Spartacus Speaks

I see much from this height.
Grape leaves wave like nailed palms
and my toes are sprouting flies.

Here on the road from Rome to Capua,
rock-propped crosses tilt
every hundred feet.

My comrades and I sag on their arms,
sun-blackened sacks
dragging a foul wind.

Crassus and his legions
marched down these cobbles months ago,
leaving trash at the roadside, and us.

Now only merchants pass in groaning carts,
no longer pinching their noses.
Hands over bellies, they snore.

Again, this wind . . . the sky
wipes its greasy, crumpled face.
My tatters flap like rotten flags

and I almost hear
the shouts of thousands, thunder
as my hands shred on the nails.

I drop face first into Roman dust.

Do not misunderstand:
I have no regrets. A gladiator's days
are whittled on a stick.

But dreams, they rattle in the skull
like dice. Even now they return:
bony old men shaking the gate

with nowhere else to spend the night.

– Michael Mack

The gladiator Spartacus is credited with leading the largest slave uprising in the history of the Roman Empire. After his revolt was brutally crushed in 71 BC, over six thousand rebel slaves were crucified along the Appian Way.

"Spartacus Speaks" is a meditation in the voice of the gladiator after his death on the cross. First published in the Mississippi Valley Review, the poem will appear in the forthcoming anthology Legendary: Stories We Tell Today, Stories Our Children Will Tell Tomorrow.