Free Spartacus by Howard Fast

road to the encampment. Like so many other rising citizens of that time, Batiatus assessed everything in terms of money; and he could not help wondering, as he proceeded, what it would cost to build this kind of a road—a temporary road just thrown down for the convenience of the encampment, but nevertheless a better road than he was able to build as an approach to his school at Capua. On a dirt and gravel base, easily-cut slabs of sandstone were laid, a whole mile of it straight as an arrow to the encampment.

    “If these cursed generals would think more of fighting and less of roads, we’d all be better off,” he thought; yet at the same time he glowed a little with pride. You had to admit that even in a dirty, rainy, miserable hole like this, Roman civilization made itself felt. No question about that.

    Now he was approaching the encampment. As always, the temporary stopping place of the legions was like a city; where the legions went, civilization went; and where the legions camped, if only for a night, civilization arose. Here was a mighty, walled area, almost half a mile square, laid out as precisely as a draftsman might lay out a diagram on his drawing board. First there was a ditch, twelve feet wide and twelve feet deep; behind this ditch was a heavy log palisade, twelve feet high. The road crossed the ditch to the entrance, where heavy wooden gates opened at his approach. A trumpeter sounded him in, and a maniple revolved around him as he entered. It was no tribute to him, but discipline for the sake of discipline. It was no idle boast that never before in the history of the world had there been troops so disciplined as the legions. Even Batiatus, with his own enormous love of blood-letting and fighting—and thereby his inherent contempt for the drafted soldier—was impressed by the machine-like precision of everything connected with the army.

    It was not simply the road or the palisade or the ditch, two miles in length, or the broad streets of the encampment-city, or the drainage ditches, or the sandstone pavement laid in the center of the streets, or the whole multiple life and motion and order of this Roman encampment of thirty thousand men; but rather the knowledge that this mighty production of man’s reason and effort was the casual nightly effort of the legions in motion. It was not lightly said that barbarians were more easily defeated by seeing a legion encamp for the night than by going into battle with one.

    As Batiatus dismounted, rubbing his fat behind where it had too long and too intimate contact with the saddle, a young officer came up and asked him who he was and what his business there was.

    “Lentulus Batiatus of Capua.”

    “Oh, yes—yes,” the young man drawled, a young fellow of no more than twenty, a pretty one, a scented, groomed product of one of the best families. The kind Batiatus hated most. “Yes,” said the young man. “Lentulus Batiatus of Capua.” He knew; he knew all about Lentulus Batiatus of Capua and who he was and what he represented and why he had been summoned here to the army of Crassus.

    “Yes,” thought Batiatus, “you hate me, don’t you, you little son of a bitch, and you stand there despising me; but you come to me and you whine to me and you buy from me, and it’s your kind that makes me what I am; but you’re too good to come close to me, because you might be soiled by my breath, you little bastard!” That he thought, but he only nodded and said nothing at all.

    “Yes,” the young man nodded. “The commander has been expecting you. I know that. He wants you to come to him immediately. I’ll take you there.”

    “I want to rest—eat something.”

    “The commander will see to that. He’s a very thoughtful man,” the young officer smiled, and then snapped at one of the soldiers, “Take his horse and water it and feed it and bed it down!”

    “I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast,” said Batiatus, “and it seems to me that if