Spartacus

by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

  ‘Strategos.’

  Spartacus turned round slowly, the stallion still nuzzling his hand. For a moment Kleon felt a strange pity for this black-staring barbarian with whose heart and head he planned to play. Then he saw, as Elpinice herself had seen, that the Thracian was altering. He had altered in the space of a day, it seemed, the blankness was fading from the deep, dark eyes, there was a wakening purpose there, a fresh set to the giant head, the bearded mouth grown stern. Elpinice gave a cry, staring. Her child-savage possessed by a nameless God: he was changing and transmuting before her eyes.

  Kleon said: ‘When we reach Lucania – what then?’

  ‘We’ll march to the sea and seize a town. Then we’ll seize ships, and each return to his own country.’

  Elpinice recognized phrases of her own, whispered in the kennels of Batiates. But now they were said with a purpose and deliberation that made them Spartacus’s own. Kleon laughed his shrill, high laugh, squatting and eating the olives.

  ‘Each his own country! And aren’t the Masters waiting in each country? The Wolf has conquered the world. There’s a Roman Army in Thrace, I’ve heard. What better will you be?’

  The girl’s young-old eyes turned on him under her straight line of brows. ‘At least we’ll be out of Italy.’

  ‘And still: what better will you be? Listen to me, Strategos. I’m a eunuch and no-man, from whom men and Gods turn their faces. But I’m a literatus as well – one who has read and pondered the thoughts and plans of many men. Slaves have risen before against the Masters, in Italy and in Greece. For a little while they’ve held their own, but never for longer than a little while. They’ve wasted the early days of revolt either in looting and rape or in seeking escape to that land that lies neither in Thrace nor under the Nile Cataracts: but elsewhere.’

  ‘Where?’ Elpinice asked, for the Gladiator stared in silence.

  Kleon pointed west, where the sun already rested on the hills.

  ‘The dead go there, they used to tell. Beyond drowned Atlantis, the Islands of the Blest. Nowhere, in fact.’

  Then the girl with old eyes, the slave bedwoman of a Gladiator-farmer, said a thing as unexpected by the Greek as a blasphemy on the lips of a woman.

  ‘I think it’s neither in Thrace nor your Islands, this land you mock. It lives in our dreams and our hopes, and maybe we’ll never attain it. But – we broke out of Batiates’ ludus to try.’

  ‘Then let us try here – in Italy. Given a leader strong and skilful, given men who will follow him without question – the land we dream is Italy, we its Masters, not its slaves.’

  Still Spartacus said nothing. Kleon stirred a little, even he uneasy under that uncanny stare of a wakening child or a wakening beast. Again it was Elpinice who spoke.

  ‘And this leader and his men?’

  Kleon had finished his olives. He wiped his fingers on his thighs, and rose up slowly, his twisted smile on the Gladiator with the giant stallion behind him.

  ‘There is your leader. He might change the order in Italy as no man before, casting down the Masters and raising the slaves, for the Republic is weak and its armies scattered, he could seize and hold all Southern Italy, and carve it out the state that Plato dreamt.’

  Elpinice would have spoken again, but Spartacus motioned her to silence, his eyes on Kleon.

  ‘Of this matter we’ll speak while we ride. Now we’ll ride.’

  Elpinice looked at him wide-eyed. And it seemed to her in that moment, being wearied, that the God, nameless, terrible, endearing, had left him at last and for ever. In his place rose sure and sane and strong – alien and strange, the King of the Slaves.

  [iii]

  A mist and a light, warm rain came down with that sunset. In a little at a trot, the three slaves had left the horreum behind, and went south with the shadows in pursuit till those shadows overtook and devoured them. And presently Elpinice, riding behind, heard the high shrill voice of the eunuch raised eagerly in explanation.

  All that night he talked, as they still rode south, into the mountains of Lucania. Then, in the morning, they learned from a shepherd that they had missed the track of the army, for the slave-horde had swung east. So eastwards turned the three, and Elpinice, in weariness, heard still the shrill of Kleon’s voice, and unceasing throughout the hour, the Thracian question him.

  So, in a night and a day, he crossed a great measure of country.

  And at last, late in the afternoon, they rode into the camp that Crixus had entrenched under the spurs of Mount Papa.

