The man was particularly communicative about the elephants. An Indian, he said, had been hired to bring over a troop of performing animals of this kind, and their cleverness and docility were almost beyond belief.
“One of them,” he told Subrius and his compan- [35] ion,” can write his name with his trunk in Greek characters on the sand. Another has got, the keeper tells me, as far as writing a whole verse. A third can add and subtract. This last, having failed one day in his task, and being docked of part of his food, was found studying his lesson by himself in his house. You smile, sir,” he said, seeing that Lateranus could not keep his countenance. “I only tell you what the keeper told me, but I can almost believe anything after what I have seen myself. And then their agility, sir, is something marvellous, even incredible. Who would think that these big creatures, which look so clumsy, can walk on a tight-rope. Yet that I have seen with my own eyes. And the man promises a more wonderful display than that. We are to have four elephants walking on the tight-rope and carrying between them a litter with a sick companion in it.” At this the friends laughed outright.
“Clemens,” said Subrius, “what traveller’s tales (Footnote: Pliny the elder relates in his Natural History these stories and others still more wonderful about the sagacity and agility of elephants. He seems to speak of his own knowledge. Born A.D. 23, he writes about events which happened at the very time to which my story refers.) are these?”
“I can only say,” returned the man, “that my head is all in a whirl from what I have seen with my own eyes and heard during the last few days.”
“Fannius will have finished by this time,” said [36] Subrius, when they had completed the round of the cages. “Lead the way, Clemens.”
It was a singular sight that presented itself to the two friends as they stood surveying the scene at the door of the room in which the gladiators had been taking their meal. It was a large chamber, not less than a hundred feet in length by about half as many in breadth. The number of gladiators was about eighty, but as this was one of the afternoons on which the men were accustomed to receive their relatives and friends, there must have been present nearly four times as many persons. Some of the better known men were surrounded by little circles of admirers, who listened to everything that they had to say with a devotion at least equal to that with which the students of philosophy or literature were accustomed to hang upon the lips of their teachers. The gladiators bragged of what they had done or were about to do, or, putting themselves into attitudes, rehearsed a favourite stroke, or explained one of those infallible ways to victory which seem so often, somehow or other, to end in defeat. Others sat in sullen and stupid silence, others were already asleep, somnolence being, as Aristotle had long before remarked, a special characteristic of the athletic habit of body. The men were of various types and races, but the faces were, almost without exception, marked by strong passions and low intelligence.
“On the whole,” said Lateranus, after watching [37] the scene for a few minutes, “I prefer the brutes that do not pretend to be men. Lions and tigers are far nobler animals than these wretches; and as for elephants, whether or no we believe our friend Clemens’ marvellous stories about them, it would be an insult even to compare them, so gentle, so teachable, so sagacious as they are, with these savages.”
“True in a general way,” said the Pr?torian, “yet even here Terence’s dictum (Footnote: “Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto.” “I am a man; I think nothing that concerns mankind beyond my sympathies.”) could be applied. Even here there is something of human interest. Look at that stout fellow there.”
Lateranus turned his eyes in the direction to which his companion pointed. The “stout fellow” was a gigantic negro.
“Good Heavens!” cried Lateranus in astonishment, for a pure-blood negro was still a somewhat uncommon sight in Rome. “Did you ever see the like? Or have they trained some gigantic ape to bear himself like a man?”
“No,” replied the Pr?torian, who had a soldier’s appreciation of an athletic frame. “If so, they have trained it very well. I warrant he will be an awkward adversary for any one whom the lot may match with him when the day shall come.”
“May be,” said the other; “but what a face! what lips! what a nose! what hair! To think that nature should ever have created anything so hideous!”
[38] “But see,” cried Subrius, “there is one person at least who seems not to have found our black friend so very unsightly.”
And, indeed, at the moment there came up to the negro a pretty little woman whose fair complexion and diminutive stature exhibited a curious contrast to his ebony hue and gigantic proportions. To judge from the blue colour of her eyes and the reddish gold of her hair, she was a Gaul, possibly belonging to one of the tribes which had been settled for many generations in the Lombard plains, possibly from beyond the Alps. Further Gaul had now been thoroughly latinized, and its people were no longer strangers in Italy. She carried in her arms a little whitey brown baby, whose complexion, features, and half woolly hair indicated clearly enough his mixed parentage. The negro took the child from her arms, his mouth opening with a grin of delight which showed a dazzlingly white array of teeth.
“See,” cried Lateranus, “Hector, Andromache, and Astyanax over again! Only Hector seems to have borrowed for the time the complexion of Memnon!”
“But we are forgetting our friend Fannius,” said Subrius. “Where is he? Ah! there I see him,” he exclaimed, after scanning for a minute or so the motley crowd which so thronged the room as to make it difficult to distinguish any one person. “And he, too, seems to have an Andromache. I thought he [39] was an obstinate bachelor. But in that matter there are no surprises for a wise man.”
Fannius was just at that moment bidding farewell to two women. About the elder of the two there was nothing remarkable. She was a stout, elderly, commonplace person, respectably dressed in a style that seemed to indicate the wife of a small tradesman or well-to-do mechanic. The younger woman was a handsome, even distinguished looking girl of one and twenty or thereabouts. Her features were Greek, though not, perhaps, of the finest type. A deep brunette in complexion, she had soft, velvety brown eyes that seemed to speak of a mixture of Syrian blood. This, too, had given an arch to her finely chiselled nose, and a certain fulness, which was yet remote from the suspicion of anything coarse, to her crimson lips. Perhaps her mouth was her most remarkable feature. Any one who could read physiognomies would have noticed at once the firmness of its lines. The chin, just a little squarer than an Apelles, seeking absolutely ideal features for his Aphrodite, would perhaps have approved, but still delicately moulded, harmonized with the mouth. So did the resolute pose of her figure, and the erect, vigorous carriage of the head. She was dressed in much the same manner as the elder woman, naturally with a little more style, but with no pretension to rank. Yet at the moment when the two friends observed the group she was reaching her hand to [40] Fannius with the air of a princess, and the gladiator was kissing it with all the devotion of a subject. The next moment she dropped a heavy veil over her face and turned away.
The gladiator stood looking at her as she moved away, so lost in thought that he did not notice the approach of Subrius and his companion.
“Well, Fannius,” cried the Pr?torian, slapping him heartily on the shoulder, “shall we find you, too, keeping festival on the Kalends of March?” (Footnote: The first day of March, when husbands and wives joined in praying to Juno Lucina for the happiness and continuance of their married life. Horace begins a well-known ode by supposing M?cenas to wonder what he, a bachelor, is doing with his festal preparations on the first of March (“Martius C?lebs quid agam Kalendis,” etc., c. III. 8), and accounts for it by saying that the day was the anniversary of a wonderful escape that he had had from being killed by the fall of a tree.)
Fannius turned round and saluted. The Pr?torian, after formally returning the salute, warmly clasped his odd acquaintance by the hand, a token of friendship which made the gladiator, who remembered only too acutely the degradation of his position, blush with pleasure.