“Very likely,” replied the Pr?torian calmly. “Yet Fannius you will find to be an exception to your rule. But to my story. The elder Fannius rented a farm of mine three or four miles this side of Alba. He might have made a good living out of it. There was some capital meadow land, a fair vineyard, and as good a piece of arable as is to be found in the country. His father had had it before him. In fact, the family were old tenants, and the rent had never been raised for at least a hundred years. Then there was only one son, and he was a hard-working young fellow who more than earned his own keep. The father ought, I am sure, to have laid by money; but he was one of those weak, good-natured fellows, who seem incapable of keeping a single denarius in their pock- [29] ets. It is only fair to say that he was always ready to share his purse with a friend. In fact, his practice of foolishly lending helped him to his ruin as much as anything else. That, and the wine-cup, and the dice-box were too much for him. About five years ago, a brother-in-law�his dead wife’s brother, you must understand�died suddenly, leaving an only daughter, with some fifty thousand sesterces for her fortune, not a bad sum for a girl in her rank of life. He had been living, if I remember right, at Tarentum, and, knowing nothing about his brother-in-law’s embarrassments, he had naturally made him his daughter’s guardian and trustee. Fannius, who was at his wit’s end to know where to find money, his farm being already mortgaged up to the hilt, accepted the trust only too willingly. The son, disgusted at seeing extravagance and waste which he could not stop, had gone away from home, and was serving under Corbulo. Perhaps if he had been here, he might have been able to put a stop to the business. Well, to make a long story short, the elder Fannius appropriated the money little by little. Of course he was always intending to make it good. There was to be a good harvest, or a good vintage, or, what, I believe, he really trusted in more than anything else, a great run of luck at the gaming-table. Equally of course he never got anything of the kind. Then came the crash. The younger Fannius came back with his discharge from the East, [30] and found his father lying dead in the house. There can be no doubt he had killed himself. The son discovered in the old man’s desk a letter addressed to himself in which he told the whole story. The girl was living with an aunt. He had always continued, somehow or other, to pay the interest on her money. She was going to be married, and the capital would have to be forthcoming. This, I take it, was the final blow, and the old man saw no other way of getting out of his trouble but suicide. Suicide, by the way, is pretty often a way of shoving one’s own trouble on to somebody else’s shoulders. Well, the poor fellow came to me. He had brought home a little pay and prize-money. I forgave him what rent was due, and bought whatever there was to sell on the farm�not that there was much of this, I assure you. So he got a little sum of money together, enough to pay the old man’s debts. But then there was the niece’s fortune. How was that to be raised? It was absolutely gone; not a denarius of it left. I would have helped if I could, but I was positively at the end of my means. Still I could have raised the money, if I had known what young Fannius was going to do. But he said nothing to me or to any one else. He went straight to the master of the gladiators’ school and enlisted. You see his strength and skill in arms were all he had to dispose of, and so, to save his father’s honour and his cousin’s happiness, he sold them, and, of course, himself with them. It [31] was indeed selling himself. You know, I dare say, how the oath runs which a free man takes when he enlists as a gladiator?”
“No; I do not remember to have heard it.”
“Well, it runs thus:�
” ‘I, Caius Fannius, do take hereby the oath of obedience to Marius, that I will consent to be burnt, bound, beaten, slain with the sword, or whatever else the said Marius shall command, and I do most solemnly devote both soul and body to my said master, as being legally his gladiator.’
“The young man had no difficulty in making good terms for himself. He was the most famous swordsman of his tribe. Indeed, I don’t know that he had his match in the whole Field of Mars. He got his fifty thousand sesterces, paid the money over just in time to prevent the truth coming out, and thus cheerfully put his neck under this yoke. What do you say to that? Have I made good my words?”
“To the full,” cried Lateranus enthusiastically. “He is a hero; nothing less.”
The two friends had by this time arrived at their destination, “the gladiators’ school,” as it was called, kept by a certain Thraso. Subrius inquired at one of the doors whether he could see Fannius, the Samnite�for it was in this particular corps of gladiators, distinguished by their high-crested helmet and oblong shield, that the young man was enrolled.
“He has just sat down to the midday meal,” said the doorkeeper.
[32] “Then we will not disturb him, but will wait till he has finished,” replied Subrius.
“Would you like to see the boys at their exercises, sir?” asked the man, an old Pr?torian, who had served under Subrius when the latter was a centurion. “They have their meal earlier, and are at work now.”
“Certainly,” said Subrius, and the doorkeeper called an attendant, who conducted the two friends to the training-room of the boys.
It was a curious spectacle that met their eyes. The room into which they were ushered was of considerable size and was occupied at this time by some sixty lads, ranging in age from ten to sixteen, who were practising various games or exercises under the eyes of some half-a-dozen instructors. Some were leaping over the bar, either unaided or with the help of a pole; others were lunging with blunt swords at lay figures; others, again, were practising with javelins at a mark. With every group there stood a trainer who explained how the thing was to be done, and either praised or blamed the performance. Every unfavourable comment, it might have been noticed, was always emphasized by the application of a whip. Did the competitor fail to clear the bar at a certain height, fixed according to his age and stature, did he strike the lay figure outside a certain line which was supposed to mark the vital parts, did his javelin miss the mark by a certain distance, the whip descended [33] with an unfailing certainty on the unlucky competitor’s shoulders. Even the vanquished of two wrestlers, whose obstinate struggle excited a keen interest in the visitors, met with the common lot, though he had shown very considerable skill, and had indeed been vanquished only by the superior weight and strength of his adversary.
BOYS WRESTLING
From the boys’ apartment the friends went in to see the wild beasts.
The show of these creatures was indeed magnificent, and, in fact, unheard of sums had been expended on obtaining them. The Emperor was determined to outdo all his predecessors in the variety and splendour of his exhibitions. Nor were his extravagances wholly unreasonable. A ruler who was not a soldier, who could not, therefore, entertain the Roman populace with the gorgeous display of a triumph, had now to fall back upon other ways of at once keeping them in good humour and impressing them with a sense of his greatness. The whole world, so to speak, had been ransacked to make the collection complete. Twenty lions, magnificent specimens most of them, had been brought from Northern Africa. To secure these monarchs of the desert, the most famous hunters of Mauretania had been engaged for pay commensurate with the perils and hardships which they had to undergo.
“I am told, sir,” said the doorkeeper, “that they cost, one with another, fifty thousand sesterces apiece. [34] It is the taking them alive, you see, that makes it so expensive. And the pits, too, which are one way of doing this, often break their bones. So they are mostly netted; and netting a lion is nasty work. That fellow there”�he pointed as he spoke to a particularly powerful male�“killed, they tell me, four men before they got him into the cage.”
Next to the lions were the tigers. They, it seemed, had been even more costly than their neighbours, for they had come considerably further. Secured among the Hyrcanian Mountains, they had been brought down to the Babylonian plains, embarked on board rafts on the Euphrates, and so carried down to the sea. The long and tedious journey had killed half of them before they could be landed at Brindisium, and their average cost had been at least half as much again as that of the lions. Panthers from Cilicia, bears from the Atlas Mountains, and from the Pyrenees, elks from the forests of Gaul and Germany, were also to be seen, and with them multitudes of apes and monkeys, and whole flocks of ostriches, flamingoes, and other birds conspicuous either for size or plumage.