Authors: Howard Fast
Tags: #Ancient, #Historical fiction, #Spartacus - Fiction, #Revolutionaries, #Gladiators - Fiction, #Biographical fiction, #Fiction, #Romance, #Revolutionaries - Fiction, #Rome, #Historical, #Slave insurrections, #Rome - History - Servile Wars; 135-71 B.C - Fiction, #General, #Gladiators, #History
Spartacus (22 page)
“What will we do now and where will we go?”
He stood in the circle of them. Varinia sat in the grass, her cheek against his leg. They sat or crouched in the grass around him, the long-limbed black men, the Gauls with their ruddy faces and blue eyes, the Thracians with their dark hair and close-knit bodies. “We are a tribe,” he said. “Is that your will?” They nodded at him. The tribe held no slaves and all men spoke equally, and it was not so long ago but that they remembered at least the memory.
“Who will speak?” he asked. “Who will come as your leader? Stand up if you want to lead us. We are free men now.”
No one stood up. The Thracians beat their bucklers with the hilts of their knives, and the drumming roused a flight of thrushes from the meadow. Some people appeared in the distance around the manor house, but so far away that it was impossible to say who or what they were. The black men saluted Spartacus by clapping their hands in front of their faces. They were all strangely content, and for the moment they were living in a dream. Varinia’s cheek kept pressing against her man’s leg. Gannicus cried,
“Hail, gladiator!”
A man who was dying stood up weakly. He had been stretched on the grass, his arm cut to the bone for all the length of it and the blood draining out of him. He was a Gaul and he didn’t want to be left behind, and this way he had tasted freedom a little. His arm was bound around with blood-soaked cloth, and he walked over to Spartacus who helped him to stand erect.
“I am not afraid to die,” he said to the gladiators. “It is better than to die in the pairs. But I would rather follow this man than to die. I would rather follow this man and see where he leads us. But if I die, remember me and do him no wrong. Listen to him. The Thracians call him father, and we are like little children, but he will suck the evil out of us. There is no evil left in me. I did a great thing, and I am purified and I am not afraid to die. I will sleep quietly. I will dream no dreams after I am dead.”
Some of the gladiators wept openly now. The Gaul kissed Spartacus, and Spartacus returned his kiss. “Stay by my side,” Spartacus said, and the man sank down on the grass next to him, and the field hands who had joined them stared open-mouthed at these gladiators who had such easy intimacy with death.
“You die but we will live,” Spartacus said to him. “We will remember your name and shout it aloud. We will make a noise of it all over the land.”
“You will never give up?” the Gaul pleaded.
“Did we give up when the soldiers came against us? We fought the soldiers twice and we won. Do you know what we must do now?” he asked the gladiators.
They watched him.
“Can we run away?”
“Where will we run?” asked Crixus. “Everywhere, it is the same as here. Everywhere, it is master and slave.”
“We will not run away,” said Spartacus, who knew now and surely and as certainly as if he had never had a doubt. “We will go from plantation to plantation, from house to house, and wherever we go, we will set the slaves free and add them to our numbers. When they send the soldiers against us again, we will fight them, and the gods will decide whether they want it the Roman way or our way.”
“And weapons? Where will we find weapons?” someone asked.
“We will take them from the soldiers. And we will make them too. What is Rome but the blood and sweat and hurt of slaves? Is there anything we cannot make?”
“Then Rome will go to war against us.”
“Then we will go to war against Rome,” said Spartacus quietly. “We will make an end of Rome, and we will make a world where there are no slaves and no masters.”
It was a dream, but they were in a mood for dreaming. They had plunged into the skies, and if this strange Thracian with the black eyes and the broken nose had told them that he intended to lead them against the gods themselves, they would have believed at that moment and followed at that moment.
“We will not dishonor ourselves,” Spartacus told them, speaking softly and directly and intently, speaking in a way to each of them singly and directly. “We will not do as the Romans do. We will not obey the Roman law. We will make our own law.”
“What is our law?”
“Our law is simple. Whatever we take, we hold in common, and no man shall own anything but his weapons and his clothes. It will be the way it was in the old times.”
A Thracian said, “There is enough for all to be rich.”
“You make the law. I will not make it,” said Spartacus.
So they talked, and there were greedy men among them who dreamed of being great lords, like the Romans, and there were others who dreamed of holding Romans as slaves; so they talked and talked, but in the end it was as Spartacus had stated it.
