Yes, it was better recalled in the pictures evoked than from the flat words of the frightened, unimaginative soldier who was giving the testimony. And some of these pictures were so clear in the mind of Gracchus that he could almost believe that he had seen it with his own eyes. The dirt road narrowing to the merest cart track. The lovely fields and pastures of the
latifundia
giving way to the tangled woods and lonely out-croppings of volcanic rock that bordered the crater. And over all, the brooding majesty of Vesuvius. The six cohorts strung out over a mile of roadway. The baggage carts lurching in the ruts. The men disgruntled and weary. And then, ahead of them, a great ridge of rock, and underneath it a little open field with a brook running through it, buttercups and daisies and soft grass, and nightfall coming.
They made their camp there, and Varinius gave in to the officers on the question of fortifications. That, too, Gracchus could visualize. The regimental commanders would point out that they led better than three thousand heavily armed Roman soldiers. What possibility was there of attack? What danger was there of attack? Even at the outset of the revolt, the gladiators had numbered only two hundred or so; and many of those had been killed. And the men were very tired. Some of them lay down on the grass and fell asleep immediately. A few cohorts raised tents and made an attempt at a disciplined laying out of regimental streets. Most of the cohorts prepared cook fires, but since there was a large supply of bread in the baggage carts, some dispensed with even that. Such was the picture of the camp made in the shadow of the mountain. Varinius raised his tent at the very center of the camp, and there he planted his standard and his Senatorial Ensign. The people of Capua had prepared great hampers of beautifully cooked delicacies. He would sit down with his senior officers and make a meal of it—perhaps relieved that the arduous task of building fortifications would not have to be faced. After all, it was not the worst campaign in the world, honor and perhaps a little glory, and all of it only a few days march from the great city.
So, in his memory, on his inward eye that raised him from the beasts and separated him from the beasts, Gracchus reflected and recalled the pictures that made up the beginning. Memory is the joy and sorrow of mankind. Gracchus sat sprawled in the sunshine, looking into the glass of morning water he held in his hand, and listening to the far echo of the one miserable soldier who had come back with the ivory rod of the legate in his hand. Pictures came. What is it like for those who face death in a few hours, but know it not at all? Had Varinius Glabrus ever heard the name of Spartacus? Probably not.
“I remember how night fell, and all the stars were in the sky,” the soldier said to the stony-faced senators.
The simple beauty of a fool’s speech. Night fell, and Varinius Glabrus and his officers must have sat in his great pavilion drinking wine and nibbling the flesh from honied squabs. There must have been good talk that night, clever talk. Here were a number of young gentlemen of the most sophisticated society the world had ever seen. What had they probably talked about? Now, four years later, Gracchus tried to recall what had been popular then—in the theatre, at the track, in the arena? Wasn’t it shortly after a new production of Pacuvius’s
Armorum Iudicium?
And hadn’t Flavius Gallis sung the leading role as it had never been sung before? (Or was that always a fancy, that a role was sung or played as it had never been sung or played before?) Yet it might have been, and perhaps the young men of the City Cohorts lifted their voices over their wine:
“Men’ servasse ut essent qui me perderent?”
Rolling forth and heard through the camp—well, possibly. Memory was a fanciful thing. Tiredness must have gone away everywhere in that camp. The men of the City Cohorts lay upon their backs, munching bread and looking at the stars, those of them who hadn’t raised tents. And so sleep came, gentle sleep came to the three thousand and several hundred soldiers of Rome who had marched south to Mount Vesuvius to teach slaves that slaves must not lift their hands against their masters . .
Gracchus was
senator inquaesitor
. His to ask the questions, and between the answers of the soldier there was such a silence in the Senate chamber that one might have heard the wings of a fly brushing the air.
“You slept?” asked Gracchus.
“I slept,” answered the single frightened soldier who had returned to bear witness.
“And what awakened you?”
