by Rice, Anne
His brown hair was filthy, had been hacked off, and around his neck by a rope was the most wretched small board I ever beheld, crowded with tiny cramped letters in Latin.
Pulling up the mantle again, I stepped up very close to his gorgeous naked chest, a little amused by his audacious stare, and tried to read all this.
It seemed he could have taught all philosophy, all languages, all mathematics, could sing everything, knew every poet, could prepare whole banquets, was patient with children, had known military service with his Roman Master in the Balkans, could perform as an armed guard, was obedient and virtuous and had lived all his life in Athens in one house.
I read this a bit scornfully. He glared at me impertinently when he saw this scorn. Impudently, he folded his arms just below this little plaque. He leaned back against the wall.
Suddenly I saw why the merchant, hovering near, had not made the Greek rise. The Greek had only one good leg. The left leg below the knee was made of well-carved ivory, complete with carefully engraved foot and sandal. Perfect toes. Of course it had been pieced together, this fine ivory leg and foot, but in three proportionate sections, each girded with decorative work, and separate parts for the feet, nails defined and sandal straps exquisitely carved.
I had never seen such a false limb, such a surrender to artifice rather than a meager attempt to imitate nature.
“How did you lose your leg?” I asked him in Greek. No answer. I pointed to the leg. No answer.
I asked again in Latin. Still no answer.
The slave trader was rising on his toes in his anxiety and wringing his hands.
“Mistress, he can keep records, run any business; he writes in perfect hand, keeps honest numbers.”
Hmmm. So no mention of tutoring children? I did not look like a wife and mother. Not good.
The Greek sneered and looked away. He said softly under his breath in piercing Latin that if I did spend money for him, I was spending it for a dead man. His voice was soft and beautiful, though weary and full of contempt, his enunciation unaffected and refined.
I threw off all patience. I spoke quickly in Greek.
“Learn from me, you arrogant Athenian idiot!” I said, red in the face, and furious to be so misjudged both by a slave and a slave dealer. “If you can write Greek and Latin at all, if you have in fact studied Aristotle and Euclid, whose name you misspelled, by the way, if you have been schooled in Athens and have seen battle in the Balkans, if even half of this great epic is true, why wouldn’t you want to belong to one of the most keenly intelligent women you’ll ever meet, who’ll treat you with dignity and respect in exchange for your loyalty? What do you know of Aristotle and Plato that I don’t? I’ve never struck a slave in my life. You pass up the one mistress to whom your loyalty might earn you any reward of which you could dream. That tablet is a pack of lies, isn’t it?”
The slave was stunned, but not angered. He sat forward, trying to appraise me further, without being obvious. The merchant gestured furiously for the slave to rise to his feet, which the slave did, giving him an admirable height over me. His legs were sound and strong up to the ivory limb.
“What about telling me the real truth as to what you can do?” I said, switching to Latin.
I turned to the slave dealer. “Get me a pen to correct this, the spelling of these names. If this man has any chance of becoming a teacher, these misspellings destroy it. He looks like a fool for writing such.”
“I didn’t have space enough to write!” declared the slave suddenly, whispering in perfect Latin fury. He bent towards me, as if I should understand.
“Look at this little tablet, if you’re so keenly intelligent! Do you realize the ignorance of this dealer here. He has not sense enough to know he has an emerald, and thinks it a piece of green glass! This is wretched. I crammed here what generalities I could.”
I laughed. I was seduced and thrilled. I couldn’t stop laughing. This was too funny! The slave merchant was confused. Chastise the slave and lower his value? Or let the two of us work this out?
“What was I to do,” he demanded in the same confidential whisper, only this time in Greek, “shout to every man passing, ‘Here sits a great teacher, here sits a philosopher!’?” He grew a little calm, having thus released this rage. “The names of my grandfathers are carved on the Acropolis at Athens,” he said.
The merchant was mystified.
But I was so obviously delighted and interested.
