Lucius Antullius usually didn’t take his fourteen-year-old son, Cotta, out on deliveries, but his slave, Aule, had been conscripted into the army being raised to march into Spain, and the iron-clad shields Lucius, the armorer, had been commissioned to forge to be used by the gladiators in Rome’s colosseum were too heavy for him to carry on his own. As it was, the boy, small and slender for his age, couldn’t manage more than two of them, but that was enough for Lucius to meet the order. It was a dangerous time to take a boy as beautiful as Cotta out on the streets of Rome. Preparing for a military campaign and the gladiator games under way in the colosseum had the juices of the men of Rome up and the reign of the current emperor, Gaius Julius Caesar, better known as Caligula, was so free-wheeling and decadent that boys like Cotta were being whisked off the streets and onto the couches of Caligula and his friends.

Lucian hadn’t meant to take Cotta this far into the center of the city. He had first taken the shields to the Gruppo Storico, the gladiator’s school, on the Via Appia Autica, not far from the family’s home and forge, but when he got there, he was told that games were on for the day at the colosseum near the Forum and that the new shields were needed there. So, it was off to a more dangerous area of the city in which to take a boy the likes of a young Apollo.

Lucan Metellus Janius, the master of the gladiators, though, was Lucius’s principle client and when he said he needed the shields today, he meant he would have the shields that day. More than needing to deliver the shields, though, Lucius needed to receive pay for them. He had spent the previous month expending nearly all of the materials he had on hand to meet his share of the armaments order for the army leaving for Spain—but serving the demands of the army did not come with immediate payment of his fees. Lucius needed an infusion of money, or his business would go under. His restock of iron was on the sea, but it was overdue to arrive.

It was this worry about keeping his business afloat and the rough time he had with Lucan Metellus Janius on payment when he and Cotta delivered new shields to the stone-clad bowels of the Roman Colosseum, where the gladiators and sacrificial animals and humans were kept during the games going on in the filled stadium above their heads, that made Lucius lose track of his son. As Lucius and Lucan dickered over payment, with Lucius following the gladiator master around the warren of subterranean stone chambers under the colosseum stands as Lucan controlled the coming and going of the gladiators and the rotation of warriors, animals, and human victims to and from the ring of sport, Cotta was left to stand over the delivered shields.

... To be forgotten by his father after Lucius said, “Watch these shields until the provisioner comes to take possession and then run down to the harbor master at the Emporium to see if there’s any word of our supply ship arriving at Ostia. But be careful. Do not make a spectacle of yourself in the streets. These are wild times. Do not walk in the dark. If it takes you too long to get news of the supply ship at the river port, go to the house of the apothecary, Metellus Janus Statius, our friend, and lodge there until it is light again.” Lucius then spun away in Lucan’s wake, giving him the thousand and one reasons Lucius needed his fee for the new shields now.

Emporium was the river port on the Tiber river between the Aventine Hill and Rione Testaccio, where goods came up from the seaport of Ostia on the Mediterranean.

Lucius wasn’t so solicitous of the purity of his son, Cotta, from any special regard for the boy’s feelings. Cotta was a third son, the other two already at work in pounding out iron and melting it to cover wooden cores for shields. Cotta was being protected so closely because, as a particularly beautiful young boy and one not needed in the family business, he was a commodity for adding to the Antullius family wealth or its power in the city, or both. Cotta was an opportunity. He could go to the priesthood, which would enhance the family’s standing. He was so comely, though, that, in this age of Caligula and his open excesses, Cotta could go to the bed of a powerful general or senator or he could go into one of the more refined male courtesan houses. The latter possibilities seemed the most likely and it was to this possibility that the boy was being trained into the arts of lying with and pleasing a man—but only in theory and with limited implements so far. If Cotta was to go to a rich man or a house of pleasure, he would need to go there unused and unsullied.

Even if the times weren’t as hedonist as they were in the reign of Caligula, it was recognized procedure in those days in Rome to follow the Greek custom of refined and powerful men taking comely young boys into their service at table and in bed as part of a mentoring process of maturing the boys into refined and powerful men themselves later in life—ones maturing into men who married and produced children of their own, while, at the same time, being able to mentor boys by taking them into their own service at table and in bed.

The provisioner didn’t come to take possession of the shields soon enough. Young, small, slender, and beautiful boy Cotta was left in a corridor where gladiators were preparing to go out into the colosseum to kill or be killed or were just returning in high bloodlust of having survived their time in the arena. It was a time of high lust for these magnificent, virile-bodied men in their sexual prime.

“And what sweet morsel do we have here?” said one hulking gladiator clad only in leather-slat skirting, called a fustanella, and sandals laced up to his knees as he came out to check on whether there was a more serviceable shield in this new shipment that had arrived then the one he had. He had but an hour before he was to enter the arena and fight his lion. He was all keyed up with blood lust, the emphasis on the “lust”.

Cotta rose from his crouched position over the stack of shields he was instructed to watch and, seeing the blood lust in the muscular, cruel-looking gladiator’s eyes, he started to move away, in the direction from which he’d heard his father’s voice, wheedling the gladiator master for payment as they moved farther into the dark bowels of the basements under the colosseum stands. But he wasn’t quick enough or decisive enough.

