All three of these talents were ideals, and ideals being what they are and people being what they are, there was no such thing as one hundred per cent fulfillment. On his own part, he had done well. Starting as the son of a simple but industrious cobbler, he was buying and selling votes at the age of nineteen, buying and selling offices and an occasional assassination at the age of twenty-five, leading a powerful political gang at the age of twenty-eight, and unopposed leader of the famous Caelian Ward at the age of thirty. Five years later he was a magistrate, and at the age of forty he entered the Senate. He knew ten thousand people in the city by name and twenty thousand more by sight. He included in his list of favors even his worst enemies, and while he never made the mistake of believing that any of his associates were honest, he never fell into the more profound error of taking for granted the dishonesty of any one of them.
His weight and substance befitted his position; he had never trusted women nor had he noticed that they were particularly profitable to his colleagues. His own vice was food, and the huge layers of fat which he had accumulated over the span of successful years not only turned him into an impressive figure of a man, but made him one of those few Romans who were never seen in public but that they were wrapped in the folds of a toga. In a tunic, Lentelus Gracchus was not an ingratiating figure of a man. In a toga, he was a symbol of Roman substance and virtue. His three hundred pounds of weight supported a bald, jowled head, firmly set in rings of fat. He had a deep, hoarse voice, a winning smile, and small, cheerful blue eyes which peered out of folds of flesh. And his skin was pink as a baby’s.
Gracchus was less cynical than informed. The formula of Roman power had never been a mystery to him, and he was rather amused by Cicero’s ponderous advance toward what Cicero liked to think was the last and most important truth. When Antonius Caius asked him his opinion of Cicero, Gracchus replied shortly,
“A young fogey.”
With Antonius Caius, Gracchus was on the best of terms, as he was with so many patricians. Aristocracy was the one mystery and shrine he permitted himself. He liked aristocrats. He envied them. He also, within a certain area, despised them, for he considered all of them rather stupid, and he never got over the fact that they seemed to derive so little advantage from birth and station. Nevertheless, he cultivated them, and it gave him a feeling of pride and pleasure to be invited to one of their splendid plantations, such as the
Villa Salaria
. He did not put on airs and he made no attempt to pass as an aristocrat. He did not speak their clipped, genteel Latin, but rather the easy language of the plebs. Though he could well afford it, he made no attempt to set up a plantation of his own. For their part, they appreciated his practicality and fund of useful information; and his immense size communicated assurance. Antonius Caius liked him because Gracchus was a man utterly unmoved by moral judgment, and he often referred to Gracchus as the only wholly honest man he had ever known.
On this evening, Gracchus missed little of what went on. He weighed and assessed, but he did not judge. For Caius, he had nothing but contempt. The great and wealthy general, Crassus, amused him, and concerning Cicero, he said to his host,
“He has everything but greatness. I think he would cut his mother’s throat if it advanced the cause of Cicero.”
“But the cause of Cicero is not that important.”
“Precisely. And therefore he will fail at practically everything. He is nobody to fear since he is nobody to admire.”
That was a most penetrating comment to make to Antonius Caius, who was someone to admire, even though his sexual tendencies and practices were pitched at the level of a twelve year old. Gracchus was willing to admit to himself that the ground he stood upon was turning to slime. His world was disintegrating, but since the process of disintegration was exceedingly slow and since he himself was far from immortal, he had no interest in deceiving himself. He was able to see what went on without taking sides; there was no necessity in his makeup for him to take sides.
On this particular evening, he remained awake after the rest of the household had gone to sleep. He slept little and poorly, and now he took a turn around the grounds in the bright moonlight. If anyone had asked him, he would have been able to report fairly accurately on how partners had been chosen for bed that evening; but he had observed this without prying, and he felt no resentment. This was Rome. Only a fool considered otherwise.
As he walked, he saw Julia sitting on a stone bench, a mournful figure in the night, dispossessed and stricken with terror at her own inadequacy and by the manner of her rejection. He turned toward her.
