Spartacus, page 14
“Some say,” Helena smiled, “that if they were all thrown on the market at once, some very respectable fortunes would have been wiped out.”
“A little truth and a lot of untruth,” Cicero replied. “I want to see beyond the superficial. I want to see the meaning of slave revolt. Delusion has become a great Roman pastime; I don’t like to delude myself. We talk of this war and that war, of great campaigns and great generals, but none of us want even to whisper about the constant warfare of our time which overshadows all other warfare, the servile war, the revolt of the slaves. Even the generals concerned hush-hush it. There is no glory in servile war. There is no glory in the conquest of slaves.”
“But surely it isn’t an affair of such consequence.”
“No? And were the crucifixions of no consequence to you as you came down the Appian Way?”
“It was quite sickening. I don’t enjoy looking at such things. My friend Claudia does.”
“In other words, of some consequence.”
“But everyone knows of Spartacus and his war.”
“Do they? I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure that even Crassus knows a great deal. Spartacus is a mystery as far as we are concerned. According to the official records, he was a Thracian mercenary and highwayman. According to Crassus, he was a born slave out of the gold mines of Nubia. Whom do we believe? Batiatus, the swine who kept the school at Capua, is dead—his throat cut by a Greek slave who was his bookkeeper—and so is every other contact with Spartacus dead or gone. And who will write about him? People like myself.”
“Why not people like yourself?” asked Helena.
“Thank you, my dear. But I know nothing of Spartacus. I only hate him.”
“Why? My brother hates him too.”
“And don’t you hate him?”
“I don’t feel anything in particular,” said Helena. “He was just a slave.”
“But was he? And how does a slave become what Spartacus became? That is the mystery I must solve. To find out where this began and why it began. But I’m afraid I bore you?”
There was an air of sincerity about Cicero which people caught and believed, and which made them defend him against all the charges hurled at him in later years. “Please go on talking,” said Helena. The young men she knew in Rome who were Cicero’s age talked about the latest perfumes, the gladiator they were betting on, the particular horse they were backing, or their latest mistress or concubine. “Please go on,” she said.
“I don’t wholly trust rhetoric,” Cicero said. “I like to write things down and let them fall into place. I’m afraid most people feel as you do, that the rising of slaves is of no great consequence. But, you see, our whole lives are concerned with slaves, and the rising of slaves accounts for more warfare than all of our conquests. Can you believe that?”
She shook her head.
“I can prove it, you know. About a hundred and twenty years ago it began—with the rising of the Carthaginian slaves we had made captive. Then, two generations later, the great revolt of the slaves in the mines of Laurium in Greece. Then the mighty revolt of the miners in Spain. Then, a few years later, the revolt of Sicilian slaves, which shook the republic to its roots. Then, twenty years later, the servile war led by the slave Salvius. These are only the great wars, but in between are a thousand smaller uprisings—and the whole thing together is a single war, a continuing, unending war between ourselves and our slaves, a silent war, a shameful war that no one speaks of and the historians are unwilling to record. We’re afraid to record it, afraid to look at it; because it’s something new on earth. There were wars between nations, cities, parties, even wars between brothers—but this is a new monster inside of us, inside our guts and against all parties, all nations, all cities.”
“You frighten me,” said Helena. “Do you know what kind of a picture you make?”
Cicero nodded and looked searchingly at her. She was moved to cover his hand with hers, and she felt a rich, outgoing sense of warmth toward him. Here was a young man, not too much older than herself, who was deeply concerned with matters concerning the fate and future of the nation. It reminded her of the stories she had heard of the old times, vaguely-remembered stories of her childhood. Cicero laid his manuscript aside and began to stroke her hand gently, and then he leaned over and kissed her. Vividly, now, she recalled the tokens of punishment, the rotting, bird-eaten, sun-baked flesh of the men who were crucified along the Appian Way; only now it was no longer horrible; Cicero had made a rationale out of it, but for the life of her, she could not recall the content of his rationale.
“We are a most singular people, filled with a great capacity for love and justice,” thought Cicero. He felt, as he began to make love to Helena, that here was a woman at last who understood him. Yet that did not lessen the sense of power a conquest of her afforded him. Quite to the contrary, he felt himself full of power, the extension of power—and it was that very extension, if the truth must be told, which comprised the logic of what he wrote. In a moment of mystical revelation, he saw the power of his loins joined with that power which had crushed Spartacus, and would crush him again and again. Looking at him, Helena realized suddenly, and with horror, that his face was full of hate and cruelty. As always, she submitted with fear and self-loathing.
II
Out of sheer weariness and emotional upheaval, Helena slept finally, and the waking nightmare which always marked her relations with a man, turned into a strange and disturbing dream. The dream combined reality and unreality in a manner which made them difficult to separate. In her dream, she recalled the time in the streets of Rome when her brother, Caius, had pointed out to her Lentulus Batiatus, the lanista. That was only about seven months ago, and only a few days before Batiatus had his throat cut by his Greek bookkeeper—as gossip had it, in a quarrel over a woman the Greek had purchased with money stolen from the lanista. Batiatus had had made something of a reputation for himself through his connection with Spartacus. This time, he was in Rome to defend himself in a lawsuit over one of his tenements; the house had collapsed, and the surviving families of six tenants who were killed were suing him.
