“Are there vacancies in your ranks, comrade?” asked Hirpinus, using the military form of speech habitually affected by his profession. “Will you enrol a man of muscle like myself, who has been looking all his life for a [pg 140]service in which there is little to do and plenty to get? Take my word for it, you will not long want for recruits.”
“There is room for all, and to spare,” answered Calchas, raising his voice till it rung through every corner of the building. “My Captain will enlist you freely, and without reserve. Only you come to Him and range yourselves under His banner, and stand by Him for a few short watches, a week, a month, a decade or two of years at the most, and He will stand by you when Cæsar and his legions are scattered to the four winds of heaven; ay, and long after that, for ages and ages rolling on in a circle that has no end! Will you come, brave hearts? I have authority to receive you, man by man.”
“Where is your Captain?” asked Hirpinus. “He must needs have a large following. Is he here in Rome? Can we see him ere we take the oaths and raise the standard? Comrades!” he added, looking round, “this old man speaks as though he were in earnest. Nay, he would scarcely dare to laugh in our very beards!”
“You might have seen Him,” answered Calchas, “not forty years ago, as I myself did, on the sunny plains of Syria. You will not see Him now, till a pinch of dust has been sprinkled on your brow, and the death-penny put into your mouth. Then, when you have crossed the dark river, He will be waiting for you on the other side.”
The gladiators looked at one another. “What means he?” said they. “Is he mad?” “Is he an augur?” “Doth he deal in magic?” Rufus reared his tall head above the throng. “Would you have us believe in what we cannot see?” was the apposite question of that practical swordsman. The old man drew his mantle round his shoulders with the air of one who prepares for argument. All he wanted was a fair hearing.
“Which is the nobler gift,” he asked, “a strong body, or a gallant heart? Ye have fought many times, most of you, in the arena. Answer me truly—which is the conqueror, courage or strength?”
“Courage,” they exclaimed, with one voice; all except Euchenor, who muttered something about skill and good fortune being preferable to either.
“And yet you cannot see it,” resumed Calchas. “Will you therefore argue that it cannot exist? Is there one of you here that doth not feel a something wanting to complete his daily existence? Why do you long for the smiles of women, and the bubble of the winecup? Why can you [pg 141]not rest when the training of to-day is over, for thinking of the labours of to-morrow? Why are you always anxious, always anticipating, always dissatisfied? Because a man consists of two parts, the body and the spirit; because his life is made up of two phases, the present and the future. Your bodies belong to Cæsar, let him have them to do with them what he likes, to-day, to-morrow, at the games of Ceres, at the feast of Neptune, what matter? But the spirit, the man within you, is your own. He it is who doth not wince when the javelin pierces to the quick, or the wild beast rends to the marrow. He it is who quails not when the level sweep of sand seems to rock beneath him, and heave up against his face; when the white garments and eager faces of the crowd spin round him faster and faster as they fade upon his darkening eye. He is the better man of the two, and he will live for ever. Shall you not provide for him? What is your present? Much trouble, many hours of toil. A foot or two of steel in the hand, and a dash at a comrade’s throat, then a back-fall below the equestrian benches, and so the future begins. Do you think there is nothing better there than old Charon’s ferry-boat, and the pale misty banks of the uncertain river? I know the way to a golden land far brighter and fairer than the fabled islands of the West. There is a high wall round it, and the gate is low and narrow; but the key stands in the lock, and you need no death-penny to purchase entrance for the poorest of you. Go to the door in rags, with no other possession but the hope and trust that you may crawl in upon your knees, and it opens ere you have knocked.”
Something in each man’s heart told him, as he listened, that if he could but believe this, the conviction was worth more than all the treasures of the empire put together. Liable as were these gladiators to stand in the jaws of death at a day’s notice, there was something inexpressibly elevating in the idea that the supreme moment which the most careless of them could not but sometimes picture to himself, was the mere passage to a nobler state of existence. The words of a man who is telling what he himself implicitly believes to be the truth, carry with them no small amount of persuasion; and when Calchas paused, the swordsmen looked doubtingly at him with eyes in which incredulity and admiration were strangely mingled; not without a certain wistful gleam of hope. Hippias, indeed, whose tastes inclined him to materialism, and his reflections to utter disbelief in every[pg 142]thing save the temper of a blade, seemed disposed to cut the matter short, as being a waste of valuable time; but the anxiety of his pupils, and especially of Esca, to hear more of the glowing promises held out, induced him to fold his arms and listen, with a smile of conscious superiority, not devoid of contempt.
“And the Captain who leads us?” asked the Gaul, after a whisper and a push from Hirpinus. “What of him? Your promises are fair enough, I grant you, but I would fain know with whom I serve.”