by Ken Parejko
With a creak of pulleys and ropes four lions came up from below. They paced the forest of faux trees and rocks and watched the noisy crowd warily. One roared, then all together, then the crowd. Four men clattered into the arena., one with a high helmet and shield and sword, another a visored helmet and shield and sword. A third carried a circular shield and a long, curved scimitar. The fourth held a long three-pronged trident and a big net. Keeping a close eye on the animals they approached the emperor’s box, raised their arms in salute. Vespasian nodded. The men bowed, turned and entered the forest. I couldn’t watch. Though they would fight, the lions, like flowers pulled up by their roots, were doomed. I looked away and watched the audience. Without looking down I could tell when one of the men or one of the lions fell. I followed my eyes past the fluttering awnings above the oval ring of the arena and into the afternoon’s thin blue sky where a dozen vultures lazily circled between the amphitheater and the Bay. So, I thought, this is what it’s about, providing them their dinner.
Try as I might to stay awake, and in spite of the roaring crowd around me, I slipped down the warm noonday sun to another short nap. I woke to Caecilius’ voice.
“Umbricius Scaurus,” Caecilius was saying to someone nearby. “Yes, Scaurus. From Pompeii. And the other is Faustus Lucinius, the best there is. This won’t take long.”
I opened my eyes to see the featured and final contest of the day, featuring this Umbricius Scaurus and Faustus Lucinius.
This is Scaurus' story, as I learned it later from his uncle, a sometime acquaintance of mine, who had heard it from Scaurus and his dissolute friends.
Lucius Umbricius Scaurus, I learned, had come into this world in a far better place than that from which, this lovely Campanian afternoon, he was about to take his exit. Umbricius’ grandfather made his living concocting fish sauce at the family home near the Porta Marina in Pompeii, a city noted for its fish sauces. His recipe for salted fish packed into an amphora then placed in the sun to ferment remains a family secret. The sauce which results is decanted as a flavoring in many recipes. I enjoy it immensely. It adds depth and complexity to the dish. Depending on details of the fermentation – the kind of fish used, how much salt, the added herbs or particular temperature, it ends up as garum, liquamen, allec or muria. The demand for good fish sauce seems insatiable.
Puteoli and Pompeii are in the midst of an economic boom. I’ve stood on floor mosaics in some of Pompeii’s finest houses which proclaim to guests that Lucrum gaudium -- Profit is a joy--and Salve lucrum! -- Hail to Profit! The Scaurus’ fish sauce can be found in markets scattered across the empire, in their trademark bottle marked Ex officina scauri, “from the Scaurus’ factory,” and sporting a red flower and the label Gari flos, “The Flower of Garum.” Their highest quality product is made from the scomber, a kind of mackerel, and goes by the name Gari flos scombri. I’ve had it once or twice as a dinner guest, and it is worth the outrageous price they charge for it. What had started as a cottage industry in the Scaurus’ back yard grew in a few years into a small shop, then a factory, and now a string of factories. Through hard work and the savvy business sense of Umbricius’ father the family entered the growing ranks of the nouveau riche.
The oldest son, Lucius Umbricius, who was at the moment walking the long ramp from the darkness below Puteoli’s amphitheater and about to enter the light, was expected to take the business over. But Lucius Umbricius was a young man with his own mind. Born into the best of circumstances and provided with the most expensive tutors his father could afford, he made it clear early on he was not interested in business, law, or politics. He had barely attained his toga virilis when he fell into the company of others who shared a common interest in young boys, loose women, drink and expensive banquets. When not drunk or whoring in their spare time they composed comic couplets which cast their fathers as dim-witted cuckolds, and threw off gaudy satiric burlesques about the society in which their parents moved. Mules, they said, were made for work, not us.
