SPARTACUS
by James Leslie Mitchell
O thou who lived for Freedom when the Night
Had hardly yet begun; when little light
Blinded the eyes of men, and dawntime seemed
So far and faint – a foolish dream half-dreamed!
Through the blind drift of days and ways forgot
Thy name, thy purpose: these have faded not!
From out the darkling heavens of misty Time
Clear is thy light, and like the Ocean’s chime
Thy voice. Yea, clear as when unflinchingly
Thou ledst the hordes of helotry to die
And fell in glorious fight, nor knew the day
The creaking crosses fringed the Appian Way –
Sport of the winds, O ashes of the Strong!
But down the aeons roars the helots’ song
Calling to battle. Long as on the shore
The washing tides shall crumble cliff and nore
Remembered shalt thou be who dauntless gave
Unto the world the lordship of the slave!
I. INSURRECTION
The Gathering of the Slaves
It was Springtime in Italy, a hundred years before the crucifixion of Christ
[i]
WHEN Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus and unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master’s body even as his own had been mutilated: and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of The Republic of Plato hidden in his breast.
He took the southwards track, not the Way, but the via terrena, hiding by day and walking swiftly by night. His face was pallid, his eyes green and weary. He had no faith in the Gods and could know no pleasure in women. Under his chin was tattooed in blue the casqued head of Athena, for he was of Athenian descent, though sold by his father in the slave-market of Corinth in time of famine.
Purchased thence, he had been for twelve years the lover of a rich merchant in Alexandria. The merchant was brown and stout and paunched, holding faith in forgotten Canaanite Gods, for he had been born in Tyre. Kleon he had taught to read and write, to compute, to play upon the lyre and to dance in obscene measures with the women of the household. Frequently, under the surveillance of the merchant, he was stripped naked and beaten with a fine wire whip, till the white flesh of his young body quivered under a thin criss-cross of fine blue weals. Watching, the merchant would quiver ecstatically in harmony, and then order the boy to be bathed and scented and fairly clad. Then, at nightfall, under the golden haze of the Alexandrine stars, he would come to Kleon.
And Kleon forgot the starings of childish wonder, and his mother’s face, in tears; and the ways of little beasts and birds on the blue hills of Corinth.
In the afternoons, in the courtyard of the merchant’s house, Kleon would sit at the feet of his Master and read aloud to him, unwinding and rewinding the scrolls in the manner he had been taught. He read in Greek, in Latin, and in Syriac; and for his Master’s delectation he sought assiduously in the bookshops for those tales that the merchant loved: Tales of the Baalim, of Ashtaroth and the obscene fecundities of the Mother Gods; the Nine Rapings of the Greek Ataretos; nameless works by nameless men, translations and retranslations of all the dark and secret and ecstatic imaginings of men who pondered on women. Arab and Indian tales he read, though their origins were long lost, tales from the Utmost Lands, from China and beyond. The merchant would nod and groan in pleasure, and drink from a bowl a mixture of honey and water, flavoured with aniseed, for he was an abstemious man.
And Kleon had forgotten love, but he had not forgotten hate. Yet that in time went by as well, even while he knelt and the wire-whip sang. For he read other books than the women-tales and saw that hatred was foolish. Great men had enquired in the meaning of Life, the nature of Fate and the loves of the Gods, the why of pain and terror and death, men slaves to lust and men slaves to men. And these things they had discovered were part of a divine plan.
For a while thereafter, conceiving Serapis, the Supreme Deity, to be insane, Kleon believed in him.
But at the age of twenty-one he and a Negro named Okkulos, too old to give pleasure to the merchant, were sold to a circus-trainer from Rome. In the course of the voyage Okkulos succeeded in breaking his manacles and freeing Kleon. Together they strangled the captain of the ship and threw overboard the circus-trainer from Rome. They were joined in revolt by the crew, and sailed to the White Islands, joining the pirate fleet of an Iberian named Thoritos, a tall man lacking a hand. He was said to worship in a cave a pointed stone fallen from heaven, and had gained great treasure in the Social Wars.
