“Until you decide otherwise, dominus, I am your servant.”
Crassus laughed. “Yes, Alexander, you are. I hear the undercurrent of insolence in your tone and I relish it. You will not disappoint me.” He walked to the doorway and turned. “Enjoy your quarters. You’ll earn them.”
This was the humble start of many cerebral wrestling matches between us. I did not intend to lose. Of course, it fell to me to populate this self-contained village on the Palatine with furniture, landscaping, and… people. So many people, in fact, that a separate, two-story barracks would be built near the main house. The irony was not lost on Crassus; he may have thought me capable, but there must have been an element of mirth in watching me squirm from on high. How would I handle conducting the purchase of my fellow man to serve this house? Would I bridle? Balk? Refuse? Any of these would have given him great pleasure and opportunity for discourse, let alone chastisement.
I decided that Crassus would be disappointed.
In the first days of my promotion, I would find little time for rest, but when I could, I took it in a small copse toward the western edge of the estate, unique for its wild woods and lack of landscaping. As the new estate grew up around us, its crushed marble walkways and formal gardens, as breathtaking as they were, began to weigh heavily upon me. There was something claustrophobic in perfection.
Several foot trails tunneled through this forgotten forest’s leafy shade, and while the place wasn’t the hilly farmland of home, it did spark memories which I was not quite ready to surrender. At first Crassus wanted the architects to raze the site to make way for a shrine to Bellona, the war goddess whose hand had helped Sulla to victory and Crassus to staggering wealth. I talked him out of it with the truth: it was the only place I had seen in Rome that reminded me of Aristotle’s Lyceum, and perhaps each of us might stroll there, separately or together, to collect ourselves and contemplate whatever inspiration the woods lent us.
It was after I realized I would soon be hiring servants of my own that I withdrew to this sanctuary to reflect upon the man I had become. I walked the dirt paths, listened to birdsong, inhaled the scents of spring and marveled at nature’s unsculpted bounty.
I know I am cursed with a mind that will not remain quiet; it will ruminate and fret till rough rocks of ideas have been tumbled into smooth stones of logic, either that or into dust. As I walked, I considered my condition. Was it better to be born a slave rather than a free man reduced to bondage? Better to exist in a perpetual fog of blessed ignorance, or to have tasted sweet self-determination, even for a little while? I say the latter, even though it is the way of pain. But why talk of choice when that commodity, once foolishly taken for granted, had become precious by its absence? The way of pain was my way. And since I have just stated that as my preference, I should have been content.
Even Aristotle believed in the natural condition where one man could be owned by another. “For he is a slave by nature who is capable of belonging to another — which is also why he belongs to another.” If you are one, you deserve to be one. However, if you have the ability to reason, he argued, as someone might if he were, say, a student captured in the destruction of Athens, then the victorious society should hold out freedom as a reward. I wonder how Aristotle might have revised his philosophy had he himself been taken as a trophy of war. You see, I did not question the system so much as rail that I had fallen victim to it.
You, reader, live in a world where power and wealth are controlled by a tiny, fractional elite, men who claim to use their wealth and armies to serve and protect you. Your government is controlled by these same men who allow your senators to live unfettered by the rules they themselves legislate. You receive only so much grain for your bread and oil for your lamps. Your sweat and toil builds great homes and palaces; those who live within tell you how proud you should be of your glorious, gleaming accomplishment. But you are barred from setting foot inside. You may rise only so high as your rulers allow, for there is only so much wealth, and it has long ago been claimed by others. These few men let slip a coin here, an entertainment there, and this they know will feed the inertia that keeps you from making the effort to claim a larger share. This is what you call freedom, but are you certain of your claim upon it?
Crassus knew what I had at first failed to recognize; his error lay in not understanding that after four years in his service, I could at last see it as clearly as he. I was a slave. Yes, I could say the word at last. Do not tax your eyesight scanning back through these scrolls, I promise you it isn’t worth the effort — nowhere in this manuscript until this very moment have I myself used it.
My owner was right: whatever place I had hoped to earn in the world, this is where fate had delivered me. I was a slave, but even slaves are given a single, awful choice: rebel, or rise as high as nature may permit within this unnatural state. My frail nature, even in my prime, was hardly rebellious. I was no Spartacus.
And so, the further freedom slipped from my grasp, the stronger my determination to become a paragon of slaves, a slave with money and power, as fine as any Rome had ever seen.
It was of significant help, I admit, that I belonged to the richest man in the city.
Chapter XV
76 BCE — Spring, Rome Year of the consulship of Gnaeus Octavius and Gaius Scribonius Curio
I should mention that in the spring of this very year, Melyaket, my brave-hearted companion and steadfast friend (I shall claim senility should he ever lay eyes upon these words), was born in a ravine at the base of the Sinjar mountains, a lonely range at the northwestern border of the Parthian Empire. To hear him tell it, on that day nothing less than the intervention of the gods saved him from a very short life span, not to mention a grisly and horrific death. Well, if the immortals did truly take such singular interest in him, then let them tell his tale. I do not have the time.
In matters of the heart, I have observed that it is difficult to learn from our mistakes. On the contrary, we seem quite adept in making the same blunders over and over again. So when Sabina told me soon after we became friends, that she had had her fill of men and wanted nothing more to do with them, I had my doubts. Seeing my eyebrows elevate, she attempted to convince me by claiming the fault lay not with men, but in her own character. It was flawed, cracked, she said. How could she make such a monumental blunder in her choice of husband and trust herself to choose wisely ever again? Her logic made me falter in my skepticism, till I realized logic had very little to do with the mystical chemistry of the heart.
When it comes to love, we are the great architects of artifice. We construct elaborate stages, festooned with intricate sets, costumed brightly, aglow with candles incapable of illuminating any flaw, upon which we play our most convincing acts of self-deception. What convoluted excuses we spin to justify behavior we would find ludicrous in others. What pretty lies we tell ourselves.