Here the soldier groped for speech. His face became very white, and Gracchus thought he was going to faint. But he did not faint, and here his report became precise and clear, but emotionless. This is what he said happened, as he saw it:
“I went to sleep, and then I woke up because someone was screaming. At least, I thought that one man was screaming, but when I woke up I realized that there was a great scream of many men in the air, and the air was full of it. I woke up and rolled over immediately. I sleep on my belly that is why I rolled over. Lying next to me was Callius, who has only one name, an orphan from the streets, but he was my first and favorite friend. He was my right hand support, and that is why we slept side by side, and when I rolled over my right wrist went into something wet and hot and soft, and when I looked I saw that it was the neck of Callius, but the neck cut all through, and all the time that scream kept on screaming. Then I sat up in a pool of blood, and I didn’t know whether it was my blood or not, but all around me in the moonlight were the dead, lying where they had slept, and the whole camp was filled with slaves who were armed with razor-sharp knives, and up and down went these knives, flashing in the moonlight, and that was the way we were killed, half of us while we slept. And when a man sprang to his feet, they killed him too. And here and there a few soldiers made a little group, but they didn’t fight long. It was the most terrible thing I ever saw in my life, and the slaves never stopped killing. Then I lost my head, and I began to scream too. I am not ashamed to say that. I drew my sword and dashed through the camp, and I cut at a slave and killed him, I think, but when I came to the edge of the meadow, there was a solid line of spears all around the camp, and most of those who held the spears were women, but they were not women such as I had ever seen or dreamed of, but terrible, wild things and their hair was blowing in the night wind and their mouths were open in a terrible scream of hate. That was part of the scream, and there was a soldier who dashed past me and drove onto the spears, because he didn’t think the women would spear him, but they did, and no one escaped from that place, and when the wounded came crawling, they drove their spears into them too. I ran up to the line and they put a spear in my arm, so I tore away and ran back into the camp, and then I fell in the blood and lay there. I lay there with my ears full of that screaming. I don’t know how long I lay there. It didn’t seem very long. I said to myself, you will get up and fight and die, but I waited. Then the screaming became less, and then hands grasped me and pulled me to my feet, and I would have struck at them with my sword, but they knocked it out of my hand, and there was no strength in my hand because of the pain of the spear cut. Slaves held me and a knife went up to cut my throat, and then I knew it was all finished and I would die too. But someone called out,
wait!
And the knife waited. It waited an inch from my throat. Then a slave strode up, he too with a Thracian knife in his hand, and he said to them, Wait.
I think he’s the only one.
They stood there and waited. My life waited. Then a slave with red hair came up, and they talked back and forth. I was the only one. That’s why they didn’t kill me. I was the only one, and all the rest were dead. They took me through the camp, and the cohorts were dead. Most of them were dead where they slept. They never woke up. They took me to the pavilion of Varinius Glabrus, the legate, but the legate was dead. He lay on his couch, dead. Some officers of the cohorts were in the pavilion, where they had been killed. All dead. Then they bound up the wound in my arm and left me there with some slaves to guard me. Now the sky was becoming gray and dawn was in the air. But all the cohorts were dead.”
This he said without emotion, in a straightforward, matter of fact narrative, but his eye kept twitching all the time, and he never looked at the rows of senators who sat with such stony faces.
“How do you know they were all dead?” demanded Gracchus.
“They kept me there in the pavilion until dawn came. The sides of the pavilion were rolled up, and I could see all over the bivouac. The screaming had stopped now, but I still heard it inside of my head. I could look around, and everywhere I looked the dead lay on the ground. The smell of blood and death was in the air. Most of the women who made the circle of spears were not there now. They went away somewhere. I don’t know where they went. But through the smell of blood, I could smell meat roasting. Maybe the women were cooking meat for breakfast. It made me sick to think that people could eat now. I vomited. The slaves dragged me out of the pavilion until I had finished vomiting. It was getting lighter now. I saw groups of slaves going through the camp. They were stripping the dead. Here and there they spread out our tents. I could see these white spots on the ground all over the place. They took everything that the dead were wearing, armor and clothes and boots, and made piles of it on the outspread tents. The swords and spears and armor they washed in the brook. The brook ran near the pavilion and it turned the color of rust, just from the bloody arms and armor they washed in it. Then they took our grease pots, and after they dried the metal, they greased it. One of the tents was spread out a few paces from the pavilion. They stacked the swords on that one, thousands of swords—”
“How many slaves were there?” asked Gracchus.
“Seven, eight hundred a—thousand maybe. I don’t know. They were working in groups of ten. They worked very hard. Some of them harnessed our baggage wagons and loaded them with what they had stripped from the dead, and drove them away. While they worked, some of the women came back with baskets of roasted meat. One group at a time would stop to eat. They ate our bread rations, too.”