Thoritos had many wives, captured in his raids. Two of these, of whom he was weary, he presented to Kleon, for he grew to love the wit and learning of the Greek. And Kleon looked on the women and shook, and the pirates shouted with laughter. And Kleon took the women to his bed, in hate and a white, cold lust: and they kissed him, apt in love, to tears, and the wall of ice broke round his heart.
Now ten years passed on the great White Islands and the secret sailings from their windy coasts. Thoritos levied tribute across many routes, and his riches grew, and Kleon became his first captain. Yet he had no love of ships, though the sea he loved, sight and sound and smell of it in the long, amethystine noons, when his bed was set on a westward terrace and the world of the Islands grew still. Crouched at his feet one of Thoritos’ women would sing and brush the flies from his face, and bring him cool wine to drink when he woke from his daytime dreams. And Kleon would drink and doze again, though he slept but little, lying still instead, companioned with thought. And the women would hear him groan as he lay, and think that a God was with him in dreams.
But he thought instead, till his thoughts were as knives: Why did men live and endure it all? For to-morrow came up with the selfsame sun, the night went down with the self-same stars, there were neither Gods nor beginnings nor ends, plan in the blood and pain of birth, plan in the blood and pain of death, only an oft-told tale that went on and knew neither reason nor rhythm nor right, men as beasts that the herdsman goads, the Herdsman himself but a slavering lout. And he thought of his captured stores of books, and the dream the great Athenian dreamt, of Herdsmen wise in the perfect state; and he knew it only an idle dream, yet he loved it and turned to it for ease; or woke and pulled the woman in his bed and buried his face in the peace of her breasts.
And the years went by like a fading breath, till he woke one dawn and found himself, in company with a score of others, redeemed the cross because of their strength, standing with white-painted feet in the ergastulum of the Roman slave-market. They had been captured by a disguised galley in an attempted raid on the Alexandrian wheat-route.
The overseer of Lucius Julius Pacianus bought him and three others and took them to the villa on the Palatine. Pacianus himself came out to inspect them. He had dull eyes and a grave mien and believed that he should have been made a consul. Standing in the sunlight, his green tunic edged with silver, his beard combed and oiled, he pointed first at Kleon and then at another.
‘That one and that. They will be safer so.’
Not until two grinning Libyans approached, and seized him and threw him on his back, did Kleon understand. Then he saw that they had brought an iron bowl where water steamed, and with it two small knives.
And suddenly, vividly, with an intensity that wrung his heart, he remembered the smell of the sea, and the smell of women, and never again so remembered them.
[ii]
Three mornings after setting out on the road to Capua he awoke on the edge of the dark and found two men bending over him. One held a pliant cord in his hands, and stooped with drooling lips. The young sunlight dappled Kleon’s face and he smelt the dew-wet vines. He laughed and stretched himself and bared his throat.
‘I am ready,’ he said.
They drew back, startled, threatening. Thereon Kleon suddenly leapt to his
feet and struck at the nearest with his dagger. The man swore and jumped aside. Kleon laughed again. The roll of The Republic fell from his breast.
‘Slit throats are to the swift, you swine.’
Then he stood and considered them. They were shepherds, clad in grey felt tunics, with bare feet and legs and conical hats. One was tall, red-haired, an obvious Gaul, with sleepy eyes and curling lips. The other was of lesser stature and different breed, and he it was held the rope. His forehead and chin sloped steeply away from the line of his straight, keen nose. And, looking in his eyes, Kleon was aware that they were the eyes of one aberrant to the point of madness.
‘Why the stranglers’ rope?’ the literatus asked.
‘Why not?’ said the sleepy-eyed shepherd, looking at his companion. The short man bared his teeth.
‘It’s fit end for a Roman slave.’
‘Aren’t you also slaves?’
‘We were – yesterday.’
‘Then you’ve heard of Capua?’
