Valentine by Chet Raymo

Author:Chet Raymo [Raymo, Chet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461636083
Publisher: Cowley Publications
Published: 2013-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

XXXVI

Julia was suddenly very grown up. The Gallic pony given to her by Valentine became her consuming passion. For the first time she had responsibility for another creature, and this overflowed into a keen new sense of self-responsibility. Desso was getting old and frail and not so able as before to run our household. Julia therefore took up some of Desso’s duties, cooking, washing, seeing to it that a fresh toga was laid out for me each morning. She refused to let me hire another servant, knowing that Desso would feel put aside. Also, Julia became more interested in my work—and she did not like all of what she learned.

It was I, for example, who supplied the condemned man for the play attended by Valentine and Rufi. The requirements of the Pompey Theatre were provided for by my jail. A docket would arrive from the office of the procurator: One capital male, of medium height and build, to be delivered to the Pompey at the eighth hour of the morning on Id. Jun. A simple transaction. The man was condemned to die anyway, perhaps with no less torment at the hands of the public executioner than on the stage of the Pompey. As often as not, the man—or occasionally woman—that I sent to the theatre was the perpetrator of a heinous crime and unworthy of compassion. In any case, it was not my task to question the custom of ages. I was a civil servant, and a good one. My jail was clean, efficient, orderly. We played our part in making Rome the safest and best regulated city of the empire.

But Julia did not approve. She heard from her new young friends—attracted by the pony—about the violence of the theatre and amphitheatre, and questioned me closely. I answered her as honestly as I could. “These things are decreed by history,” I said. “Fourteen-year-old girls do not change the course of time’s river.” She had spent most of her life in the company of men who would die in the arena, but it had never occurred to her until now that their combats were anything but childlike games. The gladiators who befriended her at the school in the Alban Hills were volunteers, who embraced their fate with bravado, occasionally feigned but more often real. Now she discovered that for every volunteer who fought in the arena, a dozen or a hundred more went unwilling to their wretched fates. On the emperor’s birthday, one hundred of these gladiatores meridiani were driven into the arena, not true gladiators, but common criminals and runaway slaves, many of them supplied by the jails of Rome, including my own. Two men of the hundred were chosen by lots. One was given a sword and ordered at spearpoint to kill the other, who was unarmed. His job complete, the executioner was disarmed and killed by the next man. And so on, until at the midday intermission one hundred bodies paved the arena floor like so many cobblestones. This spectacle was the talk of the city, and Julia, of course, heard of it.

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