CHAPTER XI.
The letter was sent, and in the course of the forenoon the tabellarius, or letter-carrier of the inn, returned from Formiæ. Crispina brought him to Paulus, who was in an avenue of the garden watching some players as they contested a game of quoits or discus. This avenue connected the garden proper with the open country westward, terminating in a cross-hedge of myrtle, through which a little wicket or trellis gate opened. "The man has brought no letter back," the hostess said, signing at the same time to the messenger to deliver the particulars of his errand.
He had found the tribune, he said, and had given him the letter and asked for an answer. The tribune was at the moment inspecting a body of troops. He read the note, however, and immediately took out of his belt both his stylus and pugillaria, or hand-tablets; when the prætorian prefect Sejanus, happening to pass, entered into conversation with him, and the messenger then saw Velleius Paterculus hand to Sejanus Paulus's letter. After reading it, the general gave it back, said something in Greek, and went away. The tribune thereupon told the bearer that he would send an answer during the day by a messenger of his own. Paulus thanked the man, who then withdrew.
Our hero, who had prepared his fishing-tackle, a portion of which he had in his hand, remarked that it was vexatious to lose so fine and favorable a day. "Moreover, why should I be a prisoner?" he suddenly exclaimed. "I have a triple right to my personal liberty, as Roman citizen, knight, and noble. And what have I done to forfeit it? What have I done except parry the blow of an assassin whom I neither injured nor provoked?"
"Hush!" murmured Crispina; and just then Cneius Piso, having a bandage round his head, and leaning on the arm of Plancina, was seen passing into the inn before them from another part of the garden.
The landlady stood still a moment, till the two figures had disappeared, when she said, with a slight motion of the thumb in the direction of Piso, "He reports himself quite well now except for a headache. He and his lady leave us in an hour for Rome, and I hope I may say both vale and salve. You ask what you have done. Have you not come to Italy to claim rights which are indisputable?"
"Is that reason?"
"It is a thousand reasons, and another thousand, too. Alas! do not deceive yourself, as your namesake and cousin did, about the character of the world."
At the door of the inn they separated, she to attend to the multifarious business of her household, and he to loiter purposelessly. After a little reflection, he went quite through the house by the impluvium, and the central corridor beyond it, and looked into the public room, or atrium. At one table a couple of centurions sat playing dice with the tesseræ, and shouting the names of half a dozen gods and goddesses, as their luck fluctuated. At another table a powerfully built, dark, middle-aged man, having a long, ruddy beard streaked with gray, upon whom Asiatic slaves waited, was taking a traveller's repast; his slaves helping him to costly wine, which he drank with a grimace of dissatisfaction, but in formidable quantities. Other groups were dotted round the large apartment. In order not to draw needless notice, for all eyes turned to him for a moment, except those of the two dice-throwing and bellowing centurions, Paulus seated himself behind an unoccupied table near the door. While idly watching the scenes around him, he thought he heard his name pronounced in the passage outside. He listened, but the noise in the room made him uncertain, and the voice outside was already less audible, as of one who had passed the door while speaking.
Presently he heard, in a much louder tone, the words, "Why, it is not our carriage, after all. Let us return and wait where we can sit down." And the speaker again passed the public room, coming back, apparently, from the porch.
Paulus happened to be sitting close to the door, which was open; a curtain, as was common, hanging over the entrance. This time, in spite of the noise in the dieta, a word or two, and a name, though not his own, struck him. He fancied some one said, "No harm to her; but still, not the brother—the sister, my trusty Claudius."
Where had Paulus heard those tones before? In itself, what he had overheard was a sufficiently harmless fragment of a sentence. Nevertheless, Paulus rose, left his table, lifted aside the door-curtain, and went into the corridor, where he saw Cneius Piso and Plancina, with their backs to him, walking toward the end of the passage opposite the porch, but he nearly stumbled against a young man going the other way. This person, who was good-looking, in both senses of the word, wore the sober-colored exomis, or tunic, the long hair, and the slippers of a slave. He had in his right hand a stylus; in his left, tablets of citron-wood, open and covered with blue wax, on which he was reading, with his head bent, some note which he had made there.
"It is my fault, noble sir," said he; "I was stooping over these and did not observe you; I beg you to pardon my awkwardness." And he bowed with an air of humility.
"It is I, rather, who am to blame," said Paulus, scanning steadily the features of the slave, who had made his apology with a look of alarm, and in exaggerated accents of deprecation.
Shortly after this incident, while Paulus, who had not returned to the atrium, was leaning dreamily over the balustrade of the inn's central court, and watching the fountain in the impluvium there, he was struck heavily on the shoulder from behind by an open hand. Turning round slowly, he beheld a man in the very prime of life, who was entirely a stranger to him.
"I was told I should find you here, excellent sir," said the stranger.
