The Gladiators. A Tale of Rome and Judæa

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

  CHAPTER II

  THE MARBLE PORCH

  It was the sound of a chariot, truly enough, that roused the dreamer fromhis slumbers; but how different the scene on which his drowsy eyesunclosed, from that which fancy had conjured up in the shadowy realms ofsleep!

  A beautiful portico, supported on slender columns of smooth white marble,protected him from the rays of the morning sun, already pouring down withthe intensity of Italian heat. Garlands of leaves and flowers, cool andfresh in their contrast with the snowy surface of these dainty pillars,were wreathed around their stems, and twined amongst the delicate carvingof their Corinthian capitals. Large stone vases, urn-shaped and massive,stood in long array at stated intervals, bearing the orange-tree, themyrtle, and other dark-green flowering shrubs, which formed a fairperspective of retirement and repose. Shapely statues filled the niches inthe wall, or stood out more prominently in the vacant spaces of thecolonnade. Here cowered a marble Venus, in the shamefaced consciousness ofunequalled beauty; there stood forth a bright Apollo, exulting in theperfection of godlike symmetry and grace. Rome could not finger the chisellike her instructress Greece, the mother of the Arts, but the hand thatfirmly grasps the sword need never want for anything skill produces, orgenius creates, or gold can buy; so it is no marvel that the masterpiecesand treasures of the nations she subdued found their way to the ImperialCity, mistress of the world. Even where the sleeper lay reclined upon acouch of curiously-carved wood from the forests that clothe MountHymettus, an owl so beautifully chiseled that its very breast-plumageseemed to ruffle in the breeze, looked down upon him from a niche where ithad been placed at a cost that might have bought a dozen such humanchattels as himself; for it had been brought from Athens as the mostsuccessful effort of a sculptor, who had devoted it to the honour ofMinerva in his zeal. Refinement, luxury, nay, profusion, reigned paramounteven here outside the sumptuous dwelling of a Roman lady: and the veryground in her porch over which she was borne, for she seldom touched itwith her feet, was fresh swept and sanded as often as it had beendisturbed by the tread of her litter-bearers, or the wheels of herchariot.

  Many a time was this ceremony performed in the twenty-four hours; forValeria was a woman of noble rank, great possessions, and the highestfashion. Not a vanity of her sex, not a folly was there of her class, inwhich she scrupled to indulge; and then, as now, ladies were prone to rushinto extremes, and frivolity, when it took the garb of a female, assumedpreposterous dimensions, and a thirst for amusement, incompatible withreason or self-control.

  There is always a certain hush, and, as it were, a pompous stillness,about the houses of the great, even long after inferior mortals are astirin pursuit of their pleasure or their business. To-day was Valeria'sbirthday, and as such was duly observed by the hanging of garlands on thepillars of her porch; but after the completion of this graceful ceremony,silence seemed to have sunk once more upon the household, and the slavewhose dream we have recorded, coming into her gates with an offering fromhis lord, and finding no domestics in the way, had sat him down to wait inthe grateful shade, and, overcome with heat, might have slept on till noonhad he not been roused by the grinding chariot-wheels, which mingled soconfusedly with his dream.

  It was no plebeian vehicle that now rolled into the colonnade, driven at afurious pace, and stopping so abruptly as to create considerable confusionand insubordination amongst the noble animals that drew it. The car,mounted on two wheels, was constructed of a highly-polished wood, cut fromthe wild fig-tree, elaborately inlaid with ivory and gold; the very spokesand felloes of the wheels were carved in patterns of vine-leaves andflowers, whilst the extremities of the pole, the axle, and the yoke, werewrought into exquisite representations of the wolf's head, an animal, fromhistorical reasons, ever dear to the fancy of the Roman. There was but oneperson besides the driver in the carriage, and so light a draught mightindeed command any rate of speed, when whirled along by four such horsesas now plunged and reared and bit each other's crests in the portico ofValeria's mansion. These were of a milky white, with dark muzzles, and abluish tinge under the coat, denoting its soft texture, and the Easternorigin of the animals. Somewhat thick of neck and shoulders, withsemicircular jowl, it was the broad and tapering head, the small quiveringear, the wide red nostril, that demonstrated the purity of their blood,and argued extraordinary powers of speed and endurance; while their short,round backs, prominent muscles, flat legs, and dainty feet, promised anamount of strength and activity only to be attained by the production ofperfect symmetry. These beautiful animals were harnessed four abreast--theinner pair, somewhat in the fashion of our modern curricle, being yoked tothe pole, of which the very fastening-pins were steel overlaid with gold,whilst the outer horses, drawing only from a trace attached respectivelyon the inner side of each to the axle of the chariot, were free to wheeltheir quarters outwards in every direction, and kick to their heart'scontent--a liberty of which, in the present instance, they seemed welldisposed to avail themselves.

