A Mixture of Madness, Book II of The Bow - By Levkoff, Andrew Page 0,4

some bit of wind to rise or sit, hence I am resolved to stay where I am put. No, hatred is a coin best spent by vigorous, ambitious youth.

Harken to me now; I am composed.

PART I – Home

Chapter I

56 BCE Summer, Rome

Year of the consulship of

Cn. Cornelius Lentulus Marcellinus and L. Marcius Philippus

It was a bad day for Livia’s homecoming. We had just returned to Rome from Luca; nerves were frayed and twisted like an unkempt braid. Though Crassus had been assured of a five-year term as governor of Syria, he was sullen and the mood of the familia was more funereal than festive. Normally, I would have helped him through his discontent with dialogue and philosophical diversions, but not today. I occupied myself instead by making a distracted attempt to teach my new assistant to balance the monthly grain accounts; my distraction was total—I was as breathless and as jumpy as a fish in a net. That evening I discovered the man had done a superlative job without any help from me. I was soon to learn why Crassus had foisted this freedman upon me. There were two reasons, one more disturbing than the next. But we shall come to that.

Pacing back and forth through the atrium, then out past the guards to scour the street for any sign of her, I thought about one of the last times Livia and I had been together, almost six years earlier. Another unhappy day.

•••

The true and lasting punishment from being whipped comes not with the stinging agony of your flesh being stripped from your back. Though you think it never will, that pain fades. Not so the humiliation you are meant to carry with you ever after. These Romans have had centuries to refine the art of encouraging submission. The true penance of a good scourging is writ with a dye more indelible than the knots of twisted rope that crawl beneath your tunic. Those scars that tug and itch with every bend or stretch are proof that you have been separated forever and always to live amongst that class of creature which welcomes those rebellious individuals of their breeds – horses, oxen, dogs and other unmanageable examples that are not fully domesticated. In my case, I was moronically proud to claim that I was not a very good example of Roman subjugation, for both Crassus and I knew, even as he cracked the lorum into my flesh, that faced with the same circumstance, I would repeat the “offense.” Did this make me a bad slave? Or Crassus a lenient owner? Neither one of us paid heed to the strict rules of Roman society—as a slave, I should never have laid hands on Julius Caesar, praetor and pontifex maximus, and because I did, Crassus should have had me crucified, and yet he spared me.

But you see, this whipping had very little to do with punishment, and almost everything to do with love. No, I have not lost what little remains of my senses. When Caesar assaulted Livia, meaning to defile her, it was either love or madness that spurred me to break his hold, punch him in the face and knock him to the ground. (Truthfully, he fell back onto a couch, but the affront was the same; I might as well have thrust a knife into him.) In the crystal sanity of that moment I was certain beyond any doubt that my love for Livia was genuine and pure. How? Because I knew the next day I would be dead. I was surprised and proud, with only a smidgeon of regret to discover I could count myself among the very few who could say they were willing to die for love. And prove it. At least my 8,791 days as a slave would finally come to an end.

Crassus had no choice but to set an example. A slave assaulting a noble must be dealt with swiftly and brutally. The consequences must be a merciless warning to others, severe and shocking, so that news of the horror of it travels far and wide. Even more so in our case, since we were summering at Baiae, over 100 miles from Rome. That is how I am certain that Marcus Licinius Crassus, the same general Crassus who revived the dormant, lethal discipline of decimation and subjected an entire cohort to it for fleeing the field of battle in the war against Spartacus, the heart of that same hard man bore some kind of