Ave, Cæsar! Morituri te salutant!
As the last notes died away, silence pervaded the school; to the rudest and most reckless, there was something suggestive in the sounds they knew too well would be the last music they should hear on earth. Calchas turned suddenly upon Hippias.
“And the wages Cæsar gives your men?” said he; “since he buys them body and bones, they must be very costly. How many thousand sesterces doth he pay for each?”
A brutal laugh echoed round him at the question.
“Sesterces!” answered Hippias. “Nay; Cæsar’s generosity provides handsomely for the training and nourishment of his swordsmen.”
“True enough!” added Rufus, at which there was another laugh. “He finds us in meat, and drink, and burial!”
“No more?” said Calchas. “Yet I have been told that in Rome everything fetches its price; but little did I think such men as these could be bought for less money than a Syrian dancing-girl, or a senator’s white horses. So you are willing to toil day after day, harder than the peasant on the hillside, or the oarsman in the galley, to live simply, temperately, ay, virtuously, for months together, and then to face certain death, often in its ghastliest form, for the wages a Roman citizen gives his meanest slave—a morsel of meat and a draught of wine! If you conquer in the struggle, a branch of palm may be added to a handful of silver, and you deem your reward is more than enough. Truly, I am old and feeble, these hands are little worth to strike or parry, yet would I grudge to sell this worn-out body of mine at so mean a price.”
“You told us you were a soldier,” observed Rufus, on whom the argument of relative value seemed to make no slight impression.
“So I am,” replied Calchas; “but not at such a low rate of pay as yours. My duties are not heavy. I am not forced to toil all day, nor to watch all night. My head aches with no weighty helmet; breastplate and greaves of steel do not gall my body nor cumber my limbs. I have neither trench to dig, nor mound to raise, nor eagles to guard. I need not stand, like you, against my comrade and my friend, with my point at his throat, and slay the man who has been to me even as a brother, lest he slay me. Yet, though my labours be so easy, and my service be so deficient and inadequate, all the gold and jewels you have seen glistening in a triumph, all the treasures of Cæsar and of Rome, would not equal the reward I hope to earn.”
The gladiators looked from one to the other with glances of astonishment and curiosity. This was a subject that spoke to their personal interest, and roused their feelings accordingly.