Colleen McCullough - 3. Fortune's Favorites

3

He was a Thracian who was not a Thracian. In the year that Caesar left Gytheum to assume his pontificate, this Thracian who was not a Thracian turned twenty six, and entered upon the stage of history. His birth was respectable, though not illustrious, and his father, a Vesuvian Campanian, had been one of those who applied within sixty days to a praetor in Rome under the lex Plautia Papiria passed during the Italian War, and had been awarded the Roman citizenship because he had not been one of those Italians who had borne arms against Rome. Nothing in the boy's farming background could explain the boy's passion for war and everything military, but it was obvious to the father that when this second son turned seventeen he would enlist in the legions. However, the father was not without some influence, and was able to procure the boy a cadetship in the legion Marcus Crassus had recruited for Sulla after he landed in Italy and began his war against Carbo. The boy thrived under a martial regimen and distinguished himself in battle before he had his eighteenth birthday; he was transferred to one of Sulla's veteran legions, and in time was promoted to junior military tribune. Offered a discharge at the end of the last campaign in Etruria, he elected instead to join the army of Gaius Cosconius, sent to Illyricum to subdue the tribes collectively called Delmatae. At first he had found the locale and the style of warfare exhilarating, and added armillae and phalerae to his growing number of military decorations. But then Cosconius had become mired in a siege which lasted over two years; the port city of Salonae refused to yield or to fight. For the boy who was by now becoming a young man, the investment of Salonae was an intolerably boring and uneventful waste of his time. His course was set: he intended to espouse a career in the army as a vir militaris a Military Man. Gaius Marius had started out as a Military Man, and look where he ended! Yet here he was sitting for month after month outside an inert mass of brick and tile, doing nothing, going nowhere. He asked for a transfer to Spain because (like many of his companions) he was fascinated by the exploits of Sertorius, but the legate in command of his legion was not sympathetic, and refused him. Boredom piled upon boredom; he applied a second time for a transfer to Spain. And was refused a second time. After that blow his conduct deteriorated. He gained a name for insubordination, drinking, absence from camp without permission. All of which disappeared when Salonae fell and the general Cosconius began to collaborate with Gaius Scribonius Curio, governor of Macedonia, in a massive sweep aimed at subduing the Dardani. Now this was more like it! The incident which brought about the young man's downfall was classified as insurrection, and the unsympathetic legate turned out to be a secret enemy. The young man along with a number of others was arraigned in Cosconius's military court and tried for the crime of mutiny. The court found against him. Had he been an auxiliary or any kind of non Roman, his sentence would automatically have consisted of flogging and execution. But because he was a Roman and an officer with junior tribunician status and was the owner of many decorations for valor the young man was offered two alternatives. He would lose his citizenship, of course; but he could choose to be flogged and exiled permanently from Italy, or he could choose to become a gladiator. Understandably he chose to be a gladiator. That way, he could at least go home. Being a Campanian, he knew all about gladiators; the gladiatorial schools were concentrated around Capua. Shipped to Aquileia along with some seven other men convicted in the same mutiny who had also elected a gladiatorial fate, he was acquired by a dealer and sent to Capua for auction. However, it was no part of his intentions to advertise his erstwhile Roman citizen status. His father and older brother did not like the sport of gladiatorial combat and never went to funeral games; he could live in fairly close proximity to his father's farm without their ever knowing it. So he picked a ring name for himself, a good, short, martial sounding name with splendid fighting connotations: Spartacus. Yes, it rolled off the tongue well: Spartacus. And he vowed that Spartacus would become a famous gladiator, be asked for up and down the length of Italy, turn into a local Capuan hero with girls hanging off his arm and more invitations to dinner than he could handle. In the Capuan market he was sold to the lanista of a famous school owned by the consular and ex censor Lucius Marcius Philippus, for the look of him was wonderfully appealing: he was tall, had magnificently developed