Spartacus (5 page)
Authors: Howard Fast
Tags: #Ancient, #Historical fiction, #Spartacus - Fiction, #Revolutionaries, #Gladiators - Fiction, #Biographical fiction, #Fiction, #Romance, #Revolutionaries - Fiction, #Rome, #Historical, #Slave insurrections, #Rome - History - Servile Wars; 135-71 B.C - Fiction, #General, #Gladiators, #History
Claudia, meanwhile, had fixed upon Antonius Caius as the most desirable male element, the master of the imposing house and the endless acres. Having only a nominal sense of politics and a rather vague notion of war, she was not particularly impressed by either Gracchus or Crassus, and Cicero was not only unknown—which meant of no consequence to Claudia—but obviously one of the money-grubbing race of knights whom she had been taught to despise. Julia already was pressing up to Caius, a favorite of hers, purring against him like a large, ungainly kitten, and Claudia made a shrewder estimate of Antonius than Caius ever had. She saw the big, hook-nosed, powerfully muscled land-owner as a mass of repressions and unsatisfied hungers. She sensed the sensual lining to his patently assumed puritanism, and Claudia preferred men who were powerful yet powerless. Antonius Caius would never be indiscreet or annoying. All this, she let him know with her apparently listless smile.
The whole party had come to the house now. Caius had dismounted before, and now an Egyptian house-slave led away his horse. The litter-bearers, weary from all the miles they had come, sweating, crouched beside their burdens and shivered in the evening coolness. Now their lean bodies were animal-like in weariness, and their muscles quivered with the pain of exhaustion, even as an animal’s does. No one looked at them, no one noticed them, no one attended them. The five men, the three women and the two children went into the house, and still the litter-bearers crouched by the litters, waiting. Now one of them, a lad of no more then twenty, began to sob, more and more uncontrollably; but the others paid no attention to him. They remained there at least twenty minutes before a slave came to them and led them off to the barracks where they would have food and shelter for the night.
Caius shared his bath with Licinius Crassus, and he was relieved to find that the great man was not of the school which took him, Caius, personally to task for all the effete qualities of well born youth today. He found Crassus pleasant and affable, and he had that winning manner which seeks for the opinions of others, even when others are persons of no particular importance. They lolled in the bath, treading water lazily, floating back and forth, luxuriating in the warm, scented water, so heavily impregnated with fragrant salts. Crassus’ body was well kept, not the paunchy affair of middle age, but hard and flat, and he was youthful and alert. He asked Caius whether they had come down the road from Rome.
“Yes, we did, and we’re going on to Capua tomorrow.”
“You didn’t mind the tokens of punishment?”
“We were very curious to see them,” answered Caius. “No, as a matter of fact, we didn’t mind them particularly. Here and there, you would see a body that the birds had torn open, and that did become somewhat unpleasant, especially if the wind was coming to you, but that can’t be helped, and the girls simply drew their curtains. But, you know, the litter-bearers were affected, and sometimes they were sick.”
“I suppose they identified,” the general smiled.
“Possibly. Do you think there is that sort of feeling among slaves? Our litter-bearers are stable-bred for the most part, and most of them were whip-broken in childhood at the school of Appius Mundellius, and while they’re strong, they’re not much better than animals. Would they identify? I find it hard to believe that there would be such uniform qualities among slaves. But you would know better. Do you think that all slaves felt something for Spartacus?”
“I think most of them did.”
“Really? You can get quite uneasy over that.”
“Otherwise, I wouldn’t like this business of the crucifixion,” Crassus explained. “It’s wasteful, and I don’t like waste for the sake of waste. Also, I think that killing can backfire—too much killing. I think it does something to us that may hurt us later.”
“But slaves?” Caius protested.
“What is Cicero so fond of saying—the slave is the
instrumentum vocale
, as distinguished from the beast, the
instrumentum semi-vocale
, as distinguished from the ordinary tool, which we might call the
instrumentum mutum
. This is a very clever way of putting it, and I’m sure that Cicero is a very clever person, but Cicero did not have to fight Spartacus. Cicero did not have to estimate Spartacus’s potential for logic because he did not have to lie awake nights, as I did, trying to anticipate what Spartacus was thinking. When you fight against them, you suddenly discover that the slaves are something more than
instrumenta vocalia
.
instrumentum vocale
, as distinguished from the beast, the
instrumentum semi-vocale
, as distinguished from the ordinary tool, which we might call the
instrumentum mutum
. This is a very clever way of putting it, and I’m sure that Cicero is a very clever person, but Cicero did not have to fight Spartacus. Cicero did not have to estimate Spartacus’s potential for logic because he did not have to lie awake nights, as I did, trying to anticipate what Spartacus was thinking. When you fight against them, you suddenly discover that the slaves are something more than
instrumenta vocalia
.