“Two of us for the night,” he said to her. “It is a most beautiful night, isn’t it, Julia?”
“If you feel beautiful.”
“And you don’t, Julia?” He arranged his toga. “Would you like me to sit for a while?”
“Please do.”
He sat in silence for a little, mildly responsive to the moonlit beauty of the grounds, the great white house rising so finely out of its bed of shrubs and evergreens, the terrace, the fountains, the pale gleam of sculpture here and there, the arbors with their lovely benches of pale pink or deep black marble. How much beauty Rome had managed! Finally, he said,
“It would seem, Julia, that this should content us.”
“Yes, it would seem so.”
He was her husband’s friend and guest. “A privilege to be a Roman,” he remarked.
“You never make these stupid platitudes except when you are with me,” Julia answered quietly.
“Yes?”
“Yes, I think so. Tell me, did you ever hear of Varinia?”
“Varinia?”
“Do you ever commit yourself on anything without turning it over in your mind at least five times? I’m not trying to be clever, my dear.” She rested her hand on his great paw. “I can’t be. Varinia was the wife of Spartacus.”
“Yes, I have heard of her. As a matter of fact, you people out here are obsessed with Spartacus. I’ve heard of little else tonight.”
“Well, he spared the
Villa Salaria
. I don’t know whether to be grateful or not. I suppose it’s the tokens of punishment. I haven’t been out to the road yet. Are they very terrible?”
“Terrible? I don’t know that I gave it much thought. There they are, and that’s about all. Life is cheap, and slaves are worth just about nothing these days. Why did you ask me about Varinia?”
“I’ve been trying to think of whom I envy. I think I envy her.”
“Really, Julia? A little barbarian slave girl. Shall I have a dozen like her picked up at the market tomorrow and sent here?”
“You’re never serious about anything, are you, Gracchus?”
“Very little worth being serious about. Why do you envy her?”
“Because I hate myself.”
“That’s too complex for me,” Gracchus rumbled. “Can you see her, dirty, picking her nose, hawking, spitting, her nails broken and unclean, her face covered with pimples? That’s your slave princess. Do you still envy her?”
“Was she like that?”
Gracchus laughed. “Who knows! Julia, politics is a lie. History is the recording of a lie. If you go down to the road tomorrow and look at the crosses, you will see the only truth about Spartacus. Death. Nothing else. Everything else is sheer fabrication. I know.”
“I look at my slaves—”
“And you don’t see Spartacus? Of course. Stop eating your heart out, Julia. I’m older than you. I take the privilege of advice. Yes, at the risk of intruding where I’ve no business to go. Take a young buck out of your slave quarters—”
“Stop it, Gracchus!”
“—and he might be Spartacus for all that.”
She was crying now. Gracchus did not see many women of his class in tears, and he felt suddenly awkward and stupid. He began to ask her whether it was his fault. Nothing he had said was particularly insulting; but was it his fault?
“No, no, please, Gracchus. You’re one of the only friends I have. Don’t stop being my friend because I’m such a fool.” She dried her eyes, excused herself, and left him there. “I’m very tired,” she said. “Please don’t come with me.”
II
Like Cicero, Gracchus had a sense of history; the important difference was that Gracchus never confused himself concerning his own place and role; and therefore he saw many things far more clearly than Cicero did. He sat now all alone in the warm and gentle Italian night and turned over in his mind the strange case of a Roman matron and patrician who envied a barbarian slave woman. First, he considered whether Julia was telling the truth. He decided that she was. For some reason, the essence of Julia’s own pitiful tragedy was spotlighted by Varinia—and he wondered whether in the same way the meaning of their own lives was not contained in the endless tokens of punishment which lined the Appian Way. Gracchus was not troubled by morality; he knew his own people, and he was not taken in by the legendry of the Roman matron and the Roman family. But for some strange reason, he was most deeply troubled by what Julia had said, and the question would not leave him.
