Spartacus, page 19
“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.
III
Daylight eases the fears and the perplexities of man, and most often it is like a balm and a benediction. Most often, but not always; for there are certain categories of human beings who do not welcome the light of day. A prisoner hugs the night, which is a robe to warm and protect him and comfort him, and daylight brings no cheer to a condemned man. But most often, daylight washes out the confusions of the night. Great men assume the mantle of their greatness anew each morning, for even great men become like all other men in the night time, and some of them do despicable things and others of them weep and still others huddle in fear of death and of a darkness deeper than that which surrounds them. But in the morning they are great men again, and Gracchus, sitting on the terrace, mantled in a fresh snow-white toga, his big fleshy face cheerful and confident, was a picture of what a Roman senator should be. It has been said many times, then and later, that no finer and nobler and wiser body of men ever came together for legislative debate than the Senate of Republican Rome, and looking at Gracchus, one was inclined to accept this. It was true that he was not nobly born and that the blood in his veins was of exceedingly dubious ancestry, but he was very rich, and it was a virtue of the Republic that a man was measured in terms of himself as much as in terms of his ancestors. The very fact that the gods gave a man wealth was an indication of his inborn qualities, and if one wanted proof of this, one had only to see how many were poor and how few were rich.
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.
“I must say I favor Greek sculpture,” Antonius Caius remarked. “It’s cheap, and it’s very pleasing once the color washes off. Of course, it’s those old pieces without any color that one finds around, but they look well in a garden and I prefer them that way.”
“Then you might have bought the monuments of Spartacus—before our friend Crassus had them smashed to pieces,” Cicero smiled.
“Monuments?” asked Helena.
“They had to be smashed,” Crassus said cooly.
“What monuments?”
“If I’m not mistaken,” Cicero said, “it was Gracchus who signed the order for their destruction.”
“You’re never mistaken, are you, young man?” Gracchus rumbled. “You’re quite right.” He explained to Helena, “There were two great monuments carved out of volcanic stone that Spartacus raised up on the eastern slope of Vesuvius. I never saw them, but I signed the order for their destruction.”
“How could you?” Helena demanded.
“How could I not? If filth raises an emblem of filth, you wash it out!”
“What were they like?” Claudia asked.
Gracchus shook his head, smiling ruefully at the manner in which the ghosts of the slaves and the ghost of their leader intruded, no matter where the conversation began. “I never saw them, my dear. Crassus did. Ask him.”
“I can’t give you an artist’s opinion,” Crassus said. “But these things looked like what they were supposed to be. There were two of them. One was the figure of a slave, about fifty feet tall, I’d say. He stood with his feet apart and he had burst his chains, so that they hung loose about him. With one arm, he clasped a child to his breast, and in the other hand, hanging loose, there was a Spanish sword. That was one, and you might call it a colossus, I suppose. It was very well done as far as I could see, but as I said, I’m no judge of art. But it was plainly done, and the man and the child were well formed even to such details as the calluses and sores the chains would naturally raise. I remember young Gaius Taneria pointing out to me the heavy shoulder development of the slave and the raised veins in the hands, just as you would see in any ploughman. You know, Spartacus had a good many Greeks with him, and the Greeks are very clever at this kind of thing. They never had an opportunity to paint it, or perhaps they couldn’t get any pigment, and all in all it reminded me of some of the old carvings you see in Athens, the ones where the paint has washed off, and I agree with Caius that they’re pleasing that way—and very cheap too.
“The other monument was not as tall; the figures were no more than twenty feet high, but they were also well done. There were three gladiators, a Thracian, a Gaul and an African. The African, interestingly enough, was carved out of black stone; the other figures were white. The African stood in the center, somewhat taller than the others, grasping his trident in both hands. On one side of him stood the Thracian, knife in hand, and on the other side, the Gaul, sword in hand. It was well done, and you could see that they had been fighting, for they were badly cut about the arms and legs. Behind them, a woman stood—and very proudly, and they say Varinia was the original of that. The woman held a trowel in one hand and a mattock in the other. I must confess, I never quite understood the significance of that.”
“Varinia?” Gracchus asked softly.
“Why did you have to destroy them?” Helena asked.
“Could you leave their monuments standing?” countered Gracchus. “Could you leave it there, for all to point to and say, Here is what slaves did?”
