Yet it was not anything he could tell the officer, standing here in the shadow of the crucifix. “I don’t know what I could have meant,” Crassus said. “It was of no importance.”
He was tired, and he decided that he would return to his villa and sleep.
III
The essence of it was that Crassus did not very much care whether this crucifixion of the last of the gladiators represented justice in the light of these specific facts or not. His sense of justice had been blunted; his sense of revenge had been blunted; and death retained no novelty whatsoever. In his childhood, as with children of so many of the “better” families of the Republic, he had been filled with the heroic legends of the past. He had fully and wholly believed that
Roma supra hominem et factiones est
. The state and the law served all men, and the law was just. He could not have said exactly at what point he ceased to believe this—yet never wholly. Somewhere within him, a little of the illusion was retained; yet he who had once been able to define justice so clearly could no longer do so today. Ten years before, he had seen his father and his brother coldly put to death by leaders of the opposition party, and justice never avenged them. The confusion concerning what was just and what was unjust increased rather than decreased, and it was only on the basis of wealth and power that he was able to make a rationale. In all reason, justice came to mean that wealth and power were undisturbed; the importance of the ethics concerned gradually disappeared. So that when he actually saw the last gladiator crucified, he felt no grand sense of godly fulfillment. In essence, he felt nothing at all. He was simply not moved.
Yet in the mind of the gladiator, there were questions of justice and injustice—and they were mingled in the unconsciousness that came of pain and shock and weariness. They were mingled in the numberless threads of his memory. They might have been unraveled; they might have been sorted out of the blinding and stabbing waves of agony. Somewhere in his mind, the memory of the incident Crassus had referred to was preserved, clearly and precisely.
It was a question of justice with the gladiators even as it was with Crassus; and afterwards, when the history of what the slaves did was written down by those who most bitterly hated the slaves and by those who knew least of what they did, it was said that they took the Roman captives they held and made them kill each other in a great orgy of reversed gladiatorial combat. So it was taken for granted—as the masters have always taken it for granted—that when power came to those who were oppressed, they would use it just as their oppressors had.
And this was in the memory of the man who hung from the cross. There had never been an orgy of gladiatorial slaughter—only the single time when Spartacus, in a cold passion of rage and hate, had pointed to the two Roman patricians and said,
“As we did, so you will do! Go onto the sand with knives and naked, so that you may learn how we died for the edification of Rome and the pleasure of its citizens!”
The Jew had been sitting there then, listening silently, and when the two Romans had been taken away, Spartacus turned to him, and still the Jew said nothing. A great bond, a deep connection had grown between them. In the course of years, in the course of many battles, the small band of gladiators who had escaped at Capua dwindled. A special toll was taken of them, and the handful who survived as leaders of the huge slave army, were welded together.
Now Spartacus looked at the Jew, and demanded, “Am I right or am I wrong?”
“What is right for them is never right for us.”
“Let them fight!”
“Let them fight, if you want to. Let them kill each other. But it will hurt us more. It will be a worm eating our insides. You and I are gladiators. How long ago did we say that we would wipe even the memory of the fighting of pairs from the face of the earth?”
“And we will. But these two must fight . . .”
So it was there, a little bit of the memory of a man nailed to a cross. Crassus had looked into his eyes and Crassus had watched him crucified. A great circle was completed. Crassus went home to sleep, for he had been up all night, and as might be expected, he was tired. And the gladiator hung unconscious from the spikes.
IV
It was almost an hour before consciousness returned to the gladiator. Pain was like a road, and consciousness travelled down the road of pain. If all his senses and sensations were stretched out like the skin of a drum, then now the drum was being beaten. The music was unbearable, and he came awake only to the knowledge of pain. He knew nothing else in the world of pain, and pain was the whole world. He was the last of six thousand of his comrades and their pain had been like his; but his own pain was so enormous that it could not be shared or subdivided. He opened his eyes, but pain was a red film that separated him from the world. He was like a grub, a caterpillar, a larva, and the cocoon was spun out of pain.
His awakening was not all at once, but in waves. The vehicle he knew best was the chariot; he was riding a bumping, lurching chariot back into consciousness. He was a little boy in the hill country, and the great ones, the lords from afar, the civilized ones, the clean ones, rode occasionally in chariots, and he ran along the rocky mountain path pleading for a ride. He cried, “Oh master—master, let me ride?” None of them spoke his language, but sometimes they let him and his friends sit on the tailboard. Generous were the great ones! Sometimes they gave him and his friends sweets! They laughed at the way the little, sunburned, black haired children clung to the tailboard. But often enough they would whip the horses ahead, and then the sudden lurch and motion would send the children flying. Well, the great ones from the western world were unpredictable, and you took the good with the bad, but when you fell off the chariot, it hurt.
Then he would realize that he was not a child in the hills of Galilee, but a man hanging from a cross. He would realize it in areas, because all of him did not belong to himself at once. He would realize it in his arms, where the nerves were white-hot wires and the hot blood flowed along his arms and down to the twisted hump of his shoulders. He would realize it in his belly, where his stomach and intestines had turned into furious knots of pain and tension.
And the crowds of people who watched him were rippling waves, real and unreal. His sight was not quite normal at this point. He was unable to focus properly, and the people he saw folded and unfolded, as an image does under a curved glass. The people, in turn, saw that the gladiator was returning to consciousness and they watched him eagerly. If this had just been another crucifixion, there would have been no novelty to the occasion. Crucifixion was very common in Rome. When Rome conquered Carthage, four generations before this, she took the best of what she had conquered, the plantation system and the crucifix being prominent among the spoils. Something about the cross with the man dangling from it took the fancy of Rome, and now the world had forgotten that it was Carthagenian in origin, so universal a symbol of civilization had it become. Where the Roman roads went, there too went the cross and the plantation system and the fighting of pairs and the enormous contempt for human life in bondage and the enormous drive to squeeze gold from the blood and sweat of mankind.
