Andivius Hedulio: Adventures of a Roman Nobleman in the Days of the Empire Part 61

He had sat down and had motioned me to be seated also. I ruminated.

"In the first place," I said, "I do not want to be made to show off in the arena before audiences. I am willing to tame animals and to keep on taming animals, but I do not want to be forced to display my powers before the populace and the n.o.bility, Senate and court. I have the most powerful antipathy to being compelled to become a performer as part of a public spectacle."

"Set your mind at rest," he said. "I give my pledge that, unless my authority is overridden, you shall not take part in public spectacles except that you may often have to enter the arena to lead out ferocious beasts which are not to be killed or which the Emperor, or some of the courtiers, senators, n.o.bles or populace have taken a fancy to for some display of courage or craft and have ordered spared. The driving into a cage or out of a postern of such a beast is generally an irritating matter, delaying the spectacle and often calling for the use of as many as a hundred muscular, agile and bold attendants. I perceive that you can do alone, quickly and easily, what a large gang of eager men has often taken a long time to accomplish. Often they have to kill a recalcitrant beast. I feel that I need you for this and I trust that you are willing."

"Entirely," I answered.

"Good!" said he, and resumed:

"Now, what is your next point?"

"In the second place," I said, "I do not want to be pestered with visitors; n.o.bles or wealthy idlers who take a fancy to me and think they are conferring a favor on me by intruding on me and wasting my time with their inquisitive questions and patronizing remarks. In particular I have a horror of the kind of women who have a fad for molesting with their attentions singers, actors, gladiators, beast-fighters, charioteers and so on; if one of them gets after me and the infection spreads to more I shall find life here in Rome altogether unendurable.

"I speak feelingly (I thought it proper to lie like a Greek, if necessary, in a situation like mine). Where I was before I suffered from the attentions of enthusiastic admirers and I have had all I want of it and far more; enough to last half a dozen lifetimes."

"Festus," said the procurator, "where were you before?"

"If you had seen my back," I said, "you wouldn't expect me to tell you."

"I don't expect you to tell me," he laughed, "but I could not help asking; you are such a wonder that I am tormented with the desire to know all about you, not merely where you came from and how you got into the _ergastulum_ at Nuceria. But I shall not press you for any information about yourself. Keep your own secrets as long as you are willing to work miracles for me.

"I don't want to see your back; without seeing it I may say that if anyone ill-treated you he was an amazing fool. You shall not be flogged here, nor ill-used in any way. I'll take all the measures in my power to ensure that no visitors bother you and that you are protected not only from genuine sporting n.o.bles but still more from the silly loungers who think it adds to their importance to make the acquaintance of all persons of public reputation. Especially I'll have you guarded from intrusive fine ladies."

"What next?"

"I want plenty of the best fruit," I said boldly.

"You'll get all you can eat of whatever the markets afford," he said, "and understand right here that I'll indulge you to any extent in anything relating to your food or wine, as long as you keep sober. Similarly you can have anything you ask for in the way of extra clothing or bedding or furnis.h.i.+ngs for your quarters. If you don't like the slave detailed to wait on you I'll have another put in his place and keep on changing till you get one to suit you.

"You are to be indulged and pampered in every way in my power, except that I mean to keep you hard at work, long hours each day, at the cages, whenever it is necessary."

I thanked him and agreed to do my best to please him.

Not many days later, as he had foretold, my work became less continuous and less burdensome. Soon afterwards I settled into a sort of daily routine which occupied me, but did not wear me out and which often left me not a little free time.

I found that I was entirely free to go and come as I pleased, when not occupied. I did go to the Temple of Mercury and offer two white hens bought in the Forum Boarium, as I had done when in the City with Maternus.

Otherwise I kept pretty close for more than a month. I feared to be recognized as myself by some secret-service agent; I feared almost as much to be identified as Felix the Horse-Tamer by some henchman of the King of the Highwaymen. I wanted to try to communicate with Vedia, but the more I pondered on how to do so the more I saw only betrayal, recognition and death as the probable results of every plan I devised.

CHAPTER x.x.x

FESTUS

Domiciled in the Choragium and busy there and in the Colosseum I spent almost a year. Until the approach of winter put a stop to spectacles in the arena and after the outset of spring permitted their resumption, I was not only continuously busy, but entirely contented. Of the dreary and tedious winter between, which was intensely dispiriting and appeared interminable, the less I say the better. I do not want to remind myself of it.

I was of course free from the bodily miseries which had made my winters at Placentia and Nuceria so terrible: I did not suffer from cold, hunger, vermin, sleeplessness, overwork, exhaustion, weakness, blows and abuse. I was, on the contrary, comfortably lodged and clothed, well attended, lavishly and excellently fed and humored by the procurator.

