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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
Yet the end of the Villa Batiatus was in sight when Spartacus and seven other gladiators returned from an engagement in Larinum at the end of the month Sextilis in the year Caesar left Gytheum and the service of Marcus Antonius to assume his pontificate.
Larinum had been a fascinating experience, even for eight men kept cooped up in a prison cart and chained for every moment save those spent fighting in the ring. At the end of the previous year one of Larinum’s most prominent men, Statius Albius Oppianicus, had been prosecuted by his stepson, Aulus Cluentius Habitus, for attempting to murder him. The trial had taken place in Rome, and a horrific story of mass murder going back over twenty years had tumbled out. Oppianicus, the whole of Rome had learned, was responsible for the murders of his wives, sons, brothers, in—laws, cousins, and others, each killing committed or commissioned in order to accumulate money and power. A friend of the fabulously rich aristocrat Marcus Licinius Crassus, Oppianicus had nearly been acquitted; the tribune of the plebs Lucius Quinctius became involved, and a huge sum of money had been set aside to bribe the jury of senators. That Oppianicus had ended in being convicted was due to the avarice of his appointed briber, the same Gaius Aelius Staienus who had proven so useful to Pompey a few years earlier—and kept ninety thousand sesterces for himself when Gaius Antonius Hybrida had hired him to bribe nine tribunes of the plebs. For Staienus was incapable of honorably fulfilling the most dishonorable commissions; he kept the money Oppianicus gave him to bribe the jury and let Oppianicus be condemned.
Larinum could still find little to talk about except the perfidy of Oppianicus, even when gladiators were in town to stage funeral games—there had been too many funeral games in Larinum, was the trouble. So while they ate chained up to a table in the courtyard of a local inn, the gladiators had listened to the four archers marveling, and looked interested. Though they were not allowed to speak to each other, of course they did. Time and much practice had enabled them to carry on snatches of shortened conversation, and mass murder among the upper classes of Larinum was wonderful cover.
Despite the huge obstacles the obsessive meticulousness of Batiatus had thrown up everywhere, Spartacus—now the veteran of more than twelve months as a resident of the Villa Batiatus—was gathering together the threads of a plot aimed at a mass escape—and a mass murder. He finally knew everybody and had learned how to communicate with people he couldn’t see daily—or even monthly. If Batiatus had created a complicated web which kept his whores and his gladiators from getting to know each other well, Spartacus had constructed an equally complicated web which enabled whores and gladiators to pass on ideas and information and pass back comments, favorable or critical. In fact, the Batiatus system had allowed Spartacus to make positive use of this enforced indirect contact; it meant personalities were not thrown together often enough to clash—or to contemplate supplanting Spartacus as the leader of the coming insurrection.
He had started to send out feelers at the beginning of the summer, and now at the end of it his plans were in place. Every gladiator without exception had agreed that if Spartacus could engineer a breakout, he would be a part of it, and the whores—a vital part of Spartacus’s scheme—had also agreed.
There were two Roman deserters whose understanding of military discipline and methods were almost the equal of Spartacus’s, and through the whisper network he had appointed them his deputies in the escape. They fought as Gauls and had adopted the ring names of Crixus and Oenomaus because the audiences disliked Latin names which reminded them that most of their sawdust heroes were Roman military outlaws. As chance would have it, both Crixus and Oenomaus were with Spartacus in Larinum, a boon for Spartacus, who had been able to move the date of his projected breakout forward in time.
They would go eight days after the return from Larinum, no matter how many or how few gladiators were actually at the Villa Batiatus. As this was the day after the nundinae the number was likely to be higher than lower, enhanced by the fact that Batiatus curtailed his show bookings during September, when he was accustomed to take his annual vacation and pay his annual visit to Philippus.
The Thracian priestess Aluso had become Spartacus’s most fervid ally; after the plot had been agreed to by everyone, whichever men were in the same cell as Spartacus contrived with the aid of the other women to ensure that Spartacus and Aluso were able to spend the whole night together if Aluso was one of the women’s detail. In voices more breath than noise they had gone over the innumerable factors involved, and Aluso vowed that through the agency of her women, she would keep all the men in a fever of enthusiasm. She had been stealing kitchen implements for Spartacus since early summer, so cunningly that when they were finally missed one of the cooks was blamed; no one suspected a gladiators’ revolt. A cleaver—a small carving knife—a hank of stout twine—a glass jar since smashed to slivers—a meat hook. A modest haul, but enough for eight men. All of these were held in the women’s quarters, which the women cleaned themselves. But on the night before the breakout the women delegated to visit Spartacus’s cell carried the implements concealed within their scanty clothing; Aluso was not among them.
Morning dawned. The eight men left their cell to eat in their enclosure. Clad only in loincloths, they carried nothing, but tucked inside the V of scarlet cloth each man wore was asection of twine about three feet long. The archer, an assistant doctor and two ex-gladiators who now served as yardsmen were garroted so quickly that the iron door of the cell still gaped open; Spartacus and his seven companions grabbed the weapons from their beds and were scattering along the row of cells using a key found on the archer before anyone knew what was happening. Each group of gladiators had dallied and grumbled on rising, shuffled and delayed, so that none had finished moving from cell to yard before eight silent athletes were among them. A cleaver flashed, a knife was plunged into a chest, a wicked chunk of broken glass sliced through a throat, and the eight pieces of twine were passed on.
