Spartacus (20 page)

The soldiers had gone off to eat in a little grove of trees, across the brook that ran by the school, and Spartacus, from within the enclosure, could see them there, sprawled on the ground, their helmets off, their heavy weapons stacked. He never took his eyes off them.

“What do you see?” asked Gannicus. They had been slaves a long time together, together in the mines, together as children.

“I don’t know.”

Crixus was sullen; violence had been too long capped inside of him. “What do you see, Spartacus?” he also asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But you know all, don’t you, and for that the Thracians call you father.”

“Who do you hate, Crixus?”

“Did the black man also call you father, Spartacus? Why didn’t you fight him? Will you fight me when our turn comes, Spartacus?”

“I will fight no more gladiators,” said Spartacus quietly. “That I know. I didn’t know it a little while ago, but I know it now.”

A half dozen of them had heard his words. They gathered close to him now. He no longer looked at the soldiers; he looked at the gladiators instead. He looked from face to face. The half dozen became eight and ten and twelve, and still he said nothing; but their sullenness went away, and there was a demanding excitement in their eyes. He looked into their eyes.

“What will we do, father?” asked Gannicus.

“We will know what to do when the time comes to do it. Now break this up.”

Then time telescoped, and a thousand years were upon the Thracian slave. All that had not happened in a thousand years would happen in the next few hours. Now again, for the moment, they were slaves—the dregs of slavery, the butchers of slavery. They moved toward the gates of the enclosure and then they marched to the mess hall for the morning meal.

At this point, they passed Batiatus in his litter. He sat in his great eight-slave litter with his slim, cultured bookkeeper, both of them on their way to the market in Capua to purchase provisions. As they passed the ranks of gladiators, Batiatus noticed how evenly and with what discipline they marched, and he considered that even if the sacrifice of an African had been an unwonted expense, it was entirely justified.

Thereby, Batiatus lived, and his bookkeeper lived to slit his master’s throat in time to come.

 

 

But Varinia, working in the kitchen, saw it with her own eyes, and long afterwards she told the tale to another—as you will see—and even if the mighty sound of such a thing dies away to a whisper, it is never wholly lost. The kitchen was at one end of the mess hall. The doors which led to it were at the other.

The mess hall itself was an improvisation of Batiatus. Many Roman buildings were built in a traditional form, but the training and hiring of gladiators on a mass scale was a product of this generation, as was the craze for the fighting of pairs, and the question of schooling and controlling so many gladiators was a new question. Batiatus took an old stone wall and added three sides to it. The quadrangle thus formed was roofed in the old fashioned manner, a wooden shed projecting inward on all sides for a width of about eight feet. The central part was left open to the sky, and the inside was paved to a central drain, where rain water could run off. This method of construction was more common a century before, but in the mild climate of Capua it was sufficient, although in the winter the place was cold and often damp. The gladiators ate cross-legged on the floor under the shed. The trainers paced the open court in the center, where they could watch all most easily. The kitchen, which consisted of a long brick and tile oven and a long work table, was at one end of the quadrangle, open to the rest of it; a pair of heavy wooden doors were at the other end, and once the gladiators were inside, these doors were bolted.

So it happened this day, in the routine fashion, and the gladiators took their places and were served by the kitchen slaves, almost all of them women. Four trainers paced in the center court. The trainers carried knives and short whips of plaited leather. The doors were duly bolted from the outside by two soldiers who were detached from the platoon for this duty. The rest of the soldiers were eating their morning meal in a pleasant grove of trees about a hundred yards away.

All this Spartacus saw and noted. He ate little. His mouth was dry and his heart hammered at his breast. No great thing was being made, as he saw it, and there was no more of the future open to him than to any other man. But some men come to a point where they say to themselves, “If I do not do such and such a thing, then there is no need or reason for me to live any more.” And when many men come to such a point, then the earth shakes.

It was to shake a little before the day was over, before this morning gave way to noon and nightfall; but Spartacus did not know this. He only knew the next step, and that was to talk to the gladiators. As he told that to Crixus, the Gaul, he saw his wife, Varinia, watching him as she stood before the stove. Other gladiators watched him too. The Jew, David, read the motion of his lips. Gannicus leaned his ear near to him. An African called Phraxus leaned closer to hear.

“I want to stand up and speak,” said Spartacus. “I want to open my heart. But when I speak, there is no going back, and the trainers will try to stop me.”

“They won’t stop you,” said Crixus, the giant red headed Gaul.

Even across the quadrangle, the currents were felt. Two trainers turned toward Spartacus and the crouching men around him. They snapped their whips and drew their knives.

“Speak now!” cried Gannicus.

“Are we dogs that you snap whips at us?” said the African.

Spartacus rose to his feet, and dozens of gladiators rose with him. The trainers lashed out with their whips and knives, but the gladiators swarmed over them and killed them quickly. The women killed the cook. In all this, there was little noise, only a low growl from the milling gladiators. Then Spartacus gave his first command, gently, softly, unhurriedly, telling Crixus and Gannicus and David and Phraxus,

“Go to the door and keep it secure, so that I may speak.”

It was in the balance for just an instant, but then they obeyed him, and when he led them afterwards, for the most part they heeded what he said. They loved him. Crixus knew that they would die, but it didn’t matter, and the Jew, David, who had felt nothing for so long, felt a rush of warmth and love for this strange, gentle, ugly Thracian with the broken nose and the sheep-like face.

