Spartacus - Swords and Ashes

by J. M. Clements

  Spartacus shrugged.

  Batiatus chuckled with excitement, patting his own chest in satisfaction.

  “The whole testament is a sham. Timarchides merely a figure convenient and believable to take on the estate. And Verres gets to play the magnanimous Roman all along, shielding himself from accusation of wrongdoing.”

  Spartacus bowed.

  “It would seem so, dominus.”

  Batiatus smacked the Thracian upon the shoulder in elation.

  “Spartacus! Such spoils of battle you have brought your master. You have won great favor for the House of Batiatus! You have just conquered an entire estate!”

  XIII

  ARGUMENTA

  They were armed to the teeth with swords and axes, lances and tridents, but nobody feared them. Their armor was the bulkiest ever seen, and yet the lightest, for it was made of stiffened cloth. When they entered the atrium of the House of Pelorus, they did so en masse, without any of the shoving and pushing that might have accompanied other gladiators. But none of the play-gladiators ran to their habitual position in the center, instead they brandished their arms to make way for new celebrities.

  Ahead of them, waving his arms in mock fear, ran a male figure attired with false breasts and a long, dark wig, his hands “chained” in manacles made of rope. Behind him, in chaotic, bounding pursuit, ran a handful of other men attired in bright yellow skins. The “lions” bumped and tripped over one another in a parade of pratfalls, eager to chase their prey, until a fateful moment, carefully timed to reach the middle of the chamber, when they realized that their prey had turned on them, and was whipping them with the chains.

  While the false Medea and the false lions clowned in the middle of the chamber, two new arrivals pranced in. Each wore a carefully fashioned skirt in the image of a horse’s torso, leading a fake horse’s head by a bridle. Their masks were outlandishly large, amounting to false heads. One bore a stubbly beard and piercing eyes picked out in blue. The other had a shock of garish blond hair and an exaggerated expression of horror.

  The first raised his arms up, exorting the crowd to acknowledge him, which they did, with cries of SPAR-TA-CUS, SPAR-TA-CUS! The other feigned an inability to control his mount, teetering from side to side, lurching back and forth, and bumping on occasion into his fellow rider.

  “Is that supposed to be us?” Varro fumed.

  Spartacus smirked.

  “I believe it is.”

  “They mock us,” Varro said.

  “Is that not their job?” Spartacus asked.

  “Until I find the man and put an end to it,” Varro said. “We stand here, originals forgotten!”

  The clown riders rode to the rescue of the clown Medea, bumping and jostling with the clown lions. The crowd laughed, as the “lions” retreated, their arms held up in a mock echo of Medea’s entrance. But as the clown riders took their bow, the clown Medea began to kick and berate them, chasing them off. They exited fast behind the lions, but for an interlude in which the clown Varro missed the portal, smacking into the wall instead, to milk one last laugh from the crowd.

  The clown Medea stopped suddenly, alone in the arena, as if hearing the crowd for the first time. “She” looked about her and began to point threateningly at the crowd, in a way that had been seen before.

  “Charon,” Varro said. “It is the same old bastard who plays Charon in the arena.”

  “You are famous,” Spartacus said.

  “I am infamous. And your clown was more handsome than mine.”

  Spartacus laughed.

  “Gladiators, already your legend supersedes your fleshy reality,” Batiatus said, appearing behind them. He gestured toward the stairs downward. “Perhaps it is time that you returned to the cells, and leave the guests to their phantoms and delights.”

  At the far end of the courtyard, Verres and Timarchides were locked in a futile argument. They bellowed and pointed at one another, such that men who did not know them well assumed that they were about to come to blows.

  “Do you suggest the love of women is natural?” Timarchides said, already somewhat the worst for wear.

  “Do you suggest that it is not?” Verres sputtered.

  “Women serve to bear and rear children. But when it comes to fucking, there is no comparision to the real thing.”

  Some of the assembled guests laughed nervously. Cicero stood among them, had a pained look on his face as the contest continued.

