Spartacus by Howard Fast

Were the others afraid of Cicero, he wondered? Stay away from Cicero, God damn him to hell, he said to himself. Crassus was listening with polite interest. Crassus had to be polite. He was the picture of the Roman military man, erect, square face, firm, hard features, bronzed skin, fine black hair—and then Caius thought of him in the bath and winced. How could he? Across the table from Caius, sat the politician, Gracchus, a big man with a deep booming voice, his head sunk in collars of fat, his huge hands fat and puffy, with rings on almost every finger. He responded with the deeply conditioned responses of the professional politician; his laugh was a great laugh; his approval was a mighty approval, whereas his disagreement was always conditional. His statements were pompous but never stupid.

    “Of course you would do better with slaves on your plow,” observed Cicero, after Gracchus had expressed some disbelief. “The beast which can think is more desirable than the beast which cannot think. That stands to reason. Also, a horse is a thing of value. There are no tribes of horses whom we can war against and bring back a hundred and fifty thousand to the auction block. And if you use horses, the slaves will ruin them.”

    “I don’t see that,” said Gracchus.

    “Ask your host.”

    “It’s true,” nodded Antonius. “Slaves will kill a horse. They have no respect for anything which belongs to their master—except themselves.” He poured another glass of wine. “Are we to talk about slaves?”

    “Why not?” reflected Cicero. “They are always with us, and we are the unique product of slaves and slavery. That is what makes us Romans, if you come right down to it. Our host lives on this great plantation—for which I envy him—by the grace of a thousand slaves. Crassus is the talk of Rome, because of the slave uprising which he put down, and Gracchus has an income from the slave market—which is in a ward he owns body and soul—which I hesitate even to compute. And this young man—” Nodding at Caius and smiling. “—this young man is, I suspect, the unique product of slaves even a little more, for I am certain they nursed him and fed him and aired him and doctored him and—”

    Caius turned red, but Gracchus burst out laughing and cried, “And yourself, Cicero?”

    “For me, they constituted a problem. To live decently in Rome these days, one needs a minimum of ten slaves. And to buy them, feed them and house them—well, there is my problem.”

    Gracchus continued to laugh, but Crassus said, “I can’t agree with you, Cicero, that slaves are what makes us Romans.” The rumbling laughter of Gracchus continued. He took a long drink of wine, and went into a story of a slave girl he had purchased in the market the month before. He was a little tight, his face flushed, the chuckles rumbling out of his enormous paunch and interspersing his words. In great detail, he described the girl he had purchased. Caius thought the story pointless and vulgar, but Antonius nodded sagely and Crassus was carried away by the earthiness of the fat man’s description. Cicero smiled thinly and reflectively through the telling.

    “Yet I return to Cicero’s statement,” said Crassus doggedly.

    “Did I offend you?” asked Cicero.

    “No one is offended here,” said Antonius. “We are a company of civilized people.”

    “No—no offense. You puzzle me,” said Crassus.

    “It’s strange,” nodded Cicero, “how when the evidence of a thing is all around us, we nevertheless resist the logic of its component parts. The Greeks are different. Logic has an irresistible lure for them, regardless of the consequences; but our virtue is doggedness. But look around us—” One of the slaves who stood in attendance at the table, replaced the emptying decanters with full ones, and another offered fruit and nuts to the men. “—what is the essence of our lives? We are not just any people; we are the Roman people,