But even the best of things pall in time, and the best wine becomes a bore when too much is swilled, and the passion of one man becomes lost in the passion of thousands. Another crucifixion would not have brought out the crowd; but here was the death of a hero, a great gladiator, a lieutenant of Spartacus, a gladiator of all time, a mighty gladiator who had survived the
munera sine missione
. Always, there had been a curious contradiction in the role of the gladiator, the slave who is marked for death, the fighting puppet, the most contemptible among the contemptible—yet at one and the same time, the survivor on the bloody field of battle.
So they came out to see the gladiator die, to see how he would greet that great mystery in which all men share, and to see how he would conduct himself when the spikes were driven into his hands. He was a strange one who had turned in on himself in silence. They had come to see whether the silence would be broken, and when it was not broken with the driving of the spikes, they lingered to see whether it would be broken when he opened his eyes on the world again.
It was broken. When he saw them finally, when the images of sight ceased to swim before his eyes, he cried out, a terrible cry of pain and agony.
Apparently no one understood his words. There was speculation on what he had said in the agonizing burst of sound. Some had bet on whether he would speak or not, and the bets were paid or not paid among angry squabbles as to whether he had spoken words, or whether it was merely a moan, or whether he had spoken in a foreign tongue. Some said he called upon the gods; others said he whimpered for his mother.
Actually, it was neither of the two. Actually, he had cried out, “Spartacus, Spartacus, why did we fail?”
V
If in some miraculous manner, the minds and brains of the six thousand men who were taken prisoner when the cause of Spartacus went down into the dust of history could have been opened and laid bare and mapped out, so that one could trace back from the crucifix the tangled web and skein which had brought them there—if six thousand maps of human lives could have been drawn, it might have been seen that the pasts of many were not too different. In that way, perhaps their suffering at the end was not too different; it was a common suffering and it blended, and if there were gods or a God in the heavens and the tears of such were rain, then surely it would have rained for days and days. But instead, the sun dried out the misery and the birds tore at the bleeding flesh, and the men died.
This was the last one to die; he was a summation of the others. His mind was filled with the sum of a human life, but in such pain a man does not think, and the memories are like nightmares. His memories could not be set down as they came to him, for they would have no meaning apart from the reflection of pain. But a tale could be sorted out of his memories, and the memories could be reshuffled to make a pattern—and in that case, the pattern would not be too different from the patterns of the others.
There were four times in his life. The first was a time of not knowing. The second was a time of knowing, and it was filled with hatred, and he became a creature of hatred. The third was a time of hope, and his hatred passed away and he knew a great love and comradeship or his fellow men. The fourth time was a time of despair.
In the time of not knowing, he was a little boy, and in that time there was happiness and the radiance of pervading sunlight all about him. When his tortured mind on the cross sought for coolness and flight from pain, he found that blessed coolness in remembering his childhood. The green mountains of his childhood were cool and beautiful. The mountain streams tumbled and sparkled, and the black goats grazed on the hillside. The hills were terraced and cared for with loving hands, and the barley grew like pearls and the grapes grew like rubies and amethysts. He played on the hillsides; he waded in the brooks, and he swam in the great, beautiful lake of Galilee. He ran like animal, free and wild and healthy and his brothers and sisters and his friends provided a society in which he was free and assured and happy.
Even in that time, he had known about God, and he had a clear and certain and delineated picture of God on his childhood vision. He came of a mountain folk, so they had placed God on a peak where no man could live. On the highest mountain of all, where no one had even climbed, God lived. God sat there all alone. There was one God and no other. God was an old man who never grew older, and his beard swept down across his breast and his white robes billowed out like the white clouds which suddenly fill the sky. He was a just God and occasionally a merciful God, but always a vengeful God; the little boy knew this. Night and day, the little boy was never free from the eyes of God. Whatever he did, God saw. Whatever he thought, God knew.
He came of a pious people, an exceedingly pious people, and God was woven in and out of their lives just as a thread is woven in and out of a cloak. When they tended their flocks, they wore long striped cloaks, and every tassel of those cloaks signified some part of the awe they had for their God. Morning and night, they prayed to God; when they sat down to their bread, they prayed; when they took a glass of wine, they gave thanks to God; and even when misfortune came upon them, they blessed God, so he might not think they resented their misfortune and thereby surrendered to arrogance.
Therefore, it was not surprising that the boy, the child, who was now a man and who hung from a cross now, was full of the knowledge and presence of God. The child feared God, and his God was a God to be feared. But the fear was a minor note in the pervading sunlight, and in the coolness of the mountains and the mountain streams. The child ran and laughed and sang songs and tended goats and sheep, and watched as the older boys threw the razor-edged Galilean knife, the
chabo
that they wore so proudly at their sides. He had one of his own he had carved out of wood, and often with this he engaged in mock knife duels with his brothers and friends.
And if he did particularly well, the older boys would nod grudgingly and say, “Like a Thracian, little one, monkey, pimple!” The
Thracian
was all things evil and all things in fighting as well. A long, long time before, mercenaries had come into the land, and there had been many years of fighting before they were killed and driven out.
Thracians,
these mercenaries were called, but the little boy had never seen one.
He looked forward to the day when he would wear a knife by his side, and then they would see whether he wasn’t as fierce as a Thracian. Yet he wasn’t very fierce; he was a gentle little boy, and to a great degree a happy one . . .