It was done without a word, a shout, a warning; Spartacus and the other gladiators now held the row of cells and the yards leading from them. Some of the dead men carried keys, more gates leading further into the labyrinth were unlocked, and the seventy men who were imprisoned in the Villa Batiatus at the time streamed silently onward, outward. There was a shed in which axes and tools were kept; a muffled jangle, and anything useful was in a gladiator’s hand. Another flaw in Batiatus’s ground plan now lay revealed, for the high internal walls kept what was going on limited to the immediate vicinity. Batiatus ought to have erected watch towers and put his archers in them.
The alarm was given when the men reached the kitchens, but that was far too late. Possessed now of every sharp instrument the kitchens owned, the gladiators used pot lids to ward off arrows and went after everyone left alive. Including Batiatus, who had meant to leave on his vacation the previous day but instead had stayed because he had found a discrepancy in his books. The men kept him alive until they had liberated the women, who tore him apart a little at a time under the clinical supervision of Aluso; she ate his heart with relish.
And by the time the sun had risen Spartacus and his sixty-nine companions had taken the Villa Batiatus. The weapons were removed from storage and every cart was yoked up to oxen or to mules. The food from the kitchens and all the spare armaments were piled into the wagons, the main gates were thrown open, and the little expedition marched bravely out into the world.
Knowing Campania of old, Spartacus’s planning had not been confined to the taking of the Villa Batiatus. It stood beside the route from Capua to Nola some seven miles out of the city; Spartacus turned away from Capua and headed in the direction of Nola. Not far along the road they encountered another wagon train and attacked it, for no other reason than that they wanted no one alive to report which way they had gone. To the delight of all, the wagons turned out to be loaded with weapons and armor for another gladiatorial school. There were now more items useful for a war than people to wear or wield them.
Soon the cavalcade left the main road to take a deserted track which headed west of south toward Mount Vesuvius.
Clad in an archer’s scaly jacket and carrying a Thracian’s saber, Aluso moved to join Spartacus at the front of the column. She had washed off Batiatus’s blood, but still licked her chops with the purring content of a cat every time she thought of how she had eaten his heart.
“You look like Minerva,” said Spartacus, smiling; he had found nothing to criticize in Aluso’s treatment of Batiatus.
“I feel like myself for the first time in ten years.” And she jiggled the big leather bag dangling from her waist; it held the head of Batiatus, which she intended to scarify and transform its skull into her drinking cup, as was the custom of her tribe.
“You’ll be my woman only, if that pleases you.”
“It pleases me if I can be a part of your war councils.”
They spoke in Greek since Aluso knew no Latin, and spoke with the ease of those who had enjoyed each other’s bodies without any emotional clouding of simple passion, united in the pleasure of being free, of walking unchained and unsupervised.
*
Vesuvius was impressively different from other peaks. It stood alone amid the rolling plenty of Campania not far from the shores of Crater Bay, sloping upward in easy planes for three thousand feet neatly patched with vineyards, orchards, vegetable and wheat fields; the soil was deep and rich. For several thousand more feet above the tilled slopes there reared a rocky, dissected tower dotted with trees hardy enough to dig their knobby toes into crevices, but devoid of habitation or cultivation.
Spartacus knew every inch of the mountain. His father’s farm lay on its western flank, and he and his older brother had played for years amid the crags of the upper peak. So he led his train with purpose ever upward until he reached a bowl—shaped hollow high among the rocks on the northern side. The edges of the hollow were steep and it was difficult getting the carts inside it, but in its bottom grew lush grass, and there was room for a much larger collection of people and animals than Spartacus owned. Yellow smears of sulphur stained the escarpment and the smells which a mound in the middle exhaled were noisome; yet that meant the grasses had never been grazed and shepherds never brought their flocks here. The place was thought to be haunted, a fact Spartacus did not impart to his followers.
For several hours he concentrated upon getting his camp organized, shelters built out of the planks dismembered from prison wagons, women set to preparing food, men deputed to this task and that. But when the sun had sunk lower than the western rim of the round hollow, he called everyone together.
“Crixus and Oenomaus, stand one to each side of me,” he said, “and Aluso, as chieftain of the women, as our priestess and as my woman, sit at my feet. The rest of you will face us.”
He waited until the group had sorted itself out, then raised himself higher than Crixus and Oenomaus by jumping upon a rock.
“We are free for the moment, but we must never forget that under the law we are slaves. We have murdered our keepers and our owner, and when the authorities find out we will be hunted down. Never before have we been able to gather as a people and discuss our purposes, our fate, our future.”
He drew a deep breath. “First of all, I will keep no man or no woman against his or her will. Those of a mind to seek their own ways separate from mine are at liberty to go at any time. I ask for no vows, no oaths, no ceremonies swearing fidelity to me. We have been prisoners, we have felt chains, we have been given no privileges accorded to free men, and the women have been forced into harlotry. So I will do nothing to bind you.
“This here”—he waved his hand about to indicate the camp—“is a temporary shelter. Sooner or later we will have to leave it. We were seen climbing the mountain, and the news of our deed will soon follow us.”
A gladiator squatting on his haunches in the front row—Spartacus didn’t know his name—raised a hand to speak.