My mantle slipped again and I gave it a hard jerk. These clothes. Had no one ever told me silk slides on silk?
“And what about Ovid?” I said, taking a deep breath. I almost laughed myself into tears. “You wrote Ovid’s name here. Ovid. Is Ovid popular here? Nobody would dare write that on your card in Rome, I can tell you. You know, I don’t even know if Ovid is still alive, and it’s a shame. Ovid taught me to kiss when I was ten years old, when I read the Amores. You ever read the Amores?”
His entire demeanor altered. He softened and I could see he was just on the verge of hope, hope that I might be a good mistress for him. But he couldn’t let himself believe it.
The merchant was waiting for the slightest signal as to what he might do. Clearly he could follow our exchanges.
“Look, you insolent one-legged slave,” I said. “If I thought you could even read Ovid to me in the evenings, I’d buy you in a moment. But this tablet here makes you a glorified Socrates and Alexander the Great smashed in one. In what war in the Balkans did you carry arms? Why are you dumped in the hands of this lowly merchant rather than taken at once to some fine house? How could anyone believe all this? If blind Homer had sung such a preposterous tale, people would have gotten up and left the tavern.”
He grew angry, frustrated.
The merchant put out his hand in warning, as if to control the man.
“What the hell happened to your leg?” I asked. “How did you lose it? Who made you this glorious replacement?”
Lowering his voice to an angry yet eloquent whisper, the slave declared slowly and patiently:
“I lost it in a boar hunt, with my Roman Master. He saved my life. We hunted often. It was on Pentelikon, the mountain …”
“I know where Pentelikon is, thank you,” I said.
His facial expressions were elegant. He was utterly confused. He licked his parched lips and said:
“Just make this merchant fetch the parchment and the ink.” He spoke his Latin with such beauty, the beauty of an actor or rhetorician, yet with no effort. “I’ll write the Amores of Ovid from memory for you,” he said, gently pleading through clenched teeth, which is no mean feat. “And then I’ll copy out all of Xenophon’s history of the Persians for you, if you have the time, in Greek, of course! My Master treated me like a son; I fought with him, studied with him, learned with him. I wrote his letters for him. His education I made my education because he wanted it so.”
“Ah,” I said in proud relief.
He looked the full gentleman now, angered, caught in impossible circumstance yet dignified, and reasoning with just enough spirit to strengthen his own soul.
“And in bed? Can you do it in bed?” I asked. I can’t say what rage or desperation prompted this question.
He was genuinely shocked. Good sign. His eyes really widened. He furrowed his brow.
Meantime the slave trader emerged with the table, stool, parchment, ink, and set it all down on the hot cobblestones.
“Here, write,” he said to the slave. “Make letters for this woman. Add stuns. Or I’ll kill you and sell your leg.”
I broke again into helpless laughing. I looked at the slave, who still stood dazed. He broke away from my gaze to cast a disdainful look on the merchant.
“Are you safe around the slave girls?” I said patronizingly. “Are you a lover of boys?”
“I am completely trustworthy!” the slave said. “I am not capable of crimes for any Master.”
“And what if I desire you in my bed? I’m the Mistress of the ho
use, twice widowed and on my own, and I am Roman.”
His face darkened. I couldn’t name the emotions that seemed to pass over his expression, the sadness, indecision, confusion and ultimate perplexity that transformed him.
“Well?” I asked.
“Let’s put it this way, Madam. You would be much more pleased with my recitation of Ovid than with any attempted enactment of his verses by me.”
“You like boys,” I said with a nod.
“I was a born a slave, Madam. I made do with boys. I know nothing else. And I need neither.” His face was crimson now, and he had lowered his eyes.
Lovely Athenian modesty.
I gestured for him to sit down.
This he did with amazing simplicity and grace, considering the circumstances: the heat, the dirt, crowds, the fragile stool and the wobbling table.