Common as it is for young men to go through a dissolute phase – and I am forever grateful it’s not a battle we’ve had to fight with Caecilius -- in Umbricius’ case the joys of adolescent rebellion turned out not to be a phase at all. He came to expect his whole life to be fun, full of fun, every day new kinds of fun. It was clear from his father’s life, the whole day at work then the tedious griping dinner, that the life of a businessman was no fun at all. The choice was clear. He threw caution and concern for the morrow out the window, gathered a following of like-minded friends, simultaneously, and an unforeseen bonus, managing to exasperate his parents to a degree he’d never thought possible. For a time he was sent to live with his uncle in Rome, with clear instructions to straighten up or be disowned. But Rome was not the place to send a lad of dissolute inclination. The city’s streets are full, day and night, of bands of rebellious adolescents engaged in what seems a heady competition to be the bawdiest, loudest, most shameless and unscrupulous of all. To Umbricius the move was empyrean.
Of the many vices he so enthusiastically embraced it was gambling which finally brought him down -- not so much his petty gambling on simple dice games, his allowance could stand that -- but the more substantial bets on gladiators and horse-races. He had his good days and weeks, as they all do, when money flowed his way freely, and just as freely spent. But then Fortune would jerk him the other way, and from wild ecstasy he’d descend into deepest despair. His father’s allowance no longer held out for the month, but would be gone within the first week. He tried to cajole his father into a bigger allowance, or loans, but was met with stony refusal. His uncle, with whom he was staying and who told me the details of this story, he saw as likewise cast of stone. As his debts grew and the debt collectors slipped in through the back door to hound him, Lucius’ entreaties to both his father and uncle grew increasingly humiliating. That he had to lower himself so, then not be rewarded for the effort, further embittered him. Finally he wrote a long, rambling, semi-coherent letter full of self-accusations and weepy promises of reforming his life, if his father would just this once send down a thousand sesterces. Umbricius posted the letter and turned back to his life of drinking, whoring, and gambling, fully expecting salvation from his father’s direction. What he got in return was his own letter, wadded into a ball and stuffed into a half-full jar of lowest-quality garum.
Umbricius threw the jar onto the floor where it oozed its malodorous contents. Now it was crystal clear how little his father cared about him. He was in the world on his own and would have to rely on his own wits. He concocted one last, most desperate strategy to repay his debts. If he could just win big on a chariot-race, his worries would be over.
Frantically he searched his room for coins. He found one dupondius under the bed and a few more among his clothes. After overturning the whole room he was left with little more than a good meal’s worth. It would have to do. Clasping his diminutive treasury he hurried down the stairs and out into the crowded street. He nearly tripped over the old fortune teller who squatted in front of the pottery shop. When his luck was on he regularly dropped her a small coin as he passed by. He stopped this time to ask if he should bet on the Greens again, or switch allegiance to the Reds or even the Blues, who’d never been good to him. She repaid his former kindnesses by reassuring him without a doubt that he should stay with the Greens. It was exactly what he wanted to hear. He bent down and kissed her wrinkled, filthy cheek. Jupiter be thanked, he’d found his salvation!
Now he only needed to find someone stupid enough to bet against him. His few coins jingled in his coin-purse. Though he was hungry and thirsty for the day’s first wine he decided to lighten the purse instead at a brothel around the corner. There Fortune again smiled on him. After spending the last of his meager funds on one of his favorite girls -- and what a time they had! -- he hung around in the brothel’s atrium over a glass of cheap wine. When the mistress of the house assured him he’d had enough wine he decided it was time to leave. Just as he was go
ing out the door, who should he meet but the Senator Curilus whose son he knew as a drinking companion. The Senator’s air of self-importance -- by Jove they shared the same women, didn’t that tell you something? -- set off Umbricius’ rebelliousness, and he found himself challenging Curilus to a far-larger bet on the morrow’s race than he'd planned on waging.
