The Glorious Ring

With the sun rising at his back in his final year of life 133 BCE, Tiberius Gracchus gingerly stepped away from the complex catacomb and onto the most Divine edifice ever known to man. This angle of The Roman Coliseum looked and felt quite different than he had imagined. Surely, he thought, there was a gravitational pull coming from the hardened dirt beneath him, imploring his calloused feet to grip the earth for reasons unknown. As if the coliseum had a mass one billion times the murky roads he grew accustomed to walking in his birthplace of Frascati. The complete silence of the now empty Roman temple was deafening.

At 30 years old Tiberius felt lucky. For one he had well surpassed the average lifespan of his fellow plebians. He’d witnessed friends die of malnutrition, disease, and war. In the last year he’d befriended 2 Macedonian slaves plucked from their army as prisoners, meeting their demise in the confines of the ring. It seemed everyone around Tiberius accepted this plight of others as glorious, seeming even pleased with the narrative of destiny. But this bothered him immensely and he wasn’t sure which was worse, the people’s embrace of this narrative, or his inability to question it amongst them.

Tiberius wanted desperately to debate what chance those men had to lead a different life. He anguished at the lack of interest others showed in considering the perspective of slaves. For anyone willing to listen, Tiberius wondered: why accept as preordained destiny, the slaughtering of innocent men against their own will?  And who the fuck decided having one’s life taken in front of thousands of people was somehow virtuous, glorious, or dignified anyways?

Tiberius was always a curious soul eager to explore life and the things it presented him. His combination of imagination, rich experiences, memory, and verbal skills gave him confidence  from a young age. However, later in life even the people he’d consider his closest friends didn’t quite seem to understand this curious disposition. He often wondered where he fit in the greater terrestrial puzzle others seemed to ignore.

Even with this uncertainty, Tiberius didn’t give up on human connection. On the contrary he felt an innate need to help humanity and see the best in people, even when he wasn’t sure they were capable of the same in return. He found particular warmth and connection in his mother. She had always seen strength in him when others couldn’t. Most importantly to Tiberius, she wasn’t stymied in her ability to produce original thought in contradiction to the Roman Republics reach.  His favorite example of her faith in him was evidenced by the fact that she kept a scroll from his childhood literator describing him at age five. She often recited a passage for him; Tiberius made strong connections with a number of friends but can be frustrated when others aren’t able to express their ideas as quickly as he’d like.

“This is your gift”, she’d remind him. “You see things others can’t. Just remember, no matter your differences, your existence does not run parallel to those around you, it is intertwined with them”.

And so at age 30, and with his mothers advice thoroughly etched into his ethos, Tiberius found himself perched atop the office of the tribune of the plebs, representing his people and their freedoms even if they didn’t always take notice. In his current undertaking, he was responsible for uniting the poorest of his society by seeking to redistribute public land to the people. Now, he could only assume the nature of his visit to the glorious ring, was one of honor and recognition by the Senatorial class.

As he stood for the first time in his life on that patch of dirt, he embraced how grateful he was for taking a gladiator’s perspective - under drastically different circumstances of course. The men standing at the center of these pits never had the luxury of time. The only certainty they had ahead of them was death.

Unbeknownst to Tiberius, his time in the ring would, in fact, mimic those who came before him.

……As he struggled to regain footing whilst being violently clubbed by the men of the senatorial class, time did an interesting thing and slowed to a near halt. Pain and panic were replaced with sensations previously unknown. Intertwined in his thoughts, were the lives of men and women past, present, and most oddly future. It felt as if time had both stopped, and been accelerated at an infinite pace all at the same time. Tiberius was sure he had entered an altered plane of existence. One where all humanity communicated as one. It was the most beautiful place of unadulterated thought he had ever been. The place he always imagined he’d traverse if he were ever lucky enough to find another human who saw his existence, as he did for himself.

A black hole was sucking everything he’d ever known into it including the colosseum.

As he was taking his last few breaths in his mortal life, Tiberius couldn’t help but wonder if the gravitational pull he felt in the presence of the Glorious ring was in fact, simply the grip his government had on his people. He wondered whether his actions had somehow just released them of it.

He wouldn’t live to see it, but Tiberius’s death would spark a century of civil unrest within the Roman Empire, and reset the fabric of the human race for centuries to come.