The gladiator reached out with a leather-clad forearm, wrapped it around the boy’s waist, hauled Cotta off his feet, hoisted him under a beefy arm, and carried him into the darkness of the gladiator preparation and waiting cells. The boy’s cries of violation echoed through the cavernous stone chambers, not bringing help, but gathering other interested and keyed-up gladiators. Cotta was pushed down on his belly on a stone table, his legs dangling off one end and his arms off the two sides, as the gladiator held him down with a fist to the small of his back, ripped the boy’s loincloth under his fustanella off, knelt behind him, and pushed his face between the boy’s plump buttocks cheeks.

The gathering gladiators, nervous for their coming turn in the arena, and full of need and lust, stood around and cheered as Cotta cried out and sobbed when the gladiator who had brought him to this cell saddled up behind the lad, mounted him, penetrated the untried-by-cock hole with difficulty but with great interest, and fucked the boy to a seeding.

The crowd was uncontrollable, and when one gladiator was finished, he gave way to the next, and then the next, and the next one after that. None cared for any consequences. None knew if the boy was of consequence or not. He was handsome and small and slim, and he had a sweet hole and channel, and he was fresh and unused—although less so with each gladiator who moved between his spread thighs, held his legs raised and spread with fists grabbing ankles, and mounted and breeded him.

They were going into the ring, many of them not to come out alive, few of them not coming out wounded and maimed. This was their chance at total pleasure between the thighs of a luscious young boy. They made the most of it.

As their numbers dwindled from being called to take their time in the arena, the survivors from arena-appearances before, even more lusting in blood from mortal combat in the colosseum and loaded for action drifted into the cell. The last one to enter, a giant of a black man everyone called The Ethiopian, who was so fierce and intimidating that he was a veteran of the arena and had never bowed to a foe there, brushed the others hovering around the semiconscious young Cotta away. He turned the boy over onto his back on the stone table. Cotta struggled up to being propped up on his elbows to see what man now was presenting between his legs. There had been so many that he now no longer cared—or he thought he didn’t.

But when Cotta saw the height and the bulk of the black gladiator standing between his legs, one massive hand under Cotta’s tailbone, raising his pelvis up and the other hand stroking a jet-black erection of huge proportions, the boy’s eyes rolled back into his head, his elbow props gave way, and he fell back on his shoulder blades. He gave a little cry and jerked and then jerked again and again, digging his fingers into the edges of the stone table, as the black bull of a man thrust inside him—and then thrust again and again and fucked him and fucked him and fucked him.

Cotta lay on the stone table until it grew dark in the cell and he no longer could hear the cheers and jeers of the spectators in the colosseum above his head. Then, with a groan, he rolled over and sat up. He’d survived the assault by countless rough men. He’d done so because he’d been in training for something like this for some time, through the use of a lubricated stone phallus. He’d never felt the real thing before and certainly not from many men in succession.

But it was done now—not that he’d tell his father what had happened. If it were known that he was used goods now—many times over—there was no telling what his father would do with him. It might be a common brothel just to get him away from the family’s dinner table. It might be more of the same Cotta had just received—just not from men as fit as these gladiators were. In some ways, Cotta could feel some pleasure from this. It was what he had become inclined to and was being trained for. Even if he was going to the priesthood, he would be lying under men—other, more senior and dominating priests.

There just had been so many men, so many penetrations and breedings.

With a groan, Cotta put his sandaled feet on the stone floor and pulled himself erect. He was sore and bruised all over. And his mind wasn’t thinking straight. He knew he was supposed to go somewhere from here—his father had commanded it—but other than having some sense of the direction he was supposed to take—toward the Tiber River—he wasn’t sure. He didn’t remember that he wasn’t supposed to roam the streets in the dark. And it was dark now.

There were buckets of water nearby that were used to sluice down the gladiators when they returned from the arena. Cotta quick stripped, dumped a bucket of water over his head, retied his loin cloth around his loins, pulled on his skirt, and, shaking his head to stop the buzzing—not completely successfully—stumbled out of the gladiator cells.

Somehow he remembered the name Statius and something about lodging there if it was dark. The river port, the Emporium, flitted through his brain and he knew that the family friend, Metellus Janus Statius, the apothecary, lived on the Via Galvani in the Testaccio section toward the Emporium. Metellus had always been very nice and attentive to Cotta when he had come to dinner at the Antullius house, so, leaving the now quiet colosseum, Cotta stumbled toward the river on the Via Galvani.

Cotta made it to Metellus’s door without incident and fairly fell into the doorkeeper’s arms there. When he was taken to the apothecary, Metellus immediately discerned what had happened to Cotta. The physical evidence was clear to one accustomed to seeing it. Metellus was both disappointed that he had not been first—he and Lucius had been going back and forth on the possibility of and fee for that—but he also was both relieved that Cotta had lost his virginity to men and thus could be had cheaper now and pleased that the boy had come to his doorstep.

“Come, lad,” he said. “You look totally done in. You must rest before you tell me what you have come for and what has befallen you on the way. I will show you to a bed and will give you something that will help you to sleep.”

The concoction that Metellus had to help Cotta sleep, something special of his own mixing that he used to control boys he debauched and ravished, put Cotta more into a yielding trance than into a sleep. The boy was aware of everything Metellus did with him, but he was in a state in which he didn’t much care—in fact enjoyed it—and couldn’t have defended himself if he did care. Metellus wasn’t as rough as the gladiators had been and he was more attentive to the boy receiving pleasure as well as he did.