 

 

It had been done so quickly, and there was still no sound from the soldiers stationed outside. The gladiators and the slaves from the kitchen—thirty women and two men—pressed around him, and Varinia stared at him with fear and hope and awe and pressed toward him. They made a passage for her; she went over to him, and he put an arm around her and held her tight against his side, thinking to himself,

“And I am free. Never a moment of freedom for my father or grandfather, but right now I stand here a free man.” It was something to make him drunk, and he felt it rush through him like wine. But along with it, there was the fear. It is no light thing to be free; it is no small thing to be free when you have been a slave for a very long time, for all the time that you have known and all the time your father has known. There was also, in Spartacus, the subdued and willful terror of a man who has made an unalterable decision and who knows that every step along the path he takes, death waits. And lastly, a great questioning of himself, for these men whose trade was killing had killed their masters, and they were full of the awful doubt which comes over a slave who has struck at his master. Their eyes were upon him. He was the gentle Thracian miner who knew what was in their hearts and came close to them, and because they were full of superstition and ignorance, as most folk of that time were, they felt that some god—a strange god with a little pity in his heart—had touched him. Therefore, he must contrive with the future and read it as a man reads a book, and lead them into it; and if there were no roads for them to travel, he must make roads. All this, their eyes told him; all this, he read in their eyes.

“Are you my people?” he asked them, when they were pressed close around him. “I will never be a gladiator again. I will die first. Are you my people?”

The eyes of some of them filled with tears, and they pressed even closer to him. Some were more afraid, and some were less afraid, but he touched them with a little bit of glory—which was a wonderful thing he was able to do.

“Now we must be comrades,” he said, “and all together like one person; and in the old times, among my people—as I heard it told—when they went out to fight, they went with their own good will, not like the Romans go, but with their own good will, and if someone did not want to fight, he went away, and no one looked after him.”

“What will we do?” someone cried.

“We will go out and fight, and we will make a good fight, for we are the best fighting men in the whole world.” Suddenly, his voice rang out, and the contrast to his gentle manner of before transfixed and held them; his voice was wild and loud, and surely the soldiers outside heard him cry,

“We will make a fighting of pairs so that in all the time of Rome, they will never forget the gladiators of Capua!”

There comes a time when men must do what they must, and Varinia knew this, and she was proud with a kind of happiness she had never known before; proud and full of singular joy, for she had a man who was like no other in all the world. She knew about Spartacus; in time, all the world would know about him, but not precisely as she knew about him. She knew, somehow, that this was the beginning of something mighty and endless, and her man was gentle and pure and there was no other like him.

 

 

“We are five to one, and maybe they will run away.”

“They will not run away,” he answered angrily. “You must know that about the soldiers, that they will not run away. Either they will kill us or we will kill them, and if we kill them, there will be others. There is no end to the Roman soldiers!”

When they looked at him as they did, he told them, “But there is also no end to the slaves.”

Then they made their preparations very quickly. They took the knives from the dead trainers, and from the kitchen they took everything that could be used as weapons, the knives and cleavers and spits and roasting forks and pestles, particularly the pestles, which were used for grinding grain for porridge and of which there were at least twenty, wooden rods with a heavy lump of wood at the end; and they could be used either as clubs or as things to throw. They took the firewood too, and a man took a meat bone if there was nothing else, and they took pot covers to use as shields. In one way or another, they had weapons, and then, with the women behind them, they threw back the big doors of the mess hall and went out to fight.

They had moved very quickly, but not quickly enough to surprise the soldiers. The two who had been on guard had warned them, and they had sufficient time to put on their armor and to form in four maniples of ten, and now they stood in their formation on the other bank of the brook, forty soldiers, two officers, and a dozen trainers, armed as the soldiers were, heavily, with sword, shield and spear. Thus, fifty-four heavily armed men faced the two hundred naked and almost unarmed gladiators. It was unequal odds, but the odds were on the side of the soldiers, and they were Roman soldiers, against whom nothing on earth could stand. They hefted their spears and they moved forward on the double, one maniple after another. Their officers’ orders came high and clear on the morning breeze, and they swept forward like a broom to clear this dirt from their path. Their high-stepping booted feet splashed in the water of the brook. The wild flowers bent aside as they mounted the bank, and from all over the place, the remaining slaves came running out and clustered in knots, to see this incredible thing that was happening. The terrible
pila
rocked back on bent arms, the iron points sparkling in the sunshine, and by all that Roman power meant, even the modest extension of Roman power which these four maniples represented, the slaves should have broken and run, ashes to ashes and dirt to dirt.

But at that moment the Roman power was at bay; and Spartacus became a commander. There is no clear definition for a man who leads other men; leadership is rare and intangible, the more so when it is not backed with power and glory. Any man can give orders, but to give them so that others will listen is a quality, and that was a quality of Spartacus. He ordered the gladiators to spread out, and they spread out. He ordered them to make a wide loose circle around the maniples, and they made such a circle. Now the four charging maniples slowed their pace. Indecision seized them. They halted. No soldiers on earth could match the pace of gladiators, where life was speed and speed was life, and except for their loin cloths, these gladiators were naked—whereas the Roman footsoldiers were burdened with the great weight of sword, spear, shield, helmet and armor. The gladiators raced into a broad circle, a hundred and fifty yards across, in the center of which were the maniples, turning here and there, hefting the
pila
—which was worthless at a range of more than thirty or forty yards. The Roman spear could be thrown only once; one throw and then close in. But what to throw at here?

In that moment, with startling clarity, Spartacus saw his tactics, the whole pattern of his tactics in the years to come. He saw in his mind’s eye, briefly and vividly, the logic of all the tales told of armies which had hurled themselves against those iron points of Rome, to be smashed under the mighty weight of the Roman spear and then to be cut to pieces with the short, razor-sharp edge of the Roman sword. But here was the discipline of Rome and the power of Rome helpless within a circle of shouting, cursing, defiant and naked gladiators.