“Rome is strong enough to afford to leave them—yes, and point to them,” Helena declared.
“Nicely said!” Cicero remarked, but Crassus thought of how it had been then, with ten thousand of his best troops lying in a bloody field, and the slaves moving away like an angry lion that is only annoyed but hardly hurt.
“What did the sculpture of Varinia look like?” Gracchus asked, trying to make the question seem as casual as possible.
“I don’t know that I can recall it very well. You would take her for a German or Gaulish woman, long hair, loose gown and all that. The hair in braids and bound the way the Germans and Gauls do it. A good bust—a fine, strong figure of a woman, like some of those German wenches you see in the market today, and everyone so eager to buy them. Of course, one doesn’t know whether it actually was Varinia or not. Like everything else in the Spartacus business, we know almost nothing about it. Unless you want to swallow the propaganda whole and let it go at that. All I know about Varinia is what that dirty old lanista, Batiatus, told me, and that was precious little, except that his tongue was out and he slobbered over the memory of her. So she must have been attractive—”
“And you destroyed that too!” Helena declared.
Crassus nodded. He was not a man easily disturbed. “My dear,” he said to Helena, “I was a soldier and I carried out the instructions of the Senate. You will hear it said that the Servile War was a small thing. It’s quite natural that such a view should be taken, since it profits Rome little to tell the world what a job we had with some slaves. But here, on this pleasant terrace at the home of my dear and good friend, Antonius Caius, with the company we have, we can dispense with legends. No one ever came as close to destroying Rome as Spartacus did. No one ever wounded her so terribly. I don’t want to build up my own case. Let Pompey be the hero, and there’s a little virtue in putting down slaves. But the truth remains, and if the tokens of punishment are unpleasant, think of how I felt when I saw the ground carpeted with the bodies of the finest troops in Rome. So I didn’t shrink from destroying some rock carving that the slaves had made. Quite to the contrary, I took a certain satisfaction in it. We destroyed the images most thoroughly and ground them into rubble—so that no trace of it remains. So did we destroy Spartacus and his army. So will we in time—and necessarily—destroy the very memory of what he did and how he did it. I am a fairly simple man and not particularly clever, but I know this. The order of things is that some must rule and some must serve. So the gods ordained it. So it will be.”
It was a quality of Crassus that he could evoke passion without being in the slightest degree passionate himself. His fine, strong military features gave emphasis to what he said. He was so much and so completely the bronze hawk of the Republic!
Gracchus watched him from under dropped lids. Gracchus sat there and watched each of them, the thin-faced, predatory Cicero, the young fop, Caius, Helena, the silent, suffering and somewhat ridiculous Julia, Claudia, sleek and satisfied, Antonius Caius—and Crassus—all of them, he watched, and he listened too, and he thought again of how the Senatorial Committee had come after him when he stalked away. That was the beginning, of course—when the six cohorts were sent. And the beginning would be forgotten, and the end too, as Crassus said. Unless—as it might be—the end was still to come.
IV
In the beginning, the decision of the Senate was to send six of the City Cohorts to Capua immediately to put down the revolt of the slaves. This was the decision which Gracchus had opposed, and which was, in some measure, carried through to teach him elements of humility. In the light of what followed, the question of humility was recalled by Gracchus with certain bitter satisfaction.
Each of the City Cohorts consisted of five hundred and sixty soldiers—who were armed as the average legionary was, only better and more expensively. The city was a good place to be. The legions went to the ends of the earth, and often enough they never returned but found their graves in foreign soil, and often enough they returned five or ten or fifteen years later. The legions marched all day on a handful of meal, and sweated and worked, built roads and cities in the wilderness, and sometimes the great urbs became only a memory to them. The City Cohorts lived on the fat of the land, and for them there was no end of girls, wine, and games. Even a common soldier in a City Cohort was a political factor, and a trickle of money always tickled his palm. Many of these men had good off-duty flats in the city, and some of them supported as many as six female slaves. The tale was told of one city soldier who kept fourteen concubines in a large apartment in Rome and made a profitable business out of raising children to the age of six and then selling them in the public market. Many similar stories were told.