Well, there it was. His fortune was almost in the purse. He managed to cajole an acquaintance out of a few more coins which he spent on food and drink, seemed to his friends to be unusually distracted during the evening, and crawled into his chaotic apartment not long before dawn. The all-important race was at the seventh hour. He slept til the fifth, dragged himself in a hangover down to the stadium just in time to see -- how was it possible? -- the Blues sweep the field. For a moment he thought he was still asleep and this was only a nightmare. The Blues never won, at least when he bet on them. And hadn’t the fortune-teller assured him of victory? Didn’t the gods know how much he needed the money? But there was no escaping it. The Blues had won. He stood dumbfounded. The raucous crowd leaving the race poured past him like a stream separating around a boulder. At last he wandered off into the side streets behind the Forum Boarium and into alleys he’d never explored before, and wandered in a daze for hours, til he found himself quite by accident near his apartment. He decided he’d feel better if he gave the old woman a good beating. But she was nowhere to be found. He had no idea where she lived, if in fact she lived anywhere. In an impotent rage he knocked down a street-vendor’s stall and stumbled off towards the Tiber, where he meant to throw himself into the river and be done with it.
He had few options left. He could skip town. But penniless where would he go? Even his closest friends would give him no more credit. He could stay in Rome til the debt collectors found him, and surely Curilis would send them his way. After a degrading trial he’d be hauled off to prison where he’d rot alongside filthy common beggars caught lifting a half-pound of bread to feed their legions of stupid squalid children. In the day's last light he stood staring at the river as it flowed past. Focusing on its current made him dizzy, as though the world were spinning out of control. He collapsed under a tall lotus tree and shut his eyes. The sounds of the nearby markets, the criers advertising bread and fruit, the clopping of horses’ hooves on the streets delivering wagons full of food and other goods lulled him to sleep. He slept deeply for an hour, perhaps two, when a dream came to him in which he saw himself crowned a great hero, victorious after an epic hand-to-hand fight over evil. The crowds roared, the laurel crown sat comfortably on his head, he bowed and waved gratefully. When he woke, he knew his way out of his troubles, and was deeply relieved it didn’t involve inhaling, in his last living moments, the cloaca maximus’ sewage partially diluted with slimy Tiber water. He’d known all along he was smarter than they, and now he could prove it. He could only lose if he played by their rules.
He rose from the Tiber-side and strode with new-found confidence into the familiar streets of the city, which seemed suffused with a lovely evening light he’d never seen before. He was happy in a way he couldn’t recall for many years. The world was as though reborn. He’d reinvented himself once again, found and embraced a brand-new venue to fame and fortune. He would become a gladiator.
It was of course a wild and rebellious gesture. A failure in the arena of public life, he would find his place and define himself in the amphitheater’s arena. Before night had completely wrapped the city in its dark cloak he’d located the gladiatorial barracks and the appropriate officials and signed the requisite oath. It was an oath which forgave all his debts, though in doing so he gave up all familial and civil rights, forever and irrevocably. He had, in one profound gesture, made a brilliant escape from a life of wealth and privilege into the utter degradation of slavery.
His heart beat with joy. He’d stumbled onto the kind of grandiose gesture his friends so admired. He would throw his life back in their faces, all of them, family, friends and debt collectors alike. But especially his father’s. More than addictive whoring or drinking, more than running up impossible debts and throwing his money away at breakneck speed, more than cursing the gods and the emperor, with this one gesture he’d elevated himself and his family into a near-celestial degree of scandal, which simultaneously raised him, among his peers, to a level of notoriety he could hardly have dreamt of.
In a moment his life-course was set. In the final detail of his decision he was at his most creative. He and his friends had spent many hours at the arena, fascinated by the life and death battles they watched. Afterward they would argue endlessly, drinks in hand, over which was the bravest of the fighters, and how, given the chance, each of them would prove their courage. It was all drunken bravado, but now he’d show them what he was made of. He would fight, he decided, as a retiarius. Of the species of gladiator the retiarius was by far the most theatrical and dangerous. He would fight for his very life with weapons never used in combat, only in the arena: nothing more than a woven hempen net and a trident. His opponents, with whom he would fight for his life, would be provided with helmets and shields. But without a helmet he would expose himself completely to the crowd, to be recognized by all the audience, and would nakedly share his struggle with them, in victory or defeat.