He picked up the pen and quickly wrote in flawless Greek, “Have I foolishly offended this great lady of learning and exceptional patience? Have I brought about, through rashness, my own doom?” He wrote on in Latin, “Does Lucretius tell us the truth when he says that death is nothing to fear?” He thought for a moment, and then he wrote in Greek again, “Are Virgil and Horace really equal to our great poets? Do the Romans truly believe this, or only hope it is true, knowing their achievements shine in other arts?”
I read this all very thoughtfully, smiling most agreeably. I had fallen in love with him. I looked at his thin nose, his cleft chin, and I looked into the green eyes that looked up at me.
“How did you come to this?” I asked. “A slave shop in Antioch? You’re Athenian-bred, just as you say.”
He tried to stand to answer. I pushed him to sit down.
“I can tell you nothing of that,” he said. “Only that I was much beloved by my Master, that my Master died in his bed with his family around him. And that here I am.”
“Why didn’t he set you free in his will?”
“He did, Madam, and with means.”
“What happened?”
“I can tell you no more.”
“Why not? Who sold you, why?”
“Madam,” he said, “please place a value upon my loyalty to a house in which I served all my life. I cannot speak more. If I become your servant, you will have the same loyalty from me. Your house will become my house, and sacred to me. What happens within your walls will remain within your walls. I speak of virtue and kindness in my Master because this is proper to say. Let me say no more.”
Sublime old-Greek morality.
“Write more, hurry!” said the slave merchant.
“Be quiet,” I told him. “He’s written quite enough.”
The handsome brown-haired slave, this enticingly beautiful one-legged man, had fallen into some deep pit of woe and looked towards the distant Forum, flash of figures back and forth over the mouth of the street.
“What would I do as a free man?” he said to me, looking up at me from a position of utter careless loneliness. “Copy all day for a pittance at the booksellers? Write letters for coins? My Master risked his own life to save me from that boar. In battle I served under Tiberius in Illyricum, where with some fifteen legions he put down all revolts. I chopped the head off a man to save my Master. What am I now?”
I was filled with pain.
“What am I now?” he repeated the question.
“If I were free, I would live hand to mouth, and when I slept in some filthy tenement, my ivory leg would be severed and stolen!”
I gasped and put my hand to my lips.
His eyes filled with tears as he looked at me, and his voice became all the more softer, yet sharply articulate:
“Oh, I could teach philosophy beneath the arches out there, you know, prattle on about Diogenes, and pretend that I liked wearing rags, as do his followers these days. What a circus out there, have you seen it? I have never seen so many philosophers in my life as in this city! Take a look when you go back. You know what it takes to teach philosophy here? You have to lie. You have to fling meaningless words as fast as you can at young people, and brood when you can’t answer, and make up nonsense and ascribe it to the old Stoics.”
He broke off, and tried to gain command of himself.
I was almost in tears as I looked down at him.
“But you see, I have no skill at lying,” he said. “That has been my undoing with you, Great Lady.”
I was shattered inside, my wounds silently opened. The nerve which had carried me out of confinement was ebbing away. But surely he saw my tears.
He looked towards the Forum again.
“I dream of an honorable Master or Mistress, a house with honor. Can a slave through the contemplation of honor thereby have honor? The law says not. So any slave called to testify in a court trial must be tortured, for he has no honor! But reason says otherwise. I have learned and I can teach both bravery and honor. And yes, all of this tablet is true. I didn’t have time or opportunity to temper its boastful style.”
He bowed his head and looked again towards the Forum, as though towards the lost world. He drew himself up in the chair, for bravery’s sake. Again, he tried to stand.
“No, sit,” I said.
“Madam,” he said, “if you seek my services for a house of ill repute, let me tell you now … if it is to torture and force young girls such as those you just purchased, if you order me to advertise their charms abroad, I won’t do it. It is as dishonorable to me as to steal or to lie. Why do you want me?”
The tears were halted, merely resting between him and his vision of the world around him. His face was serene.
