Spartacus (28 page)

Gracchus interrupted him. He was in and under the spell of his own speech, like a man in a trance, and rather sharply Gracchus said to him,

“We are not interested in what you know, soldier. We are interested in what happened between you and the slaves.”

“This happened,” the soldier began, and then he stopped. He came awake and looked from face to face of the noble Senate of mighty Rome. He shivered and said,

“Then I waited for them to tell me what they were going to do with me. Spartacus sat there, and he had the staff in his hand. He ran his fingers up and down its length and then he suddenly thrust it at me. I didn’t know at first what he meant or what he wanted.
Take it, soldier,
he said.
Take it, Roman. Take it.
I took it
Now you are the arm of the noble Senate,
he said. He didn’t seem angry. He never raised his voice. He was just stating a fact—I mean it was a fact to him. That was what he wanted. There was nothing I could do. Otherwise, I would have died before I touched the sacred rod. I would not have touched it. I’m a Roman. I’m a citizen—”

“You will not be punished for that,” Gracchus said. “Go on.”

“Now you are the arm of the noble Senate,
Spartacus said again.
The noble Senate has a long arm, and all there is on the end of it now is yourself.
So I took the rod—I held it, and still he sat there with his eyes fixed on me, and then he asked me,
Are you a citizen, Roman?
I told him I was a citizen. He nodded and smiled a little.
Now you are a legate,
he said.
I will give you a message. Take it to the noble Senate. Word for word—take it to them as I give it to you.
” Then he stopped. He stopped speaking, and the Senate waited. Gracchus waited too. He didn’t want to ask him for the message of a slave. Yet it would have to be spoken. Spartacus had come out of nowhere—but now he stood in the midst of the Senate Chamber, and Gracchus saw him then as he saw him so many times afterwards, even though he never saw the flesh and blood that was Spartacus.

And finally, Gracchus told the soldier to speak.

“I can’t.”

“The Senate commands you to speak.”

“These were the words of a slave. May my own tongue dry up—”

“That’s enough of that,” Gracchus said. “Tell us what this slave told you to tell us.”

So the soldier spoke the words of Spartacus. This was what Spartacus said to him—as nearly as Gracchus could recall it all the years later; and recalling it, Gracchus had a picture of how the
praetorium
must have been, the great pavilion of a Roman commander with its gay blue and yellow stripes, standing in the center of that field of naked dead, the slave Spartacus sitting on the commander’s couch, his general staff of gladiators grouped around him, and in front of him the frightened, wounded Roman soldier, the single survivor, held by two slaves and holding in turn the delicate rod of power, the legate’s staff, the arm of the Senate!

“Go back to the Senate (said Spartacus) and give them the ivory rod. I make you legate. Go back and tell them what you saw here. Tell them that they sent their cohorts against us, and that we destroyed their cohorts. Tell them that we are slaves—what they call the
instrumentum vocale
. The tool with a voice. Tell them what our voice says. We say that the world is tired of them, tired of your rotten Senate and your rotten Rome. The world is tired of the wealth and splendor that you have squeezed out of our blood and bone. The world is tired of the song of the whip. It is the only song the noble Romans know. But we don’t want to hear that song any more. In the beginning, all men were alike and they lived in peace and they shared among them what they had. But now there are two kinds of men, the master and the slave. But there are more of us than there are of you, many more. And we are stronger than you, better than you. All that is good in mankind belongs to us. We cherish our women and stand next to them and fight beside them. But you turn your women into whores and our women into cattle. We weep when our children are torn from us and we hide our children among the sheep, so that we may have them a little longer; but you raise your children like you raise cattle. You breed children from our women, and you sell them in the slave market to the highest bidder. You turn men into dogs, and send them into the arena to tear themselves to pieces for your pleasure, and as your noble Roman ladies watch us kill each other, they fondle dogs in their laps and feed them precious tidbits. What a foul crew you are and what a filthy mess you have made of life! You have made a mockery of all men dream of, of the work of a man’s hands and the sweat of a man’s brow. Your own citizens live on the dole and spend their days in the circus and the arena. You have made a travesty of human life and robbed it of all its worth. You kill for the sake of killing, and your gentle amusement is to watch blood flow. You put little children into your mines and work them to death in a few months. And you have built your grandeur by being a thief to the whole world. Well, it is finished. Tell your Senate that it is all finished. That is the voice of the tool. Tell your Senate to send their armies against us, and we will destroy those armies as we destroyed this one, and we will arm ourselves with the weapons of the armies you send against us. The whole world will hear the voice of the tool—and to the slaves of the world, we will cry out, Rise up and cast off your chains! We will move through Italy, and wherever we go, the slaves will join us—and then, one day, we will come against your eternal city. It will not be eternal then. Tell your Senate that. Tell them that we will let them know when we are coming. Then we will tear down the walls of Rome. Then we will come to the house where your Senate sits, and we will drag them out of their high and mighty seats, and we will tear off their robes so that they may stand naked and be judged as we have always been judged. But we will judge them fairly and we will hand them a full measure of justice. Every crime they have committed will be held against them, and they will make a full accounting. Tell them that, so that they may have time to prepare themselves and to examine themselves. They will be called to bear witness, and we have long memories. Then, when justice has been done, we will build better cities, clean, beautiful cities without walls—where mankind can live together in peace and in happiness. There is the whole message for the Senate. Bear it to them. Tell them it comes from a slave called Spartacus . . .”