But at Placentia and Nuceria I had solaced myself amid the horror of my situation by reminding myself that I was, at least, alive, and, as long as I was in an _ergastulum_, entirely safe from any danger of being recognized and executed. Here, in Rome, often in the arena, under the eyes of sixty thousand Romans, thousands of whom had known me in my prosperity and hundreds of whom had known me familiarly from my childhood, I was, every instant, in peril of recognition and of betrayal to the secret service. While I was actually in the arena I was so busy or so exhilarated by my partic.i.p.ation in the most magnificent spectacle on earth that I never worried a moment. I seldom worried while I was occupied with any of my duties in the Colosseum or Choragium, although I knew I was very liable to recognition, for the pa.s.sages and vaults of the Colosseum and the courtyards of the Choragium were habitually visited by men of sporting tastes; gentlemen, wealthy idlers, n.o.blemen, senators, courtiers, even the Emperor himself. I was, in my intellect, conscious of my danger; but, while I was occupied, it did not perturb my feelings.

During the idleness of the long winter my peril did rob me of sleep, of appet.i.te and of peace of mind. I had continually to devise excuses for remaining in my lodgings, for declining invitations to banquets, for keeping to myself. I dreaded that the procurator himself was growing suspicious of me. He had, in the kindness of his heart, thrown in my way offers of opportunities for outings, for diversions, for entertainments, which any man in my situation might have been expected to accept with alacrity. My refusals, I felt, might set him to thinking. He was entirely loyal to the Emperor and the government. If the idea ever crossed his mind he would, at once, have reported to the secret service that it would be well to take a look at Festus the Beast-Tamer; he might be other than he appeared. The anxiety caused by these thoughts preyed upon my mind.

Without reason, apparently. The procurator, as I look back on that deadly winter, seems to have accepted all my peculiarities without question. If I would remain content and quell obstreperous beasts when spring opened as I had until autumn ushered in winter, I might do and be anything I pleased.

If I pleased to mope in my quarters, pace under the arcades of the courtyard, lie abed from early dusk till after sunrise, what mattered that to him? Such, apparently, was his att.i.tude of mind. He gave orders that I was to have my meals alone in my quarters, as I requested. He had brought to me, from the libraries of the Basilica Ulpia, most of the books I asked for. I had read all the books on catching, caring for, curing, managing, taming and fighting beasts which formed the library of the Choragium.

After they were exhausted I asked the procurator for more. As he had a cousin among the a.s.sistant curators at the Ulpian Library he was able to gratify me. After I could learn of no more books on beasts I took to comedies and read Naevius, all of Menander and Caecilius, and most of the best plays of other writers of comedies; then. I turned to histories, which I thought safe, and spent my days for the remainder of the winter sleeping early, long and late, eating abundant meals of good food, walking miles round and round the big courtyard under the empty arcades, exercising in the gymnasium of the Choragium, steaming and parboiling and half-roasting myself in its small but very well-appointed and well-served baths, and, otherwise, reading every bit of my daylight. I kept well and I remained safe, ignored and unnoticed. The procurator kept his word as to s.h.i.+elding me from visitors, and he said he had much ado to succeed, for the ease and cert.i.tude with which, in the open arena, before all Rome, I approached a lion or tiger which had just slaughtered a criminal and lapped his blood, seized the beast by the mane or scruff of the neck, as if he had been a tame dog, and led him to a postern or into his cage, roused much interest, much curiosity, many enquiries and not a little desire to see me closer, question me, talk with me, get acquainted with me and learn the secret of my power.

I thanked the procurator for his resolution and success in rebuffing would-be patrons eager to pamper me. Also, all winter, I dreaded that he would he less lucky or less adamantine when spring came.

Thus pa.s.sed my fourth winter since my disaster.

I might have been spared much of my anxiety during the winter if I had learned sooner that such aloofness as mine was no novelty to the procurator, that he had, among his most valued subordinates, a man even more unsociable than I, and even more highly esteemed and more sedulously pampered. This was the celebrated and regretted Spaniard, Mercablis, who, for more than thirty years, was accorded by the Choragium a home of his.

own, a retinue of servants and the fulfillment of every whim, of which the chief was his determination to have as little as possible to do with any human being except his wife and their three children, for he was not a slave, but a freeman. In his way Mercablis was as celebrated as Felix Bulla the brigand or Agyllius Septentrio the actor of mimes, and the memory of his fame yet lingers in the recollections of the aged and in the talk of their children and grandchildren. For it was Mercablis who, for half a life-time, invented, rehea.r.s.ed, and kept secret till the moment of its display the noon-hour sensational surprise for each day of games in the Colosseum.

I have, in my later years, met many persons who congratulated me on my luck in having personally known and frequently talked with Mercablis, just as many have similarly envied me my encounters with Felix Bulla. For myself I have never plumed myself on such features of my adventures, though they are not unpleasing to recall.

When, in the spring of the next year, while Fuscia.n.u.s and Sila.n.u.s were consuls, I came to know Mercablis and to consider him, I arrived at the conclusion that his inclination for solitude and his aloofness were not the result of any dread of strangers or of any need for seclusion, like mine, but the product of a disposition naturally churlish, crabbed, and unsocial.

Habituated as the procurator had been to Mercablis and his loathing for strangers, my desire for privacy had seemed to him as a matter of course.

