Colosseum

by Simone Sarasso

  In any event, those trained in the Castra Praetoria know their stuff. That is why the crowd, despite making a lot of noise, does not dare approach the men in blue who protect the strolling nobles with a circumspect gaze.

  The reasons for which Julia and Domitian find themselves here are good ones, too. It is just one more on the long list of indulgences with which Titus showers his populace, this time by distributing some measure of comfort. Whether it is bread, water, blankets or simply coins, all outstretched hands come away with something these days. But the Empire’s money, doled out by the couple without any show of respect for the drama these citizens have just lived through, will end up doing more harm than good, of that the young Briton is quite sure.

  Perhaps it is the look on the faces of the two nobles as they stroll along, fingers interlocked and glances heavy with desire. Her impudent smile betrays the girl’s sixteen years, and her vacuous laughter explodes every time she trips over a pebble. The defiant stare of her uncle, the dashingly handsome son of the She-wolf with his hands laden with coin. He does not have to say a thing: it is quite clear just from looking at him that he holds the normal folk in utter contempt. He does not even have to go to the trouble of feeling superior, by fortune or by virtue. Domitian is superior. By birth.

  Enjoy it, commoners!

  Heal your wounds with silver from my house.

  Cleanse the soot from your injured skin with the treasury of the Judeans, the Egyptians, the barbarous enemies of Rome.

  Fill your pockets with my mercy and worship me like a god.

  All this and more seem to say the eyes of the son of the Empire. The reflections shine unbearably off his decorated cape under the rising heat of the sun.

  “Shame on you!” shouts a baker’s wife while her husband, terrified, grabs her by the arm before a Praetorian can spot her.

  Domitian ignores her, only Julia’s mood seems to darken for a moment. But it is only a moment, a meaningless trifle after which the stroll continues on its brazen course.

  A skinny, toothless man scoops up a fistful of assarii scattered with nonchalance by the perverted uncle. Scrap metal worth no more a bagful of bread, if only an oven had been left standing anywhere within seven leagues.

  “Is this what my son’s life was worth, you stingy wretch?” The man’s eyes brim with tears.

  He has lost someone dear. Everyone has lost someone. Everyone except them.

  Rich bastards.

  This time Domitian reacts to the affront. He is still a Roman officer and is not in the habit of letting people call him a wretch. He stops the convoy. His guards advise against it, but he is not dissuaded.

  Julia shakes her head and tells him to let it go, but Domitian is an asshole. He walks up to the toothless man without saying a word. The two are separated by the wall of guards.

  The prince stares at the plebeian from his side of the imperial wall of iron, and spits in his face.

  And right then, all hell breaks loose.

  The commoner instinctively reacts with a head-butt, but he is too short and the blow lands on a Praetorian’s nose. Unfortunately the guard is decked out in iron from head to foot and it is the toothless man who bleeds first, smashing his face on the soldier’s helmet.

  A mere scratch, best to leave things that way.

  But the mob is dying to avenge the calamity that has befallen it from out of the blue. They are furious with Titus and his relatives: as long as his father Vespasian was at the helm everything went smoothly. A little disorder but no disasters, may the gods clasp him to their breast.

  But since Titus took over, not yet two years ago, the city has already suffered a plague and a fire. What next? Will the circus lions escape and devour the innocent? A hailstorm without end? Will it rain shit?

  “Fuck our leaders!” The toothless man launches himself into the attack with a platoon of hopeless commoners by his side.

  The brawl begins in an instant: the Praetorians are trained to conduct pitched battles, not street fights. Their square cannot resist the pressure of the disorderly surge of a hundred bodies and soldiers fall to the ground. The fury meted out on one of them rivals the fate of Troy, as four filthy common folk tear his helmet off and smash his head in without mercy.

  In the turn of an hourglass the warrior of Rome is covered in bruises, not a single healthy tooth left in his mouth.

  Even the “virtuous” daughter of the Empire does not come out of the brawl unscathed, receiving such a forceful slap to her thigh that she will be able to make out five fingers for the next ten days. She screams, of course, and Verus’s eyes light up.