“I see that we will be pursued and hunted down,” said the fellow, frowning. “Would it not be better to disband now? If we scattered in a hundred directions, some of us at least will manage to escape. If we stay together, we will be captured together.”
Spartacus nodded. “There is truth in what you say. However, I’m not in favor of it. Why? Chiefly because we have no money, no clothes other than what Batiatus issued us—and they brand us for what we are—and nothing to help us except weapons, which would be dangerous if we were scattered. Batiatus had no money on the premises, not one single sestertius. But money is a vital necessity, and I think we have to stay together until we find it.”
“How can we do that?” asked the same fellow.
The smile Spartacus gave him was rueful but charming. “I have no idea!” he said frankly. “If this were Rome we could rob someone. But this is Campania, and full of careful farmers who keep everything in a bank or buried where we’d never find it.” He spread his hands in an appeal. “Let me tell you what I would like us to do, then everyone can think about it. Tomorrow at this same time we’ll meet and vote.”
No more enlightened than the rest, Crixus and Oenomaus nodded vigorously.
“Tell us, Spartacus,” said Crixus.
The light was dying little by little, but Spartacus atop his rock seemed to concentrate the last rays of the sun upon himself, and looked like a man worth following. Determined, sure, strong, reliable.
“You all know the name Quintus Sertorius,” he said. “A Roman in revolt against the system which produces men like Batiatus. He has gathered Spain to himself, and soon he will be marching to Rome to be the Dictator and found a new style of Republic. We know that because we heard people talking whenever we were sent somewhere to fight. We learned too that many in Italy want Quintus Sertorius at the head of Rome. Especially the Samnites.”
He paused, wet his lips. “I know what I am going to do! I am going to Spain to join Quintus Sertorius. But if it is at all possible I would bring him another army—an army which would already have struck blows against the Rome of Sulla and his heirs. I am going to recruit among the Samnites, the Lucanians, and all the others in Italy who would rather see a new Rome than watch their heritage run away to nothing. I will recruit among the slaves of Campania too, and offer them full citizenship rights in the Rome of Quintus Sertorius. We have more weapons than we can use—unless we recruit more men. And when Rome sends troops against us we will defeat them and take their gear too!”
He shrugged. “I have nothing to lose but my life, and I have vowed that never again will I endure the kind of existence Batiatus forced upon me. A man—even a man enslaved!—must have the right to associate freely with his fellows, to move in the world. Prison is worse than death. I will never go back to any prison!”
He broke down, wept, dashed the tears away impatiently. “I am a man, and I will make my mark! But all of you should be saying that too! If we stay together and form the nucleus of an army, then we stand a chance to defend ourselves and make a great mark. If we scatter in a hundred directions, every last one of us will have to run, run, run. Why run like deer if we can march like men? Why not carve ourselves a place in the Rome of Quintus Sertorius by softening up Italy for him, then marching to join him as he comes? Rome has few troops in Italy, we know that. Which of us hasn’t heard the Capuans complaining that their livelihood is dwindling because the legionary camps are empty? Who is there to stop us? I was a military tribune once. Crixus, Oenomaus, and many of you here belonged to Rome’s legions. Is there anything that the likes of Lucullus or Pompeius Magnus knows about forming and running an army that I do not, or Crixus, or Oenomaus, or any of you? It isn’t a difficult business to run an army! So why don’t we become an army? We can win victories! There are no veteran legions in Italy to stop us, just cohorts of raw recruits. It is we who will attract experienced soldiers, the Samnites and Lucanians who fought to be free of Rome. And between us we will train the inexperienced who join us—does it follow that a slave is necessarily a man without martial ability or valor? Servile armies have brought Rome to the brink of ruin several times, and only fell because they were not led by men who understand how Rome fights. They were not led by Romans!”
Both mighty arms went up above his head; Spartacus closed his hands into fists and shook them. “I will lead our army! And I will lead it to victory! I will bring it to Quintus Sertorius wreathed in laurels and with Rome in Italy beneath its foot!” Down came the arms. “Think about what I have said, I ask nothing more.”
The little band of gladiators and women said nothing when Spartacus jumped down, but the looks directed at him were glowing and Aluso was smiling at him fiercely.
“They will vote for you tomorrow,” she said.
“Yes, I think they will.”
“Then come with me now to the spring of water. It needs to be purified if it is to give life to many.”
Quite how she understood what she was doing Spartacus did not know, but was awed to discover that after she had muttered her incantations and dug with the severed hand of Batiatus at the crumbling walls to one side of the hot, smelly fountain which gushed out of a cleft, a second spate of water appeared—cool, sweet, quenching.
“It is an omen,” said Spartacus.
*
In twenty days a thousand volunteers had accumulated inside the hollow near the top of Vesuvius, though it remained a mystery to Spartacus how word had flown around when he had as yet sent no messengers or recruiting teams into the surrounding countryside. Perhaps a tenth of those who arrived to join the gladiators were escaped slaves, but by far the majority were free men of Samnite nationality. Nola wasn’t far away, and Nola hated Rome. So did Pompeii, Neapolis, and all the other partisans of Italy who had fought to the death against Sulla, first in the Italian War, then for Pontius Telesinus. Rome might delude herself that she had crushed Samnium; but that, thought Spartacus as he entered Samnite name after Samnite name on his recruitment list, would never happen until the last Samnite was no more. Many of them arrived wearing armor and carrying weapons, hoary veterans who spat at the mention of Sulla’s name or made the sign to ward off the Evil Eye at the mention of Cethegus and Verres, the two who had scorched the Samnite heartlands.
