The Advocate

by Randy Singer

  “I am sorry, Master Seneca. What does what mean?”

  Seneca let a few beats of silence show his displeasure. “Decimation. What is the origin of that word?”

  Lucian frowned. “I do not know.”

  “Anyone?” Seneca asked.

  I knew the answer, but I had learned long ago that it was sometimes better to hold my tongue. I kept my eyes down while Seneca surveyed the group.

  “Decimate comes from the root word decimare, which means to take or destroy one-tenth,” Seneca explained. He moved closer to us, and the sun behind him seemed to make him glow. “So Crassus divided his Roman legions into groups of ten and had them draw lots. The one to whom the lot fell would be stripped of his armor and beaten to death by the other nine. The fighting spirit of his troops increased dramatically. Crassus had demonstrated that he was more dangerous to them than their enemies.”

  Seneca now had everyone’s attention. In my mind, I imagined the twelve of us drawing lots and the loser being beaten to death by the others. I didn’t think I could bring myself to do it.

  “Eventually, Crassus’s men cornered Spartacus and his army. Spartacus wanted to engage Crassus in battle, slaughtering his way toward the general’s position. But the overwhelming numbers were too much for the slaves. Spartacus died in battle before he reached Crassus. Six thousand slaves were captured.”

  I had been taught for as long as I could remember to despise Spartacus and the bloody revolt he had started. The uprising was an affront to every Roman citizen. But there was always a part of me that cheered for the slaves—my natural desire to root for the disadvantaged. I secretly wished that Spartacus had been able to run the gauntlet and engage Crassus one-on-one, the way real men fight.

  “Crassus wanted to make sure no slave in the empire would ever revolt again,” Seneca said. “And so he perfected the art of crucifixion.”

  He paused for effect, and we all knew something unusual was coming. It was why our parents paid handsomely for us to attend this school. Seneca was famous for his memorable stunts.

  “Even though you’re not old enough to attend the games and see the live executions there, I’m sure many of you have seen criminals hanging on crosses outside the walls of the city. Still, I thought it might be interesting for Gallus to tell you how it’s done.”

  The legionnaire named Gallus stepped forward, directly in front of where I was sitting. Why is it always me? I stared at the black hair on his legs, the worn sandals, the calloused feet.

  “Stand up!” he said gruffly.

  I stood, looking him squarely in the eye.

  He picked up my crossbeam and placed it in the middle of the group. He pulled a hammer from his belt and a long, sharp spike from his sack.

  “Lie down on the beam,” he said. “Arms stretched out on the wood.”

  I looked at Seneca, who nodded slightly.

  “Need any help?” Caligula asked the legionnaire.

  “You want to take his place?” Gallus shot back.

  “Not really.”

  “Then shut up.”

  I lay down on the beam, arms stretched wide, keeping an eye on Gallus. The legionnaire knelt beside me, hammer in one hand, spike in the other. “We use six-inch spikes,” he said, pressing the point against my left wrist.

  “Come here and hold this,” he said to another student. It was Marcus, my skinny friend. Because he had struggled carrying his beam, he had been berated by Gallus most of the morning.

  Marcus got up and held the spike over my wrist, his hand trembling.

  “Nervous?” Gallus asked him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s your friend here who should be worried.”

  Gallus snorted a laugh, but I wasn’t concerned. I knew Seneca would only let this go so far. Maybe the soldier would draw a little blood, but Seneca would never let him drive a spike through my wrist.

  “We’ve found,” Gallus said, eyeing the other boys, “that when we sever the nerve that runs up your wrist, it causes unbearable pain. Plus, when we put the spike here, it’s lodged between two bones, so it won’t just rip out of the arm.”

  “The pain is so severe,” Seneca said helpfully, “that a new word was invented to describe it. Our word excruciatus literally means ‘out of the cross.’”

