Spartacus by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

hard to say. So he went the way he came, out of nothing into nothing, out of the arena into the butcher shop. We live by the sword and we die by the sword. That was Spartacus. I salute him.”

    What the general said recalled to Caius the conversation with the sausage maker, and it was on the tip of his tongue to raise the question. But then he thought better of it and asked instead,

    “You don’t hate him?”

    “Why? He was a good soldier and a damned, dirty slave. What should I hate particularly? He’s dead and I’m alive. I like this—” twisting gratefully under the masseuse’s fingers, but taking it for granted that his words were something apart from her and beyond her. “—but my experience is limited. You wouldn’t think so, would you, but your generation looks at things differently. I don’t mean sluts, I mean niceties, like this. How far does one go, Caius?”

    The young man at first did not know what the general was talking about, and glanced at him curiously. The muscles on Crassus’s neck were swelling with passion, and passion was all over his body now. It troubled Caius and frightened him a little, he wanted to get out of the room quickly, but there was no way to do it decently; and less because he minded what would happen than he minded his being there to see it happen.

    “You might ask her?” Caius said.

    “Ask her? Do you suppose the bitch speaks Latin?”

    “They all do, a little.”

    “You mean ask her directly?”

    “Why not?” muttered Caius, and then turned onto his belly and closed his eyes.
     

IX
     
    While Caius and Crassus were in the bath, and while the last fading hour before the sunset cast its golden glow over the fields and garden of Villa Salaria, Antonius Caius took his niece’s friend on a walk across the grounds toward the horse run. Antonius Caius did not indulge in such ostentatious displays as, for example, a private race course or his own arena for games. He had a theory of his own that to survive in the possession of wealth, one had to display it discreetly, and he had none of the social insecurity that called for gaudy prominence, such as was common with the new social class of business men arising in the republic. But like his friends, Antonius Caius loved horses and paid out fantastic sums of money for good breeding stock, and took a good deal of pleasure in his stables. At this time, the price of a good horse was at least five times the price of a good slave—but the rationale was that one sometimes needed five slaves to raise a horse properly.

    The horse run, fenced in, sprawled over a broad meadow. The stables and pens were at one end, and a little distance from there, a comfortable stone gallery, capable of holding up to fifty people, commanded both the course and a large pen.

    As they approached the stables, they heard the shrill, demanding cry of a stallion, a note of insistence and rage new to Claudia, thrilling yet frightening.

    “What is that?” she asked Antonius Caius.

    “A stallion aroused. I bought him at the market only two weeks ago. Thracian blood, big boned, savage, but he’s a beauty. Would you like to see him?”

    “I love horses,” said Claudia. “Please show him to me.”

    They walked to the stables, and Antonius told the foreman, a withered, shrunken little Egyptian slave, to put him in the big display pen. Then they went to the gallery to watch, seating themselves in a nest of cushions which a slave arranged for them. Claudia did not fail to notice how well-trained and how sedulous Antonius Caius’s body servants were, how they anticipated every wish, every glance of his. She had grown up among slaves and she knew the difficulties one was likely to have with them. When she mentioned it to him, he remarked,

    “I don’t whip my slaves. When there is trouble, I kill one. That exacts obedience, but it does not break their spirit.”

    “I think they have wonderful spirit,” Claudia nodded.

    “It isn’t easy to