Spartacus

LEGIO LIBERA 89
A man learned in the Greek tongue, he treated his
slaves and soldiers with great kindness. His friend,
Kharmides, was a freedman, and this friend he brought
to Salenae. Together, sitting in the pavilion, they
read Aeschylus and laughed over the freakish ancient
world portrayed by Aristophanes; they read and
debated in Hesiod and Ovid the Golden Age of
Justice and Kindness that had once existed, a well-
known fact, ere Jupiter in Egypt rose against the good
King Saturn. Kharmides had recently met in Rome
the Greek noble Hiketas, renowned alike for his
wanderings in distant lands, his blasphemies against
the Gods, and the fact that he lived in incest with his
sister. This Hiketas was newly returned from a long
year’s voyaging up a great river from the Euxine.
Beyond the land of the Scythians, in a land of eternal
forests, the Greek noble told that the Golden Age
still reigned: he himself had lived with a forest
people who knew nothing of war or government,
cities or arms, masters or slaves. Many in Rome
believed this tale a lie, and Cossinus himself was
doubtful.
‘Even were it true it is a tale of barbaric folk,
living far from the lands of the Republic. How can
it help or hinder us in Rome ?’
Kharmides agreed that it helped nothing; then
told (the jest of the Roman baths) the further tale
that Hiketas had spread : that the Thracian savage
who led the slaves was himself no Thracian, but a
tribesman of remoter people, strayed southwards
and captured from the Golden Age. This accounted
for his strange conduct in the Indus of Batiates and
the fashion in which he had spared the Roman wounded
at the Battle of the Mountain.
Cossinus laughed : ‘Then the Iron Age has engulfed
him rapidly.’ And thought. ‘As in Hesiod it tells that