  The slave started to his feet as the nearest horse winced and swervedaside from his unexpected figure, snorting the while in mingled wantonnessand fear. The axle grazed his tunic while it passed, and the driver,irritated at his horses' unsteadiness, or perhaps in the mere insolence ofa great man's favourite, struck at him heavily with his whip as he wentby. The Briton's blood boiled at the indignity; but his sinewy arm was uplike lightning to parry the blow, and as the lash curled round his wristhe drew the weapon quickly from the driver's hand, and would have returnedthe insult with interest, had he not been deterred from his purpose by theyouthful, effeminate appearance of the aggressor.

  "I cannot strike a girl!" exclaimed the slave contemptuously, throwing thewhip at the same time into the floor of the chariot, where it lit at thefeet of the other occupant, a sumptuously-dressed nobleman, who enjoyedthe discomfiture of his charioteer, with the loud frank glee of a masterjeering a dependant.

  "Well said, my hero!" laughed the patrician, adding in good-humoured,though haughty tones, "Not that I would give much for the chance of man orwoman in a grasp like yours. By Jupiter! you've got the arms and shouldersof Antaeus! Who owns you, my good fellow? and what do you here?"

  "Nay, I would strike him again to some purpose if I were on the groundwith him," interrupted the charioteer, a handsome, petulant youth of somesixteen summers, whose long flowing curls and rich scarlet mantle denoteda pampered and favourite slave. "Gently, Scipio! So-ho, Jugurtha! Thehorses will fret for an hour now they have been scared by his ugly face."

  "Better let him alone, Automedon!" observed his master, again shaking hissides at the obvious discomfiture portrayed on the flushed face of hisfavourite. "Through your life keep clear of a man when he shuts his mouthlike that, as you would of an ox with a wisp of hay on his horn. You sillyboy! why he would swallow such a slender frame as yours at a gulp: andnobody but a fool ever strikes at a man unless he knows he can reach him,ay, and punish him too, without hurting his own knuckles in return! Butwhat do you here, good fellow?" he repeated, addressing himself once moreto the slave, who stood erect, scanning his questioner with a fearless,though respectful eye.

  "My master is your friend," was the outspoken answer. "You supped with himonly the night before last. But a man need not be in the household ofLicinius, not have spent his best years at Rome, to know the face ofJulius Placidus, the tribune."

  A smile of gratified vanity stole over the patrician's countenance whilehe listened; a smile that had the effect of imparting to its lineaments anexpression at once mocking, crafty, and malicious. In repose, and such wasits usual condition, the face was almost handsome, perfect in itsregularity, and of a fixed, sedate composure which bordered on vacuity,but when disturbed, as it sometimes, though rarely, was, by a passingemotion, the smile that passed over it like a lurid gleam, became trulydiabolical.

  The slave was right. Amongst all the notorious personages who crowded andjostled each other in the streets of Rome at th
at stormy period, none wasbetter known, none more courted, flattered, honoured, hated, andmistrusted, than the occupant of the gilded chariot. It was no time formen to wear their hearts in their hands--it was no time to make anadditional enemy, or to lose a possible friend. Since the death ofTiberius, emperor had succeeded emperor with alarming rapidity. Nero hadindeed died by his own hand, to avoid the just retribution of unexampledvices and crimes; but the poisoned mushroom had carried off hispredecessor, and the old man who succeeded him fell by the weapons of thevery guards he had enlisted to protect his grey head from violence. Sincethen another suicide had indued Vitellius with the purple; but the throneof the Caesars was fast becoming synonymous with a scaffold, and the swordof Damocles quivered more menacingly, and on a slenderer hair than ever,over the diadem.

