Spartacus by Howard Fast Page A

and we are that precisely because we are the first to understand fully the use of the slave.”

    “Yet there were slaves before there was Rome,” Antonius objected.

    “Indeed there were, a few here, a few there. It is true that the Greeks had plantations—so did Carthage. But we destroyed Greece and we destroyed Carthage, to make room for our own plantations. And the plantation and the slave are one and the same thing. Where other people had one slave, we have twenty—and now we live in a land of slaves, and our greatest achievement is Spartacus. How about that, Crassus? You had an intimate acquaintance with Spartacus. Could any other nation but Rome have produced him?”

    “Did we produce Spartacus?” Crassus wondered. The general was troubled. Caius guessed that it bothered him to think profoundly under any circumstances—and even more so when confronted with a mind like Cicero’s. There was actually no meeting ground between the two. “I thought that hell produced Spartacus,” Crassus added.

    “Hardly.”

    Undisturbed, Gracchus rumbled comfortably and drank wine and observed to Cicero, somewhat apologetically, that being a good Roman, he, Gracchus, was a poor philosopher. In any case, here was Rome and here were the slaves, and what did Cicero propose to do about it?

    “Understand it,” Cicero answered.

    “Why?” Antonius Caius demanded.

    “Because otherwise they will destroy us.”

    Crassus laughed and caught Caius’s eye as he did so. It was the first real rapport between them, and the young man felt a shiver of excitement race down his spine. Crassus was drinking heavily, but when Caius felt like this, he had no desire for wine.

    “Did you come down the road?” Crassus asked.

    Cicero shook his head; it was never easy to convince a military man that all matters were not decided by the sword. “I don’t mean the simple logic of a butcher shop. Here is a process. Here on the land of our good host, there were once at least three thousand peasant families. If you consider five to a family, that is fifteen thousand people. And those peasants were damned good soldiers. What about that, Crassus?”

    “They were good soldiers. I wish there were more of them around.”

    “And good farmers,” Cicero continued. “Not for lawns and formal gardens, but take barley. Just barley—but the Roman soldier marches on barley. Is there any acre of your land, Antonius, which produces half as much barley as an industrious peasant used to squeeze out of it?”

    “Not one quarter as much,” Antonius Caius agreed.

    It had all become exceedingly dull and boring to Caius. He was riding on his inner images, and his face felt hot and flushed. Excitement coursed through him, and he imagined that a soldier felt like this when going into battle. He hardly heard Cicero any more. He kept glancing at Crassus, asking himself why Cicero persisted in this tedious subject.

    “And why—why?” Cicero was demanding. “Why can’t your slaves produce? The answer is very simple.”

    “They don’t want to,” Antonius said flatly.

    “Precisely—they don’t want to. Why should they want to? When you work for a master, your only achievement is to spoil your work. It’s no use sharpening their plows, because they’d blunt them immediately. They break sickles, crack flails, and waste becomes a principle with them. This is the monster we have created for ourselves. Here on ten thousand acres, there once lived fifteen thousand people; and now there are a thousand slaves and the family of Antonius Caius, and the peasants rot in the slums and alleys of Rome. We must understand this. It was a simple matter when the peasant came back from war and his land was overgrown with weeds and his wife had gone to bed with someone else and his children didn’t know him, to give him a handful of silver for his land and let him go into Rome and live on the streets. But the result is that now we live in a land of slaves, and this is