Spartacus (21 page)

“Rocks!” cried Spartacus. “Rocks—the stones will fight for us!” He raced around the circle, light on his toes, light in his motions, graceful. “Throw rocks!”

And under the shame of rocks, the soldiers went down. The air became full of flying stones. The women joined the circle—the household slaves joined and the field slaves ran from the gardens to join. The soldiers shielded themselves under their huge targets, but that gave the gladiators a chance to run in, cut and run. One maniple charged the circle and hurled their spears. A single gladiator was caught by one of the terrible weapons, but the rest flung themselves on the maniple and dragged it down and slew the soldiers almost with bare hands. The soldiers fought back. Two maniples made a circle, and even when only a handful remained on their feet under the rain of stones, even when the gladiators poured onto them like a pack of wolves, they fought until they were dead. The fourth maniple tried to cut their way out of the circle and escape, but ten were too few for such a tactic, and they were dragged down and slain, even as the trainers were slain—and two of the trainers, pleading for mercy, were killed by the women who beat them to death with rocks.

The strange, violent little battle, which had started close to the mess hall, raged across the grounds of the school and onto the Capuan road, where the last soldier was dragged down and killed, and all over that space and distance lay dead men and wounded men, fifty-four dead who were Romans and trainers, and more who were gladiators.

Yet it was only the beginning. Full of victory, blooded with it and exulting with it, it was only a beginning—and now as he stood on the highroad, Spartacus could see the walls of Capua in the distance, a misty golden city in the golden haze of the forenoon, and he could hear the beat of the garrison’s drums. Now there would be no rest, for things were happening and word was on the wind, and there were many soldiers garrisoned in Capua. The whole world had exploded. He rode on currents mighty and tumultuous as he stood panting on the paved highroad with blood and death around him, and he saw Crixus, the red headed Gaul, laughing, Gannicus exultant, David the Jew with blood on his knife and life in his eyes, and the huge Africans deliberately calm, murmuring their battle chant. He took Varinia in his arms then. And other gladiators were kissing their women, whirling them up in their arms and laughing with them, while house slaves came running with skins of Batiatus’s wine. Even the wounded made less of their wounds, and stifled their cries of pain. And the German girl looked at Spartacus, laughing and crying at once, and touched his face, his arms and the hand in which he held his knife. The wine sacks were being tilted when Spartacus brought them back to themselves. They could have stepped out of history then, drunken and exultant, for already the soldiers were beginning to march out of the gates of Capua, but Spartacus caught them and held them. He ordered Gannicus to strip the dead soldiers of their arms, and he sent Nordo, an African, to see whether the armory could be broken into. His gentleness had gone now, and his single-minded intentness upon their escape burned like a bright flame and transformed him. All his life had been for this, and all his patience had been in preparation for this. He had waited for centuries; he had waited since the first slave was shackled and whipped to hew wood and draw water, and he would not be turned from it now.

Before, he had asked them; now he commanded them. Who could use Roman arms? Who had fought with the
pilum?
He made a rank in four maniples.

“I want the women inside,” he said. “They are not to be exposed. They are not to fight.”

The fury of the women had surprised him. It was beyond and more than the fury of the men. The women wanted to fight; they wept with him out of their need to fight. They pleaded for some of the precious knives, and when he denied that, they belted their tunics and filled them with rocks to throw.

Near the school were sloping, hilly fields of plantations. The field slaves, seeing that something was different and terrible and wild, ran to watch, gathered on the stone walls and in little clumps here and there and, seeing them, the manner of his future, in all its simplicity, became plain to him. He called the Jew, David, and told him what to do, and the Jew ran toward the field slaves. Spartacus had not guessed wrong; three quarters of the field slaves returned with David. They came running up and saluted the gladiators and kissed their hands. They carried with them their hoes, and all of a sudden their hoes were not tools but weapons. Now the Africans returned. They had not been able to break into the main armory; it would take at least a half hour to do so; but they had broken open a newly arrived chest of
tridents,
the long, three-pointed fish forks. There were thirty of these three-pointed spears, and Spartacus distributed them among the
retiari,
and the Africans kissed the weapons, stroked them, and made their strange pledges upon them in their own strange tongues.

All this had taken only a very short time, yet the need for haste weighed even more heavily upon Spartacus. He wanted to be away from the place, away from the school, away from Capua. “Follow me!” he cried. “Follow me!” Varinia stayed next to him. They went off the road and across the fields, mounting up onto the sloping hills. “Never leave me behind, never leave me behind,” said Varinia. “I can fight like a man can fight.”

Now they saw the soldiers coming on the road from Capua. There were two hundred of the soldiers. They came on the double until they saw that the gladiators were taking to the hills. Then their officers swung them on a tangent, so that they might cut off the gladiators, and the soldiers charged onto the fields. And beyond them, the citizens of Capua were pouring through the gates to watch this rising of slaves put down, to see a fighting of pairs without cost and without quarter.

It could have ended here or an hour before or a month afterwards. At any one of an endless number of points, it could have ended. Slaves had run away before. If these slaves had run away, they would have gone into the fields and the woods; they would have lived like animals on what they could steal and on the acorns from the ground. They would have been hunted down one by one, and they would have been crucified one by one. There was no sanctuary for a slave; the world was made that way. And as Spartacus looked at the garrison soldiers, racing toward them, he knew this simple fact. There was no place to hide, no hole to crawl into. The world had to be changed.