“I have something to show you,” said Crixus to Spartacus, voice eager; it was the morning of the last day of September.
Drilling a century of slaves, Spartacus handed the task to another gladiator and moved off with Crixus, who was dragging anxiously at his arm. “What is it?” he asked.
“Better to see for yourself,” said Crixus as he led Spartacus to a gap in the crater wall which allowed a far and sweeping view of Vesuvius’s northern slopes.
Two Samnites were on sentry duty, and turned excited faces toward their leader. “Look!” said one.
Spartacus looked. Below him for a thousand feet the crags and pockets of the upper mountain presented an inhospitable mien; below that lay ordered fields. And through the wheat stubble there wound a column of Roman soldiers led by four mounted men in the Attic helmets and contoured cuirasses of high officers, the man riding alone behind three riding abreast wearing the looped and ritually knotted scarlet sash of high imperium around his glittering chest.
“Well, well! They’ve sent a praetor against us at the very least!” said Spartacus with a chuckle.
“How many legions?” asked Crixus, looking worried.
Spartacus stared, astonished. “Legions? You were in them, Crixus, you ought to be able to tell!”
“That’s just it! I was in them. When you’re in them, you never get to see what you look like.”
Spartacus grinned, ruffled Crixus’s hair. “Rest easy, there’s no more than half a legion’s worth down there—five cohorts of the greenest troops I’ve ever seen. Notice how they straggle, can’t keep a straight line or an even distance apart? What’s more important, they’re being led by someone just as green! See how he rides behind his legates? Sure sign! A confident general is always out in front.”
“Five cohorts? That’s at least two and a half thousand men.”
“Five cohorts that have never been in a legion, Crixus.”
“I’ll sound general quarters.”
“No, stay here with me. Let them think we haven’t noticed them. If they hear bugles and shouting, they’ll stop and camp down there on the slopes. Whereas if they think they’ve stolen a march on us, that idiot leading them will keep on coming until he’s among the rocks and realizes he can’t make a camp. By then it will be too late to re-form and march down again—the whole lot will have to doss down in little groups wherever they can find the room. Idiots! If they’d gone round to the south, they could have used the track right up to our hollow.”
By the time darkness fell Spartacus had established beyond doubt that the punitive expedition was indeed composed of raw recruits, and that the general was a praetor named Gaius Claudius Glaber; the Senate had ordered him to pick up five cohorts in Capua as he passed through—and keep on marching until he found the rebels and flushed them out of their Vesuvian hole.
By dawn the punitive expedition no longer existed. Throughout the night Spartacus had sent silent raiding parties down into the crags, some even lowered on ropes, to kill swiftly and noiselessly. So green indeed were these recruits that they had shed their armor and piled their arms together before cuddling up to campfires which betrayed where every pocket of them slept, and so green was Gaius Claudius Glaber that he thought the lie of the land a greater protection than a proper camp. Closer to dawn than to dusk some of the more wakeful soldiers began to understand what was going on, and gave the alarm. The stampede began.
Spartacus struck then in force, using his women followers as torchbearers to light his way. Half Glaber’s troops died, the other half fled—but left their arms and armor behind them. Chief among the fugitives were Glaber and his three legates.
Two thousand eight hundred sets of infantry equipment went to swell the cache in the hollow; Spartacus stripped his growing army of its gladiatorial accoutrements in favor of legionary gear and added Glaber’s baggage train to his carts and animals. Volunteers were now streaming in, most of them trained soldiers; when his tally grew to five thousand, Spartacus decided the hollow on Vesuvius had outlived its usefulness and moved his legion out.
He knew exactly where he was going.
*
Thus it was that when the praetors Publius Varinius and Lucius Cossinius marched two legions of recruits out of camp in Capua and headed off along the Nola road, they encountered a well laid out Roman fortification not far from the devastated Villa Batiatus. Varinius, the senior in command, was experienced. So was Cossinius, his second-in-command. One look at the men of their two legions had horrified them; so raw were these recruits that their basic training had only just begun! To add to the praetors’ difficulties the weather was cold, wet, and windy, and some kind of virulent respiratory infection was raging through the ranks. When Varinius saw the workmanlike structure beside the Nola road he knew at once that it belonged to the rebels—but also knew that his own men were not capable of attacking it. Instead he put the two legions into a camp alongside the rebels.
No one knew a name then, nor any details about the rebels save that they had extirpated the gladiatorial school of Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Batiatus (who appeared on its books as the proprietor), gone to earth on Mount Vesuvius, and had been joined by some thousands of discontented Samnites, Lucanians, and slaves. From the disgraced Glaber had come the news that the rebels now owned every scrap of his gear, and that they were well enough led to have gone about destroying Glaber’s five cohorts like experts.
However, some thorough scouting revealed to Varinius and Cossinius that the force inside the rebel camp numbered only about five thousand, and that a certain proportion were women. Heartened, Varinius deployed his two legions for battle the next morning, secure in the knowledge that even with sick raw troops he had the numbers to win. It was still raining hard.
