Chapter Four
City of Ephesus—west coast of modern Turkey—Roman Empire—AD 99
There were two kinds of Roman men: the ones who lived in search of Gloria and the ones who lived in search of bona fortuna. Arria’s father was the second kind. No matter what family crisis or holy ritual, what call of duty or act of the gods, nothing could keep him from the fighting pits and that was where she found him the night he sold her freedom.
‘No women allowed,’ growled the guard, standing at the entrance to the pit-viewing area. ‘Unless you want to do me a favour?’ He gave himself a rude scratch, then flashed Arria a wine-stained grin.
‘Go to Hades,’ she told him, and in the split second of his astonishment she slipped past him into the rollicking crowd. There must have been two hundred men gathered on the slope before her—portly merchants and seafaring traders, oily-haired plebeians and watchful freedmen, even a smattering of patricians—all vying for position around the large gladiator training pit known as the Chasm of Death.
Arria scanned the men’s torchlit faces, searching for her father. She told herself that it was possible he was not here at all. There was a chance that he had been on his way to the fighting pit that evening and been struck by a bolt of reason.
I am an honourable pater familias, Arria imagined him realising. I should not continue risking my family’s survival on the uncertainties of bets.
Arria almost laughed. As if her father were capable of such Aristotelian logic! No, he was here, as was every other corrupt gambler in the province. The fighting pits of Ephesus were as popular as they were bloody and the Chasm of Death was the largest and bloodiest of them all. The only hope now was for Arria to find her father and seize his purse before the damage was done.
A shell horn moaned. A ringmaster’s voice resounded from below. He was introducing the next set of gladiators—a Dacian and a Berber, whose heights and weights he announced first in Latin, then in Greek. Nearby, a Jewish man echoed the information in Aramaic and Arria thought she heard someone say it again in the Armenian tongue. Second only to Alexandria in influence, Ephesus was the most important commercial centre outside of Rome—a place where people from every corner of the world gathered to live and trade. They spoke different languages and worshipped different gods, though Arria doubted any kind of god was present in this bloody place.
Keeping out of the torchlight, she stalked along the edge of the crowd in search of her father’s stooped form.
The fight below commenced. Arria could hear the metallic clang of weapons and the grunts of effort as the gladiators began their bloody brawl. The Chasm of Death was the training ground of Ephesus’s largest gladiator school and several times a year its owner, Brutus, would invite spectators to place their bets on fights between old or unpromising gladiators in an effort to clean out his stock.
It was a twisted, bloody business and one which the idle and desperate