“What did they do with the dead?”
“Nothing. They left them there where they were. They moved around as if the dead were not there at all, once they had stripped everything off them. The dead were everywhere. The ground was carpeted with them, and the ground was soaked with blood. Now the sun had come up. It was the worst thing I ever saw. Now I saw a group of slaves standing at one side of the field, watching what was going on. There were six in the group. One of them was a black man, an African. They were gladiators.”
“How did you know?”
“When they came over to where I was, in the pavilion, I could see that they were gladiators. Their hair was cropped to their skulls and they had scar-marks all over their bodies. It’s not hard to tell a gladiator. One of them was missing an ear. One had red hair. But the leader of the group was a Thracian. He had a broken nose and black eyes that looked at you without moving and without blinking—”
Now there was a change among the senators, almost imperceptible but there nevertheless. They were listening in a new way; they were listening with hatred and tension and added intensity. Very well indeed did Gracchus remember that moment, for that was when Spartacus came to life, emerged out of nowhere to rock the whole world. Other men have roots, a past, a beginning, a place, a land, a country—but Spartacus had none of these. He was born on the lips of a soldier who survived and whose survival was engineered by Spartacus for that very purpose—for the purpose of having him return to Senate to say, it was such and such a man. It was not a giant of a man, not a wild man, not a terrible man, simply a slave; but there was something that the soldier saw which had to be told in detail.
“—and the face reminded me of a sheep. He wore a tunic and a heavy brass belt and high boots, but no armor or helmet. He had a knife in the belt, and that was all the arms he had. His tunic was splattered with blood. He had the kind of a face you don’t forget. He made me afraid of him. I wasn’t afraid of the others, but I was afraid of him.” The soldier might have told them of seeing that face in his dreams, of waking up in a cold sweat and seeing that flat, tanned face with the broken nose and the black eyes, but those were not the details of information that one gave to the Senate. The Senate was not interested in his dreams.
“How do you know he is a Thracian?”
“I could tell from his accent. He spoke bad Latin, and I’ve heard Thracians speak. One of the others was a Thracian and maybe the rest were Gauls. They just looked at me, just glanced at me. It made me feel that I was dead with the others. They glanced at me and walked past to the other section of the pavilion. The bodies had been taken out of the pavilion now and thrown on the ground outside with the bodies of the soldiers. But first they had stripped Varinius Glabrus naked, and all his armor and all the things he had were stacked on his couch. His legate’s staff was on the couch too. The slaves came back and gathered around the couch, looking at the armor and the possessions of the commander. They picked up the sword and examined it and passed it around. It had an ivory scabbard, covered with carving. They looked at it, and then they threw it back on the couch. Then they examined the staff. The man with the broken nose—his name is Spartacus—turned to me and held up the staff and asked me,
Roman, do you know what this is? It’s the arm of the noble Senate,
I answered. But they didn’t know. I had to explain it to them. Spartacus and the red headed Gaul sat down on the couch. The others remained standing. Spartacus put his chin in his hands, his elbows on his knees, and kept his eyes fixed on me. It was like having a snake look at you. Then when I had finished talking, they said nothing, and Spartacus kept on staring at me. I could feel the sweat pouring from all over my skin. I thought they were going to kill me. Then he told me his name.
My name is Spartacus,
he said.
Remember my name, Roman.
And then they stared at me again. And then Spartacus said,
Why did you kill the three slaves yesterday, Roman? The slaves did you no harm. They came down to look at the soldiers marching past. Are the women of Rome so virtuous that a whole legion must rape one poor slave woman? Why did you do it, Roman?
I tried to tell him what had happened. I told him that the Second Cohort had raped her and killed the slaves. I told him that I was in the Third Cohort, and that I had nothing to do with it and that I had not raped the woman. I don’t know how they found out about that, because there seemed to be no one else around when the three slaves were killed. But they knew everything that we did. They knew when we came to Capua. They knew when we left Capua. It was all in his black snake eyes that never blinked. It was all in his voice. He never raised his voice. He talked to me the way someone talks to a child, but he didn’t fool me talking to me like that. He was a killer. It was in his eyes. It was in the eyes of all of them. All killers. I know gladiators like that. Gladiators become killers. No one else but gladiators could have killed the way they killed that night. I know gladiators who—”