calves, thighs, chest, shoulders and arms, a neck like a bull, skin like a sun drenched girl's except for a few interesting looking scars; and he was handsome in a fair haired, grey eyed way; and he moved with a certain princely grace, bore himself regally. The lanista who paid one hundred thousand sesterces for him on behalf of Philippus (who naturally was not present Philippus had never set eyes on any of the five hundred gladiators he owned and rented out so profitably) thought from the look of him that Spartacus was a born gladiator. Philippus couldn't lose. There were only two styles of gladiator, the Thracian and the Gaul. Looking at Spartacus, the lanista was hard put to decide which kind he ought to be trained as; usually the man's physique dictated the answer, but Spartacus was so splendid he could be either. However, Gauls bore more scars and ran a slightly higher risk of permanent maiming, and the price had been a long one. Therefore the lanista elected to make Spartacus a Thracian. The more beautiful he remained in the ring, the higher his hiring price would be after he began to gain a reputation. His head was noble, would look better bare. A Thracian wore no helmet. Training began. A cautious man, the lanista made sure that Spartacus's athletic prowess was the equal of his looks before commissioning his armor, which was silver plated and embossed with gold. He wore a scarlet loincloth held at the waist by a broad black leather sword belt, and carried the curved saber of a Thracian cavalryman. His shins were protected by greaves which extended well up each thigh, which meant he moved more awkwardly and slowly than his opponent, the Gaul and needed more intelligence and coordination to manage these contraptions. Upon his right arm he wore a leather sleeve encrusted with metal scales, held in place by straps across neck and chest; it projected down over the back of his right hand to the knuckles. His outfit was completed by a small, round shield. It all came easily to Spartacus. Of course he was a bit of a mystery (his seven fellow convicts had gone elsewhere from Aquileia) as he would never speak of his military career, and what the Aquileian agent had said in his letter was sketchy in the extreme. But he spoke Campanian Latin as well as Campanian Greek, he was modestly literate, and he knew his way around an army. All of which began to disturb the lanista, who foresaw complications. Spartacus was too much the warrior, even in the practice ring with wooden sword and leather buckler. The first arm he broke in several places might have been a mistake, but when his tally of badly broken bones had put five doctores out of commission for some months, the lanista sent for Spartacus. "Look," the man said in a reasonable voice, "you must learn to think of soldiering in the ring as a game, not a war. What you're doing is a sport! The Etrusci invented it a thousand years ago, and it's been passed down the ages as an honorable and highly skilled profession. It doesn't exist anywhere in the world outside of Italy. Some man dies and his relatives put on not the games Achilles celebrated for Patroclus, running and jumping, boxing and wrestling but a solemn contest of athletic ability in the guise of warrior sport." The fair young giant stood listening with expressionless face, but the lanista noticed that the fingers of his right hand kept opening and closing, as if wishing for the feel of a sword. "Are you listening to me, Spartacus?" "Yes, lanista." "The doctor is your trainer, not your enemy. And let me tell you, a good doctor is hard to come by! Thanks to your misguided enthusiasm I'm five doctores poorer than I was a month ago, and I can't replace them with men anything like as good as they were. Oh, they'll all live! But two of them are permanently out of a job! Spartacus, you are not fighting the enemies of Rome, and shedding buckets of blood is not the object of the game! People come to see a sport a physical activity of thrust and parry, power and grace, skill and intelligence. The nicks and cuts and slashes all gladiators sustain bleed quite freely enough to thrill the audience, which doesn't come to see two men kill each other or cut off arms! It comes to see a sport. A sport, Spartacus! A contest of athletic prowess. If the audience wanted to see men kill and maim each other, it would go to a battlefield the gods know we've had more than our share of battlefields in Campania!" He stopped to eye Spartacus. "Now did that sink in? Do you understand better?" "Yes, lanista," said Spartacus. "Then go away and train some more, like a good boy! Take out your ardor on the bolsters and the swinging wooden men and next time you face a doctor with your toy sword, put your mind on making a beautiful movement through the air with