Colleen McCullough - 3. Fortune's Favorites

That had been a year ago. His twenty fifth birthday had passed at the other school, and his twenty sixth inside the walls of what its inmates referred to as the Villa Batiatus. No pampering at the Villa Batiatus! The exact number of men held there varied slightly from time to time, but the record books usually said one hundred gladiators fifty Thracians and fifty Gauls. To Batiatus they were not individuals, just Thracians and Gauls. All of them had come from other schools after some kind of offense mostly associated with violence or rebellion and they lived like mine slaves except that when inside the Villa Batiatus they were not chained, and they were well fed, comfortably bedded, even provided with women. But it was genuine slavery. Each man knew he was inside the Villa Batiatus until he died, even if he survived the ring; once too old to fight, a man was put to work as a doctor or a servant. They were not paid, nor were their bouts spaced far enough apart to allow wounds to heal when business for Batiatus was brisk and business for Batiatus was almost always brisk. For he was the bottom price man; anyone who had a few sesterces to rub together and a wish to honor a dead relative with funeral games could hire a couple of Batiatus's men. Because of the low price, most of the engagements were fairly local. Escape from the Villa Batiatus was virtually impossible. Its interior was divided into many small areas each walled and barred off from every other area, and no part wherein gladiators moved was actually adjacent to the immensely high outside walls, all of which were topped by inward angled iron spikes. Escape on the outside (they were often outside on engagements) was also virtually impossible; each man was chained at wrists and ankles, wore an iron collar around his neck, traveled in a windowless prison cart, and when on foot was escorted everywhere by a party of archers carrying small composite bows, arrows at the ready. Only in the moment a man entered the ring was he freed from his chains, and then the archers were stationed nearby. How different from the kind of life an ordinary soldier of the sawdust lived! He was free to come and go from his barracks, was coddled and made much of, the idol of a good many women, and aware he was banking a sizable nest egg. He fought no more than five or six bouts in a year, and after five years or thirty bouts whichever came first he retired. Even free men sometimes elected to become gladiators, though the bulk were deserters or mutineers from the legions, and a very few were sent to the schools already enslaved. All this care and cosseting arose out of the fact that a trained gladiator was a very expensive investment, had to be preserved and kept happy to earn the owner of his school a nice fat profit. At the school of Batiatus things were different. He didn't care whether a man bit the sawdust during his first bout or fought regularly for ten years. Men much over twenty were not accepted as gladiators, and ring life lasted ten years at the most; it was a young man's sport. Even Batiatus didn't send grizzled men into the ring; the crowd (and the bereaved doing the hiring) liked its combatants supple, unset. Once retired from the ring, a man in the Villa Batiatus simply went on existing and enduring there. A desperate fate considering that when an ordinary gladiator retired, he was free to do what he liked where he liked; usually he went to Rome or some other big city, and hired himself out as a bouncer, a bodyguard, or a bully boy.

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The Villa Batiatus was a place of unyielding routines which were heralded by the clanging of an iron bar on an iron circle and rotated according to a schedule painted too high on the main exercise yard wall to be defaced. The hundred or however many men were locked at sunset into barred stone cells holding between seven and eight, each having no communication with its neighbors even sound did not penetrate the walls. No man remained with the same group; sleeping arrangements were staggered so that each man moved each evening to six or seven new companions. After ten days he was shuffled yet again, and so crafty were the permutations Batiatus had worked out that a new man had to wait for a year before he succeeded in getting to know every other man. The cells were clean and equipped with big comfortable beds as well as an anteroom which contained a bath, running water and plenty of chamber pots. Warm in winter and cool in summer, the cells were used only between sunset and sunrise. They were serviced during the day by domestic slaves with whom the men had no contact. At sunrise the men were roused by the sound of bolts sliding back, and commenced the day's routines. For all that day a gladiator would associate with the men he had shared a cell with on the previous night, though talk was forbidden. Each group broke its fast in the walled off yard directly in front of its cell; if it was raining, a hide shelter was rigged overhead. Then the group would work together in the practice drills, after which a doctor would divide them, Gaul against Thracian if that were possible, and put them to dueling with wooden swords and leather shields. This was followed by the main meal of the day cooked meats, plenty of fresh bread, good olive oil, fruit and vegetables in season, eggs, salt fish, some sort of pulse porridge sopped up with bread, and all the water a man could drink. Wine, even sparse enough to be a mere flavoring, was never served. After the meal they rested in silence for two hours before being set to polishing armor, working leather, repairing boots, or some other gladiatorial maintenance; any tools were scrupulously logged and collected afterward, and archers watched. A third and lighter meal followed a hard exercise workout, then it was time for each man to move to his new set of companions. Batiatus kept forty women slaves whose only duty aside from soft work in the kitchens was to assuage the sexual appetites of the gladiators, who were visited by these women every third night. Again, a man took his turn with all forty; in numbered order, the seven or eight women deputed to a cell would file into the cell under escort and each go straight to an assigned bed nor could she remain in that bed once intercourse had taken place. Most of the men were capable of at least three or four sexual encounters during the night, but each time had to be with a different woman. Well aware that in this activity lay the greatest danger of some form of affection growing up, Batiatus set a watch on the lucky cells (a duty no servant minded, as the cells were lit for the night) and made sure the women moved on and the men did not try to strike up conversations. Not all hundred gladiators were in residence at once. From one third to one half of them were on the road an existence all of them loathed, as conditions were not as comfortable as inside the Villa Batiatus, and of women there were none. But the absence of a group allowed the women days of rest (strictly rostered Batiatus had a passion for rosters and tricky permutations) and also gave those who were heavily pregnant time to have their babies before returning to duty. Duty was excused them only during the last month before labor and the first month after it, which meant that the women strove not to fall pregnant, and that many who did immediately procured abortions. Every baby born was removed from its mother at once; if a female it was thrown away on the Villa Batiatus rubbish heap, and if a male was taken to Batiatus himself for inspection. He always had a few women clients anxious to purchase a male baby. The leader of the women was a genuine Thracian by name of Aluso. She was a priestess of the Bessi, she was warlike, she had been one of Batiatus's whores for nine years, and she hated Batiatus more fiercely than any gladiator in the school. The female child she had borne during her first year at the Villa Batiatus would under her tribal culture have been her successor as priestess, but Batiatus had ignored her frenzied pleas to be allowed to keep the baby, who had been thrown out with the rubbish. After that Aluso had taken the medicine and no other babies followed. But she nursed her outrage, and swore by terrible gods that Batiatus would die a piece at a time. All of this meant that Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Batiatus was one of the most efficient and meticulous men the city of gladiators had ever known. Nothing escaped him no precaution was overlooked no detail left unattended to. And in that side of him lay a part of the reason why this school for unsatisfactory gladiators was so successful. The other part of the reason lay in Batiatus's personal skill as a lanista. He trusted no one, he deputed nothing better done himself. So he kept the only key to the stone fortress wherein the armor and weapons were stored; he took all the bookings; he made all the travel arrangements; he picked every archer, slave, armorer, cook, laundress, whore, doctor and assistant personally; he kept the accounts; and he alone ever saw the school's owner, Lucius Marcius Philippus who never visited his establishment, but rather made Batiatus come to Rome. Batiatus was also the only one of Philippus's old employees who had survived the colossal shaking up Pompey had instituted some years before; in fact, so impressed was Pompey by Batiatus that he asked him to take over as Philippus's general manager. But Batiatus had smiled and declined; he loved his work.