(This, then, said Crassus, as he lay beside the young man, happened shortly after I had been given the command—the kind of an honor that you take with you to a quick grave. The slaves had torn our legions to shreds, and to all effects and purposes, they ruled Italy. This, they told me to rescue. Go out and defeat the slaves, they said. My worst enemies honored me. I had encamped my troops in Cis-Alpine Gaul then, and I sent out a message for your fat friend, Lentulus Batiatus.)
And rain was falling lightly as Lentalus Batiatus approached the camp of Crassus. The whole landscape was miserable and desolate, and he was also desolate, being a long way from home and from the warm sunshine of Capua. Not even the comfort of a litter was his; he rode on a skinny yellow horse, thinking:
“When military men take over, honest men dance to the strings they pull. Your life is no longer your own. People envy me because I have a little money. It’s fine to have money if you are a knight. It’s even better to have money if you are a patrician. But if you are neither of them, only an honest man who made his money honestly, you can never lay your head down in peace. If you are not bribing an inspector, you’re paying off a ward heeler; and if you’re rid of both, you have a Tribune on your payroll. And every time you wake up, you’re surprised you weren’t knifed in your sleep. And now a damned general does me the honor of dragging me halfway across Italy—to ask me questions. If my name was Crassus or Gracchus or Silenus, or Menius, it would be a very different story indeed. That’s Roman justice and Roman equality in the Republic of Rome.”
And then Lentulus Batiatus entertained a series of uncomplimentary thoughts concerning Roman justice and a certain Roman general. In these thoughts, he was interrupted by a sharp interrogation from road guards stationed before the encampment. He halted his horse obediently and sat there in the cold, fine rain while two troopers advanced and examined him. Since they had to stand in the rain anyway for their time on guard, they were in no haste to relieve his discomfort. They examined him coldly and unpleasantly and asked him who he was.
“My name is Lentulus Batiatus.”
Because they were ignorant peasants, they didn’t recognize the name, and they wanted to know where he thought he was going.
“This road leads to the camp, doesn’t it?”
“It does.”
“Well, I’m going to the camp.”
“For what?”
“To speak with the commander.”
“Just like that. What are you selling?”
“Why, the dirty bastards!” thought Batiatus, but he said, patiently enough, “I’m selling nothing. I’m here by invitation.”
“Whose invitation?”
“The commander’s.” And he went into his wallet and brought out the order Crassus had sent him.
They couldn’t read, but even a piece of paper was sufficient to pass him on, and he was allowed to walk his yellow nag down the military road to the encampment. Like so many other rising citizens of that time, Batiatus assessed everything in terms of money; and he could not help wondering, as he proceeded, what it would cost to build this kind of a road—a temporary road just thrown down for the convenience of the encampment, but nevertheless a better road than he was able to build as an approach to his school at Capua. On a dirt and gravel base, easily-cut slabs of sandstone were laid, a whole mile of it straight as an arrow to the encampment.
“If these cursed generals would think more of fighting and less of roads, we’d all be better off,” he thought; yet at the same time he glowed a little with pride. You had to admit that even in a dirty, rainy, miserable hole like this, Roman civilization made itself felt. No question about that.
Now he was approaching the encampment. As always, the temporary stopping place of the legions was like a city; where the legions went, civilization went; and where the legions camped, if only for a night, civilization arose. Here was a mighty, walled area, almost half a mile square, laid out as precisely as a draftsman might lay out a diagram on his drawing board. First there was a ditch, twelve feet wide and twelve feet deep; behind this ditch was a heavy log palisade, twelve feet high. The road crossed the ditch to the entrance, where heavy wooden gates opened at his approach. A trumpeter sounded him in, and a maniple revolved around him as he entered. It was no tribute to him, but discipline for the sake of discipline. It was no idle boast that never before in the history of the world had there been troops so disciplined as the legions. Even Batiatus, with his own enormous love of blood-letting and fighting—and thereby his inherent contempt for the drafted soldier—was impressed by the machine-like precision of everything connected with the army.
