The Gladiators. A Tale of Rome and Judæa

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

“Habet!” exclaimed the tribune with a brutal laugh; adding to himself, as Hirpinus turned away sorrowful and [pg 449]disgusted, “My last rival down; my last obstacle removed. One more throw for the Sixes, and the great game is fairly won!”

Placidus was indeed now within a stride of all he most coveted, all he most wished to grasp on earth. A dozen feet below him, pale and rigid on the ground, lay the rival he had feared might win the first place in the triumph of to-day; the rival whom he knew to possess the favour of Titus; the rival who had supplanted him in the good graces of the woman he loved. He had neither forgotten nor forgiven Valeria; but he bore none the less ill-will against him with whom she had voluntarily fled. When he joined the Roman army before Jerusalem, and found her beautiful, miserable, degraded, in the tent of the gladiator, he had but dissembled and deferred his revenge till the occasion should arrive when he might still more deeply humiliate the one and inflict a fatal blow on the other. Now the man was under his elephant’s feet; and the woman left alone yonder, friendless and deserted in the camp, could not, he thought, fail eventually to become his prey. He little knew that those who had made each other’s misery in life were at last united in the cold embrace of death. He had arrived, too, in the nick of time, to seize and place on his own brows the wreath that had been twined for him by the Lost Legion and their leader. A little earlier and Hippias, supplied by himself with fresh troops, would have won the credit of first entering the Temple; a little later, and his triumph must have been shared by Licinius, already with the Tenth Legion close upon his rear. But now, at the glorious opportunity, there was nothing between him and victory save a score of Jewish spearmen and a few feet of blazing wood.

Leaning over to the unwilling driver, he urged him to goad the elephant through the flames, that its weight might at once bear down what remained of the barricade and make a way for his followers into the Temple. Ambition prompted him not to lose a moment. The Syrian unwound the shawl from his waist, and spread it over the animal’s eyes, while he persuaded it, thus blindfolded, to advance. Though much alarmed, the elephant pushed on, and there was small hope that the shattered smouldering barrier would resist the pressure of its enormous weight. The last chance of the besieged seemed to fail them, when Eleazar leaped out through the smoke, and, running swiftly to meet it, dashed under the beast’s uplifted trunk, and stabbed it fiercely with [pg 450]quick repeated thrusts in the belly. At each fresh stroke the elephant uttered a loud and hideous groan, a shriek of pain and fear, mingled with a trumpet-note of fury, and then sinking on its knees, fell slowly and heavily to the ground, crushing the devoted Zealot beneath its huge carcass, and scattering the band of archers, as a man scatters a handful of grain, over the court.

Eleazar never spoke again. The Lion of Judah died as he had lived—fierce, stubborn, unconquered, and devoted to the cause of Jerusalem. Mariamne recognised him as he sallied forth, but no mutual glance had passed between the father and the child. Pale, erect, motionless, she watched him disappear under the elephant, but the scream of horror that rang from her white lips when she realised his fate was lost in the wild cry of pain, and anger, and dismay, that filled the air, while the huge quivering mass tottered and went down. Placidus was hurled to the pavement like a stone from a sling. Lying there, helpless, though conscious, he recognised at once the living Esca and the dead Valeria; but baffled wrath and cherished hatred left no room in his heart for sorrow or remorse. His eye glared angrily on the Briton, and he ground his teeth with rage to feel that he could not even lift his powerless hand from the ground; but the Jewish warriors were closing in with fierce arms up to strike, and it was but a momentary glimpse that Esca obtained of the tribune’s dark, despairing, handsome face. It was years, though, ere he forgot the vision. The costly robes, the goodly armour, the shapely writhing form, and the wild hopeless eyes that gleamed with hatred and defiance both of the world he left and that to which he went.

And now the court was filling fast with a dun lurid smoke that wreathed its vapours round the pinnacles of the Temple, and caused the still increasing troops of combatants to loom like phantom shapes struggling and fighting in a dream. Ere long, bright tongues of flame were leaping through the cloud, licking the walls and pillars of the building, gliding and glancing over the golden surface of its roof, and shooting upwards here and there into shifting pyramids of fire. Soon was heard the hollow rushing roar with which the consuming element declares its victory, and showers of sparks, sweeping like storms across the Court of the Gentiles, proclaimed that the Temple was burning in every quarter.

One of the gladiators, in the wild wantonness of strife, had caught a blazing fragment of the barricade, as its remains were carried by a rush of his comrades, after the fall of [pg 451]Eleazar, and flung it into an open window of the Temple over his head. Lighting on the carved woodwork, with which the casement was decorated, it soon kindled into a strong and steady flame, that was fed by the quantity of timber, all thoroughly dry and highly ornamented, which the building contained; thus it had communicated from gallery to gallery, and from storey to storey, till the whole was wrapped in one glowing sheet of fire. From every quarter of the city, from Agrippa’s wall to the Mount of Olives, from the camp of the Assyrians to the Valley of Hinnom, awestruck faces of friend and foe, white with fear, or anger, or astonishment, marked that rolling column, expanding, swaying, shifting, and ever rising higher into the summer sky, ever flinging out its red forked banner of destruction broader, and brighter, and fiercer, with each changing breeze.

Then the Jews knew that their great tribulation was fulfilled—that the curse which had been to them hitherto but a dead letter and a sealed book, was poured forth literally in streams of fire upon their heads—that their sanctuary was desolate, their prosperity gone for ever, their very existence as a nation destroyed, and “the place that had known them should know them no more”! The very Romans themselves, the cohorts advancing in serried columns to support their comrades, the legions massed in solid squares for the completion of its capture, in all the open places of the town, gazed on the burning Temple with concern and awe. Titus, even, in the flush of conquest, and the exulting joy of gratified ambition, turned his head away with a pitying sigh, for he would have spared the enemy had they but trusted him, would fain have saved that monument of their nationality and their religion, as well for their glory as his own.

And now with the flames leaping, and the smoke curling around, the huge timbers crashing down on every side to throw up showers of sparkling embers as they fell—the very marble glowing and riven with heat—the precious metal pouring from the roof in streams of molten fire—Esca and Mariamne, half suffocated in the Court of the Gentiles, could not yet bring themselves to seek their own safety, and leave the helpless form of Calchas to certain destruction. Loud shouts, cries of agony and despair, warned them that even the burning Temple, at furnace heat, was still the theatre of a murderous and useless conflict. The defenders had set the example of merciless bloodshed, and the Romans, exasperated to cruelty, now took no prisoners and gave no quarter. John of Gischala and his followers, driven to bay by the legions, [pg 452]still kept up a resistance the more furious that it was the offspring of despair. Hunted from wall to wall, from roof to roof, from storey to storey, they yet fought on while life and strength remained. Even those whose weapons failed them, or who were hemmed in by overwhelming numbers, leaped down like madmen, and perished horribly in the flames.

But although steel was clashing, and blood flowing, and men fighting by myriads around it, the Court of the Gentiles lay silent and deserted under its canopy of smoke, with its pavement covered by the dead. The only living creatures left were the three who had stood there in the morning, bound and doomed to die. Of these, one had his foot already on the border-land between time and eternity.

“I will never desert him,” said Esca to his pale companion; “but thou, Mariamne, hast now a chance of escape. It may be the Romans will respect thee if thou canst reach some high commander, or yield thee to some cohort of the reserve, whose blood is not a-fire with slaughter. What said Hippias of the Tenth Legion and Licinius? If thou couldst but lay hold on his garment, thou wert safe for my sake!”