When the battle was over Varinius didn’t know whether to blame his defeat upon the sheer terror the sight of the rebels had inspired in his men, or upon the illness which caused so many of his legionaries to lay down their arms and refuse to fight, pleading that they couldn’t, they just couldn’t. Worst blow of all was that Cossinius had been killed trying to rally a group of would—be deserters—and that a great deal of equipment had been spirited off the field by the rebels. There was no point in pursuing the rebels, who had marched off through the rain in the direction of their camp. Varinius wheeled his bedraggled and demoralized column about and went back to Capua, where he wrote to the Senate frankly, not sparing himself—but not sparing the Senate either. There were no experienced troops in Italy, he said, except for the rebels.
He did have a name to illuminate his report: Spartacus, a Thracian gladiator.
For six market intervals Varinius concentrated upon the training of his miserable soldiers, most of whom had survived the battle, but seemed less likely to survive the respiratory disease which still raged through their ranks. He commandeered the services of some old Sullan veteran centurions to help him train, though he couldn’t persuade them to enlist. The Senate thought it prudent to begin recruiting four more legions, and assured Varinius that he had its support in whatever measures he felt called upon to execute. A fourth praetor out of that year’s group of eight was dispatched from Rome to act as Varinius’s senior legate: Publius Valerius. One fled, one dead, one vanquished; the fourth was not a happy man.
Varinius thought his men sufficiently well trained to begin operations at the end of November, and led them out of Capua to attack Spartacus’s camp. Only to find it deserted. Spartacus had stolen away, yet one more indication that, Thracian or no, he was a military man in the Roman manner. Illness still dogged poor Varinius. As he led his two under—strength legions south he had to watch helplessly as whole cohorts were forced to abandon the march, their centurions promising to catch up with him as soon as the men felt better. Near Picentia, just before the ford across the Silarus River, he caught up with the rebels at last; only to see in horror that Spartacus’s legion had mushroomed into an army. Five thousand less than two months ago—twenty-five thousand now! Not daring to attack, Varinius was obliged to watch this suddenly great force cross the Silarus and march off along the Via Popillia into Lucania.
When the sick cohorts caught up and the stricken men still with him showed signs of recovering, Varinius and Valerius held a conference. Did they follow the rebels into Lucania or return to Capua to spend the winter training a bigger army?
“What you really mean,” said Valerius, “is whether we would do better to give battle now, even though outnumberedbadly, or whether we can raise enough extra men during the winter to make delaying a confrontation until the spring a wiser move.”
“I don’t think there is a decision to make,” said Varinius. “We have to follow them now. By the spring they’re likely to be doubled in strength—and every man they add to their ranks will be a Lucanian veteran.”
So Varinius and Valerius followed, even when the evidence told them that Spartacus had departed from the Via Popillia and was moving steadily into the wilds of the Lucanian mountains. For eight days they followed without seeing more than old signs, pitching a stout camp each and every night. Taxing work, but the prudent alternative.
On the ninth evening the same process was begun amid the grumbles of men who had not been legionaries long enough to understand the necessity or the advantages of a safe camp. And while the earth walls were being piled up out of the refuse thrown from the ditches, Spartacus attacked. Outnumbered and outgeneraled, Varinius had no choice other than to retreat, though he left his beautifully caparisoned Public Horse behind along with most of his soldiers. Of the eighteen cohorts he had started with from Capua, only five returned out of Lucania; having crossed the Silarus into Campania again, Varinius and Valerius left these five cohorts to guard the ford under the command of a quaestor, Gaius Toranius.
The two praetors journeyed back to Rome, there to exhort the Senate to train more men as quickly as possible. The situation was undeniably growing more serious every day, but between Lucullus and Marcus Cotta in the east and Pompey in Spain, many of the senators felt that the recruiting process was a waste of time. The Italian well was dry. Then in January came the news that Spartacus had issued out of Lucania with forty thousand men organized into eight efficient legions. The rebels had rolled over poor Gaius Toranius at the Silarus, killed him and every man in his five cohorts. Campania lay at the mercy of Spartacus, who, said the report, was busy trying to persuade towns of Samnite population to come over to his side, declare for a free Italy.
The tribunes of the Treasury were told very succinctly to cease their noises of complaint and start finding the money to lure veterans out of retirement. The praetor Quintus Arrius (who had been scheduled to replace Gaius Verres as governor of Sicily) was instructed to hustle himself to Capua and begin organizing a proper consular army of four legions, stiffened as much as possible with veteran intakes. The new consuls, Lucius Gellius Poplicola and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus, were formally given the command in the war against Spartacus.
*
All of this Spartacus gradually discovered from the time he had re-entered Campania. As his army was still growing, he had learned to weld it on the march, forming and drilling new cohorts as he went. It had been a grief when Oenomaus was killed during the successful attack on the camp of Varinius and Valerius, but Crixus was still very much alive and other capable legates were rising to the surface. The Public Horse which had belonged to Varinius made a wonderful mount for a supreme commander! Showy. Every morning Spartacus kissed its nose and stroked its flowing silvery mane before leaping upon its back; he called it Batiatus.