  “Spoken like a Greek!” Verres scoffed.

  “Spoken like the greatest warriors the world has ever known!”

  “Are we really going to have discussion of this now?”

  “The Sacred Band of my native Thebes! A phalanx of fearsome warriors that drove all Greece before them. The most beautiful youths on the front line. Their older lovers bearing spears behind them, encouraged to fight all the more in order to protect the ones they loved so dearly.”

  “Were not the Sacred Band annihilated at the battle of Chaeronea? Killed to a man? Not a single one left alive.”

  “Killed by Alexander the Great!” Timarchides cried, slurring victoriously. “Whose love of his male companion Hephaestion surpassed that of man for any woman. Whose ‘Persian boy,’ Bagoas—”

  “Enough! My ears grow weary of this,” Verres said. “You are drunk beyond coherent speech.”

  “Quite so,” Cicero said. “Citing occasional exceptions to a general rule is no argument worth using, except to fool the gullible and easily persuaded. Not an exercise in rhetoric, rather two drunks shout at one other. If you seek to duel with words, then do so with some panache! As the gladiators of good Batiatus, here, duel with their blades!”

  Batiatus, ascending the stairs from the now almost-deserted ludus, brightened at the sound of his name spoken with approval.

  “I have gladiators under my command,” Batiatus said, “who subscribe to the same obscenities as Timarchides describes. Their performance in the arena uneffected.”

  “My concern rests with the claim that these foreign lovers of men are ‘the greatest warriors in the world,’” Cicero said. He appealed to the crowd. “Will nobody answer this? At a dinner in the heart of Italia, will nobody stand up to defend the honor of the Republic?”

  “The Republic needs no defence,” Verres said. “History is its shield. Free Greece is no more. Conquered by Romans. And Timarchides knows this, for it was a Roman that set him free.”

  The house shook with laughter, and the chastened Timarchides staggered away, laughing himself, as Cicero and Verres clasped arms in friendship and approval.

  “Let us argue on another topic!” Verres proclaimed, to extended cheers. “I would see how quaestors approach true debates!”

  “Apollo’s shit pipe,” Batiatus muttered to himself. “Not more talk!” he crept from the gathering as carefully as he could, feigning an interest in a retreating platter of fruits and the slave that bore it.

  “Name your argumenta,” Cicero declared, “and I shall speak upon them.”

  “Concerning slavery!” a red-faced Timarchides shouted, leaning on a statue of Pelorus, barely able to stand himself. “Let Cicero argue that all should be as liberated as I!”

  There was a hushed murmur of approval among the other guests, and scattered outbreaks of applause. Cicero mimed shock, and then deep thought, and then turned to address the crowd with a smile.

  “In nature, we are all born as squalling infants, unable to fend for ourselves,” he began. “We are all born in need of succour and sustenance. This is natural. But we are not born equal, and it is a fallacy to suggest otherwise. Why? I shall tell you why...”

  “I cannot stay!” Ilithyia proclaimed. She collapsed onto the couch and grabbed an entire bunch of grapes to pick at. “I leave tonight in hope my bearers may convey me to Atella while I sleep. So this is farewell, till reunion in Capua.”

  “What can possibly have tired you?” Lucretia said. “You have done nothing all day but watch other people exert themselves for your en
tertainment.”

  “Good Verres spat wine all over me at the arena. My dress destroyed, I was forced to search for another for hours in Neapolis. Weary hours passed waiting for the slaves to model it. Dickering with the merchants. Such efforts!”

  “I see you found suitable replacement, eventually,” Lucretia noted.

  “It will do, though it is not of the latest fashion,” she said. “I chose blues and greens, to resemble the seas of the bay of Neapolis.”

  “Were they without grays and browns, decorated with fish-heads and floating shit?” Batiatus asked.

  “The waters as I imagine them to be,” Ilithyia continued, undaunted. “In summer before such autumnal upheavals.

  “And you chose wisely,” Lucretia said. “You look most becoming.”