“Did you know him—I mean personally?”
“Him?”
“Spartacus, I mean.”
The general smiled reflectively. “Not really,” he considered. “I made my own picture of him, putting this and that together, but I don’t known that anyone
knew
him. How could you know him? If your pet dog suddenly ran amuck and did so intelligently, he would still be a dog, wouldn’t he? Hard to know. I made my image of Spartacus, but I wouldn’t presume to write a portrait of him. I don’t think anyone can. Those who might have are hanging along the Appian Way, and already the man himself is like a dream. We will now remake him back into a slave.”
knew
him. How could you know him? If your pet dog suddenly ran amuck and did so intelligently, he would still be a dog, wouldn’t he? Hard to know. I made my image of Spartacus, but I wouldn’t presume to write a portrait of him. I don’t think anyone can. Those who might have are hanging along the Appian Way, and already the man himself is like a dream. We will now remake him back into a slave.”
“Which he was,” said Caius.
“Yes—yes, I suppose so.”
It was difficult for Caius to pursue the matter. It was not that he had so little experience in war; the truth of the matter was that he was uninterested in war; yet war was the obligation of his caste, his class, his station in life. What did Crassus think of him? Could the politeness and the considerate attention be real? In any case, Caius’s family could not be ignored or belittled, and Crassus had need of friends; for ironically enough, this general who fought the bitterest war in perhaps all Roman history had little enough glory out of it. He had fought against slaves and defeated them—when those slaves had almost defeated Rome. The whole thing was a curious contradiction, and the humility of Crassus might very well be real. About Crassus, the legends would not be made nor the songs sung. The necessity of forgetting the whole war would belittle his victory increasingly.
They climbed out of the bath, and the slave women waiting there enveloped them with the warm towels. Many a more ostentatious place than that of Antonius Caius would not have been fitted one half so well with everything to anticipate and satisfy the needs of a guest. Caius thought of this as he was rubbed dry; in the old times, as he had been taught, there was a world full of petty princelings, little kingdoms and dukedoms, but few of them would have been able to live or entertain in the style of Antonius Caius, a not too powerful or important landholder and a citizen of the Republic. Say what you would, the Roman way of life was a reflection of those most fit and most able to rule.
“I have never quite gotten used to being dressed and handled by women,” said Crassus. “Do you like it?”
“I never gave it much thought,” answered Caius, which was not entirely true, for there was a definite pleasure and excitement in being handled by slave women. His own father did not allow it, and in certain circles, it was frowned upon; but in the past five or six years, the attitude toward slaves had altered considerably, and Caius, like so many of his friends, had divested them of most elements of humanity. It was a subtle conditioning. At this moment, he did not actually know what these three women in attendance looked like, and if he had been asked abruptly, he could not have described them. The general’s question made him observe them. They were out of some tribe or part of Spain, young, small in bone, not uncomely in their dark, silent way. Barefoot, they were dressed in short, plain tunics, and their dresses were damp from the steam of the bath and spotted with perspiration from their efforts. They excited him only a little in terms of his own nakedness, but Crassus drew one of them to him, handling her oafishly and smiling down at her, while she cringed against him but made no resistance.
It embarrassed Caius enormously; he felt a sudden contempt for this great general who was fumbling around a bath house girl; he didn’t want to watch. It seemed to him small and dirty, and it divested Crassus of dignity, and Caius also felt that when Crassus remembered it later he would hold it against Caius that he had been present.
He walked to the rubbing table and lay down, and a moment later Crassus joined him. “A pretty little piece,” said Crassus. Was the man a complete idiot in terms of women, Caius wondered? But Crassus was not perturbed. “Spartacus,” he said, picking up the thread of his conversation before, “was as much of an enigma to me as he is to you. I never saw him—with all the devil’s dance he led me.”
“You never saw him?”
“Never did, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t know him. Piece by piece, I composed him. I like that. Other people composed music or art. I composed a picture of Spartacus.”
