“I think they have wonderful spirit,” Claudia nodded.
“It isn’t easy to handle slaves—slaves, horses—men are the easiest.”
Now they brought the stallion into the pen, an enormous yellow beast with bloodshot eyes and a lathered mouth. His head was lashed in check, yet the two slaves hanging onto his bridle could hardly keep him from rearing and plunging. He dragged them half way across the pen, and then when they released him and ran for safety, he reared and slashed at them with his hoofs. Claudia laughed and clapped her hands in delight.
“He’s splendid, splendid!” she cried. “But why is he that way—so full of hate?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I should think it would be love, not hate.”
“The two mix. He hates us because we keep him from what he wants. Would you like to see?”
Claudia nodded. Antonius said a few words to the slave who stood a little distance from them, and the man ran down to the stables. The mare was chestnut brown, lithe and nervous. She fled across the pen, and the stallion whirled to cut her off. But Antonius Caius was not watching her; his eyes were fixed on Claudia, who was enthralled in the scene being enacted before her.
X
Through with his bath, shaved, perfumed, his hair oiled slightly and curled delicately, his clothes fresh for dinner, Caius went into the fern room to have a glass of wine before the call to dinner. The fern room at the
Villa Salaria
combined rose-colored Phoenician tile with a delicately-tinted, pale yellow glass roof. The result at this time of the day was a gentle glow of fading sunlight which transformed the dark ferns and heavy-leafed tropical plants into a phantasy. When Caius entered, Julia was already there, sitting on an alabaster bench, with one of her little girls on either side of her, the fading light both flattering and kind. As she sat there in her long white gown, her dark hair dressed tastefully on top of her head, an arm around each of the children, she was the very picture of a Roman matron, comely and calm and dignified; and if she had not been so obviously and childishly posed, she would have quite naturally recalled to Caius every painting of the mother of the Gracchi he had ever seen. He repressed his impulse to applaud or say, “Bravo, Julia!” It was too easy to destroy Julia, for her pretense was always pathetic, never hostile.
“Good evening, Caius,” she smiled in a fine combination of simulated surprise and real pleasure.
“I didn’t know you would be here, Julia,” he apologized.
“But please stay. Stay and let me pour you a glass of wine.”
“All right,” he agreed, and when she started to send the girls away, protested, “Let them stay if they want to—”
“It’s really time for their supper.” When the children had gone, she said, “Come and sit beside me, Caius. Do sit beside me, Caius.” He sat down, and she poured wine for both of them. She touched her glass to his and drank with her eyes on him. “You are too handsome to be good, Caius.”
“I have no desire to be good, Julia.”
“What do you desire, Caius, if anything?”
“Pleasure,” he answered frankly.
“And it becomes harder and harder, young as you are, doesn’t it, Caius?”
“Really, Julia, I don’t look particularly mournful, do I?”
“Or particularly happy.”
“The role of vestal virgin, Julia, is not very becoming.”
“You’re much cleverer than I am, Caius. I can’t be as cruel as you.”
“I don’t want to be cruel, Julia.”
“Will you kiss me and prove that?”
“Here?”
“Antonius won’t walk in. Right now, he is putting his new stallion to stud for the edification of that little blonde you brought here.”
“What? For Claudia? Oh, no—no.” Caius began to chuckle deep inside himself.
“What a little beast you are. Will you kiss me?”
He kissed her lightly on the lips.
“Just that? Will you—tonight, Caius?”
“Really, Julia—”
“Don’t say no to me, Caius,” she interrupted him. “Don’t—please. You won’t have your Claudia tonight in any case. I know my husband.”
“She isn’t my Claudia, and I don’t want her tonight.”
“Then—”
“All right,” he said. “All right, Julia. We won’t talk about it now.”
“You don’t want to—”
“It isn’t that I want to or don’t want to, Julia. I just don’t want to talk about it any more now.”