  She spots him as well, amid the chaos. She has been torn from Domitian’s grasp, who is too busy kicking some beggar and his ragged kids in the balls.

  The Briton forces his way through as best he can, careful not to hurt anybody, but it is difficult to keep his composure in the middle of the fray.

  A little girl is pulling Julia’s hair and she is screaming again. The child grins as if she has just found a shiny gold coin in a fresh pile of crap. Then she pulls harder, until the wheat-colored strands snap and Julia is on the point of fainting.

  Now Verus can see it in her eyes, as clear as a winter morning: fear. Terror that she is not going to make it, that there is no way out. Julia realizes she is up to her neck in trouble. Who can say where her uncle has got to. All she can see around her are ugly, dirty faces, belonging to the very people for whom she had her servants brush her hair this morning into a style that would do Aphrodite proud.

  The young gladiator is elbowing his way through the swelling violence of the crowd when the inevitable finally occurs. A Praetorian makes a sudden movement; almost certainly he does not wish to really hurt anyone, but staying cool in the middle of a fire is no easy task. Impossible, even. His sharpened sword lodges itself in a red-haired man’s chest, stabbing into his heart like a lightning bolt.

  The man collapses, eyes open wide, and time stands still: a long moment of nothing, before madness explodes like the belly of a volcano. Blood and violence fill the street and the Praetorians are at risk of being lynched. Domitian, forced to climb up a drainpipe to reach safety, defends himself as best he can. From atop an unsealed roof, he looks on helplessly as his beloved niece comes under attack.

  The girl is stuck in the middle of it and things are about to turn nasty. There are four men around her, now five. Hungry for sex and vengeance, blackened by smoke right down to their poor souls.

  “I feel like busting your ass, imperial bitch!”

  And not just in a manner of speaking.

  Verus cannot simply stand aside and throws himself forwards, elbows held high. He wipes out one of them—a well-built blond man—with a punch to the nose and sends a second to the ground with a powerful slap. The next two need something a little firmer, so he picks up a stick and breaks a few bones. The last man standing legs it—legs are all he has left.

  The Briton takes Julia by the hand and leads her away. She follows without a word, grateful and dazed as only a naïve girl can be. They run like crazy away from the brawl and slip into an empty house cloaked in darkness, windows consumed by the fire. They stand facing each other, now: heavy breathing and too many thoughts.

  Too many.

  Verus’s heart kicks out wildly as he empties all of his rage and impossible love onto the girl: “Because of you innocent people are dying, but do you even care? Is this what you people do to get off?”

  More heavy breathing, life blowing in and out like a desert wind laden with sand.

  Verus swallows spit, his jugular throbbing like a war drum: “Now call your guards and have them kill me, I’ve had enough of all this shit!”

  Julia trembles, mouth sublime, eyes wet with salt. She strokes his face and cradles his head with infinite gentleness, his short hair filling her small hands.

  She does not say anything. She does not know what to say.

  She only knows that inside her, now, the tumult is real.

 
; That brave boy she thought was just an object, a cheap plaything, has just saved her life. He looked out for her when she had tossed him away; insulted him, wasted him, squandered him as one can only squander something precious.

  She kisses his mouth, slowly. It tastes of earth and sweat.

  Verus responds, because blood will not be commanded.

  Lips biting and teeth doing the rest.

  Their clothes fall to the ground as if by magic, following the oldest of men’s laws. Hands discover breasts and flanks, bodies ready for love. But there is no hurry, this time. A step away from oblivion there is all the time in the world.

  Verus is inside Julia, his back against the wall. His buttocks and her knees on the bare floor, she takes him without resistance, flexing her joints to ease him into her.

  Heavy breathing swells like a wave of heat, a sublime storm of hips and waists. Rubbing flesh, his hands tracing furrows through the white sea of her back.

  Love rolls, like a sublime ocean swell.

  Eyes locked to eyes, it could go on forever.

  Julia is in ecstasy, and in love. Yes, in love, she is sure of it now.

  Verus loses himself even more deeply, until his tide cannot help but break against the softness of her cliff.