So the soldier told it, or in some such fashion—it was so long ago, thought Gracchus—and so the Senate heard it, their faces like stone. But it was long ago. It was so long ago, and most of it forgotten already, and the words of Spartacus not written down, and existing nowhere except in the memories of a few men. Even from the records of the Senate those words were expunged. It was right. Of course it was—just as right as it was to destroy those monuments the slaves had set up and to pound them into a rubble of stone. Crassus understood that, even though Crassus was something of a fool. A man had to be a little bit of a fool to be a great general. Unless he was Spartacus, for Spartacus had been a great general. Had he been a fool too? Were those words the words of a fool? Then how does a fool, for four long years, resist the power of Rome, smashing one Roman army after another and making Italy a graveyard for the legions? How then? They say he is dead, but others say that the dead live. Is this the living image of him walking toward Gracchus—a giant in size, a giant of a man, and yet so much the same, the broken nose, the black eyes, the tight curls against his skull? Do the dead walk?

 

 

“Don’t make fun of him!” said Julia.

“Who laughs at Gracchus? No one, I say, my dear Julia,” said Cicero. “I will strive all my life for such dignity.”

“And always fall a good deal short of it,” thought Helena.

Gracchus woke up, blinking. “Was I sleeping?” It was typical of him that he turned to Julia. “My dear, I beg your pardon. I was daydreaming.”

“Of good things?”

“Of old things. I don’t think man is blessed with memory. More often he is cursed with it. I have too many memories.”

“No more than the next man,” offered Crassus. “We all have our memories, equally unpleasant.”

“And never pleasant?” asked Claudia.

“My memory of you, my dear,” Gracchus rumbled, “will be like sunshine until the day I die. Permit an old man to say that.”

“She would permit a young man too,” laughed Antonius Caius. “Crassus was telling us, while you slept—”

“Must we talk of nothing but Spartacus?” cried Julia. “Is there nothing but politics and war? I detest that talk—”

“Julia,” Antonius Caius interrupted.

She stopped, swallowed hastily, and then looked at him. He spoke to her as one does to a difficult child.

“Julia, Crassus is our guest. It is pleasing to the company to hear him tells things we could not learn in any other way. I think it might be pleasing to you, too, Julia, if you would listen.”

Her mouth tightened and her eyes became red and watery. She inclined her head, but Crassus was gracious in his apology.

“It bores me as much as it does you, Julia, my dear. Forgive me.”

“I think Julia would like to listen, wouldn’t you, Julia?” Antonius Caius said. “Wouldn’t you, Julia?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Please continue, Crassus.”

“No—no, not at all—”

“I was foolish and behaved badly,” Julia said, as if repeating a lesson. “Please continue.”