Paulus took in, at a glance, his dress and general appearance. He had a thick brown beard, neatly trimmed, and open, daring, large blue eyes, in which there was nothing whatever sullen or morose; yet a sort of wildness and fierceness, with a slight but constant gleam of vigilance, if not subtlety. On the whole, his face was handsome; it was conspicuously manful, and, perhaps, somewhat obdurate and pitiless.
His stature was good without being very lofty. He had broad shoulders, rather long, sinewy arms, a deep chest, and, altogether, a figure and person not lacking any token of agility, but more indicative of huge strength.
He wore sandals, the laces of which crossed each other up his mighty legs, which were otherwise bare, and a white woollen diphera covered his shoulders, and was belted round his waist.
"And who told you that you would find me here?" asked Paulus; "for a few minutes ago I did not know I should find myself here."
"There goes the youth who told me," answered the other pointing, and at the same moment Paulus saw the slave, against whom he had walked in the passage, cross on tiptoe an angle of the court-yard, and vanish through a door on the opposite side.
"Claudius," continued the stranger, "is an acquaintance of mine, and chancing to meet him as I entered the hostelry, I asked for you."
"And pray who are you, and what do you want with me?" asked Paulus, after the slave, who must, he now felt sure, be the Claudius to whom Benigna was betrothed, had disappeared.
"Who am I?" returned the stranger; "a good many people know my name, and my person, too. But that matters not for the present. Your second question is more immediately important. 'What do I want with you?' To deliver to you a letter; nothing more. Understanding that I meant to stroll out in this direction, the distinguished tribune, Velleius Paterculus, requested me to hand you this."
And he produced from a fold in the breast of his white woollen tunic a letter, having a written address on one side, and a thread round its four ends, which thread was knotted on the side opposite to that bearing the superscription. The knot was secured by a waxen seal, upon which the scholarly writer had, in imitation of the deceased minister Mæcenas, impressed the engraving of a frog.
Paulus opened it and read what follows:
"To the noble Paulus Æmilius Lepidus, the younger, Velleius Paterculus sends greeting:
"Go where you like, amuse yourself as you like, do as you like—fish, ride, walk, read, play, sing—provided you sleep each night at the Post House of the Hundredth Milestone, under the excellent Crispina's roof. Be careful of your health and welfare."
"So far so good," said Paulus; "I am a prisoner, indeed, but with a tolerable long tether, at least. I am much obliged to you for bringing me the letter."
"Imprisonment!" observed the other. "I have heard a knot of centurions, and also soldiers unnumbered, talk of your imprisonment, and of the blow with which it seems to be connected. You are a favorite, without knowing it, among the troops at Formiæ. One fierce fellow swore, by quite a crowd of gods, that your blow deserved to have freed a slave, instead of enslaving a knight; that is, to have freed you had you been a slave, instead of enslaving you, who are already a knight."
"I feel grateful to the soldiers," said Paulus. "You are doubtless an officer—a centurion, perhaps?"
"Well, they do speak freely," replied the stranger, "and so do I; therefore you have made a fair guess; but you are wrong."
"Ah! well," said Paulus; "thanks for your trouble, and farewell. I must go."
"One word," persisted the other. "I am a famous man, though you do not seem to know it. The conqueror in thirty-nine single combats at Rome, all of them mortal, and all against the best gladiators that ever fought in circus or in forum, stands before you. At present I am no longer obliged to fight in person. I keep the most invincible familia of gladiators that Rome has hitherto known. You are aware of the change of morals and fashions; you are aware that even a senator has been seen in the arena. Some day an emperor will descend into our lists." (This, as the reader knows, really happened in the course of time.) "Join my family, my school; I am Thellus, the lanista."
"What!" cried Paulus, his nostrils dilated, and his eyes flashing. "In Greece, where I have been bred, gladiatorial shows are not so much as allowed by law, even though the gladiators should be all slaves; and because some senator has forgotten the respect due to the senate and to himself, and has no sense either of decency or humanity, you dare to propose to me, the nephew of a triumvir, the son of an honorable and a famous soldier—to me, the last of the Æmilians, to descend as a gladiator into the arena, and to join your school, mehercle! of uneducated, base-born, and mercenary cut-throats!"
The lanista was so astounded by this unexpected burst of lofty indignation, and felt himself thrust morally to such a sudden distance from the stripling, at least in the appearance of things, that he uttered not one word for several instants. He glared in speechless fury at the speaker, and when at length he found voice and ideas he said,
"Do you know that I could take you in these unarmed hands, and tear you limb from limb where you stand, as you would rend a chicken—do you know that?"
"I do not," said Paulus, in slow and significant accents, facing round at the same time upon the lanista with deliberate steadiness, and looking him fixedly in the face; "but if you even could, it would suit my humor better to be murdered where I am by a gladiator than to be one."