  They come, one after the other.

  When it is all over, there is only their embrace. And soft kisses against temples, for the lovers destined to go their separate ways. There is nothing else in the fiery morning heat, just the two of them. Neither of them sees anything else. They certainly do not look up. Where a pair of malevolent eyes watches on silently through the upstairs window.

  Domitian had moved from rooftop to rooftop in a desperate search for his lost niece. He saw her enter the building with the Briton, the same god of the arena that put on a show in the Emperor’s home.

  Jealousy twists his insides as he observes their embrace, hidden from view. But the coward says nothing. He does not shout or yell. He knows that revenge, like all the best platters, must be chilled by the passage of time before it can be properly savored.

  Domitian dips his dagger of hatred in burning rage. He looks on in silence, and love does the rest. In the smoky darkness he dreams of revenge and punishment, promising reprisal as he lets out an inaudible sigh.

  In the meantime Rome is bleeding, and runs to lick her wounds.

  And the Amphitheater, that ghostly womb, intact and silent, is ready to breathe life into its dark wonders.

  The big day is just a few dawns away.

  The time of the games of death is close at hand.

  Let the Games Begin

  The People anxiously hope for just two things: bread and circuses

  JUVENAL, Satire, X, 81

  Rome, AD 80, August

  AND THE DAY arrives.

  The first of a hundred, beginning of a dream.

  The very walls herald it:

  TWENTY PAIRS OF GLADIATORS, PROPERTY OF DECIUS LUCRETIUS IRCIUS FLORENTIUS, FLAMEN IN PERPETUITY OF TITUS CASEAR AUGUSTUS, AND TEN PAIRS OF GLADIATORS, PROPERTY OF DAIMON OF CAPUA, WILL INAUGURATE THE HUNDRED DAYS OF GAMES AT THE FLAVIAN AMPHITHEATER IN ROME. THERE WILL ALSO BE THE CUSTOMARY BEAST HUNT AND VELARIUM.

  Verus is left stunned as he walks with the rest of the Ludus Argentum, lined up neatly behind Decius Ircius, towards the Amphitheater. The meaning of the handwritten words is quite clear, carved onto wood and painted a sooty black, then hung above the best-known bar in the city like a placard for some barber-surgeon.

  A stone’s throw from the Forums, people are talking about them: the gods of the arena, Ircius’s soldiers.

  It took Verus a while to learn to read, but by now he knows enough of his letters to manage. Thanks to Priscus, who spent many a sleepless night drawing them on the sand with a piece of wood, expecting Verus to do likewise by the light of the moon.

  “What do I need the alphabet for? I’m a slave, a gladiator. My job is killing people, not writing love letters,” the Briton had protested.

  But the Gaul was deaf to reason. “You never know. Now, from the beginning: how do you write the first letter of your name?”

  He misses Priscus like air in his lungs, there is no use pretending otherwise. Not even now the big day has arrived. Rome is in a holiday mood, and since late last night the preparations have been underway for the mother of all events: the opening of the Amphitheater, the first of a hundred days of games. Titus’s crowning glory, watched by the tired and happy eyes of his people.

  The eyes of the entire world.

  Verus is beside himself with excitement: for days now, an electric current has been running through the ludus. And the thought of Priscus pushes its way to the forefront. The words he just read came as a real shock: ten pairs of gladiators from Capua! If destiny played fair, it would do him this one damned favor after a lifetime of hardships. But what does a slave know of the power of destiny? Verus resigns himself to the fact that he will never see his friend’s face again. He is learning to live without, although he also made himself a promise. That when he has nothing before him but thousands upon thousands of miles of empty road, when he has spilt the blood of a hundred enemies and finally won back his freedom, he will go in search of Priscus. He will look him straight in the eye and tell him everything. Everything he has to say.

  It is a mad dream that fills the Briton’s head, but in the life of a man condemned to die, what else does he have if not dreams? Hope warms his soul and the distant finishing post lights up his gaze.

  Ircius falls into step beside him and has no need to read his mind to know what is in his heart.

