"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.