“Do I look as if I am a whore?” I asked him with shock. “Yea gods, I wore all my best clothes. I’m doing my best to look revoltingly respectable in all these fancy silks! Do you see cruelty in my eyes? Can’t you believe that it is perhaps the tempered soul that survives grief? One need not fight on a battlefield to have courage.”
“No, Madam, no!” he said. He was so very sorry.
“Then why fling these insults at me now?” I said, full of hurt. “And no, I agree with you, what you’ve written there, our Roman poets are not the equals of the Greeks. I don’t know our destiny as an Empire and this weighs as heavily on me as it ever did on my Father and his Father! Why? I don’t know!” I turned as if to go, but I had really no intention of going! His insults had simply gone too far.
He bent towards me over the writing table.
“Madam,” he said whispering even lower and with greater solicitude. “Forgive me my rash words. You are absolutely a paradox. Your face is eccentrically painted, and I think the lip rouge is not properly set. You have rouge on your teeth. You have no powder on your arms. You wear three dresses of silk and I can see through all of them! Your hair is in two barbarian-style braids lying on your shoulders, and you are raining little silver and gold pins galore. Look at these little pins falling. Madam, you will be hurt by these pins. Your mantle, more appropriate for evening, has fallen on the ground. Your hems drag in the dirt.”
Not missing a beat of his speech, he reached down deftly and picked up the palla, standing at once to offer it to me, coming round the table with a heavy shift of his leg, to lay the palla on my shoulders.
“You speak with miraculous speed, and stunning gibes,” he went on, “yet you carry a huge dagger in your girdle. It should be hidden on your forearm under your mantle. And your purse. You take gold out of it to pay the girls. It’s huge, carelessly visible. And your hands, your hands are beautiful, fine as your Latin and your Greek, but they are deeply creased with dirt as though you have been digging in the Earth itself.”
I smiled. I had stopped my tears.
“You are very observant,” I said cheerfully. I was charmed. “Why did I have to cut you so deeply to find your soul? Why can’t we simply reveal ourselves to one another? I need a strong steward, a guardian who can bear arms, run my house and protect it because I am alone. Can you really see through all this silk?”
He nodded. “Well, now th
at the mantle is over your shoulders and hiding the … the dagger and the girdle—” He blushed. Then as I smiled at him, trying to regain my calm, trying to fight back the engulfing darkness that would take away all confidence from me, all faith in any task, he spoke on.
“Madam, we learn to hide our souls because we are betrayed by others. But I would entrust to you my soul! I know it, if you would reconsider your judgment! I can protect you, I can run your house. I will not molest your little girls. But mark, for all my time fighting in Illyricum I have one leg. I came home from three years of bloody constant battle to lose it to a boar because a spear, poorly tempered and made, broke as I thrust it into the boar.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Flavius,” he answered. This was a Roman name.
“Flavius,” I said.
“Madam, the palla is slipping again from your head. And these little pins, they are sharp, they are everywhere, they’ll hurt you.”
“Never mind that,” I said, though I let him drape me again properly as if he were Pygmalion, and I his Galatea. He used the tips of his fingers. But the mantle was already soiled.
“Those girls,” I said, “whom you glimpsed. They are my household, as of the past half-hour. You have to be their loving master. But if you lie in any woman’s bed under my roof, the bed had better be mine. I am flesh and blood!”
He nodded, at a total loss for words.
I pulled open my purse and took out what I thought to pay, a reasonable price in Rome, I thought, where slaves were always bragging about how much they had cost. I laid down the gold, oblivious to the imprint of the coin, only gauging the value.
The slave stared at me with ever increasing fascination, then his eyes whipped the merchant.
The slimy, merciless, weasling slave trader puffed up like a toad and told me this priceless Greek scholar was to be auctioned for a high price. Several rich men had expressed interest. An entire school class was to question him within the hour. Roman officers had sent their stewards to inspect him.