  When great political convulsions agitate a State, already seething withgeneral vice and luxury, the moral scum seems, by a law of nature, tofloat invariably to the surface--the characters most destitute ofprinciple, the readiest to obey the instincts of self-aggrandisement andexpediency, achieve a kind of spurious fame, a doubtful and temporarysuccess. Under the rule of Nero, perhaps, there was but one path to Courtfavour, and that lay in the disgraceful attempt to vie with this emperor'sbrutalities and crimes. The palace of Caesar was then indeed a sink of fouliniquity and utter degradation. The sycophant who could most readilyreduce himself to the level of a beast in gross sensuality, while heboasted a demon's refinement of cruelty, and morbid depravity of heart,became the first favourite for the time with his imperial master. To befat, slothful, weak, gluttonous, and effeminate, while the brow wascrowned with roses, and the brain was drenched with wine, and the handswere steeped in blood--this it was to be a friend and counsellor of Caesar.Men waited and wondered in stupefied awe when they marked the monsterreeling from a debauch to some fresh feast of horrors, some ingeniousexhibition of the complicated tortures that may be inflicted on a humanbeing, some devilish experiment of all the body can bear, ere the soultakes wing from its ghastly, mutilated tenement, and this not on one, buta thousand victims. They waited and wondered what the gods were about,that divine vengeance should slumber through such provocations as these.

  But retribution overtook him at last. The heart which a slaughteredmother's spectre could not soften, which remorse for a pregnant wife'sfate, kicked to death by a brutal lord, failed to wring, quailed at theapproach of a few exasperated soldiers; and the tyrant who had so oftensmiled to see blood flow like water in the amphitheatre, died by his ownhand--died as he had lived, a coward and a murderer to the last.

  Since then, the Court was a sphere in which any bold unscrupulous manmight be pretty sure of attaining success. The present emperor was a good-humoured glutton, one whose faculties, originally vigorous, had beenwarped and deadened by excess, just as his body had become bloated, hiseye dimmed, his strength palsied, and his courage destroyed by the samecourse. The scheming statesman, the pliant courtier, the successfulsoldier had but one passion now, one only object for the exercise of hisenergies, both of mind and body--to eat enormously, to drink to excess, tostudy every art by which fresh appetite could be stimulated when gorged torepletion--and then--to eat and drink again.

  With such a patron, any man who united to a tendency for the pleasures ofthe table, a strong brain, a cool head, and an aptitude for business,might be sure of considerable influence. The Emperor thoroughlyappreciated one who would take trouble off his hands, while at the sametime he encouraged his master, by precept and example, in his swinishpropensities. It was no slight service to Vitellius, to rise from adebauch and give those necessary orders in an unforeseen emergency whichCaesar's sodden brain was powerless to originate or to understand.

  Ere Placidus had been a month about the Court, he had insinuated himselfthoroughly into the good graces of the Emperor. This man's had been astrange and stirring history. Born of patrician rank, he had used hisfamily influence to advance him in the military service, and already,whilst still in the flower of youth, had attained the grade of tribune inVespasian's army, then occupying Judaea under that distinguished general.Although no man yielded so willingly, or gave himself up so entirely tothe indolent enjoyments of Asiatic life, Placidus possessed many of thequalities which are esteemed essential to the character of a soldier.Personal bravery, or we should rather say, insensibility to danger, wasone of his peculiar advantages. Perhaps this is a quality inseparable fromsuch an organisation as his, in which, while the system seems to contain awealth of energy and vitality, the nerves are extremely callous toirritation, and completely under control. The tribune never came out inmore favourable colours than when everyone about him was in a state ofalarm and confusion. On one occasion, at the siege of Jotapata, where theJews were defending themselves with the desperate energy of their race,Placidus won golden opinions from Vespasian by the cool dexterity withwhich he saved from destruction a whole company of soldiers and theircenturion, under the very eye of his general.