  “I do,” Ilithyia agreed. “But that is not what has taxed me most! Have you heard?”

  She pointed over at the menfolk in the middle of the room, where Verres and Cicero were engaged in heated debate. Other guests lurked around them in rapt attention, piled onto couches and chairs, leaning on arm-rests, seated on tables in row after serried row.

  “They look like they are reconvening the senate in the atrium,” Lucretia observed.

  “Indeed they are!” Ilithyia giggled.

  “They drone of politics and faraway lands,” Batiatus said, “of men and legends I never heard. Bringing reminder of two senile old men striving to remember the past. And they will brook no interruption.”

  “I think they find you rude,” Lucretia said.

  “I am the very model of fucking politesse.”

  “You interrupt.”

  “I await suitable opening for discourse,” Batiatus protested.

  “You do not! One can barely get a sentence out before—”

  “Cicero can wag tongue all day. He is a fucking lawyer. Every time he opens his mouth his tongue speaks another argument for the defence.”

  “It is a considered example of superb rhetoric from a master of the form,” Ilithyia said.

  Batiatus’s eyes bulged.

  “It is a—? It is a what?”

  “Can you not hear it when he speaks?” Ilithyia said. “Everybody hangs upon his every word. His speeches provoke new thoughts, and report ideas from educated men all over the world. It is a performance rarely seen outside the Senate itself!”

  “Hold tongue and let him speak!” Lucretia agreed. “Look at them. Hearing of distant countries and mad ideas. The guests entertain themselves, and still proclaim they have had the best of times.”

  “Timarchides has engaged the dancing girls already at great cost,” Batiatus protested. “Unless Cicero is going to strip off...”

  “All will go home speaking of the wonders of this night.”

  Batiatus shook his head in amazement.

  “Lucretia, your words turn insufferable bore into unexpected blessing.”

  “Now speak with the kitchen,” Lucretia said. “Timarchides is not in sight, and refreshments wanting.”

  But Batiatus was drifting back toward the two Romans in the center of the room, listening with newly found interest to the way they spoke. He saw the excited gleam in the observers’ eyes, their respectful silence as they watched. And he realized where he had seen it before.

  He turned back to his wife.

  “My ears are awakened,” he whispered to Lucretia. “They duel like gladiators. But they duel with words and ideas.”

  “Indeed they do,” Lucretia sighed. “I will deal with the refreshments then, shall I?”

  “Fuck the refreshments. I wish to dine on ideas, Lucretia. Ideas!”

  Ilithyia laughed and raised her hand in farewell, while Lucretia shook her head in exasperation.

  “Sicilia is a special case,” Verres was saying.

  “Every province can claim its own particulars and peculiarities,” Cicero said. “I speak to the wider issue, of slavery itself, and its future.”

  “Slavery is a fact of life.”

  “A fact that has gouged holes in our memory of our history. No monuments stand in Rome to the Sicilian slave revolt. No great plays or poetry that commemorate either it or the proscriptions that ended it. We prefer not to dwell on the massacre of innocents, the rape and murder of good Roman citizens, not only by slaves, but by low-ranking peasants who chose to join the slaves rather than die alongside the wealthier freeborn.”

  “Hardly a subject suitable for drama,” Verres laughed, to supportive cries from some of the crowd.

  “Why not? It is the most perfect and terrible of tragedies.”

  “We learn from tragedies,” Verres said. “We must purge the revolt from living memory, not for matters of aesthetics, but simply to ensure that it does not spread such ideas.”

  “Do you think the slaves who rose up in Silicia needed drama to inform their anger? Do you think they read books about the precedents? Of course not! They rose up because they had nothing left to lose.”

  “And that, good Cicero, is why I say that as governor of Sicilia I must be ever vigilant, and to stamp out with firm hand indication of further revolt.”

  “And that, good Verres, is why I say that Sicilia is not a special case at all. The uprising in Sicilia could have come to pass anywhere in the Republic. At any time! And might still again.”

  “Where is your evidence?”