XI
The evening meal at the
Villa Salaria
demonstrated, as did other practices of the household, a certain resistance to changes already common in cosmopolitan Rome. On the part of Antonius Caius, it was less an ingrained conservatism than a desire to separate himself from the new class of rich merchants who had made their fortunes out of war, piracy, mining and trade—and who lapped eagerly at every Greek or Egyptian innovation. As far as eating went, Antonius Caius could not enjoy a meal sprawled out on a couch; it impaired his digestion and diverted him from real food to the little tidbits of sweet-and-sour delicacies which were becoming so fashionable now. His guests sat at the table and ate from the table, and while he presented them with game and fowl, with fine roasts and elegant pastries, with the best of soup and the most succulent of fruits, there were none of the weird concoctions that were showing up at the boards of so many Roman noblemen. Nor did he favor music and dancing during a meal; good food and good wine and good conversation. His father and his grandfather had both been able to read and write fluently; himself, he considered an educated man, and while his grandfather had gone out to work the fields of the farm alongside of his slaves, Antonius Caius ruled his great
latifundium
much as a minor Eastern prince might have ruled his little empire. Nevertheless, he was fond of thinking of himself as an enlightened ruler, well versed in Greek history, philosophy and drama, able to practice at least competent medicine, and a person of political affairs as well. His guests reflected his taste, and when they reclined in their chairs after the meal, sipping their dessert wine—the women having repaired to the fern room for the moment—Caius recognized in them and his host the cream of the quality which had made Rome and which ruled Rome so tenaciously and so ably.
Caius admired it less than he recognized it; he had no ambitions in that direction himself. In their opinion, he was of no value and of no particular importance, a young wastrel of good family with real talent only in the direction of food and stud; which in some respects was a new direction, a product of only the last generation or two. Yet he had some importance; he had family connections which were enviable; when his father died, he would be very wealthy, and it was even possible that some twist of fortune would turn him into a person of political consequence. Thus, he was a little more than tolerated and treated a little better than one might treat a young, perfumed fop with good features, oiled hair, and little brains.
And Caius feared them. There was a disease in them, but the disease did not appear to weaken them. Here they sat, having eaten their fine food, sipping their mellow wine, and those who contested their power were crucified for miles and miles along the Appian Way. Spartacus was meat; simply meat; like the meat on the cutting table at a butcher shop; not even enough of him to crucify. But no one would ever crucify Antonius Caius, sitting so calmly and surely at the head of the table, speaking of horses, making the extremely logical point that it was better to harness two slaves to a plow than one horse, since there never was a horse which could stand the half-human treatment of slaves.
A slight smile on Cicero’s face as he listened. More than the others, Cicero disturbed Caius. How could one like Cicero? Did he want to like Cicero? Once Cicero had glanced at him, as if to say, “Oh, I know you, my lad. Top and bottom, up and down, inside and out.” Were the others afraid of Cicero, he wondered? Stay away from Cicero, God damn him to hell, he said to himself. Crassus was listening with polite interest. Crassus had to be polite. He was the picture of the Roman military man, erect, square face, firm, hard features, bronzed skin, fine black hair—and then Caius thought of him in the bath and winced. How could he? Across the table from Caius, sat the politician, Gracchus, a big man with a deep booming voice, his head sunk in collars of fat, his huge hands fat and puffy, with rings on almost every finger. He responded with the deeply conditioned responses of the professional politician; his laugh was a great laugh; his approval was a mighty approval, whereas his disagreement was always conditional. His statements were pompous but never stupid.
“Of course you would do better with slaves on your plow,” observed Cicero, after Gracchus had expressed some disbelief. “The beast which can think is more desirable than the beast which cannot think. That stands to reason. Also, a horse is a thing of value. There are no tribes of horses whom we can war against and bring back a hundred and fifty thousand to the auction block. And if you use horses, the slaves will ruin them.”
“I don’t see that,” said Gracchus.
“Ask your host.”
“It’s true,” nodded Antonius. “Slaves will kill a horse. They have no respect for anything which belongs to their master—except themselves.” He poured another glass of wine. “Are we to talk about slaves?”