Crassus stretched and luxuriated under the clever, kneading fingers of the masseuse. One woman held a little pitcher of scented oil, pouring a constant, careful lubrication under the fingers of the masseuse, who flexed the tension out of muscle after muscle. Crassus twisted like a great cat being stroked, sighing with pleasure.
“What was he like—your picture, I mean?” asked Caius.
“I often wonder what I was like in his mind,” grinned Crassus. “He called to me in the end. Or so they say. I can’t swear that I heard him, but they say he sang out, Crassus—wait for me, you bastard! Or something like that. He wasn’t more than forty or fifty yards from me, and he began to cut his way to me. It was an astonishing thing. He wasn’t a very big man—not a very powerful man either, but he had a fury. That’s the word, precisely. When he fought with his own arms, it was like that, a fury, an anger. And he actually cut his way half the distance to me. He must have killed at least ten or eleven men in that last wild rush of his, and he wasn’t stopped until we cut him to pieces.”
“Then it’s true that his body was never found?” asked Caius.
“That’s right. He was cut to pieces, and there was just nothing left to find. Do you know how a battlefield is? There is meat and blood, and whose meat and whose blood, it is very hard to say. So he went the way he came, out of nothing into nothing, out of the arena into the butcher shop. We live by the sword and we die by the sword. That was Spartacus. I salute him.”
What the general said recalled to Caius the conversation with the sausage maker, and it was on the tip of his tongue to raise the question. But then he thought better of it and asked instead,
“You don’t hate him?”
“Why? He was a good soldier and a damned, dirty slave. What should I hate particularly? He’s dead and I’m alive. I like this—” twisting gratefully under the masseuse’s fingers, but taking it for granted that his words were something apart from her and beyond her. “—but my experience is limited. You wouldn’t think so, would you, but your generation looks at things differently. I don’t mean sluts, I mean niceties, like this. How far does one go, Caius?”
The young man at first did not know what the general was talking about, and glanced at him curiously. The muscles on Crassus’s neck were swelling with passion, and passion was all over his body now. It troubled Caius and frightened him a little, he wanted to get out of the room quickly, but there was no way to do it decently; and less because he minded what would happen than he minded his being there to see it happen.
“You might ask her?” Caius said.
“Ask her? Do you suppose the bitch speaks Latin?”
“They all do, a little.”
“You mean ask her directly?”
“Why not?” muttered Caius, and then turned onto his belly and closed his eyes.
While Caius and Crassus were in the bath, and while the last fading hour before the sunset cast its golden glow over the fields and garden of
Villa Salaria,
Antonius Caius took his niece’s friend on a walk across the grounds toward the horse run. Antonius Caius did not indulge in such ostentatious displays as, for example, a private race course or his own arena for games. He had a theory of his own that to survive in the possession of wealth, one had to display it discreetly, and he had none of the social insecurity that called for gaudy prominence, such as was common with the new social class of business men arising in the republic. But like his friends, Antonius Caius loved horses and paid out fantastic sums of money for good breeding stock, and took a good deal of pleasure in his stables. At this time, the price of a good horse was at least five times the price of a good slave—but the rationale was that one sometimes needed five slaves to raise a horse properly.
The horse run, fenced in, sprawled over a broad meadow. The stables and pens were at one end, and a little distance from there, a comfortable stone gallery, capable of holding up to fifty people, commanded both the course and a large pen.
As they approached the stables, they heard the shrill, demanding cry of a stallion, a note of insistence and rage new to Claudia, thrilling yet frightening.
“What is that?” she asked Antonius Caius.
“A stallion aroused. I bought him at the market only two weeks ago. Thracian blood, big boned, savage, but he’s a beauty. Would you like to see him?”
“I love horses,” said Claudia. “Please show him to me.”
They walked to the stables, and Antonius told the foreman, a withered, shrunken little Egyptian slave, to put him in the big display pen. Then they went to the gallery to watch, seating themselves in a nest of cushions which a slave arranged for them. Claudia did not fail to notice how well-trained and how sedulous Antonius Caius’s body servants were, how they anticipated every wish, every glance of his. She had grown up among slaves and she knew the difficulties one was likely to have with them. When she mentioned it to him, he remarked,
“I don’t whip my slaves. When there is trouble, I kill one. That exacts obedience, but it does not break their spirit.”
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