Certain that towns like Nola and Nuceria would rally behind him, he had sent his ambassadors to see their magistrates at once, explaining that he was intent upon helping Quintus Sertorius establish a new Italian Republic, and asking for donations of men, materiel, money. Only to be told firmly that no city of Campania or any other region in Italy would support the cause of Quintus Sertorius—or of Spartacus the gladiator general.
“We do not love the Romans,” said the magistrates of Nola, “and we are proud of the fact that we held out longer against Rome than any other place in all of Italy. But no more. Never again. Our prosperity is gone, all our young men are dead. We will not join you against Rome.”
When Nuceria returned the same answer Spartacus held a small conference with Crixus and Aluso.
“Sack them,” said the Thracian priestess. “Teach them that it is wiser to join us.”
“I agree,” said Crixus, “though my reason is different. We have forty thousand men, enough equipment to outfit every last one, and plenty to eat. But we have nothing else, Spartacus. It is all very well to promise our troops lives of distinction and wealth under the government of Quintus Sertorius, but it might be better to give them some of that wealth right now. If we sack any town which refuses to join us, we will terrify the towns we have still to reach—and we will please our legions. Women, plunder—there’s not a soldier born who doesn’t love a sack!”
His temper frayed by what he saw as unappreciative rejection, Spartacus made up his mind more quickly than the old Spartacus of pregladiatorial days would have; that had been a different life, he a different sort of man. “Very well. We attack Nuceria and Nola. Tell the men to have no mercy.”
The men had no mercy. Looking at the results, Spartacus decided that there was much merit in sacking towns. Nuceria and Nola had yielded treasure as well as money, food, women; if he continued to sack, he would be able to present Quintus Sertorius with a huge fortune as well as an army! And if he did, then it seemed likely that Quintus Sertorius the Dictator of Rome would make Spartacus the Thracian gladiator his Master of the Horse.
Therefore the huge fortune had to be obtained before he left Italy. Requests were still pouring in from whole districts of men anxious to join him, and telling of rich pickings in parts of Lucania, Bruttium and Calabria which had not been touched by the Italian War. So from Campania the rebels journeyed south to sack Consentia in Bruttium and then Thurii and Metapontum on the Gulf of Tarentum. Much to Spartacus’s delight, all three towns were possessed of staggering wealth.
When Aluso had finished scarifying the skull of Batiatus, he had given her a sheet of silver with which to line it; but after Consentia, Thurii and Metapontum, he told her to throw the silver on the nearest rubbish heap, replace it with gold. And there was a certain seduction in all this—as well as the ever—present seduction of Aluso, who thought like a barbarian but had terrible magic and stood to him as the talisman of his luck. As long as he had Aluso by his side, he was one of Fortune’s favorites.
Yes, she was wonderful. She could find water, she sensed when disaster was looming, she always gave him the right advice. Growing heavy with his child, her rich red mouth a perfect foil for flaxen hair and wild white wolf’s pallid eyes, ankles and wrists clashing with the gold she loaded upon them, he thought her perfect, not the least because she was a Thracian and he had become a Thracian. They belonged together; she was the personification of this strange new life.
Early in April he was marching into eastern Samnium, sure that here at least the towns would join him. But Asernia, Bovianum, Beneventum and Saepinum all rejected his overtures—we won’t join you, we don’t want you, go away! Nor were they worth sacking. Verres and Cethegus had left nothing. However, individual Samnites kept flocking to join his army, which had now swelled to ninety thousand men.
So many people, Spartacus was finding out, were difficult to manage. Though the troops were organized into proper Roman legions and were armed in Roman style, he could never seem to find enough capable legates and tribunes to keep an iron control over soldierly impulses, wine, the hideous strife the female camp followers provoked. Time, he decided, to march for Italian Gaul, Gaul-across-the-Alps, and Quintus Sertorius in Nearer Spain. Not to the west of the Apennines—he had no desire to venture anywhere near the city of Rome. He would proceed up the Adriatic littoral through regions which had fought bitterly against Roman control of the peninsula—Marrucini, Vestini, Frentani, southern Picentines. Many of their men would join him!
But Crixus didn’t want to go to Nearer Spain. Nor did the thirty thousand men in his division of the army.
“Why go so far?” he asked. “If what you say about Quintus Sertorius is true, then one day he will arrive in Italy. It’s better that he finds us in Italy still, with our foot on Rome’s neck. The distance from here to Spain is half as far again as a thousand miles, and we’d be marching the whole way through barbarian tribes who would see us as just another lot of Romans. My men and I are against the idea of leaving Italy.”
“If you and your men are against the idea of leaving Italy,” said Spartacus angrily, “then don’t leave Italy! What do I care? I’ve close to a hundred thousand men to look after, and that’s far too many! So off you go, Crixus—the further, the better! Take your thirty thousand idiots, stay in Italy!”
So when Spartacus and seventy thousand soldiers—together with a vast baggage train and forty thousand women, not to mention babies and young children—turned north to cross the Tifernus River, Crixus and his thirty thousand followers turned south in the direction of Brundisium. It was the end of April.
*
At about the same moment, the consuls Gellius and Clodianus left Rome to pick up their troops from Capua, Quintus Arrius the ex-praetor having told the Senate that the four legions of new soldiers assembled in Capua were as good as they were ever going to be; he could not guarantee that they were battleworthy, but he hoped they were.