it, not a nasty crunchy sound of bones breaking!" As Spartacus was quite intelligent enough to understand what the lanista had tried to explain to him, for some time after their chat he did turn his mind to the rituals and ceremonies of pure movement even found it a challenge he could enjoy. The wary and apprehensive doctores who faced him were gratified to see that he did not try to break their limbs, but instead concentrated upon the various traceries of movement which so thrilled a crowd. It took the lanista a longer time to believe that Spartacus was cured of his bloodthirstiness, but at the end of six months he put his problem gladiator on a list of five pairs who were to fight at the funeral games of one of the Guttae of Capua. Because it was a local performance the lanista could attend it himself, see for himself how Spartacus shaped up in the ring. The Gaul who faced Spartacus (they were the third pair on) was a good match for him; a little taller, equally splendid of body. Naked except for a small patch of cloth covering his genitalia, the Gaul fought with a very long, slightly curved shield and a straight, two edged sword. The chief glory of his apparel was his helmet, a splendid silver cap with cheek flaps and a neck guard, and surmounted by a leaping enameled fish larger than a conventional plume would have been. Spartacus had never seen the Gaul before, let alone spoken to him; in a huge establishment like Philippus's school the only men one got to know were one's doctores, the lanista, and fellow pupils at the same stage of development. But he had been told beforehand that this first opponent was an experienced fighter of some fourteen bouts who had gained much popularity in Capua, the arena he usually occupied. It went well for a few moments as Spartacus in his clumsier gear moved in slow circles just out of the Gaul's reach. Looking upon his handsome face and Herculean body, some of the women in the crowd sighed audibly, made kissing sounds; Spartacus was forming the nucleus of a future band of devoted female followers. But as the lanista did not allow a new man access to women until he had earned this bonus in the ring, the kissing sounds affected Spartacus, took his mind off the Gaul just a little. He raised his small round shield a foot too high, and the Gaul, moving like an eel, chopped a neat gash in his left buttock. That was the end of it. And the end of the Gaul. So fast that no one in the crowd saw more than a blur, Spartacus whirled on his left heel and brought his curved saber down against the side of his opponent's neck. The blade went in far enough to sever the spinal column; the Gaul's head fell over sideways, flopped against his shoulder and hung there with horrified eyes still blinking their lids and mouth aping the kissing sounds thrown to Spartacus. There were screams, shouts, tremendous ripples and eddies in the crowd as some fainted and some fled and some vomited. Spartacus was marched back to the barracks. "That does it!" said the lanista. "You'll never, never make a gladiator!" "But he wounded me!" protested Spartacus. The lanista shook his head. How can someone so clever be so stupid?" he asked. "Stupid, stupid, stupid! With your looks and your natural ability, you could have been the most famous gladiator in all of Italy earned yourself an easy competence, me a pat on the back, and Lucius Marcius Philippus a huge fortune! But you haven't got it in you, Spartacus, because you're so stupid! So clever and so stupid! You're out of here today." Out of here? Where to?'' the Thracian demanded, still angry. "I have to serve my time as a gladiator!" "Oh, you will," said the lanista. "But not here. Lucius Marcius Philippus owns another school further out of Capua, and that's where I'm sending you. It's a cozy little establishment about a hundred gladiators, ten or so doctores, and the best known lanista in the business. Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Batiatus. Old Batiatus the barbarian. He's from Illyricum. After me, Spartacus, you'll find Batiatus a cup of pure poison." "I'll survive," said Spartacus, unimpressed. "I have to." At dawn the next day a closed box cart came for the deportee, who entered it quickly, then discovered when the bolt on the door slammed home that the only other communication between interior and exterior was narrow gaps between the ill fitting planks. He was a prisoner who couldn't even see where he was going! A prisoner! So alien and horrific was the concept to a Roman that by the time the cart turned in through the enormously high and formidably barred gates of the gladiatorial school run by Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Batiatus, the prisoner was bruised, grazed and half senseless from beating himself against the planks.