In her dream, she recalled him very well and normally, a huge, waddling product of overeating and dissipation, who would not hire a litter, but walked all wrapped in a great toga, hawking and spitting constantly and driving off street urchins who begged for alms, with a cane he carried. Later, that same day, she and Caius stopped at the Forum and just by chance happened in at the court where Batiatus was defending himself. This, in the dream, was much the same as it had been in life. The court was being held out of doors. It swarmed with spectators, idlers, women with endless time on their hands, young men about town, children, people from other lands who could not leave the great urbs without witnessing the famous Roman justice, slaves on their way to or from some errand—indeed it seemed a miracle that any reason, much less justice, could be extracted from such a throng; but this was how the courts proceeded, week in and week out. Batiatus was being questioned, and he answered the questions in a bull-like roar, and all of this was as it had been in her actual experience.
But then, as happens in dreams, she found herself without explanation standing in the lanista’s bedchamber and watching the Greek bookkeeper approach with bared knife. The knife was the curved sica which Thracians fight with in the arena, and the floor of the bedchamber was also arena, or sand, since both are the same word in Latin. The Greek minced across the sand with all the wary poise of a Thracian, and the lanista, awake and sitting up in his bed, watched him with horror. But no word or sound from anyone. Then, alongside the Greek, a giant figure appeared, a mighty, bronzed man in full armor, and Helena knew immediately that this was Spartacus. His hand closed over the bookkeeper’s wrist and squeezed just a trifle, and the knife fell to the sand. Then the bronzed, handsome giant who was Spartacus, nodded at Helena, and she picked up the knife and cut the lanista’s throat. The Greek and the lanista then disappeared, and she was left with the gladiator; but when she opened her arms to him, he spat full in her face, turned on his heel, and walked off. Then she ran after him, whimpering and pleading for him to wait for her, but he had disappeared, and she was alone in a boundless space of sand.
III
It was an ugly and cheap death which actually had overtaken Batiatus, the lanista, to be murdered by his own slave; and perhaps he would have avoided that and many other things if, after the abortive performance of the two pairs for Bracus, he had put to death both gladiators who survived. If he had done that, he would have been entirely within his rights; for it was an accepted practice to kill gladiators who sowed dissension. But it is questionable whether it would have changed history too much if Spartacus had perished. The forces which prodded him would simply have turned elsewhere. Just as the dream of Helena, the Roman maiden sleeping her guilt-ridden sleep at the Villa Salaria so long afterwards, concerned not him specifically, but the slave who takes up the sword, so were his own dreams less a singular possession than the blood-ridden memories and hopes shared by so many of his profession, the gladiators, the men of the sword. That would answer those who could not understand how the plot of Spartacus had been hatched. It was not hatched by one, but by many.
Varinia, the German girl, his wife, sat by him as he slept, kept awake by his moans and by his frantic talking in his sleep. He talked of a great many things. Now he was a child and now he was in the gold mines, and now he was in the arena. Now the sica had split his flesh and he screamed with pain.
When that happened, she woke him, for the nightmare he had been living in his sleep was impossible for her to endure any longer. She awakened him and made love to him tenderly, stroking his brow and kissing his wet skin. When Varinia had been a little girl, she saw what happened to men and women in her tribe when they knew love for each other. It was called the triumph over fear; even the devils and spirits of the great forests where her people lived knew that those who loved were invulnerable to fear, and you could see that in the eyes of people who loved and in the way they walked and in the way their fingers intertwined. But after she had been taken captive, she had forgotten such memories, the prime instinct of her existence had become hatred.
Now her whole being, the life within her, her being and her existence, her living and functioning, the motion of her blood and the beating of her heart were fused into love for this Thracian slave. Now she knew that the experience of the men and women in her tribe was very true and very ancient and very expressive. She no longer was afraid of anything on earth. She believed in magic, and the magic of her love was real and provable. At the same time, she realized that her man was an easy man to love. He was one of those rare human beings who were knit out of one piece. That was the first thing one saw in Spartacus, his wholeness. He was singular. He was content, not in where he was but in what he was as a human being. Even in this nest of terrible, desperate and doomed men—in this murder school of condemned murderers, army deserters, lost souls and miners whom the mines could not destroy, Spartacus was loved and honored and respected. But her love was something else. All of him was the essence of men and the being of men for women. She had believed that the desire in her loins was dead forever, but she had only to touch him to want him. Everything about him was the special way in which men should be formed, if she were the sculptor and had to do the forming. His broken nose, his large brown eyes and his full, mobile mouth were as different from the faces of the men she had known in her childhood as a face could be, but she could not conceive of having a man or loving a man who was not like Spartacus.
