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.”
Batiatus took his place before the long line of gladiators and the soldiers gathered behind him. “I feed you,” said the
lanista
. “I feed you the best, roasts and chickens and fresh fish. I feed you until your bellies swell out. I bathe you and I massage you. I took the lot of you from the mines and the gallows, and here you live like kings in idleness on the fat of the land. There was nothing lower than what you were before you came here, but now you live in comfort and you eat the best.”
“Are you my friend?” whispered Spartacus, and the Gaul answered, barely moving his lips, “Gladiator, make no friends of gladiators.”
“I call you friend,” said Spartacus.
Batiatus now said, “In the black heart of that black dog, there was neither gratitude nor understanding. How many of you are like him?”
The gladiators stood in silence.
“Pick me a black man!” said Batiatus to the trainers, and they went to where the Africans stood and dragged one out to the center of the enclosure. It had been arranged in advance. The drums began to roll, and two soldiers separated themselves from the others and lifted their heavy wooden spears. Still the drums rolled. The Negro struggled convulsively and the soldiers drove their spears one after another through his breast. He lay on his back in the sand, the two spears angled curiously. Batiatus turned to the officer who stood beside him, and said,
“Now there will be no more trouble. The dogs will not even growl.”
“I call you friend,” said Gannicus to Spartacus, and the Gaul who stood on the other side of him said nothing, only breathing heavily and hoarsely.
Then the morning drill began.
V
Afterward, at a Senatorial Board of Inquiry, Batiatus claimed, quite truthfully, that not only did he not know that a plot had been hatched, but that he did not believe it possible for one to be hatched. In support of this, he pointed out that there were always at least two among the gladiators who were in his pay with his promise of manumission. At intervals, these two would be paired out to fight for hire. One would be freed, the other would be returned with some slight signs of combat, and then a new informer would be recruited for the pair. Batiatus insisted that a plot could not have been hatched without his knowledge.
Thus it was always, and no matter how often revolt broke out among the slaves, there was no locating it, no pinning it down, no finding the continuous root of it, which unquestionably, like the roots of strawberries, was continuous and invisible, whereas only the flowering plant could be seen. Whether it was revolt in Sicily on a grand scale or an abortive attempt on a plantation, which ended in the crucifixion of a few hundred miserable wretches, the attempt of the Senate to dig up the roots failed. Yet the roots had to be dug up. Here men had created a splendor of life and luxury and abundance never known in the world before; the warring of nations had ended in the Roman Peace; the separation of nations had ended with the Roman roads; and in the mighty urban center of the world, no man wanted for food or pleasure. This was as it should be, as all and each and every one of the gods had planned it to be, yet with the flowering of the body had come this disease which could not be rooted out.
Whereby the Senate asked Batiatus, “Were there no signs of conspiracy, discontent, plotting?”
“There were none,” he insisted.
“And when you executed the African—mind you, we consider your action quite proper—was there no protest?”
“None.”
“We are particularly interested in whether any sort of outside help, foreign provocation of any sort could have entered into this matter?”
“It is impossible,” said Batiatus.
“And there was no outside help or funds provided for the triumvirate of Spartacus, Gannicus and Crixus?”
“I can swear by all the gods there were not,” said Batiatus.
VI
Yet this was not wholly true, and no man is alone. It was the incredible strength of Spartacus that he never saw himself alone and he never retreated into himself. Not too long before the abortive fighting of the two pairs, which the wealthy young Roman, Marius Bracus, had contracted for, there was a rising of slaves on three great plantations in Sicily. Nine hundred slaves were involved and all except a handful were put to death, and it was only at the tail end of blood-letting that the owners realized how much cold cash was going down the drain. Thereby, almost a hundred survivors were sold into the galleys for a mere pittance, and it was in a galley that one of Batiatus’s agents saw the huge, broad-shouldered, red-headed Gaul whose name was Crixus. Since galley slaves were considered incorrigibles, the price was cheap and even the bribes which promoted the transaction were small, and since the slave dealers who controlled the naval docks at Ostia did not look for trouble, they said nothing of the origin of Crixus.
Whereby Spartacus was neither alone nor disconnected with many threads which wove a particular fabric. Crixus was in the cell next to his. On many an evening, stretched full length on the floor of his cell, his head near the door, Spartacus heard the story from Crixus of the endless warfare of the Sicilian slaves, which had begun more than half a century before. He, Spartacus, was a slave and born out of slaves, but here among his own kind were legendary heroes as splendid as Achilles and Hector and Odysseus the wise, as splendid and even prouder, though no songs were sung of them and they were not turned into gods which men worshipped. Which was well enough, for the gods were like the rich Romans and as little concerned with the lives of slaves. These were men and less than men, slaves, naked slaves who were cheaper on the market than donkeys, and who put their shoulders into harness and dragged ploughs across the fields of the
latifundia
. But what giants they were! Eunus, who freed every slave on the island and smashed three Roman armies before they dragged him down, Athenion the Greek, Salvius the Thracian, the German Undart, and the strange Jew, Ben Joash, who had escaped in a boat from Carthage and joined Athenion with his entire crew.
Listening, Spartacus would feel his heart swell in pride and joy, and a great and cleansing sense of brotherhood and communion toward these dead heroes would come over him. His heart went out to these comrades of his; he knew them well; he knew what they felt and what they dreamed and what they longed for. Race, city or state had no meaning. Their bondage was universal. Yet for all the pitiful splendor of their revolts, they always failed; always it was the Romans who nailed them to the cross, the new tree and the new fruit, so that all might see the rewards for a slave who would not be a slave.
“In the end it was always the same,” Crixus said . . .
So the longer he was a gladiator, the less Crixus spoke of what had been. Neither the past nor the future can help the gladiator. For him, there is only now. Crixus built a wall of cynicism around himself, and only Spartacus dared to probe at the bitter shell of the giant Gaul. And once Crixus had said to him,
“You make too many friends, Spartacus. It’s hard to kill a friend. Leave me alone.”
On this morning, after the drill, they were grouped together for a while in the enclosure before going to the morning meal. Hot and sweating, the gladiators stood or squatted in little groups, their talk muffled by the presence of the two Africans who now hung crucified on the fence. There was a fresh pool of blood under the one who had been selected as a token of punishment for the other, and the blood birds pecked and gobbled the sweet stain. The gladiators were sullen and subdued. It was only the beginning, they felt. Batiatus would now contract and fight them as quickly as he could. It was a bad time.