“It does if he’s been freed and is a citizen on the grain dole,” I said.
“I suppose so. Well, let me accompany you, then. I’ve been meaning to make the acquaintance of Statilius for some time. After all, you and I will one day be aediles, in charge of the Games, and we’ll need these contacts.” He smiled and clapped me on the shoulder, as if we had been dear friends for life instead of virtual strangers.
The Statilian training school consisted of an open yard surrounded by barrack-buildings arranged in a square. There were three tiers of cells for the fighters, and the school maintained nearly a thousand at any one time. The Statilian family was devoted to the sports of the amphitheater, and the school was run so tightly that even during the slave rebellion of the three previous years, the school had remained open, supplying a steady stream of expert swordsmen for the public Games.
We stood for a while in the portico, enjoying the practice of the fighters in the yard, where the beginners fought the post and the more experienced fought each other with practice weapons. The veterans fenced with real swords. I have always been a devotee of the amphitheater and the Circus, and I had even taken some sword instruction myself at this school, before my military service. The Ludus Statilius stood where the Theater of Pompey now stands, and it now comes back to me, after all these years, that we must have been standing that morning almost on the spot where Caius Julius died twenty-six years later.
The head trainer came to greet us, an immense man in a coat of bronze scales with a helmet the size of a vigile’s bucket under his arm. His face and arms bore more scars than the back of a runaway slave. Obviously, a champion of years past.
“May I help you, my masters?” he asked, bowing courteously.
“I am Decius Caecilius of the Commission of Twenty-Six. I wish to speak to Lucius Statilius, if he is here.” The trainer shouted for a slave to run and summon the master.
“You are Draco of the Samnite School, are you not?” Caesar said. The trainer nodded. I knew the name, of course, it had been famous for years, but I had never seen him without his helmet. “You had ninety-six victories when I left Rome ten years ago.”
“One hundred twenty-five when I retired, master, and five munera sine missione.” Allow me to explain this term, which has fallen out of use. Before they were forbidden by law, munera sine missione were special Games in which as many as a hundred men fought until only one was left on his feet, sometimes fighting in sequence, sometimes all against all. This man had survived five such, besides his one hundred twenty-five single combats. This may help to explain why I prefer that such men be confined except when employed in their official public capacity. While we waited for Statilius, Draco and Julius chatted about the Games, with the swordsman predictably lamenting the sorry state to which the art of mortal combat had fallen since his day.
"In the old days,” he said, smiting his chest with his fist and making the scales rattle, “we fought in full armor, and it was a contest of skill and endurance. Now they fight with the breast bared and the fights are over before they fairly begin. Soon, they will just push naked slaves out into the arena to kill one another with no training at all. There’s no honor in that.” It has been my observation that even the most degraded of men have some notion of honor which they cling to.
Statilius arrived, accompanied by a man in Greek dress who wore a fillet around his brow, plainly the school’s resident physician. Statilius was a tall man, dressed in a decent toga. He introduced the physician, who rejoiced in the grandiose name of Asklepiodes. Briefly, I asked Statilius about Marcus Ager.
“You mean Sinistrus? Yes, he was here for a while. Just a third-rate daggerman. I sold him a couple of years ago to someone looking for a bodyguard. Let me consult my records.” He hurried off to his office while Caesar and I conversed with the trainer and the physician.
The Greek studied my face for a moment and said: ”I see you’ve been in battle against the Spaniards.”
“Why, yes,” I said, surprised. “How did you know?”
“That scar,” he said, indicating a jagged line along the right side of my jaw. It’s still there, and has plagued my barbers for the sixty years since I received it. “That scar was made by a Catalan javelin.” The Greek folded his arms and waited to receive our awestruck applause.
“Is it true?” Julius asked. “When was that, Decius? Sertorius’s rebellion?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I was a military tribune in the command of my uncle, Quintus Caecilius Metellus. If something hadn’t attracted my attention and made me turn my head, that javelin would have gone right through my face. All right, Master Asklepiodes, how did you guess?”