Why he should be as he was, she did not know. She had been long enough a part of the cultured, genteel life of the Roman aristocracy to know what their men were, but why a slave should be what Spartacus was, she did not know.
Now her hands quieted him, and she asked him, “What were you dreaming?”
He shook his head.
“Hold me close to you and you won’t dream anymore.”
He held her close to him and whispered to her, “Do you ever think that we might not be together?”
“Yes.”
“And then what will you do, my darling?” he asked her.
“Then I will die,” she answered simply and directly.
“I want to talk to you about that,” he said, awake out of his dream now and calm again.
“Why should we think of it or talk about it?”
“Because if you loved me enough, you would not want to die if I died or was taken away from you.”
“Do you think that way?”
“Yes.”
“And if I died, you would not want to die?” she asked.
“I would want to live.”
“Why?”
“Because there is nothing without life.”
“There is no life without you,” she said.
“I want you to make me a promise and to keep it.”
“If I make a promise, I will keep it. Otherwise, I won’t make it.”
“I want you to promise that you will never take your own life,” said Spartacus.
She didn’t answer him for a time.
“Will you promise?”
Finally, she said, “All right, I will.
Then, in a little while, he was asleep, calmly and gently, with her arms around him.
IV
The morning drumbeat summoned them to exercise. There was forty minutes of simple on-the-double in the enclosure before the morning meal. Each man on awakening was given a glass of cold water. His cell door was opened. If he had a woman, she was permitted to clean the cell before she went to work as a part of the slave population of the school. There was no waste in the institution of Lentulus Batiatus. The women of the gladiators scrubbed and cleaned and cooked and tilled the kitchen gardens and worked in the baths and tended the goats, and on these women Batiatus was as hard a master as any plantation owner, using the whip freely and abundantly and feeding them cheap mash. But of Spartacus and Varinia, he had a curious fear; although he would hardly have been able to say what there was in them that he feared and why he feared it.
On this particular and remembered morning, however, there was a note of impatience and hatred through the school, in the reveille drums, in the way the trainers drove the men from their cells into the enclosure, lining them up to face the iron fence where the black African was crucified in death; and the women were whipped to their tasks with the same nervous hatred. There was no fear of Varinia this morning, nor was the whip any lighter on her than on others. If anything, she was singled out by the overseer with special comments about the whore of the great warrior. And the whip touched her more often than others. She worked in the kitchen, to where she was driven.
It was the anger of Batiatus which pervaded the place, a deep and trembling anger which arose out of the one thing which could most successfully anger the lanista, a financial loss. Bracus had withheld half of the agreed price, and although there would be a lawsuit and all the trimmings, Batiatus knew what the chances were of his winning a lawsuit against a prominent Roman family in a Roman court. The results of his anger were everywhere in the place. In the kitchen, the cook cursed the women and beat them to their work with his long wooden rod of authority. The trainers, lashed by their employer, lashed the gladiators, and the black man in death was stretched onto the enclosure fence, to confront the gladiators as they shaped up for their morning drill.
Spartacus took his place, Gannicus on one side of him, a Gaul called Crixus on the other side. They made two lines across the face of the cellblock, and the trainers who faced them this morning were heavily armed, specially armed with knife and sword. The gates of the enclosure were opened, and four squads of regular troops, forty men, stood there at attention, their big wooden darts swinging in their fists at their sides. The morning sun flooded the yellow sand and touched the men with its warmth, but there was no warmth in Spartacus, and when Gannicus whispered to him whether he knew what this meant, he shook his head silently.
“Did you fight?” the Gaul asked.
“No.”
“But he didn’t kill any of them, and if a man is going to die, he could die better than that.”
“Will you die any better than that?” asked Spartacus.
“He’ll die like a dog and so will you,” said Crixus the Gaul. “He’ll die in the sand with his belly open, and so will you.”
It was then that Spartacus began to realize what he must do; or it could be better said that the realization, with him so long, solidified into a reality. The reality was only beginning; the reality would never be any more than a beginning with him, the end or endlessness of it stretching into the unborn future; but the reality was connected with all that had happened to him and the men around him and with all that was going to happen now. He stared at the great body of the Negro, lashed out in the sun, the skin and flesh torn where the pila had driven through it, the blood clotted and dry, the head hanging between the broad shoulders.
What a contempt for life these Romans have! thought Spartacus. How easily they kill, and what a lusty delight they take in death! Yet why not, he asked himself, when the whole process of their living was built on the blood and bones of his own kind? Crucifixion had a particular fascination for them. It had come from Carthage, where the Carthagenians had adopted it as the only death fitting for a slave; but where Rome’s fingers reached, crucifixion became a passion.
Batiatus came into the enclosure now, and Spartacus, barely moving his lips, asked the Gaul who stood beside him, “And how will you die?”
“The way you will, Thracian.”
“He was my friend,” said Spartacus of the dead Negro, “and he loved me.”
“That’s your curse.”