The answer was in a flash of understanding which left him cold and shaken in a way he had rarely been shaken before; and it left him full of fear of death and of the awful and utter darkness and non-existence which death brings; for the answer took away a great deal of the cynical certainty which supported him and left him sitting there on the stone bench bereft, a fat and paunchy old man whose personal doom had suddenly become linked with an enormous movement of the currents of history.
He saw it clearly. The thing which had come into the world so newly was a whole society built upon the backs of slaves, and the symphonic utterance of that society was the song of the whip-lash. What did it do to the people who wielded the whip? What did Julia mean? He had never married; a germ of this present understanding had kept him from ever taking a wife, so he bought women and the concubines in his house were there when he needed them. But Antonius Caius also kept a stable of concubines, even as every gentleman he knew kept a quantity of women as one keeps a quantity of horses or dogs, and the wives knew and accepted and equalized matters with the male slaves. It was not a simple matter of corruption, but a monster which had turned the world over; and these people, gathered together for a night at the
Villa Salaria,
were obsessed with Spartacus because Spartacus was all that they were not. Cicero might never understand whence came the virtue of this mysterious slave, but he, Gracchus, he understood. Home and family and honor and virtue and all that was good and noble was defended by the slaves and owned by the slaves—not because they were good and noble, but because their masters had turned over to them all that was sacred.
As Spartacus had a vision of what might be—the vision arising out of himself—so did Gracchus have his own vision of what might be, and what he saw in the future made him cold and sick and afraid. He rose and gathered his toga about him, and plodded with heavy steps toward his room and bed.
But he could not sleep easily. He took up Julia’s wish, and like a little boy he wept noiseless and dry tears for a companion in his loneliness, and like a little boy, he pretended that the slave girl Varinia shared his bed with him. Terror gave force to his plaintive desire for virtue. His fat, ringed hands stroked a ghost on his bedsheet. The hours passed, and he lay there with his memories.
They all hated Spartacus. This house was filled with Spartacus; no one knew his form or shape or thoughts or manner, but this house was filled with his presence and Rome was filled with his presence. It was a complete fiction that he, Gracchus, was free from that hatred. Quite to the contrary, his hatred, which he had always so carefully concealed, was more violent, more bitter, more poignant than their hatred.
As he struggled with his memories, his memories took shape and form and color and reality. He remembered how he was sitting in the Senate—and he never sat in the Senate chamber but that he felt and resented his own pride at being there among the great, the aristocrats—when news came by fast post from Capua that there had been an uprising among the gladiators at the school of Lentulus Batiatus and that it was spreading over the countryside. He remembered the wave of fear that spread through the Senate, and how they began to cackle like a great flock of geese, all of them talking at once, all of them saying wild, frightened things simply because a handful of gladiators had killed their trainers. He remembered his disgust with them. He remembered how he rose, gathering his toga together and throwing it over his shoulder with the sweeping gesture which had become a hallmark of his, and thundering at his august colleagues,
“Gentlemen—gentlemen, you forget yourselves!”
They stopped their cackling and turned to him.
“Gentlemen, we are faced with the crime of a handful of miserable, dirty butcher slaves. We are not faced with a barbarian invasion. But even if we were, gentlemen, it would seem to me that the Senate might comport itself somewhat differently! It would seem to me that we owe ourselves a certain dignity!”
They were enraged with him, but he was enraged with them. He made it a point of pride never to lose his temper, but this was one time he had, and he, a person of low birth and breeding, a commoner, had insulted and humbled the most august body in the whole world. “The devil with that!” he said to himself, and he stalked out of the chamber with their pious defense of their dignity ringing in his ears, and he went home.
That day lived with him. Every minute of that day lived with him. He had been frightened at first. He had violated his own sacred rules of conduct. He had lost his temper. He had made enemies. He walked through the streets of his beloved Rome, and he was full of fears at what he had done. But the fear was mingled with contempt for his colleagues and contempt for himself, in that he could not even now overcome his awe of the Senate and his ingrained veneration for the fools who occupied its seats.