When the consuls reached Capua they were informed of the split between Spartacus and Crixus, and of the new direction into the north that Spartacus himself was taking. A plan was developed; Quintus Arrius would take one legion south to deal with Crixus at once, Gellius would take the second legion and shadow Spartacus from behind until Arrius could rejoin him, while Clodianus took the other two legions on a rapid march past Rome, then east on the Via Valeria to emerge on the Adriatic coast well to the north of Spartacus. The two consuls would then have Spartacus between them and could close the jaws of their pincer.
Some days later came splendid news from Quintus Arrius. Though outnumbered five to one, he had concealed himself in ambush on Mount Garganus in Apulia and fallen upon the undisciplined, jostling mass of men Crixus led into the trap. Crixus himself and all thirty thousand of his followers were killed, those who survived the ambush by execution afterward; Quintus Arrius had no intention of leaving live enemy in his wake.
Gellius was not so lucky. What Arrius had done to Crixus, Spartacus did to him. The troops of the single legion Gellius possessed scattered in wild panic the moment they saw a vast force descending upon them—a good thing, as it turned out, for those who stayed were slaughtered. And at least they fled without abandoning arms or armor, so that when the reunited Arrius and Gellius managed to round them up they still had their equipment and could (theoretically, anyway) fight again without needing to return to Capua.
The course Arrius and Gellius took after their defeat was of no moment to Spartacus; he marched immediately into the north to deal with Clodianus, of whose ploy he had been informed by a captured Roman tribune. At Hadria on the Adriatic coast the two armies met with much the same result for Clodianus as for Gellius. The troops of Clodianus dispersed in panic. Victor on both fields, Spartacus continued his northward progress unopposed.
Nothing daunted, Gellius, Clodianus and Arrius collected their men and tried again at Firmum Picenum. Again they were defeated. Spartacus marched into the Ager Gallicus. He crossed the Rubico into Italian Gaul at the end of Sextilis and started up the Via Aemilia toward Placentia and the western Alps. Quintus Sertorius, here we come!
The valley of the Padus was lush, rich countryside which provided forage aplenty and towns with granaries full to overflowing. As he now systematically sacked towns likely to yield good plunder, Spartacus did not endear himself or his army to the citizens of Italian Gaul.
At Mutina, halfway to the Alps, the vast army encountered the governor of Italian Gaul, Gaius Cassius Longinus, who tried valiantly to block their progress with a single legion. Gallant though the action was, it could not but fail; Cassius’s legate Gnaeus Manlius came up two days later with Italian Gaul’s other legion and suffered the same fate as Cassius. On both occasions the Roman troops had stayed to fight, which meant that Spartacus collected over ten thousand sets of arms and armor on the field.
The last Roman to whom Spartacus had personally spoken—and if he spoke to none, then nor did anyone else in that vast and terrifying horde—had been the tribune captured during the first defeat of Gellius months before. Neither at Hadria nor at Firmum Picenum did he so much as see Gellius, Clodianus or Arrius at close quarters. But now at Mutina he had two high—ranking Roman prisoners, Gaius Cassius and Gnaeus Manlius, and he fancied the idea of speaking with them: time to let a couple of members of the Senate see the man of whom all Italy and Italian Gaul was talking! Time to let the Senate know who he was. For he had no intention of killing or detaining Cassius and Manlius; he wanted them to return to Rome and report in person.
He had, however, loaded his prisoners down with chains, and made sure that when they were brought into his presence he was seated on a podium and wearing a plain white toga.
Cassius and Manlius stared, but it was when Spartacus addressed them in good, Campanian—accented Latin that they realized what he was.
“You’re an Italian!” said Cassius.
“I’m a Roman,” Spartacus corrected him.
No Cassius was easily cowed; the clan was warlike and very fierce, and if an occasional Cassius committed a military blunder, no Cassius had ever run away. So this Cassius proved himself a true member of his family by lifting one manacled arm and shaking his fist at the big, handsome fellow on the podium.
“Free me from the indignity of these bonds and you’ll soon be a dead Roman!” he snarled. “A deserter from the legions, eh? Put in the ring as a Thracian!”
Spartacus flushed. “I’m no deserter,” he said stiffly. “In me you see a military tribune who was unjustly convicted of mutiny in Illyricum. And you find your bonds an indignity? Well, how do you think I found my bonds when I was sent to the kind of school run by a worm like Batiatus? One set of chains deserves another, Cassius the proconsul!”
“Kill us and get it over and done with,” said Cassius.
“Kill you? Oh, no, I have no intention of doing that,” said Spartacus, smiling. “I’m going to set you free now that you’ve felt the indignity of bonds. You will go back to Rome and you will tell the Senate who I am, and where I’m going, and what I intend to do when I get there—and what I will be when I come back.”
Manlius moved as if to answer; Cassius turned his head and glared; Manlius subsided.
“Who you are—a mutineer. Where you’re going—to perdition. What you’re going to do when you get there—rot. What you’ll be when you come back—a mindless shade without substance or shadow,” sneered Cassius. “I’d be glad to tell the Senate all of that!”