  Gallus went on to explain the details of the process. How the feet would be impaled. How the prisoner would literally suffocate, his body sagging under its own weight as he lost the strength to push up against the nails in order to draw breath. “We usually let ’em hang for about three days. They typically die on the second day, and then the birds have a snack on day three. Any questions?”

  There were none.

  Gallus swung his hammer. I closed my eyes and cringed. He stopped it a few inches from the spike and laughed. He allowed me to get up and return on wobbly knees to my original spot as he described all the configurations he and his fellow soldiers had used to crucify prisoners.

  “Okay,” Seneca finally said, “I think they’ve got the picture.”

  Gallus stepped back, and Seneca continued the lesson. “Crassus still holds the record,” Seneca said. “He put six thousand men on crosses, every one of the slaves he had captured, and lined the Appian Way with them—from here all the way back to Rome.”

  The teacher paused and let the enormity of that sink in. We had been walking for miles. At one time this entire distance had been lined with dying men.

  “Crassus and his men rode through the gauntlet of the crucified, while the slaves cried out for mercy, begging to be thrust through with a spear. Cheering crowds greeted Crassus in Rome, where he was crowned with a laurel wreath and hailed as a triumphator. He sacrificed a white bull at the temple of Jupiter, and the entire city celebrated for days. It was said that three days after the slaves’ bodies were discarded, you could still smell the stench.”

  Seneca looked over our heads, down the Appian Way, as if he could imagine the scene. “And so I have a question for you,” he said, his voice lower. “Should Romans crucify people? Is this the type of conduct befitting the most advanced civilization the world has ever known?”

  I was looking at Seneca, but I noticed Gallus out of the corner of my eye. He seemed to stiffen at the very suggestion that his cherished method of execution might be open to question.

  I hoped Seneca wouldn’t call on me. Everything inside me said that crucifixion was not worthy of the glory of Rome. How could we inflict such torture on our enemies? What separated us from the barbarians when we committed such acts? And what about the innocent men condemned to die for something they didn’t do? Our system of justice wasn’t perfect.

  But I didn’t want to seem weak in front of my classmates. Seneca’s little display, complete with Gallus as a prop, was designed to show us how horrible it was to die this way. Yet we were Romans. We weren’t supposed to flinch in the face of death, no matter how horrible. One sign of manhood was being able to stomach this kind of gore, even relish it.

  “I’ll answer that,” Caligula said, standing.

  “Very well, Gaius,” Seneca replied. He never used his pupil’s nickname.

  “Have there been any slave revolts since the triumph of Crassus over Spartacus?” Caligula asked. The question, of course, was a rhetorical one, a method of argumentation that Seneca had taught us.

  “I was born on a battlefield,” Caligula continued. “I have seen wars. Men die. Their heads are cut off and their guts are ripped out. Only the strong survive. There is nothing pretty about it and nothing philosophical to debate.”

  That last comment was a dig at Seneca, and I wondered what he would do about it. As usual, our teacher didn’t flinch.

  “The only criticism I have of Crassus,” Caligula continued, “is that he wasted a lot of good wood on a bunch of slaves.”

  He stood there for a moment, proud of his wit. He smirked and sat down.

  Seneca scanned the young faces before him. “Does anybody disagr
ee?” he asked.

  I knew I should stay seated. Nothing would be gained from picking a fight with Caligula. Lucian would undoubtedly come to Caligula’s defense—if not now, then later, when Seneca wasn’t looking. Others would join them because they were intimidated by them. The only student who might agree with me would be little Marcus, and having him on my side was sometimes more trouble than it was worth.

  But I couldn’t be silent, could I? If I held my tongue now, what would I do when the stakes really mattered?

  I stood, certain that Caligula was rolling his eyes. “I disagree,” I said as forcefully as possible.

  “For some reason, Theophilus,” Seneca said, “I am not the least bit surprised.”