Resolute as Mercablis was to be let alone, he was enormously vain and self-conceited and puffed up with his conviction of his own importance. He never smiled, but some subtle alteration in his countenance betrayed that any flattery pleased him.

He was a tall, spare, bony man, with a dry, brown, leathery skin, lean legs and arms, a stringy neck, almost no chin, a hooked nose, deep set little greeny-gray eyes and intensely black, harsh, stiff, curly hair and very bushy eyebrows. He wore old, worn, faded garments and stalked about as if the fate of the universe depended on him.

Certainly he never failed to surprise all Rome when the time came for his novelty to be displayed. Every one which I saw, either earlier when I was myself or while in the Choragium as Festus the Beast-Wizard or later, justified the claim of Mercablis to being the most original-minded sensation-deviser ever known in the Colosseum or elsewhere.

One of his utterly unpredictable surprises recurs often to my recollection.

It was a hot July day and, during the noon pause, the vendors of cooling drinks did a good business among the spectators of the upper tiers. To the ring-rope round the opening in the awning, over the middle of the arena, had been fastened a big, strong, pulley block. One of the lightest and most agile of the awning-boys hung by his hands from the radial rope stretched from nearest that pulley, worked out to it, sat on it, rove through it a light cord which he carried coiled at his waist, and worked back along the radial rope, leaving the cord trailing from the pulley- wheel to the sand of the arena. By means of the cord the arena-slaves rove through the pulley first a light rope, then a very strong one.

The end of this rope they fastened to an iron ring, from which hung four stout chains, three of them of equal length, each about thirty feet, whose lower ends, at points precisely equidistant from each other, were fastened to a big iron hoop all of twenty-four feet across. From the hoop hung six lighter chains, like the fourth chain which hung from the ring. As the six were fastened to the hoop either where one of the upper chains ended or exactly between two of them each of the six was precisely twelve feet from those on either side of it and from the center chain hanging from the ring. The hoop hung perfectly level and each of the seven chains, about thirty feet below the level of the hoop, had hung to it an iron disk, a yard or more across, hanging by a ring-bolt in its center and perfectly level. From a second ring-bolt in the underside of each disk depended more of the same light, strong chain, to a length of some thirty feet below the disks.

I, like all the arena-slaves and Choragium-slaves, like all the spectators, knew that this apparatus portended some unpredictable surprise; but I, like the others, like the audience, gaped at it, incredulous and unable to conjecture what it could be for.

Then arena-slaves carried in and set down on the sand a full hundred feet from the hoop and chains, a dozen or more wicker crates full of quacking white ducks with yellow bills. They and the noise they made recalled unpleasantly to me my sensations as I clung to the alder bush immersed in Bran Brook, after Agathemer and I had crawled through the drain at Villa Andivia.

Then there was a delay and I was called out to a.s.sist the mahout of the Choragium's best trick elephant, the smallest full-grown elephant I ever saw and the worst-dispositioned elephant of any age or size which ever I encountered. When I and the _mahout_ had put him in a good humor he entered the arena and stationed himself by the crates of quacking ducks.

Then there marched out into the arena a procession of arena-slaves, four by four, each four carrying by two poles a strong cage housing a big African ape. These cages they set down each under one of the chains depending from the hoop. Then I was called to deal with the baboons.

Now I fear no beast, but of all beasts I most dislike an African ape.

These creatures, inhabiting the mountains of Mauretania, Gaetulia and the Province of Africa, are big as a big dog and have teeth as long and cruel as any big dog. They are violent and treacherous. Whereas any wild bear or wolf I ever approached would permit me to handle him without snarling or growling, every baboon I ever had to handle made some sort of threatening noise inside him. Although none ever bit me or attempted any attack on me yet the hideousness of such apes and their vile odor always made me timid in dealing with them.

Each of these seven had around his middle an iron hoop-belt, with a strong ring-bolt in the back. It was my task to affix the end of each pendant chain to the ring-bolt in the belt of one of the baboons. This was easy to do, as each cage, in addition to a door in one side, had a trap-door in its top; and each chain had a snap-hook ringed to its last link. More difficult was managing so that the apes should be hauled up out of their cages without any two swinging sideways enough to clutch each, other; for, while baboons in their native haunts hunt in packs, male baboons not of the same pack always fight venomously and members of the same pack, if separated for a time, are as hostile to each other as males of different packs.

By care and caution, the slaves at the rope obeying my signals promptly, I at last had all seven apes clear of their cages, and not swinging too much. Then the cages were removed and the hoop lowered somewhat. Then I steadied each chain till none had any side-ways swing. Each ape finally hung on a level with every other ape, and about two yards above the sand of the arena.

I say finally, for it was at once manifest why the disks were hung to the chains; each baboon swarmed up his chain; each got no higher than the disk, for it was too broad for his arm to reach the chain above it, so that each failed to climb past it, and, after some chattering, and hesitation, each climbed down his chain again and hung by his belt, every one mewing and chattering at his neighbors, frantic with hostility and eager for a fight.