At that the eyes of the sleepy Gaul lit up. ‘We are making Capua,’ he said; and added, with simplicity. ‘So we were to strangle you, to prove ourselves freemen and worthy to kill.’
Kleon picked up his copy of The Republic. ‘I also was a slave. I am going to Capua. Come with me. We’ll be crucified near one another.’
They scowled at him and stood fast. The short man’s lips parted again, shewing decayed teeth.
‘You’re mad, a fool, or an ill augur. Pity you woke so soon. I was to open your chest and offer your heart to Kokolkh – though Brennus, being but a Gaul, was against that.’
‘A sacrifice?’ Kleon was coldly amused. ‘I hadn’t heard of your God. Tell me of him as we go. This is a poor place to hide, and we must make the hills.’ He added, as an afterthought, coldly, ‘I carry a charm that twists in agony the entrails of any who seek my life.’
High up on a hill-ridge they found a grassy dip and squatted there throughout the hours of the day. Below them the country lay blue in the Spring-time warmth. To the north a ribbon of river glinted. Once a kid strayed near them and the short man leapt out upon it, strangled it with his hands, and brought it back to their hiding-place. They drank its blood, but their throats were too parched to swallow the raw flesh. The short man speared the kid’s heart on a flake of stone and held it towards the sun, ceremonially. Brennus grinned. Kleon squatted cross-wise and regarded the proceeding with passionless gaze.
‘Who is Kokolkh?’ he asked.
‘I come from the northern seacoast of Iberia,’ the short man said, ‘but I am no Iberian. My name is Titul and my people are the last of a race that lived on the world’s edge, far in the Western Sea. This people was a great people: but they neglected to sacrifice to the God Kokolkh. So he whelmed their country in mud and sand; and the seas rose against it and devoured it.’ He paused ceremonially, being mad, and chanting an oft-told tale. ‘But my fathers fled in boats and them Kokolkh allowed to escape. They saw him, the God visible, in the lightning fires that smote the islands. He was bearded with serpents and on his head were the feather-plumes of the sun.’
Kleon nodded, as the slurred chant ended. ‘It was the island of Atlantis, for so Plato tells. Of him you’ve never heard. And why worship this ill God?’
‘He is Pain and Life,’ said Titul, and ate the heart ceremonially, watched by Brennus the agnostic and Kleon the atheist. The sun wheeled westward. Brennus clasped his hands round his knees, and sang a song in the broken Latin of the vulgares slaves:
‘These are the things I desire:
The city of stakes
And the darkened rooms
Of my home,
And the curling smoke,
And the moon;
Wild cattle low in the woods:
Shall I not return?’
‘He’s a poet,’ said Titul; and fell to his drone. ‘Mighty were the poets of old in the vanished Western Isle.’
Brennus yawned. ‘They were fools. For they were drowned. Let’s sleep.’ He yawned again, and shaded his eyes and looked south. ‘There’s a big farm across that stream.’
Kleon nodded. ‘We’ll try to get near at dusk, and free the slaves. If we form a large enough company, we can march openly to join the Games men.’
Titul licked his thick lips and also peered through the haze.
‘There may be women there – women of the Masters.’
Stretched full-length on the sun-warmed grass, Brennus purred drowsily. ‘No women are like the Gaul women. Oh, Gods, Gods, none at all! And I haven’t had one since they brought me south, four years ago this Spring. Deep-breasted and with wide full hips; and we used to raid them. Gods! for a strong, warm woman to weep under your hands!’
‘In the Western Isle,’ said Titul, ‘there were mighty women.’
[iii]
A day later Kleon halted his band by a river ford. With him were forty men and three women. More than half of the men were Gauls, tall, thin, and black-burned by the sun. Shepherds, they were matted still with the filth of their night-time kennels where every sunset they were led and chained when the horns of the horreum sounded. They had ceased to weep and sing and stare, and challenge one another to racings and wrestlings. Now, wearied, Brennus elected their leader, they lay down at halts and cast lots for the use of the three women captives.