  CHAPTER 2

  I faced Seneca, trying to block the other boys out of my peripheral vision. I knew I should be careful because Caligula was petulant and didn’t like to be made the fool. But when I had an audience, I couldn’t resist showing off a little.

  I stood to my full height and spoke using my orator’s voice, as Seneca had taught me.

  “‘Let us not listen to those who think we ought to be angry with our enemies and who believe this to be great and manly,’” I said. “‘Nothing is so praiseworthy, nothing so clearly shows a great and noble soul, as clemency and readiness to forgive.’”

  A few of my classmates groaned at my eloquence. No matter; Seneca had taught me not to be distracted by a hostile audience.

  “Those are the words of Cicero, and those are also words of truth and reason,” I said proudly. “Roman virtues should include not only justice and courage but forgiveness and mercy.”

  “Spoken like someone who has never seen a battle, never seen a friend decapitated by a barbarian,” Seneca countered. He paced a little, gauging the expressions of the students. “Cicero, not coincidentally, had never seen the battlefield either. So doesn’t young Gaius have a point? Rome did not conquer the world with etiquette and Senate resolutions. We extended our civilization, including our cherished adherence to Roman law, by brutal force.”

  Seneca locked his eyes on me. “How can one claim to honor the law yet not support the forms of punishment that ensure others will follow it?” He pointed behind me to the Appian Way. “Roads like that do not appear from thin air. They are built. Built by slaves, as was your father’s estate, Theophilus. There can be no advance without civilization, no civilization without order, and no order without punishment.”

  I didn’t know if Seneca actually felt this way or if he was just challenging my thinking. He was always hard on students like me, ones who thought we could hold our own. In my opinion, he let students like Caligula off too easy, simply because they weren’t willing to try.

  I wanted to note that Seneca had never been in battle either. He probably wouldn’t have lasted one day on a forced march. He had the soft body of a philosopher, though his mind was tempered steel.

  “Germanicus Julius Caesar was one of the greatest generals Rome has ever seen,” I said. This was Caligula’s father, a revered warrior who had died from poisoning when Caligula was only seven, and I noticed Caligula stir. He scowled and leaned forward as if I had crossed some sacred line just by mentioning his father’s name.

  “Germanicus became consul because of his triumph in Germania. Yet when he traveled to Alexandria, he saw the starvation of the people there, and he opened the granaries so they could eat. They worshiped him like a pharaoh, and if he had stayed, they might have made him a god. But Caesar was angry because Rome would now see less of the corn supply.”

  “Is this just a history lesson,” Seneca asked, “or do you have a point?”

  “My point is this: It is the kindness of Germanicus rather than the brutality of Crassus that best represents the heart of Rome. Germanicus would not have crucified those slaves. You can fight barbarians without becoming one.”

  I stood facing Seneca with my chest thrust out, proud of my little speech. Even though there was an unwritten rule that we didn’t talk about the suspicious circumstances of Germanicus’s death, I thought mentioning his name in this context would be acceptable. My argument was especially clever because his own son Caligula had been the one who had argued so peevishly that crucifying the slaves was right. Maybe even Caligula would think twice about it now.

  All might have been well if Seneca had just allowed it to end there. But the man never let us savor a moment of oratorical triumph. When we felt the most pride, he would cut our legs out from under us and make us feel small again.

  “You have chosen an interesting example, Theophilus. But I must ask: Was what Germanicus did legal? Should he have even been in Alexandria? Or have you premised your argument on a violation of the very laws you would have us honor?”

  We all knew the answers to those questions, yet I did not want to say them aloud. The orphaned son of Germanicus was sitting less than twelve feet away.

  But what was the truth? That’s what Seneca had drilled into me in the past two years of training. If we got confused, he said, it was probably because we were considering extraneous issues that were clouding our judgment. His advice was to find the truth and cling to it. He gave us one question to ask, one question to guide our answers to life’s most difficult issues.

  What is true?

