or fruit peel, until the oil sacs part. Then it goes up in steam and we condense the steam with the spray of water.” He led them to another oven, where the still was feeding. “There you see the water coming over. When we have a pot of that, we chill it and the oil gathers at the top. The oil is the quintessence, and it is removed carefully and sealed in those silver tubes. What remains is the fine fragrant water, which is becoming so popular as a breakfast drink these days.”

“You mean that is what we drink?” Claudia cried.

“More or less. It is cut with distilled water, but I assure you it is most healthful. Also, these waters are blended for taste, even as the oils are blended with each other for scent. As it is, the water is used for toilet water.”

He saw Helena smiling at him and asked, “You think I’m not telling you the truth?”

“No—no. Only I’m filled with admiration for such knowledge. I can remember the times in my life when I heard how anything was made. I didn’t think anyone knew how anything was made.”

“It’s my business to know,” Crassus replied evenly. “I’m a very rich man. I’m not ashamed of that, as so many people are. A lot of people, my dear, look down upon me because I’ve devoted myself to making money. That does not concern me. I enjoy becoming richer. But unlike my colleagues, I don’t look upon a plantation as a source of riches, and when they gave me a war, they gave me no cities to conquer, as they did Pompey. They gave me the Servile War, which paid small profit indeed. So I have my own small secrets, and this factory is one of them. Each of those silver tubes of quintessence is worth ten times its weight in pure gold. A slave eats your food and dies. But these workers turn themselves into gold. Nor am I concerned with feeding and housing them.”

“Yet,” Caius speculated, “they could do as Spartacus did—”

“Workers revolt?” Crassus smiled and shook his head. “No, that will never be. You see, they are not slaves. They are free men. They can come and go as they please. Why should they ever revolt?” Crassus looked around the great shed. “No. As a matter of fact, all through the Servile War, we never stopped our ovens. There is no bond between these men and slaves.”

Yet as they left the place, Caius was full of uneasiness. These strange, silent, bearded men who worked so quickly and expertly filled him with fear and misgiving. And he did not know why.

 

 

When a man devotes his life to winning the favor of people and avoiding their enmity, he is bound to develop certain attributes of social intercourse, and Gracchus had rarely met a person whose liking he could not win. Cicero, however, was not exceedingly likeable; he was one of those clever young men who never allow principle to interfere with success. While Gracchus was equally opportunistic, he differed from Cicero in that he respected principles; they were merely an inconvenience which he himself eschewed. The fact that Cicero, who liked to conceive of himself as a materialist, refused to recognize any aspects of decency in any human being, made him less the realist than Gracchus. It also allowed him to be somewhat shocked now and then at the bland wickedness of the fat old man. The truth of the matter was that Gracchus was no more wicked than the next person. He had merely fought somewhat more strongly against self-deception, having found it an obstacle to his own ambitions.

On the other hand, he had less contempt for Cicero than he might have had. To a certain degree, Cicero puzzled him. The world was changing; Gracchus knew that in his own lifetime a great new change had come, not only to Rome but to the entire world. Cicero was a harbinger of that change. Cicero was one of a whole generation of clever and ruthless young men. Gracchus was ruthless, but at least a recognition of sorrow, a sense of pity if no action on the basis of pity, crept into his own ruthlessness. But these young men could afford themselves neither pity nor sorrow. They seemed to have an armor without a crevice. There was some social envy concerned here, for Cicero was exceedingly well educated and well connected; but there was also an element of envy for the specific coldness involved. To some extent, Gracchus envied in Cicero an area of strength where he himself was weak. And on this, his thoughts turned and wandered.

“Are you sleeping?” Cicero asked softly. He himself found the motion of a litter lulling and productive of drowsiness.

“No—just thinking.”

“Of weighty matters of state?” Cicero asked lightly, assuring himself that the old pirate was plotting the destruction of some innocent senator.

“Of nothing of any consequence. Of an old legend, as a matter of fact. A very old story, slightly foolish, as the old stories are.”

“Would you tell it to me?”

“I’m sure it would bore you.”

“Only scenery bores a traveller.”

“In any case, it’s a moral tale, and nothing is more tiresome than a moral tale. Do you suppose moral tales have any place in our lives today, Cicero?”

“They are good for little children. My own favorite concerned a possible distant relative. The mother of the Gracchi.”

“No relationship.”

“I was six years old then. At the age of seven I questioned it.”

“You couldn’t have been that nasty at seven,” Gracchus smiled.

“I’m sure I was. The thing I like best about you, Gracchus, is that you never bought yourself a family tree.”

“That was thrift and not virtue.”

“And the story?”

“I’m afraid you’re too old.”

“Try me,” Cicero said. “I’ve never been disappointed in your stories.”

“Even when they are pointless?”

“They are never pointless. One has only to be clever enough to see the point.”

“Then I tell my story,” Gracchus laughed. “It concerns a mother who had only one son. He was tall and clean-limbed and handsome, and she loved him as much as a mother ever loved a son.”