  “By the time I had evidence, it would be too late! Rome is not founded on bricks and cement. Whisper it, that only your inner circle may hear. Rome is founded on the blood and sweat of slaves. Our borders must expand ever outward to bring in new slaves to till fields, rear children, wash clothes... And we sit at our tables and cheer each other with tales of nobility and virtue. But cast eyes around you. One in every three people in this house, in this town, in this land, is a slave!”

  “And kept in their place.”

  “For now. What if they found opportunity to rise against us?”

  “You see, now I am concerned!” Verres said. “But consider, slaves are in a state of perpetual revolt.”

  Cicero looked around him in mock concern.

  “I see no burning buildings. No fleeing citizens,” he said archly, to titters from the crowd.

  “Of course not. But there are ways far subtler of fighting back. And you would know it, too, if you spent more time managing your household.”

  “How, then, do slaves revolt?”

  “Stupidity feigned to manage their master’s expectations. Pilfering from the house or on return from market. Selling their master’s things. And worst and most prevalent of all, by not working hard enough!” This last was greeted with grumbles of approval from the menfolk present, and hearty outbreaks of applause.

  “How is that revolt?” Cicero asked, frowning at the audience as if they had insulted him.

  “If I buy a slave,” Verres said, “I buy everything that he is. I buy his every waking moment, and his dreams if I wish them. I buy every day of labor while he is under my authority, and if that day ends too quickly, or is not busy to my satisfaction, if that day is truncated by illness feigned or otherwise, then my slave is stealing from me.”

  It was dark. The openings to the outer world were small, and little light shone through from the cloudy night beyond the walls. The gloom was such that Medea could not even see the bars on the far side of her cell. She held up her arms, able to pick out only the most striking of her painted symbols. She prodded unhappily at the bowl of gruel left for her in her solitary cell.

  In the next cell, she saw something watching her.

  “What is this offal?” she said to the darkness.

  “There is offal? We are fortunate tonight,” the voice of Spartacus replied.

  “Almost. It is a foul paste of pulses and leftovers.”

  “It is your miscellany.”

  “My what?”

  “Your miscellany. The food of the gladiators.”

  “It is no better than pig food.”

  “There is all you can eat.”

  “But
I can eat none of it!”

  “Then truly, there is all you can eat.”

  She smiled. They looked at each other through the bars.

  “Does my body excite you?” she asked, suddenly.

  “It does not,” Spartacus said.

  “You lie to me. Come close to the bars, Thracian. I shall relieve your animal hungers.”

  “My appetite is not for you.”

  “I suppose I owe you my life,” she said, in Thracian.

  “Think not of it,” he replied, in the same language.

  “I repay my debts,” she said.

  “Live,” he replied. “Live to spite them. That is repayment enough.”

  “Now I see it. You love men, like the Carthaginian.”

  “I do not.”

  “You love animals? Like the Cretan queen!”

  They laughed together at the suggestion.

  “I do not,” Spartacus chuckled.

  “Then what is it, Thracian?”

  “I love a woman,” Spartacus said.

  “All men love women,” Medea said.

  “I mean,” Spartacus said, “I love one woman, and one woman alone.”

  Medea was silenced.

  “You have a wife?”

  “I do.”

  “Then where is she?”

  “She was sold into slavery, as was I. I fight here for the House of Batiatus, that she will be returned to me.”

  Medea leaned her head against the wall, staring up at the moon.

  “Now I see it, Thracian. Now I see why you prize the life of Batiatus above your own. But what will happen when your wife is returned to you?”

  “We shall live together at the House of Batiatus, until I win my freedom.”

  “And if she is not returned to you?”

  “She will be.”

  “And if she is not?”

  “She will be. There can be no alternative.”

  “You are a trusting man. Too trusting.”

  “I have nothing else.”

  “They call you Spartacus,” she said. “After the Thracian king of old?”

  “The only Thracian they have ever heard of.” He shrugged.

  “You are fortunate that they have heard of even one.”