“Why not?” reflected Cicero. “They are always with us, and we are the unique product of slaves and slavery. That is what makes us Romans, if you come right down to it. Our host lives on this great plantation—for which I envy him—by the grace of a thousand slaves. Crassus is the talk of Rome, because of the slave uprising which he put down, and Gracchus has an income from the slave market—which is in a ward he owns body and soul—which I hesitate even to compute. And this young man—” Nodding at Caius and smiling. “—this young man is, I suspect, the unique product of slaves even a little more, for I am certain they nursed him and fed him and aired him and doctored him and—”
Caius turned red, but Gracchus burst out laughing and cried, “And yourself, Cicero?”
“For me, they constituted a problem. To live decently in Rome these days, one needs a minimum of ten slaves. And to buy them, feed them and house them—well, there is my problem.”
Gracchus continued to laugh, but Crassus said, “I can’t agree with you, Cicero, that slaves are what makes us Romans.” The rumbling laughter of Gracchus continued. He took a long drink of wine, and went into a story of a slave girl he had purchased in the market the month before. He was a little tight, his face flushed, the chuckles rumbling out of his enormous paunch and interspersing his words. In great detail, he described the girl he had purchased. Caius thought the story pointless and vulgar, but Antonius nodded sagely and Crassus was carried away by the earthiness of the fat man’s description. Cicero smiled thinly and reflectively through the telling.
“Yet I return to Cicero’s statement,” said Crassus doggedly.
“Did I offend you?” asked Cicero.
“No one is offended here,” said Antonius. “We are a company of civilized people.”
“No—no offense. You puzzle me,” said Crassus.
“It’s strange,” nodded Cicero, “how when the evidence of a thing is all around us, we nevertheless resist the logic of its component parts. The Greeks are different. Logic has an irresistible lure for them, regardless of the consequences; but our virtue is doggedness. But look around us—” One of the slaves who stood in attendance at the table, replaced the emptying decanters with full ones, and another offered fruit and nuts to the men. “—what is the essence of our lives? We are not just any people; we are the Roman people, and we are that precisely because we are the first to understand fully the use of the slave.”
“Yet there were slaves before there was Rome,” Antonius objected.
“Indeed there were, a few here, a few there. It is true that the Greeks had plantations—so did Carthage. But we destroyed Greece and we destroyed Carthage, to make room for our own plantations. And the plantation and the slave are one and the same thing. Where other people had one slave, we have twenty—and now we live in a land of slaves, and our greatest achievement is Spartacus. How about that, Crassus? You had an intimate acquaintance with Spartacus. Could any other nation but Rome have produced him?”
“Did we produce Spartacus?” Crassus wondered. The general was troubled. Caius guessed that it bothered him to think profoundly under any circumstances—and even more so when confronted with a mind like Cicero’s. There was actually no meeting ground between the two. “I thought that hell produced Spartacus,” Crassus added.
“Hardly.”
Undisturbed, Gracchus rumbled comfortably and drank wine and observed to Cicero, somewhat apologetically, that being a good Roman, he, Gracchus, was a poor philosopher. In any case, here was Rome and here were the slaves, and what did Cicero propose to do about it?
“Understand it,” Cicero answered.
“Why?” Antonius Caius demanded.
“Because otherwise they will destroy us.”
Crassus laughed and caught Caius’s eye as he did so. It was the first real rapport between them, and the young man felt a shiver of excitement race down his spine. Crassus was drinking heavily, but when Caius felt like this, he had no desire for wine.
“Did you come down the road?” Crassus asked.
Cicero shook his head; it was never easy to convince a military man that all matters were not decided by the sword. “I don’t mean the simple logic of a butcher shop. Here is a process. Here on the land of our good host, there were once at least three thousand peasant families. If you consider five to a family, that is fifteen thousand people. And those peasants were damned good soldiers. What about that, Crassus?”
“They were good soldiers. I wish there were more of them around.”
“And good farmers,” Cicero continued. “Not for lawns and formal gardens, but take barley. Just barley—but the Roman soldier marches on barley. Is there any acre of your land, Antonius, which produces half as much barley as an industrious peasant used to squeeze out of it?”