  “Capua! You read it, right?”

  Verus smiles: the lanistamisses nothing.

  “You will probably meet him again,” the master of the ludus states, without a trace of emotion. Then he runs on ahead to catch up with Aton, whispering the final arrangements in his ear.

  Verus keeps walking, but nobody can take that damned smile off his face.

  Careful what you wish for, boy. Because you might get it…

  Verus thought he knew, that he had had the privilege of seeing inside the monster before the crowds. After all, he helped build it. The Amphitheater was his home for many months…

  But no one can truly be prepared for the spectacle that Titus has put together for Rome.

  Verus and Ircius’s team of champions approach the oval arena from the east, passing the ludus barracks and reaching the rooms assigned to the fighters who will perform during the afternoon. It is the first light of dawn and Rome should be dozing, but that is not how it is. Not today.

  The throng is superhuman, a sumptuous spectacle of flesh and anticipation. Fifty thousand people—the full capacity of the stadium, perhaps a few more—press in disorderly lines against the gates, watched over by guards in shining armor. Silence still reigns within, broken only by the deep roars of beasts chained up in the dungeons and the orderly scraping of a hundred rakes across the arena sand. The imperial family has been walking around the stone palace since first light: Titus could not resist, today is his day. He compelled Julia, Domitian, and his retinue to come with him. Nobody objected, but the pale faces of his daughter and brother are smeared with tiredness, like a perfumed ointment from across the seas.

  Titus, standing in the Emperor’s box, casts his eye once more across the breathtaking void before him. The handmaidens invite Julia to take her place at her father’s side while Domitian, in great form with his freshly-mussed hair, seats his behind next to his young niece.

  Things are not going well between them. Since the fire and what happened with Verus, Julia has seemed confused, distant. She refuses her uncle’s attentions, turning him down politely but denying him all the same. She will not even allow the blond son of the She-wolf to hold her hand. And to think that until a few weeks ago they were a single being, especially beneath the sheets.

  But the heart is a fickle thing, and that of a sixteen-year old girl is a rose petal caught in a tempest.

  Titus
is pleased, that much is certain: not so much with his daughter’s apathy as with her newfound distance from his hated brother. But today is not the day for family dramas. As much as his sweet, paternal heart worries for his daughter, the master of the world’s thoughts are elsewhere.

  Titus savors the final moments of calm as the shouts of the crowd, pressing against the entrances, echo through his head. He can feel the breath of the grateful subjects on his eardrums, the vulgar masses already heedless of their sorry lives.

  Today Rome wants to enjoy itself. And it wants to go on enjoying itself for a hundred days in a row, one after another.

  The Emperor commands the last rake-bearer to leave the arena. Then he gives the order.

  “Open the gates!”

  Now it begins.

  The sun has just risen on the perfect day.

  The assault at the entrances is so forceful that even Verus can feel it, down in the belly of the beast with his companions, the instructor,and the lanista. A hundred thousand feet trampling over marble, stone and travertine as they surge into the arena.

  As one.

  No one pays today: they are all guests of the Emperor.

  Still, that does not mean people can sit where they like. Senators and vestal virgins fill the front rows and equestrians behind them. Ordinary male citizens sit on the endless terraces, while foreigners, slaves and women are corralled in the galleries at the top of the circle.

  And it is this group that is making the most noise: women, the perfume of Rome. The female lovers of the games can barely contain themselves before the death and spectacle of the arena. But it is the gladiators that really get them going. Verus knows it well, because during the last year his life has changed a dozen times on the whim of some high-born woman. He knows, because he has seen it in the eyes of the noblewomen at the dinners Ircius has held in their honor. He recognizes the scent and the desire, knows that even the most sober of mistresses is prepared to get down on all fours and be fucked on the flagstones like a beast, if it means being taken by the man of her dreams. The erotic fantasies of the Eternal City are shot through with the swordsand sicae of the gods of the arena. Not even Apollo or Mars turn the women of Rome on in quite the same way. Because they have never seen either of them in action, gutting some poor wretch or fucking their best friend until she screams for her mother.