“Then tell the Senate this while you’re about it!” snapped Spartacus, rising to his feet and ripping off the immaculate toga; he raked his feet on it with the relish of a dog raking its hind legs after defaecation, then kicked it off the podium. “In my train I have eighty thousand men, all properly armed and trained to fight like Romans. Most of them are Samnites and Lucanians, but even the slaves who enlisted under me are brave men. I have thousands of talents in plunder. And I am on my way to join Quintus Sertorius in Nearer Spain. Together he and I will inflict total defeat upon Rome’s armies and generals in both the Spains, and then Quintus Sertorius and I will march back to Italy. Your Rome doesn’t stand a chance, proconsul! Before the next year has passed, Quintus Sertorius will be the Dictator of Rome, and I will be his Master of the Horse!”
Cassius and Manlius had listened to this with a series of expressions chasing each other across their faces—fury, awe, anger, bewilderment, amazement—and finally, when they were sure Spartacus had ended, amusement! Both men threw their heads back and roared with unfeigned laughter while Spartacus stood feeling a slowly rising tide of red suffuse his cheeks. What had he said that they found so funny? Did they laugh at his temerity? Did they think him mad?
“Oh, you fool!” said Cassius when he was able, the tears of hilarity running like a freshet. “You great bumpkin! You booby! Don’t you have an intelligence network? Of course you don’t! You’re not a Roman commander’s anus! What’s the difference between this horde of yours and a horde of barbarians? Nothing, and that is the simple truth! I can’t believe you don’t know, but you really don’t know!”
“Know what?” asked Spartacus, his color gone. There had been no room for rage at the derision in Cassius’s voice, at the epithets he hurled; all that filled Spartacus’s mind was fear.
“Sertorius is dead! Assassinated by his own senior legate Perperna last winter. There is no rebel army in Spain! Just the victorious legions of Metellus Pius and Pompeius Magnus, who will soon be marching back to Italy to put paid to you and your whole horde of barbarians!” And Cassius laughed again.
Spartacus didn’t stay to hear, he fled from the room with his hands clapped against his ears and sought out Aluso.
Now the mother of Spartacus’s son, Aluso could find nothing to say to console him; he covered his head in folds of his scarlet general’s cape snatched from the couch, and wept, wept, wept.
“What can I do?’’ he asked her, rocking back and forth. “I have an army with no objective, a people with no home!”
Hair hanging in strings over her face, knees wide apart as she squatted with her blood—cup and her knucklebones and the grisly tattered hand of Batiatus, Aluso whipped the bones with the hand, stared and muttered.
“Rome’s great enemy in the west is dead,” she said at last, “but Rome’s great enemy in the east still lives. The bones say we must march to join Mithridates.”
Oh, why hadn’t he thought of that for himself? Spartacus threw away the general’s cape, looked at Aluso with wide, tear—blurred eyes. “Mithridates! Of course Mithridates! We will march across the eastern Alps into Illyricum, cross Thrace to the Euxine and join ourselves to Pontus.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, snuffled, gazed at Aluso wildly. “In Thrace is your homeland, woman. Would you rather stay there?’’
She snorted scornfully. “My place is with you, Spartacus. Whether they know it or not, the Bessi are a defeated people. No tribe in the world is strong enough to resist Rome forever, only a great king like Mithridates. No, husband, we will not stay in Thrace. We will join ourselves to King Mithridates.”
*
One of the many problems about an army as huge as that one belonging to Spartacus was the sheer impossibility of direct communication with all its members. He gathered the vast crowd together as best he could and did his utmost to make sure that all his men and their women understood why they were going to turn in their tracks and march back down the Via Aemilia toward Bononia, where they would take the Via Annia northeast to Aquileia and Illyricum. Some did understand, but many did not, either because they hadn’t heard Spartacus himself and so had received a garbled version of what he said, or because they owned all an Italian’s fear and detestation of the eastern potentate. Quintus Sertorius was Roman. Mithridates was a savage who ate Italian babies and would enslave everyone.
The march resumed, this time eastward, but as Bononia came closer discontent among the soldiers and their camp followers grew. If Spain was an eternity away, what was Pontus? Many of the Samnites and Lucanians—and they were a majority in the army—spoke Oscan and Latin, but little or no Greek; how would they get on in a place like Pontus without Greek?
At Bononia a hundred-strong deputation of legates, tribunes, centurions and men from the ranks came to see Spartacus.
“We will not leave Italy” was what they said.
“Then I will not desert you,” said Spartacus, swallowing a terrible disappointment. “Without me you will disintegrate. The Romans will kill all of you.”
When the deputation left he turned as always to Aluso. “I am defeated, woman, but not by an external enemy, even Rome. They are too afraid. They do not understand.”
Her bones were not lying happily. She scattered them angrily, then scooped them up and put them in their pouch. What they said she would not tell him; some things were better left in the minds and hearts of women, who were closer to the earth.
“Then we will go to Sicily,” she said. “The slaves of that place will rise for us, as they have risen twice before. Perhaps the Romans will leave us to occupy Sicily in peace if we promise to sell them enough grain at a cheap enough price.”
The uncertainty in her she could not disguise; sensing it, for one wild moment Spartacus toyed with the idea of deflecting his army south onto the via Cassia and marching on the city of Rome. But then the reason in what Aluso suggested won out. She was right. She was always right. Sicily it must be.