“And we will take no woman, except as wife,” said Spartacus. “Nor shall any man hold more than one wife. Justice will be equal between them, and if they cannot live in peace, they must part. But no man may lie with any woman, Roman or otherwise, who is not his lawful wife.”
Their laws were few, and they agreed upon their laws. Then they took up their arms and went against the manor house. Only the slaves remained, for the Romans had fled to Capua . . . And the slaves joined the gladiators.
In Capua, they saw the smoke of the first manor house which burned, and thereby the slaves were vindictive and cruel. They would have wanted for the slaves to be gentle and understanding; in more practical terms, they would have wanted the slaves to flee to the still-wild mountain heights, hiding singly or in handfuls in caves, living like animals until each was hunted down as an animal is hunted down. Even when the citizens of Capua saw the smoke of the first burning house, they were not unduly alarmed. It was to be expected that the gladiators would take out their bitterness on whatever they encountered. An express was already hammering along the Appian Way to inform the Senate of the outbreak at Capua—and this meant that in a very few days, the situation would be under control. A lesson would be taught to slaves then that they would not easily forget.
A large landowner, Marius Acanus by name, was forewarned, and gathered all his seven hundred slaves together to shepherd them to the safety of the walls of Capua; but the gladiators met him on the road and stood in grim silence and watched as his own slaves slew him and his wife, and his wife’s sister, and his daughter and his daughter’s husband. It was a grim and awful business, but Spartacus knew that he could not stop it, nor was he particularly anxious to stop it. They had harvested only what they had sown, and the litter slaves themselves did the work, the moment they saw that these were not Roman soldiers but the very escaped gladiators whose fame was already running all over the place, a song and a scream on the wind itself. It was late afternoon now, but the news had flown quicker than time. The original few hundred were more than a thousand, and as they marched south, slaves poured over the hills and across the valleys to join them. The field hands came with their tools of work; the goatherds drove their herds of goats and sheep with them. When they approached a house, flowing toward it, a great, shapeless mass of folk—for only the gladiators still preserved a military formation of sorts—the news ran before them, and the kitchen slaves came out to greet them with their knives and cleavers, and the house slaves came running to give them gifts of silk and fine linen. In most cases, the Romans fled; where the overseers and the Romans put up a fight, there was grisly evidence of work done.
They could not move quickly. They had become too great a host of laughing, singing men and women and children, all of them drunk with the same wine of freedom. Darkness fell before they were twenty miles from Capua, and they camped in a valley beside a bubbling stream, lighting fires, and eating their fill of fresh meat.
Whole goats and sheep, and here and there even a bullock, went onto their spits, and the crisp, savory smell of roasting meat perfumed the air. It was a great feasting for folk who went from year’s end to year’s end on leeks and turnips and barley porridge. They washed down the meat with wine, and their songs and laughter spiced the food. What a company they were, Gauls and Jews and Greeks and Egyptians, Thracians and Nubians and Sudanese and Lybians, Persians and Assyrians and Samarians, Germans and Slavs, Bulgars and Macedonians and Spaniards and many an Italian too out of generations which had been sold into bondage for one reason or another, Sabines and Umbrians and Tuscans and Sicilians and folk of many other tribes whose very names are lost forever, a singular company of blood and nations but united first in their bondage and now in their freedom.
In the old times, there had been the family of the
gens
and the community of the tribe—and ultimately the pride and privilege of the nation; but for the world here was something new in this peculiar comradeship of the oppressed, and in all the great throng of so many nations and peoples that night, there was no voice raised in anger or discontent. They were touched with a little love and a little glory. Many of them had hardly seen Spartacus, or had him pointed out to them from a distance only, but they were full of Spartacus. He was their leader and their god—for it was not clear in their minds that gods did not walk the earth occasionally, and hadn’t Prometheus himself stolen the holy fire from heaven and given it as the most precious of all gifts to mankind? And what had happened once could happen again. Already, tales were being told around their fires, and a whole Saga of Spartacus was coming into being. There was no one among them—no, not even among the little children—who had not dreamed dreams of a world where none were slaves . . .
gens
and the community of the tribe—and ultimately the pride and privilege of the nation; but for the world here was something new in this peculiar comradeship of the oppressed, and in all the great throng of so many nations and peoples that night, there was no voice raised in anger or discontent. They were touched with a little love and a little glory. Many of them had hardly seen Spartacus, or had him pointed out to them from a distance only, but they were full of Spartacus. He was their leader and their god—for it was not clear in their minds that gods did not walk the earth occasionally, and hadn’t Prometheus himself stolen the holy fire from heaven and given it as the most precious of all gifts to mankind? And what had happened once could happen again. Already, tales were being told around their fires, and a whole Saga of Spartacus was coming into being. There was no one among them—no, not even among the little children—who had not dreamed dreams of a world where none were slaves . . .