It was not simply the road or the palisade or the ditch, two miles in length, or the broad streets of the encampment-city, or the drainage ditches, or the sandstone pavement laid in the center of the streets, or the whole multiple life and motion and order of this Roman encampment of thirty thousand men; but rather the knowledge that this mighty production of man’s reason and effort was the casual nightly effort of the legions in motion. It was not lightly said that barbarians were more easily defeated by seeing a legion encamp for the night than by going into battle with one.
As Batiatus dismounted, rubbing his fat behind where it had too long and too intimate contact with the saddle, a young officer came up and asked him who he was and what his business there was.
“Lentulus Batiatus of Capua.”
“Oh, yes—yes,” the young man drawled, a young fellow of no more than twenty, a pretty one, a scented, groomed product of one of the best families. The kind Batiatus hated most. “Yes,” said the young man. “Lentulus Batiatus of Capua.” He knew; he knew all about Lentulus Batiatus of Capua and who he was and what he represented and why he had been summoned here to the army of Crassus.
“Yes,” thought Batiatus, “you hate me, don’t you, you little son of a bitch, and you stand there despising me; but you come to me and you whine to me and you buy from me, and it’s your kind that makes me what I am; but you’re too good to come close to me, because you might be soiled by my breath, you little bastard!” That he thought, but he only nodded and said nothing at all.
“Yes,” the young man nodded. “The commander has been expecting you. I know that. He wants you to come to him immediately. I’ll take you there.”
“I want to rest—eat something.”
“The commander will see to that. He’s a very thoughtful man,” the young officer smiled, and then snapped at one of the soldiers, “Take his horse and water it and feed it and bed it down!”
“I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast,” said Batiatus, “and it seems to me that if your commander has waited this long, he can wait a while longer.”
The eyes of the young man narrowed, but he kept his voice pleasant and observed, “That’s for him to say.”
“You feed the horse first?”
The young officer smiled and nodded. “Come along,” he said.
“I’m not in your damned legion!”
“You’re in a legion encampment.”
They faced it out for a moment; then Batiatus shrugged, decided that there was no point in continuing the argument there in that needle-like rain, wrapped his wet cloak around him, and followed what he characterized as a dirty little patrician snotnose—but to himself, thinking too that, after all, he had seen more blood run in a single afternoon than this whelp, whose mother’s milk was scarcely dry on his lips, had seen in all his fancy military career. But think what he might, the fat man remained as a small butcher in a slaughterhouse—his only comfort being a knowledge that he was not entirely apart from the forces which had brought the legions to this place.
He followed the young man down the broad central avenue of the encampment, looking curiously from side to side at the dirty, mud-stained tents, good enough as roofs but open in front, and at the soldiers who sprawled on their grass beds, talking, swearing, singing and throwing dice or knuckle-bones. They were hard, clean-shaven, olive-skinned Italian peasants for the most part. Some of the tents had little stoves, but generally they took the cold as they took the heat, as they took the endless drill and the merciless discipline, the weak among them dying quickly, the tough ones becoming tougher and tougher, steel and whalebone attached to a small, efficient knife, which had become the most dreadful instrument of mass destruction ever known.
Directly in the center of the camp, at an intersection of two lines stretched between the four corners, stood the general’s pavilion, the
praetorium
, which was merely a large tent divided into two sections or rooms. The flaps of this tent were closed, and on either side of the entrance stood a sentry, each of whom carried a long, slender dress spear instead of the heavy and murderous
pilum
, and a light, circular buckler and curved knife in the Thracean style, instead of the regular massive shield and Spanish shortsword. They wore white woolen cloaks which were sodden with rain, and stood as if they were carved from stone, the rain running from their helmets, their clothes and their weapons. For some reason this impressed Batiatus more than anything else he had seen. He was pleased when flesh did more than flesh was calculated to do, and this pleased him.