Since daybreak they had marched through a country deserted. Like droppings of blood long shed, the grapes hung heavy in abandoned vineyards. Flocks strayed without shepherds and the horrea were found fast-locked and barred. These buildings the Gauls fired and looted, gathering bundles of grass and piling them under the wooden eaves. In stone-built houses which would not burn they defiled the atria with excrement, and smeared it upon the faces of the statues in the peristyles. Far across the countryside as the day waned other fires broke forth at intervals.
The Gauls had been shepherds and labourers, but the others vulgares of the household, ostiarii, pistores, coqui, bed-chamber slaves and slaves of the bath. Nine of these were Greeks, slaves from slave mothers, pale men with black hair and keen eyes and a high, shrill laughter: as though they knew this freedom a dream that would not endure, and shivered in the winds of the open lands. Their backs were scored with cicatrices, for their mistress had been Petronia, wife of C. Gaius Petronius, strong in belief that a well-flogged slave was a willing slave. Now, clad in a single linen shift, dust-covered, blinded, she was dragged forward by the hair grasped in the hand of a giant Gaul. He had cut a switch from a thorn-brake and at intervals raised the shift and smote the woman with the full strength of his arm. Her two daughters, with faces engrimed and staring eyes, ran by the side of their mother. Them the Gaul did not beat, for he desired them.
Five of the men were Negroes, cooks and men of the bedchamber, who slobbered a strange, half-intelligible Latin and stared appalled on the spaces of a countryside they had seen but seldom in their days of toil. One had been the household executioner. In the sleeves of his girt-up robe he carried two swords, and marched and smiled with a vacant intensity.
But the women slaves of the household had been left behind, at the order of the literatus Kleon. For they would delay the march. They had wept and followed the company many miles, some carrying children, some loot from the rooms of Petronius. Then they were lost behind in a stretch of marshland.
Now it drew towards nightfall again, and at the halt by the ford Kleon gestured Brennus and Titul to his side. Since they freed the slaves of Petronius, these slaves had elected them leaders without demur, and lonians Kleon and the Negroes Titul. Some already had heard of the Gladiators’ revolt, others believed it only a tale, and the cross the end of the day’s revolt. These it was who wrecked their fury on the countryside and the body of their stumbling mistress.
Brennus came sleepy-eyed from the midst of his Gauls. He wore the sandals of Petronia, strained and split on his shambling feet, and about him had girt the green robe she once wore, for he had been the first to reach her room. In his belt he carried a dagg
er, a sling, and over his shoulder a pouch of clay pellets.
‘Look there,’ said Kleon.
They shaded their eyes with their hands and looked into the sunset quietude of Italy. Against it was a glitter of metal. A band of soldiers was riding towards the ford.
‘The Masters,’ said Brennus, his hands trembling. Kleon looked at him with a cold contempt, unstirred by either fear or hope, and Brennus caught that look, and ceased to tremble. ‘Well, here’s an end to women and freedom.’
‘We’ll cut the throats of the women,’ said Titul, licking his lips. ‘But first we’ll fight.’
At the order of the three leaders the company climbed a knoll that overlooked the ford. Upon its summit were great stones, ruins of a temple builded by ancient men. With these stones the slaves set to building a wall. Flinging back the long hair from their faces, the sun-blackened Gauls lost their fear, and toiled with obscene jests and panting breath. Then they unwound their shepherds’ slings, and laid in each leathern thong a round clay pellet, such as were used against flock-raiding wolves. The Negro executioner drew out his swords and laughed with a vacant fury towards the ford. But the Ionians were silent, toiling to erect the stone wall. Then one, the youngest, said to the others:
‘I’d thought to see the ships in Delos harbour of which our mothers told.’ And he smiled upon them a strange, frightened smile. And the older men muttered and turned away their faces, to hide the ready Greek tears.
The three women crouched in the hollow on the summit of the knoll. Petronia knelt and stared with half blind eyes. A Negro flung filth in her face and promised her jackals instead of men to share her bed by the morrow. Kleon smiled coldly and looked down on the ford.