They wore handsome uniforms. All of the cohorts were commanded by young men of good families who were making careers out of the army, but desired their careers within walking distance of the theatre, the arena and the better restaurants. Half of them were friends of Caius, and once or twice he had even toyed with the notion of taking such an appointment himself, but had abandoned the idea as being apart from his peculiar talents. But this kind of command and also the fact that the cohorts were called upon to perform ceremonial parade duty at almost every public function, led to a natural rivalry among the young gentlemen to lead the best uniformed contingent. In the city, the dirty, sweat-soaked leather trousers of the legionary was replaced by softly-tanned and beautifully-dyed doeskin. Each regiment sported a different color, and the privilege of wearing plumes in the helmets was generally given. The humeralia, the iron shoulder strips which came down in front and lapped over the breast-plate, were frequently plated with gold or silver. One cohort was armored entirely in brass, and each regiment had a distinctive boot, often knee-high and ornamented with tiny silver bells. Bronze greaves, long since discarded by the frontier legions who found marching miles a day impossible to men whose legs were encased in metal, were still sported by half of the city regiments, and each cohort had a different design for the face of its shields. The quality of their arms and armor was unmatched in all Italy.
It was not that they were poorly trained. The cohorts went through their paces every day in this period. They trained, usually in the early morning, in the Circus Maximus, which was then an open race course in the depression of the Vallis Murcia, and it was a pleasure to see them go through their movements to the cadenced music of one hundred fifes. On any morning, the hillsides around the circus would be covered with the children of Rome, who watched the military spectacle with delight and envy.
But the fact of the matter was that the cohorts were not legions, and it’s one thing to put down a mob of desperate and hungry unemployed or to fight through a political squabble in the narrow city streets, and quite another to go up against Spaniards or Gauls or Germans or Thracians or Jews or Africans. Yet this was no more than an uprising of a handful of slaves, and for all their failings, six of the City Cohorts included better than three and a half thousand Roman soldiers. Even Gracchus granted that in part. He did not, as a matter of principle, like to see the cohorts go more than a day’s march from the city walls. But there were twenty-seven cohorts in all, and even Gracchus granted that they could do what they had to do. His opposition stemmed more from a deep-seated fear of these political regiments which consisted not of peasant soldiers but of the city born and bred, the workless, conscienceless, corrupted parasites of Rome, the castoff and the hopeless who lived their lives in the limbo between the mass of the slaves upon which the society rested and the handful of rulers above. They outnumbered the working people of Rome, the dwindling core of artisans and shopkeepers. They spent their days in the streets or in the arena; they lived on their dole and gambled and bet on the races and sold their votes at each election and strangled their new-born children to escape the responsibility of raising them and spent hours at the baths and lived in the dirty little flats in the towering tenements—and from them were recruited the City Cohorts.
The six cohorts left at the break of dawn, on the day following the decision of the Senate. Their command was given to a young senator, Varinius Glabrus, who was given the token of legate and dispatched as a direct deputy of the Senate. There was no shortage of older men with years of military experience in Rome; but Rome had been wracked for years by an internal struggle for power, and the Senate was exceedingly wary about giving military power into the hands of anyone outside their body. Varinius Glabrus was vain, rather stupid, and politically dependable.
He was thirty-nine years old at the time, and through his mother, he had excellent family connections. He was not unduly ambitious, and both he and his family welcomed the assignment as an opportunity for considerable glory with no uncertainty attached. In selecting him, the Senate majority was strengthening its position with a whole section of the patrician population. The officers under him would do what had to be done in a military way; as to the few decisions he had to make, careful and explicit instructions were given him. He was to lead his men to Capua at field pace, which meant twenty miles a day. All of this distance was along the Appian Way, which meant that wagons would take care of food and water which the ordinary legionary had to carry on his back. He was to bivouac his men outside the walls of Capua, and spend no more than a day in that city receiving intelligence on the progress of the slave revolt and making his plans to suppress it. After that, he was to report his plans to the Senate, but proceed with his plans without waiting for confirmation. He was to deal with the slaves as he found necessary, but was to make every effort to capture the leaders of the revolt, and to return them and as many more as could be taken, to Rome for public trial and punishment. If the council at Capua should request tokens of punishment, he was given the right to crucify ten slaves outside Capua—but only if that represented less than half of those taken prisoner. By explicit order of the Senate, all property rights in the slaves were forfeit to the Senate, and Varinius was instructed that no claims upon them should be honored, although writs for subsequent suits could be accepted and delivered to the Committee for Claims.