"By the Capitoline Jove!" cried Thellus, after another rather long, doubtful pause, laughing vehemently, "when I place your skill of fence, about which I have heard a particular account, by the side of your high spirit, you really do make my mouth water to number you among my pupils. I have not a man in my familia whom you would not, when a little addition to your years shall have perfected your bodily vigor, stretch upon the sand in ten minutes. But what mean you, after all? You do not wish to hurt my feelings, because I make you a friendly offer in the best shape that my unlucky destiny and state of life afford me the means of doing? Do you, then, so utterly despise the gladiator? Have you reflected on it so deeply? Who, nevertheless, displays in a greater degree many of the severest and highest virtues? Do you despise the man who despises life itself, when compared with honor in the only form in which honor is for him accessible? Answer that. Do you despise abstemiousness, fortitude, self-control, self-sacrifice, chastity, courage, endurance? Answer that. Who is more dauntless in the combat, more sublimely unruffled when defeated, more invincibly silent under the agony of a violent death, accompanied by the hootings of pitiless derision, and whose derision, whose mockery, is the last sound in his ears? Let that pass.
"But who pays a dearer price for the applause of his fellow-men when it is his? Who serves them more desperately in the way in which they desire to be, and will needs be, served? Who gives them the safe and cruel pleasures they demand more ungrudgingly, or under such awful conditions? Who comes forward to be mangled and destroyed with a more smiling face, or a more indifferent mien? Who spurns ease, and sloth, and pleasure, and pain, and the sweet things of life, and the bitter things of death, in order to show what manhood can dare and what manfulness can do, and in order to be thoroughly the man to the last, with the same constant and unconquerable mind, as the very gladiator whom you thus insult? Women can often show heroism in pain while shrinking from danger; and, on the other hand, amidst the general excitement and the contagious enthusiasm of an army in battle, to fight pretty well, and then to howl without restraint in the surgeon's hands, is the property of nearly all men. Some who face danger badly endure anguish well; and many, again, who cannot support pain will confront danger. But if you wish to name him who does both in perfection, and who practises that perfection habitually, you will name the gladiator. Nor is it pain of body alone, nor loss of life alone, which his calling trains him to undergo with alacrity. Are you sure that our motives are simply and solely that grovelling lust of gain which you imply? Mercenary you dare to term us? Mercenary! The gambler is mercenary. Is the gladiator like your high-born voluntary gambler? Is the gladiator deaf to praise? Indifferent to admiration? Reckless of your sympathy? Is he without other men's human ties and affections, as the gambler is? Has the gladiator no parents whom he feeds with that blood which flows from his gashes? No wife whom he is all the time protecting with that lacerated and fearless breast? No children whom his toils, efforts, and sufferings are keeping out of degradation, out of want, and out of that very arena which he treads with a spirit that nothing can subdue, in order that those whom he loves may never enter it?"
While Thellus thus thundered with increasing and increasing vehemence, the clear-faced youth whom he addressed, and who had confronted his words of menace without any emotion except that of instinctive and settled defiance, was and appeared to be quite overwhelmed. Had Paulus been struck bodily, he could not have felt any thing like the pain he suffered. The words of the gladiator smote the lad full to the heart, like stones shot from a catapult.
Thellus gazed thoughtfully at him during the pause which ensued, and then resumed by exclaiming,
"Mercenary! that is, he takes pay. Does the author take pay? answer that. Do the lawyer and soldier take pay? Does the magistrate take pay? Does, or does not, the emperor take pay? Does the vestal virgin herself take pay? If the gladiator did, and suffered, and was all he does, all he suffers, all he is, in mere sport, and at his own personal expense, I suppose you would respect him. But I, Thellus—I, the gladiator—I, the lanista—would scorn him, and spurn him, and spit upon him. Blame the community who go to these sports, and sit in shameless safety; blame the hundreds of thousands who succeed other hundreds of thousands to applaud us when we kill our beloved comrades, and, at the same time, to howl and hoot over those same brave friends whom we kill; blame those who, having cheered us when we slew our faithful companions, yell at us in our own turn when we are slain; blame men for taking us when we are little children, and rearing us expressly to be fit for nothing else; blame men for taking the little ones of captured warriors who have in vain defended their native lands against the discipline and skill of Rome; blame men for mingling these poor infants in one college with the foundlings and the slaves to whom law and positive necessity bequeath but one lot in this life; blame those who thus provide for the deadly arena. Blame your customs, blame your laws, blame your tyrannous institutions, against which the simplicity and trustfulness of boyish years can neither physically nor mentally struggle; blame, above all, your fine dames, more degraded—ay, far more degraded and more abased than the famishing prostitutes who must perish of starvation, or be what they are; blame your fine dames, I say, who when, like the august Julia, they import the thick silks of India, are not satisfied till they pick them thin and transparent before wearing them, lest their garments should conceal their shame; and thus attired, pampered with delicacies, gorged with food, heated with wine, surfeited with every luxury, reeking and horrible, know not what else to do to beguile the languid intervals of systematic wickedness, than to come to the arena and indulge in sweet emotions over the valiant and virtuous fathers of homes and hopes of families, who perish there in torture and in ignominy for their pleasure."