Gracchus stepped into what was degenerating into an exceedingly unpleasant situation. He turned it away from Julia onto Crassus, saying, “I’m sure I can guess the general’s thesis. He was telling you that the slaves won their battles because they had no regard for human life. Their hordes poured onto us and overwhelmed us. Am I correct, Crassus?”

“You could hardly be more incorrect,” Helena laughed.

Gracchus allowed himself to be the butt, and was even tolerant of Cicero when the young man said, “I always suspected, Gracchus, that anyone whose propaganda was as good as yours had of necessity to believe it.”

“Some of it,” Gracchus admitted tolerantly. “Rome is great because Rome exists. Spartacus is contemptible because Spartacus is no more than those tokens of punishment. That is the factor one must consider. Wouldn’t you agree, Crassus?”

The general nodded. “Yet,” said Cicero, “there were five great battles Spartacus won. Not those battles where he drove back the legions—not even those where he put them to flight. I refer to the five times he destroyed Consular Armies, destroyed them and wiped them from the face of the earth and took their arms. Crassus was making the point that Spartacus was less a brilliant master of tactics than a fortunate—or unfortunate, as you look at it—leader of a particular group of men. They were undefeatable because they could not afford the luxury of defeat. Isn’t that the point you were making, Crassus?”

“To an extent,” the general admitted. He smiled at Julia. “Let me illustrate with a story that will please you more, Julia. Some war, some politics, and something of Varinia. That was the woman of Spartacus, you know.”

“I know,” Julia answered softly. She looked at Gracchus with relief and with gratitude. “I know,” Gracchus said to himself. “I know, my dear Julia. We are both somewhat pathetic and somewhat ridiculous, the main difference being that I am a man and you are a woman. You could not become pompous. But essentially we are the same, with the same empty tragedy in our lives. We are both in love with ghosts, because we never learned how to love or be loved by human beings.”

“I always thought,” said Claudia, rather unexpectedly, “that someone had invented her.”

“Why, my dear?”

“There are no such women,” Claudia said flatly.

“No? Well, perhaps. It is hard to say what is true and what isn’t true. I read of an action I myself fought in, and what I read had very little to do with the reality. That’s how it is. I don’t vouch for the truth of this, but I have every reason to believe it. Yes, I think I believe it.”

There was a strange note in his voice, and looking at him sharply, Helena realized suddenly how handsome he was. Sitting there on the terrace in the morning sunshine, his fine, strong face was reminiscent of the legendary past of the young republic. But for some reason, the thought was not pleasant, and she glanced sidewise at her brother. Caius had his eyes fixed upon the general in a sort of rapt worship. The others did not notice this. Crassus commanded attention; his low, sincere voice gripped them and held them, even Cicero who looked at him with a new awareness. And Gracchus remarked again what he had noticed earlier, the quality whereby Crassus could evoke passion without being the least bit passionate.

“Just a word in general to preface this,” Crassus began. “When I took command, the war had been going on for a good many years, as you know. It’s always delicate to step into a lost cause, and when the war is servile, there’s precious little glory in victory and unspeakable shame in defeat. Cicero is quite correct. Five armies had been destroyed by Spartacus, wholly destroyed.” He nodded at Gracchus. “Your propaganda is tempting, but you will admit that I had to look at the situation as it was?”

“Of course.”

“I found there were no hordes of slaves. There was never an occasion when we did not outnumber them, if the whole truth is to be told. That was true at the beginning. It was true at the end. If Spartacus ever had under his command anything like the three hundred thousand men he was supposed to have led, then we would not be sitting here today on this pleasant morning at the loveliest country home in Italy. Spartacus would have taken Rome and the world too. Others may doubt that. But I fought against Spartacus enough times not to doubt it. I know. The whole truth is that the mass of the slaves of Italy never joined Spartacus. Do you think, if they were made of such metal, that we would be sitting here like this on a plantation where the slaves outnumber us a hundred to one? Of course, many joined him, but he never led more than forty-five thousand fighting men—and that was only at the height of his power. He never had cavalry, such as Hannibal did, yet he brought Rome closer to her knees than Hannibal ever did—a Rome so powerful that it could have crushed Hannibal in a single campaign. No, only the best, the wildest, the most desperate, joined Spartacus.