  A maniple, or, in the military language of to-day, a wing of the cohortled by Placidus was advancing to the attack, and the first centurion, withthe company under his command, was already beneath the wall, bristling asit was with defenders, who hurled down on their assailants darts,javelins, huge stones, every description of weapon or missile, includingmolten lead and boiling oil. Under cover of a movable pent-house, whichprotected them, the head of the column had advanced their battering-ram tothe very wall, and were swinging the huge engine back, by the ropes andpulleys which governed it, for an increased impulse of destruction, whenthe Jews, who had been watching their opportunity, succeeded in balancingan enormous mass of granite immediately above the pent-house and thematerials of offence, animate and inanimate, which it contained. A Jewishwarrior clad in shining armour had taken a lever in his hand, and was inthe act of applying that instrument to the impending tottering mass; inanother instant it must have crashed down upon their heads, and buried thewhole band beneath its weight. At his appointed station by the eagle, thetribune was watching the movements of his men with his usual air ofsleepy, indolent approval. And even in this critical moment his eye neverbrightened, his colour never deepened a shade. The voice was calm, low,and perfectly modulated in which he bade the trumpeter at his right handsound the recall; nor, though its business-like rapidity could scarce havebeen exceeded by the most practised archer, was the movement the leasthurried with which he snatched the bow from a dead Parthian auxiliary athis feet and fitted an arrow to its string. In the twinkling of an eye,while the granite vibrated on the very parapet, that arrow was quiveringbetween the joints of the warrior's harness who held the lever, and he hadfallen with his head over the wall in the throes of death. Before anotherof the defenders could take his place the assaulting party had retired,bringing along with them, in their cool and rigid discipline, thebattering-ram and wooden covering which protected it, while the tribunequietly observed, as he replaced the bow into the fallen Parthian's hand,"A company saved is a hundred men gained. A dead barbarian is exactlyworth my tallest centurion, and the smartest troop I have in the maniple!"

  Vespasian was not the man to forget such an instance of cool promptitude,and Julius Placidus was marked out for promotion from that day forth. Butwith its courage, the tribune possessed the cunning of the tiger, notwithout something also of that fierce animal's outward beauty, and much ofits watchful, pitiless, and untiring nature. A brave soldier should haveconsidered it a degradation, under any circumstances, to play a doublepart; but with Placidus every step was esteemed honourable so long as itwas on the ascent. The successful winner had no scruple in deceiving allabout him at Rome, by the eagerness with which he assumed the character ofa mere man of pleasure, while he lost no opportunity the while ofingratiating himself with the many desperate spirits who were to be foundin the Imperial City, ready and willing to assist in any enterprise whichshould tend to anarchy and confusion. While he rushed into everyextravagance and pleasure of that luxurious Court--while he vied with Caesarhimself in his profusion, an
d surpassed him in his orgies--he suffered nosymptoms to escape him of a higher ambition than that of excellence intrifling--of deeper projects than those which affected the winecup, thepageant, and the passing follies of the hour. Yet all the while, withinthat dainty reveller's brain, schemes were forming and thoughts burningthat should have withered the very roses on his brow. It might have beenthe strain of Greek blood which filtered through his veins, that temperedhis Roman courage and endurance with the pliancy essential to conspiracyand intrigue--a strain that was apparent in his sculptured regularity offeatures, and general symmetry of form. His character has already beencompared to the tiger's, and his movements had all the pliant ease andstealthy freedom of that graceful animal. His stature was little above theaverage of his countrymen, but his frame was cast in that mould of exactproportion which promises the extreme of strength combined with agilityand endurance. Had he been caught like Milo, he would have writhed himselfout of the trap, with the sinuous persistency of a snake. There wassomething snake-like, too, in his small glittering eye, and the clearsmoothness of his skin. With all its brightness no woman worthy of thename but would have winced with womanly instincts of aversion andrepugnance from his glance. With all its beauty no child would have lookedup frankly and confidingly in his face. Men turned, indeed, to scan himapprovingly as he passed; but the brave owned no sympathy with that smoothset brow, that crafty and malicious smile, while the timid or thesuperstitious shuddered and shrank away, averting their own gaze from whatthey felt to be the influence of the evil eye. Yet, in his snowy tunicbleached to dazzling white, in his collar of linked gold, his jewelledbelt, his embroidered sandals, and the ample folds of his deep violetmantle, nearly approaching purple, Julius Placidus was no unworthyrepresentative of his time and his order, no mean specimen of the wealth,and foppery, and extravagance of Rome.

  Such was the man who now stood up in his gilded chariot at Valeria's door,masking with his usual expression of careless indolence, the realimpatience he felt for tidings of its mistress.