"O God!" cried young Paulus.
"Well may you," cried Thellus, "be filled with horror. Ah! then, when will a god descend from heaven, and give us a new world? I have one child in my home, a sweet, peaceful, natural-hearted, conscience-governed, loving little daughter. Her mother has gone away from me for ever to some world beyond death where more justice and more mercy prevail. The day when I lost her I had to fight in the arena. Eheu! She was anxious for me, she could not control her suspense; she saw the execrable Tiberius. Bah! do you think I'm afraid to speak? Of what should I be afraid? Thellus has been at the funeral of fear; yes, this many a day," continued Thellus, raising his voice; "she came to the Statilian amphitheatre against my express command; she saw the execrable Tiberius, contrary to every custom, after I had been victor in four fatal encounters, when I was worn out with fatigue, order me to meet a fresh antagonist; and looking up among the hundred thousand spectators, I beheld the sweet, loving face. I beheld the clasped and convulsive fingers. But, lo, who came forth to fight against me? Whom had the accursed man provided as my next antagonist? Her only brother, poor Statius, whom Tiberius knew to be a gladiator, and whom he had thus selected for the more refined excitement of the spectators to fight against Thellus; but, above all, for his own more refined enjoyment, for the monster had tried and found my poor Alba incorruptible; and this was his revenge against a wretched gladiator and his faithful wife. Statius was no match for me; I tried to disarm him; after a while I succeeded, wounding him at the same time slightly. He fell, and his blood colored the sand. I looked to the people; they looked to Tiberius, waiting for the sign of mercy or execution. I was resolved in any case not to be the slayer of Statius.
"The prince turned up his thumb, to intimate that I was to kill my wounded opponent. The amphitheatre then rang with a woman's scream, and the people, with one impulse, turned down their hands. I bore Statius in my own arms out of the arena; but when I reached home, I found my wife was near childbirth, delirious, and raving against me as the murderer of her brother. She died so, in my arms and in her brother's. She left me my poor little Prudentia, who is dearer to me than all this globe."
After taking breath, he added, quoting Paulus's words,
"But we are a gang of base-born, uneducated, and mercenary cut-throats."
"Oh! forgive, forgive, forgive my words," exclaimed Paulus, stretching out both hands toward the gladiator.
Thellus took those hands and said,
"Why, I love you, lad. I love you like a son. I am not high-born enough to be father to the like of you; but it is not forbidden me to love a noble youth who hates baseness and is ignorant of fear. I'll tell you more; but first answer me—are you of opinion, from what has passed between us, that Thellus is an uneducated man?"
"I am afraid that you are better educated than I am."
"In any case," replied Thellus, "I am ready to confess that the qualities and virtues exercised by gladiators are exercised for a wrong purpose, and in a wrong way. But tell me, why is bread made? You will not say because bakers bake it. That would be a girl's answer; it would be saying that a thing is because it is, or is made because it is made. Why is it made? Because it is wanted. Would bakers bake it if nobody ate it? If nobody wanted to live in a house, would masons build any? or would there even be any masons? You could not, I grant, have music if there were no musicians, if none wanted music. It is the gladiator, unquestionably, who does the fighting in the arena; but if none wanted the fighting, you would have no gladiators. I have told you how we are trepanned in helpless infancy; and not only reared, prepared, and fitted for this calling, but hopelessly unfitted for every other. We supply the spectacle—but who desires the spectacle? It is not we; we are the only sufferers by it; we detest it. But whatever in so dreadful and wicked a pastime can be noble, courageous, unselfish, heroic, we the same, we the victims, give and exhibit; and all the selfishness of it, all that is cowardly in it, all that is cruel, base, despicable, execrable, and accursed, sits on the benches, and applauds or yells in the wedges;[61] this you, you, who go thither, and bring thither us, your victims, this you produce, this is your contribution to it. Ours is honor, valor, skill, and dauntless death; yours, inhumanity, cowardice, baseness, luxurious ease, and a safe, lazy, and besotted life."
"It is true," said Paulus. "Hideous are the pleasures, detestable the glories of this gigantic empire; but unless, as you say, a God himself were to come down from heaven, how will it ever be reformed?"
"How, indeed?" answered Thellus.
Little did they dream who a certain Child in Syria was, who had then entered his eleventh year!