As they approached, the sentries saluted and then held the flaps aside. Batiatus and the young officer passed through, into the dim light of the tent, and Batiatus found himself in a room forty feet in width and some twenty in depth, the front half of the
praetorium
. Its only furnishings consisted of a long wooden table with a dozen folding stools set around it. At one end of the table, elbows upon it, staring at a map that was spread out in front of him, sat the commander in chief, Marcus Licinius Crassus.
Crassus rose as Batiatus and the officer entered, and the fat man was pleased to note how readily the general walked forward, giving him his hand in greeting.
“Lentulus Batiatus—of Capua? I imagine so.”
Batiatus nodded and shook hands. This general was really very personable, with fine, strong manly features and nothing condescending about him. “I’m happy to meet you, sir,” said Batiatus.
“You’ve come a long way, and very decently, and very good of you too, I’m sure, and you’re wet and hungry and tired.”
He said this with concern and a certain misgiving, which put Batiatus at his ease; the young officer, however, continued to regard the fat man as superciliously as before. If Batiatus had been more sensitive he would have realized that both attitudes were equally meaningful. The general had a program of work before him; the young officer maintained the attitude of a gentleman toward such as Batiatus.
“I am all of that,” answered Batiatus. “Wet and tired, but most of all starved to death. I asked this young man whether I could eat, but he thought it was an unreasonable request.”
“We are conditioned to follow orders very precisely,” said Crassus. “My orders were to bring you to me as soon as you came. Now, of course, your every wish will be mine to please. I am quite conscious of what an arduous journey you had here. Dry clothes, of course—immediately. Do you want a bath?”
“The bath can wait. I want to put something between my ribs.”
Smiling, the young officer left the tent.
II
They had finished with broiled fish and baked eggs, and now Batiatus was devouring a chicken, breaking it apart and cleaning every bone thoroughly. At the same time, he dipped regularly into a wooden bowl of porridge and washed the food down with huge draughts from a beaker of wine. The chicken and porridge and wine smeared his mouth; bits of food were already dirtying the clean tunic Crassus had given him; and his hands were greasy with chicken fat.
Crassus watched him with interest. As with so many Romans of his class and generation, he had a particularized social contempt for the
lanista
, the man who schooled and trained gladiators, who bought them and sold them and hired them out for the arena. It was only in the past twenty years that the
lanistae
had become a power in Rome, a political and financial power, and frequently men of enormous wealth, such as this fat, gross man who sat at the table here with him. Only a generation ago, arena fighting was an intermittent and not too important feature of society. It had always been present; it was more popular with certain elements, less popular with others. Then, suddenly, it had become the rage of Rome. Everywhere, arenas were built. The smallest town had its wooden arena for fights. The fighting of one pair turned into the fighting of a hundred pairs, and a single set of games would go on for a month. And instead of reaching a point of satiation, the lust of the public grew seemingly without end.
Cultured Roman matrons and street hoodlums took equal interest in the games. A whole new language of the games had arisen. Army veterans looked forward to nothing else but the public dole and the games, and ten thousand workless, homeless citizens lived for no other apparent reason than to watch the games. Suddenly, the market in gladiators was a seller’s market, and the gladiatorial schools came into being. The school at Capua, which Lentulus Batiatus operated, was one of the largest and most prosperous. Just as the cattle from certain
latifundia
were desired in every market place, so were the gladiators of Capua esteemed and desired in every arena. And from a street man, a third rate ward heeler, Batiatus had become a rich man and one of the most notable trainers of
bustuarii
in all Italy.
“Yet,” thought Crassus as he watched him, “he is still a street man, still a crafty, vulgar, scheming animal. See how he eats!” It was always difficult for Crassus to comprehend how so very many poorly-born and ill-mannered men had more money than many of his friends could ever hope to have. Certainly, they were not less clever than this gross trainer. Take himself; he knew his own value as a military man; he had the Roman virtues of thoroughness and doggedness, and he did not look upon military tactics as something that came to one instinctively. He had studied every campaign recorded, and he had read all the best of the Greek historians. Nor did he make—as every previous general in this war had made—the mistake of underestimating Spartacus. Yet he sat here across the table from this gross man and in some curious way, he felt inferior.