And meanwhile Spartacus sat among the gladiators, and they talked and weighed the things that had happened. The little brook had become a river already and a torrent was in the making. Gannicus said it. His eyes shone whenever he looked at Spartacus. “We can march across the world and turn it over, stone by stone!” This he said, but Spartacus knew better. He lay with his head in Varinia’s lap, and she passed her fingers through his tight brown curls and felt the stubble on his cheeks, and inside she was full of riches and contentment. Now she was satisfied, but a fire burned in him; he had been more satisfied in slavery. He looked at the clear bright stars in the Italian night and he was filled with wild thoughts and yearning and fears and doubts and the weight of what he had to do lay upon him. He had to destroy Rome. The very thought, the insolent enormity of thinking this, made him smile and Varinia was pleased and traced his lips with her fingers, singing to him in her own tongue,
“When the hunter, from the forest,
Brings the red deer from the hunting,
Casts his eyes upon the fire,
Speaks the children, speaks the woman—”
The rhythm of a forest folk in a cold and wild land. How many of her strange forest songs he had heard. She sang, and he repeated to himself, his thoughts laying themselves against the background of the music, his dreams spaced out among the shining stars in the sky,
“You must destroy Rome—you, Spartacus. You must take these people away and be stern and strong with them. You must teach them to fight and kill. There is no going back—not one single step back. The whole world belongs to Rome, so Rome must be destroyed and made only a bad memory, and then, where Rome was, we will build a new life where all men will live in peace and brotherhood and love, no slaves and no slavemasters, no gladiators and no arenas, but a time like the old times, like the golden age. We will build new cities of brotherhood, and there will be no walls around them.”
Then Varinia stopped singing and asked him. “What are you dreaming, my man, my Thracian? Are the gods in the stars talking to you? Then what are they telling you, my beloved? Are they telling you secret things that are never to be shared?” She half believed this. Who knew what was true and what was untrue concerning the gods? Spartacus hated the gods and gave them no worship. “Are there gods for slaves?” he had once asked her.
“In all my life,” he said to her, “there will be nothing I won’t share with you, my beloved.”
“Then what are you dreaming?”
“I am dreaming that we will make a new world.”
Then she was afraid of him, but he said to her, gently, “This world was made by men. Did it just happen, my darling? Think. Is there anything in it that we did not build, the cities, the towers, the walls, the roads and the ships? Then why can’t we make a new world?”
“Rome—” she said, and in the single word there was the power implicit, the power that ruled the world.
“Then we will destroy Rome,” answered Spartacus. “The world has had its belly full of Rome. We will destroy Rome and we will destroy what Rome believes in.”
“Who? Who?” she pleaded.
“The slaves. There have been risings of slaves before, but it will be different now. We will send out a call that slaves will hear across the world . . .”
So peace went and hope went, and long afterwards, Varinia recalled that night when her man’s head was in her lap and his eyes were fixed on the far off stars. Yet it was a night of love. A few people are given a few such nights, and then they are fortunate. They lay there, among the gladiators, alongside the fire, and time went slowly. They touched each other and proved their awareness of each other. They became like one person.
PART FIVE.Being an account of Lentelus Gracchus, some of his memories, and some particulars of his stay at the Villa Salaria.
Lentelus Gracchus was fond of saying that as his weight increased, so did his ability to walk a tight rope, and the fact that thirty-seven of his fifty-six years were spent in the successful pursuit of Roman politics gave support to his claim. Politics, as he occasionally said, required three unchanging talents and no virtues. More politicians, he claimed, had been destroyed by virtue than by any other cause; and the talents he enumerated in this fashion. The first talent was the ability to choose the winning side. Failing that, the second talent was the ability to extricate oneself from the losing side. And the third talent was never to make an enemy.
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