He stopped running away, and he said, “We will fight the soldiers.”

 

 

So the truth was that the soldiers were beaten by the slaves and ran away from them, and halfway back to Capua the slaves pursued them and dragged them down. In the first battle, the slaves suffered sorely, but in the second battle only a handful of them died, and the Roman soldiers fled before them. This was the fact of the matter, but the tale was told in a hundred different ways, and the first report was that written out by the commander of the forces at Capua.

“There was a rising of the slaves at the training school of Lentulus Batiatus,” he wrote, “and a number of them escaped and fled southward along the Appian Way. Half a cohort of garrison troops were sent out against them, but some of them managed to break through and escape. It is not known who their leaders are or what their intentions are, but already they have caused dissension among the slaves of the countryside, and it is felt by the citizens here that the noble Senate should spare no effort to reinforce the garrison at Capua, so that the revolt may be put down promptly.” Possibly as an afterthought, the commander added, “A series of outrages have already taken place. It is feared that the countryside will suffer from looting and rapine.”

And, of course, Batiatus told his story to crowds of Capuan citizens who were eager to hear it. No one was really disturbed—except Batiatus, who saw years of work go down the drain—but everyone realized that the countryside would be an uneasy place until the last of these terrible men (the gladiators) were run down and either slain or nailed upon a cross, so that others might profit by the example. The telling was a process; the story was told and retold by hundreds of people whose whole lives were built on the uneasy structure of slaves, and they told the tale out of their fears and needs. Thus it has always been. Years later, it would be,

“Yes, I happened to be taking the waters at Capua when Spartacus broke loose. I saw him, yes indeed. A giant of a man. I saw him skewer a little child on his spear. It was a terrible thing to see.”

Or any one of a thousand other versions. But the truth was something Spartacus himself only caught glimpses of at that time. His vision had broken loose from the fetters of his time. In two small engagements, the slaves he led had beaten Roman soldiers. It was quite true that these were only a handful of second-rate garrison troops, soft from easy living in a resort city, and they were opposed by the best professional swordsmen in all of Italy. But even with that factor considered, for the slave to strike down his master twice in a single day is an earth-shaking fact. Nor did they throw it away when the soldiers fled. They came back when Spartacus called them—they were disciplined people, and already in a few hours, he was like a god to them. They were full of pride, and their fears had gone away. They kept touching each other; in a fashion, it was a caressing of each other—as if the remorseless maxim,
Gladiator, make no friends of gladiators,
had suddenly reversed itself. And thereby, they were filled with an awareness of each other. They did not think this through or reason it out; they were in great part simple and ignorant folk, but they had been suddenly exalted and purified. They looked at each other as if they had never seen each other before, and perhaps there was some truth in that. They had never really dared to look at each other before. Can the executioner look at his victim? But now they were no longer victim and executioner in inevitable partnership; now they were a brotherhood in triumph, and now Spartacus knew how it had happened in Sicily and in so many other places. He felt their strength because a part of it swelled up within himself, and this very current that coursed through him cleansed him of all the suffering that made up his past, all the fears and shames and indignities. He had clung to life for so long, made an exact science of maintaining the life within him for so long, that one might readily have supposed that life would become a careful and cautious matter with him. But here was the sum of his savings, and he suddenly no longer feared death or thought of death because death was of no consequence . . .

About five miles south of Capua, a little distance from the Appian Way, the gladiators and their women and the slaves who had joined them, gathered on a hillside within sight of one of the great manor houses which marked the plantation of some Roman gentleman. It was well onto midday now, and in the process of the two fights and the subsequent march southward, the gladiators had become a little army. From a distance, were it not for the black men among them, they might have been taken for a detachment of Roman soldiery. The weapons had been shared out among them, as had been the helmets and body armor and spears and shields of the soldiers. No one was unarmed now, and armed and tested as they were, it was doubtful whether any force closer than Rome could seriously challenge them. Aside from their women, but with the hand slaves and the field slaves who had joined them, they numbered two hundred and fifty men. Each of the three major groupings, the Gauls, the Africans and the Thracians, marched as a detachment—each with its own leading men as its nominal officers. Because for so long they had seen the Roman maniple of ten as a unit, they fell into it quite naturally. Spartacus led them. There was no discussion of that. They would have died for him. They were full of the legends of men who had been touched by the gods. When they looked at Spartacus, that belief was in their faces.

While they marched, he was at their front, and the German girl, Varinia, walked beside him, her arm around his waist. Sometimes, she looked at him. This was not news to her. Long ago, she had married this man who was the best and bravest of all men, and hadn’t she known that then—as well as she knew it now? When their eyes met, she smiled at him. She had fought the soldiers. She didn’t know whether he was pleased or not that she had fought the soldiers, but he made no objection to the knife she carried in her hand. They were equals. The world was full of old legends of the Amazons, the women who had gone onto the battlefield like men in the old, old days—and there were many other legends still current at the time of Spartacus of a past where all men and women too had been equals and there was neither master nor slave and all things had been held in common. That long ago was obscured by a haze of time; it was the golden age. It would be the golden age again.

It was a golden age now with the sun tipped over the lovely countryside and the fierce men of the arena, the men of the
sand,
pressing around him and the German slave girl, full of questions. The grass was soft and green in the meadow where they gathered. Yellow flowers topped it like butter, and everywhere butterflies and bees swarmed and the air was full of their song. They called him
father
in the Thracian way.