  [iv]

  The slave-army had marched from Campania without a casualty; but the most of the slaves were in rags, their feet torn and bloody from the wear of the rough tracks crossed, their throats and voices choked with dust. Even the Gladiators grumbled, and unending in the baking heat of the march the dreamings went on in each man’s head; dreamings in German heads of the sound of the Rhine and its steel-blue splash, the easeful scrunch of pine cones and mists that hid off the sun; dreamings in the heads of Eastern slaves of the yielding sands and a bright, white glare; black men’s dreamings of blue-shadowed forests and the rich mould lands that slope by Nile. Only the Gauls and Thracians and Iberians were unvexed by the mountains, and hailed them with cries, some thinking them the veritable mountains of home.

  In their three days’ march into Lucania the country had cleared before them as dust clears before a broom. Twice they had come on deserted villages, tenantless and foodless, waterless even, the wells filled up to hinder the slaves. One of these villages the Gladiators fired, hearing that it belonged to Licinius Crassus. Gershom ben Sanballat had looked on, keeping his Bithynians under sharp surveillance, his black beard curling in haughty contempt for this childish display of servile spite.

  Though meat was plentiful enough, for they drove a great herd in the van of their march, the slaves grumbled continuously for lack of clothes, for tents such as strategoi and Gladiators used, for the comforts that most of them had known but seldom in all the years of their slavery. They had tasted freedom and raved to devour it, starved men set down at a giant dish. Rumours and scandal spread through the host. Were they being led into Lucania to perish? Why had they not scoured the land in their march, for clothes and gear and the Masters’ women? Where was the Strategos Spartacus?

  And concerning him tales grew and grew, some saying he had returned to the Masters, others that the Gauls had killed him – the Germans – the Iberians – the Thracians, each and all blamed by return of rote by the others whom scandal accused of the crime. The Germans under Gannicus clamoured to be led north again.

  Castus rode brooding and absorbed, with his Gauls. Crixus made friendly overtures to him, but met with little response to these – instead, a stare of suspicion and dislike. Where was Spartacus? Was not Crixus the last to see him?

  Crixus had shrugged and gone off with a smile. Yet, the evening of their halt under Papa’s spurs, when Gannicus secretly approached him with a project, Crixus refused to listen.

  ‘Wait for Spartacus,’ he advised. ‘Deserting him, we’re lost.’

  Gannicus, bulky, Roman-armoured, a splendid figure, sneered, and played with his tribune’s gladius.

  ‘He’s well enough, the Thracian, but that he’s mad and a woman’s man. How do we know he’ll ever reach us here? We’ve left no easy track. I think he may have been slain by Varinus, him and the woman and the Greek.’

  For it was now known that Kleon and Elpinice had stayed to patrol the camp with Spartacus. Crixus’s jesting face grew rigid.

  ‘Gannicus, if that’s as you dream, I’ll gather what men I can myself and hunt down Varinus like a dog a deer.’

  ‘You’ll not gather the Germans for the hunt,’ said Gannicus, and turned away.

  So, on the afternoon when Spartacus and his two companions rode into camp, they saw a diminished force; and were greeted with the news that on the previous afternoon the Germans and Thracians were found to have deserted the camp. But news of them was not uncertain. T
hey had marched south with intent to fall upon Metapontum, taking it by surprise. Gannicus led them; and with him, strangely enough, had gone Oenomaus.

  ‘Of this intent I knew nothing,’ said Crixus to the Strategos, ‘else I’d have strangled Gannicus with his own beard.’

  ‘For a little man,’ growled the Jew ben Sanballat, standing by, ‘your heart is high.’

  ‘My father was a butcher,’ said Crixus, modestly, ‘and I am accustomed to killing cattle.’

  Beside Spartacus was the pale-faced eunuch Greek. ‘If this Teutone fool takes Metapontum we can expect no Italiot allies!’

  ‘Italiot allies?’ said Crixus. ‘Who seeks them?’ and he looked at the giant Gladiator. Spartacus smiled his dark smile.

  ‘We seek them, the Legio Libera. Varinus is following us without any doubt, and if we destroy Metapontum we’ll be in a land of enemies. Gannicus has done ill.’

  ‘Shall I follow him and cut his throat?’ asked Brennus the Gaul, who stood near.