  “It was not legal, Master Seneca. Alexandria was important to Germanicus because of his ancestry as a descendant of Mark Antony. But Caesar Augustus’s laws forbade the entry of any member of the ruling class into Alexandria.”

  “Was Germanicus a criminal, then?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “He was.”

  It was the truth. But sometimes the truth has unintended consequences.

  CHAPTER 3

  I didn’t see him coming.

  Caligula attacked me from the side, cursing about what I had said. He drove me to the ground and climbed on top, punching my face before I could even react. I raised my arms to block the blows, but he pulled one arm away and drove his fist into my cheek. I heard the thud of bone on bone. I tasted blood and saw stars.

  I turned my head and tried to block the blows, but Caligula was maniacal, pummeling me with his right fist. The other boys had gathered around, and I thought I saw Marcus trying to help me. But someone was holding him back.

  Seneca?

  Nobody was going to rescue me, and I wanted to cry. Caligula hunkered over me now, still landing blows. I managed to cover my head with my forearm, curling into a little ball on my side, pulling my knees up to my stomach. Surely if I went into the fetal position, he would stop. Instead, he kicked me in the ribs and drove his fist into my ear. I felt it pop, a sharp pain that made me yelp.

  Somehow little Marcus broke through and pushed Caligula in the back, knocking him off-balance. Lucian grabbed Marcus and threw him away from the two of us. But my friend had given me enough of an opening so I could scramble to my feet and lunge at Caligula.

  This time I was the crazed animal. I had tasted blood and humiliation. I had nothing left to lose. I had been trained in gymnastics and wrestling, and though Caligula outweighed me by nearly fifteen pounds, I was wiry and filled with adrenaline. I threw him to the ground and put him in a cradle move I had perfected. I wrapped one arm around his head and the other around his legs. He tried to scratch at me, but I squeezed him tighter and put my full weight on top of his body, punching him with little blows in the face with the same arm I had wrapped around his legs.

  “Enough!” Seneca barked.

  I let go and sprang to my feet, wiping the blood from my mouth. I kept one eye on Caligula, ready for him to jump up and attack.

  Instead, he started shaking. At first they were small spasms, but they soon became full convulsions, his hands wrenched at odd angles, his wrists bent forward, fingers clawing at the air. I stood there, my mouth agape. His head was tipped back and he was foaming at the mouth.

  “Stand back,” Seneca demanded, stepping in to kneel beside his student.

  I backed away, shuddering at what I had done. Was he d
ying?

  Seneca put a hand under Caligula’s head, tilting it back. He pulled out his waterskin and jammed it between Caligula’s teeth. He grabbed Caligula’s tongue.

  “It’s parliamentary disease,” Seneca said breathlessly. “We need a doctor.”

  I stared for a moment, horrified and guilt-ridden at the scene before me. “Come on,” I said to Marcus and took off running down the Appian Way toward the city. I was probably the fastest kid in the class. Plus, I felt personally responsible for whatever Caligula was going through. Had I just killed the great-nephew of the emperor?

  I soon outdistanced Marcus, fueled by the fear of what I had done, running so fast my lungs started burning. I passed an array of travelers—merchants with wagons pulled by mules, a lone horseman, a bleary-eyed family trudging along, a group of actors, a small regiment of soldiers. With every group, I breathlessly asked if any of them were doctors or if they knew where one might be found. I barely slowed down long enough to get an answer.

  The picture of Caligula squirming on the ground, his eyes rolled back in his head, would not leave my mind. I ran faster, parched with thirst, my muscles beginning to fail. “I need a doctor!” I yelled at every traveler.

  I don’t know how long I ran. It might have been ten minutes or it might have been thirty. Finally I found a man who claimed to be a physician riding with a small caravan. He was probably the personal physician for the family inside the litter. Gasping for air, I explained what had happened.

  When I mentioned the name Caligula, the physician’s gray eyebrows shot up and he interrupted me. “Did you say Caligula, son of Germanicus?”