The next day he moved into the gladiators’ barracks. The crowd he’d hung out with before was bad enough. Now he found himself among the damned. Months of training followed. He concentrated himself like he had never before. He was a young and well-built man, and away from the drink and whoring his natural strength showed through. The training was rigorous, but exciting. Old drinking buddies would stop by the barracks now and then, and he would strut and show off his new-found skills. Sometimes they would bribe the night-guard to let him out and he would join his old cronies in a tavern and regale them with lurid stories of the romantic life of a gladiator. They hung on his every word. As many contests as they had witnessed in the arena, the world he described, the real world of the arena behind the scenes, had been locked away from them. Long into the night he painted grotesque pictures of his comrades at the barracks. He’d never been paid so much attention. His friends plied him with the best wine and food. This was great sport.
But there came upon him moments, as he stumbled alone down the empty early-morning streets to the barracks, or in a moment of rest or just as he fell asleep, when his heart would speak to him and remind him that the caricatures he made jokes about were the very men who in a matter of days would struggle to kill him, men who had already in months of fighting learned how to stay alive. He feared these quiet moments, for it was then he could hear his heart quietly but persistently reminding him that, in spite of all the jokes and bravado, he was a rookie in a sport in which rookies were the first to die.
His first fight, he knew, would be his most important, and in that fight the deciding factor would be who he’d be paired against. When he struggled in training against one or another of the his barrack-mates, most often though not always coming out on the losing side, he wondered who he would face in the real life or death battle. He studied them carefully, one after another, to learn their separate strengths and weaknesses. As the days passed he grew more confident, knowing when to use the net and when to hold it in abeyance, when to jab with the trident and when to use it defensively. Now in training he won more often than lost. As the time approached to leave Rome for Campania he felt he stood an even chance of bettering anyone he came up against.
So spectators could bet on the contests the bill of play for the games was published a week or more ahead of time. One evening a copy was passed around the barracks. Now they would know who their opponents would be, and a sharp coolness arose between some of the men who hours before had been close friends. Umbricius’ name was not on the ticket. At first he thought there was some mistake. Maybe for some unknown reason he’d been withdrawn from the day’s fights. He was simultaneously relieved, that he wouldn’t have to prove himself just yet, and disappointed. Then so
meone pointed out the notice at the bottom of the play-bill. As finale to the days’ program a special contest was to be held between two unannounced contestants.
Four days before the spectacle they traveled out the Porta Capena, past the Aqua Marcia and down the Appian Way towards Puteoli where after a short night’s sleep in the gladiatorial barracks they were shown around the brand-new arena and allowed to practice in it under the hot Campanian sun, before the final sand was lain on its surface inches deep to absorb their blood. The cena libra, a grandiose gladiatorial banquet of the finest food and wine, with plenty of women and boys available for those who could afford them, was held the night before the spectacle. Men who tomorrow would reach deep to find their last ounce of strength and cunning in order to kill each other tonight drank and ate, sometimes indulged in varieties of sex together. As the revelries proceeded, now and then one would raise a glass, call for silence and challenge his opponent:
“Manius, you ugly f-----g coward...”
“Yeah, well Sextus, enjoy your food because tomorrow your guts will decorate the arena.”
Only Umbricius didn’t know who he would face. In a way, he wasn’t surprised. Putting his name on the list would officially sanction his scandalous behavior. Contests in the arena were meant for professionals or condemned criminals, not just anyone who wanted to sign up. Though as a free adult he couldn’t legally be prevented from joining, the unwritten rules were meant to keep freemen clear of the arena. Except for his friends or others who’d learned through word of mouth, no one even knew he was fighting. But Umbricius made his friends promise to tell his family he would be in the arena the next afternoon.