  The Gladiator looked at him with undreaming eyes. ‘You’ll slay when I bid you slay, Gaul.’ Then he turned away to his tent. All stared. Some strange thing had come on the Strategos.

  Irritable, Gershom ben Sanballat stared after him. What had wrought this change in the Gentile barbarian? He accosted Kleon with the question, and met the usual cold, twisted smile.

  ‘Not what, but who. I.’

  ‘You?’

  The eunuch nodded. ‘This barbarian Spartacus is more than a mere brute beast of the ludus, or a lion that plans a killing. So I’m teaching him and finding him apt. It was just such material that Plato looked for to build up the New Republic.’

  ‘I remember now that I’ve heard of him,’ the Pharisee mused. ‘He believed in enslaving all men. Slavery’s well for the rabble: I am a noble of Judaea.’

  ‘You’re an escaped Roman slave, one of the rabble yourself. And unless it ceases to be a rabble –’

  The Jew laughed, angrily. ‘Are these the words you spoke in the camp by the Lake?’

  ‘I’d not thought of amusing myself with this little game then. What does it matter one way or the other, when all we do or dream are but blowings of dust?’

  The guerilla leader of the Hasidim knew otherwise. ‘There’s the Law – of which you know nothing, being a Gentile. We nobles of Judaea worship no planless God, but one terrible in Will, with the Jews his people.’

  Kleon smiled politely. ‘A peculiar God.’

  [v]

  In his tent Spartacus ate and drank, Elpinice serving him. Then he sat for a while with his head in his hands, deep in thought; and looked up at her with that sharpened gaze of the last two days. Far leagues from the gaze of the giant child who had held her in love in the sheds of Batiates.

  Yet she regretted nothing, loving him still, perhaps now with a deeper passion that he stirred and moved from her side, he whom she had comforted, herself uncomprehending, from his horror of blood and war. And, whatever this wakening had brought to him, he desired her still, and hungered for her breast and body, if no longer her hands in pity. But a strange thing she noted even while he held her in passion, a changed passion and possession that minded her with a stab of hate of nights in the hands of Batiates. It was the lust of a man who sought lust for a food, not the dream passion of the slave God-possessed.

  ‘Send for Crixus the Gaul,’ he said.

  So Elpinice sent that message, and Crixus came, and saluted the Strategos, cheerful and fat and short of build, with a heart in which sat, so alien to the land and time, a humour simple and kindly. Spartacus looked up at him.

  ‘I intend to make you tribune of the Free Legion, if you’ll take my commands as its strategos. We cannot longer remain a rabble, leaderless and planless, or with leaders rising in a night and marching off half the slave-host in an hour. I in future command without question. Will you be my tribune?’

  The little Gaul pulled at his lip with a troubled finger. ‘I’m no general. But I’ll be your tribune – if it’s in your power to make me so.’

  ‘I have the power.’

  Thereat Crixus swore to take his commands as strategos of the Legio Libera, swearing mistily by the names of two Gods, one of Gaul and one of whom he had heard in the sheds of the Roman arena. Then Castus was brought and swore the same obedience, a fellow-tribune to Crixus. Kleon the eunuch stood in the background, listening and watching with a cool amusement this play of slaves who played to be Masters. Yet – they might succeed. And the game had its humour.

  ‘It would be as well to swear also Gershom the Jew,’ he said, ‘who was a noble in his own country, and a commander of barbaric armies.’

  So Gershom was brought from outside the camp, where, under the frown of the Papa spurs, he had set to training his Bithynian company. They were armed now with long hastae, round shields and short breastplates, and the one-time leader of the Hasidim planned to use them as the Greeks their peltasts – scouts or legionaries, as the need arose. Chattering and docile, the Bithynians obeyed his commands, wheeling and charging in running columns, forming and kneeling in solid ranks to meet the charge of imaginary horse, breaking and flying in feigned retreat. Cursing the laggard and urging the eager, Gershom pulled irritably at his curled beard when the message from the Strategos interrupted his training. Nevertheless, he went with the messenger, through the lounging lines of the other slaves, who attempted no training but slept in the sun.

  The Pharisee listened with a haughty scowl as the Thracian spoke, and looked round the tent at the listening Gauls, the Greek, and the woman.

