Spartacus by Howard Fast Page B

and revive their hopes.

    The overseers stand to one side, grouped together, munching bread and sucking at water. Not for another four hours will the slaves be fed or watered, but it is one thing to be an overseer and another to be a slave. The overseers are wrapped in woolen cloaks, and each carries a whip, a weighted billy and a long knife. Who are these men, these overseers? What brings them to this terrible womanless place in the desert?

    They are men of Alexandria, bitter, hard men, and they are here because the pay is high, and because they get a percentage of all the gold the mines produce. They are here with their own dreams of wealth and leisure, and with the promise of Roman citizenship when they have served five years in the interest of the corporation. They live for the future, when they will rent an apartment in one of the tenements in Rome, when they will each of them buy three or four or five slave girls to sleep with and to serve them, and when they will spend each day at the games or at the baths, and when they will be drunk each night. They believe that in coming to this hell, they heighten their future earthly heaven; but the truth of the matter is that they, like all prison guards, require the petty lordship of the damned more than perfume and wine and women.

    They are strange men, a unique product of the slums of Alexandria, and the language they talk is a jargon of Aramaic and Greek. It is two and a half centuries since the Greeks conquered Egypt, and these overseers are not Egyptians and not Greeks, but Alexandrians. Which means that they are versatile in their corruption, cynical in their outlook, and believing of no gods at all. Their lusts are warped but commonplace; they lie with men and they sleep a drugged sleep over the juice of the Khat leaves, which grow on the coast of the Red Sea.

    These are the men whom Spartacus watches, there in the cool hour before the dawn, as the slaves plod from the great stone barracks, shoulder their chains and go toward the escarpment. These will be his masters; and over him they will hold the power of life and the power of death; and so he watches for small differences, habits, mannerisms and indications. In the mines, there are no good masters, but it may be that there will be some less cruel and less sadistic than others. He watches them detach themselves, one by one, to take over where the slaves are shaping up. It is still so dark that he cannot distinguish subtleties of face and feature, but his is a practiced eye in such matters, and even in the walk and heft of a man there is definition.

    It is cool now, and the slaves are naked. Not even a loincloth hides their pitiful, futile, sun-blackened organs of sex, and they stand and shiver and wind their arms around their bodies. Anger comes slowly to Spartacus, for anger is not productive in the life of a slave, but he thinks, “All things but this we can bear, but when there is not even a scrap of cloth to cover our parts, we are like animals.” And then revises it in his mind, “No—less than animals. For when the Romans took the land where we were owned and the plantation where we labored, the beasts were left in the field and only we were sorted out for the mines.”

    Now the drum stops its wracking sound and the overseers uncoil their whips and crack the stiffness out of the bull-hide, so that the air is full of a snapping and cracking music. They lay the whips in the air, for it is too early to lash the flesh, and the gangs move forward out of the shapeup. It is lighter now, and Spartacus can clearly see the skinny, shivering children who will crawl down into the belly of the earth and claw at the white stone where the gold is found. The other Thracians also see, for they crowd close around Spartacus, and some of them whisper,

    “Father, oh father, what kind of a hell is this!”

    “It will be all right,” Spartacus says; for when you are called father by those old enough to be your father, what