  ‘To make of the slaves an army at all is foolishness, as I’ve always said. And I’ve no great wish to tribune the fools. Even so, who are you to swear by, Gladiator? If I swear by Spartacus do I swear by the slaves?’

  ‘You swear by the best of them, at the least,’ said Crixus. ‘Swear by Spartacus.’

  ‘Spartacus and the slaves are one,’ said Kleon. ‘For the Leader is the People.’

  Then Elpinice spoke, strangely, as once before in Kleon’s presence.

  ‘Yet I think a time will come when men will swear by the people alone.’

  Gershom ben Sanballat looked at her, with veiled eyes, for she was a woman. ‘That is your counsel, then? I should swear by the slaves, as their tribune, and not by your lover, as their Strategos?’

  ‘That’s for you to decide. Yet in your case I’d not swear myself the Strategos’s man.’

  The Jew shrugged. ‘This may be good sense or a lovers’ quarrel. I have nothing to do with the squabbles of the bed. But I take the sense of it, agreeing with mine. This is where I stand, Spartacus: a section of the slaves has made me their leader: all the slaves have made you their strategos. Good. So long as you remain that strategos, I’ll take your orders, whatever the grace. But I’ll lend no aid to setting up this Gentile kingship of slaves.’

  Gershom laughed, his eyes on the Thracian. Kleon’s lip curled. Castus, hand on his dagger, half rose.

  ‘I think, Bithynian, you’re tired of the sun.’

  The Jew laughed contemptuously. ‘I am tired of many things, Castus. Most I am wearied of fools.’ With a sudden motion he held the arm of Castus and those watching saw the veins stand black on his forehead. ‘Do you think I’ve marched from Campania in order to die with the dagger of a savage in my throat? If you’re the type of Companion our new Alexander swears to his side, it’ll be long before the Republic trembles.’

  With that he flung Castus aside and left the tent. Crixus’ eyes followed him admiringly.

  ‘There goes a true man, Spartacus, and one that’ll stand by you when I and this Greek run as fast as deer. You did ill to threaten him, Castus.’

  ‘Do you lead here, or does the Strategos?’ The blood of anger, unusual enough, mantled the face of Castus. Then Elpinice spoke.

  ‘Neither, it seems. There’s fear and hate and suspicion to lead, since we swear by leaders and not by a plan. I didn’t climb the ledges of Vesuvius for this. Who did?’ She looked at
Kleon and he saw the eyes of the woman who had cut the tribune’s throat. ‘It was a pity they didn’t put a knife in your neck when you came to our camp by the Lake that day.’

  Spartacus, not looking, put a hand on her shoulder. He had heard the debate with a shining calm that reminded Kleon of a waiting snake. Now the snake had moved. Elpinice shivered.

  ‘I am the Leader. Kleon, watch Gershom. If his words mean deeds, kill him at once.’ He looked at Elpinice with bright snake’s eyes, and she saw the horror of the threat that was there, no hate or anger, but a bright, cold purpose. A mist of sweat came out on her forehead. Spartacus dropped his hand from her shoulder.

  ‘Sound the bucinae. We march after Gannicus.’

  [vi]

  Spartacus marched on Metapontum, intent on seizing it before Gannicus and the slow-moving Germans should make their surprise.

  But swiftly though the Strategos marched his Gauls and Eastern men the retiarius Gannicus at length had moved. In the early hours of a misty dawn he fell upon Metapontum. It was feebly garrisoned and unsuspecting, for, though the news of the slave exodus from Campania into Lucania had spread over the countryside, the Gladiators were believed to be encamped near Papa. The citadel was stormed and fired; then the Germans turned their weapons on the town. By full day Metapontum was blazing murkily, and Gannicus, his army laden with spoil and women-captives, withdrew again to the hills.

  Leaving the smoking wilderness of Metapontum on the horizon, the Thracian marched rapidly after the German retreat. Late in the afternoon the entrenched camp of Gannicus was sighted, and the German, awed by the superior numbers of the slaves who followed Spartacus, came out and greeted him. The Gauls clamoured for their share of the women.

  What passed in the tent of the leaders none knew, but Gannicus marched back his host to Mount Papa under the leadership of the Thracian. Spartacus had suppressed the first revolt, and not for the space of a score of battles while Italy reeled under their marching feet, was any to dispute his leadership.