Lucian’s afternoon seems the more diverting occasion. While Martial’s pair slug it out for survival, Lucian’s hero, Sisennes, aims for stardom. With his eye fixed on the 10,000-drachma prize, he jumps out of the crowd, takes the wager, declines his safety helmet, suffers a setback with an undercut to the back of his thighs and triumphs with a straight stroke through the gladiator’s chest. Whether this gallant blade or the plodding Old and Reliable were the normal fare, no one knows. Some men fought by the dictata, the numbered rules of the training school. Others aimed for stardom. There was probably a broad variety of death on offer. Few in Rome ever cared if public slogging and killing interfered with politics or trade. The gladiatorial contest was bigger than both, a burial ritual that became an entertainment, an entertainment that became a vote-buyer and a vote-buyer that became big business, a business which eventually summed up so much of what was Rome and what Rome would be remembered for.
There is a buzz of hip-hop from Carlo’s belt. He finds his mobile phone and frowns. Cristina has a problem. Or rather Cristina’s co-worker, Carlo’s second street artist, so far unmentioned, has a problem. This man is a Tutankhamun, a task of imitation that is easier, it seems, than being a Vergine. This new King Tut, despite relying on a fixed face mask and needing no powers of mime or movement, has been doing well – too well. Euros have been showering on this ill-sited symbol of pre-Roman Egypt. The official gladiators’ shop-steward has been getting nasty. The Mummy was getting nervous. What was Carlo going to do about it?
First, he was going to get rid of his new client. There was no time for Pompey’s theatre or an explanation of why precisely we should go there. You should get down the Appian Way to Capua Vetere (he stressed the ‘Vetere’ even more strongly than the ‘Capua’), the place from which Spartacus escaped, the place from which the road can truly begin.
II
ARICCIA to BENEVENTO
Via Appia, Ariccia
I am trying to stop the car as little as possible before Capua. The old Appian Way sets off like a stone arrow and makes the ancient route as easy as an autostrada. One by one the sites drop away in the rear-view mirror. Pine trees and monuments flash by. The Scipios’ tombs, rock-cut reminders of glories from before Spartacus was born, are a smudge of mural rouge. The memorial to Paezusa, beautician to the court of Nero, is the merest blur. The tower of Caecilia Metella, daughter-in-law of the richest man of the Republic, is a shadow. Far back in the distance is the Quo Vadis church and its marble footprints where St Peter saw his disembodied Christ. Just as ignored are the niches of brick where statues once contemplated the embalming of Priscilla, a former slave whose ‘modesty remained constant as her fortunes rose’. Priscilla and her mourning husband had a good friend in their poet Statius.
The bridge here at Ariccia is a traditional first resting place for travellers hurrying out of Rome. There is a domed church modelled on the Pantheon. There is a palace packed with the blackest paintings from the blood-and-suffering age of the Roman baroque. The surrounding monuments are of Julius Caesar’s family. For a traveller on the Spartacus Road the main attractions are memorials to the Horatii and Curatii brothers, Roman boys and plucky locals who fought a famous triple duel, three-on-three, in the mystic era of the Roman kings.
That ‘Horatii vs Curatii’ affair is the first spectacular of this route, a tiny spark from 250 years before the building of the Appian Way, one of the earliest Italian contests that became more than just a street brawl, a match with some significance and rules, one that meant more than other fights because so many people kept talking about it. No one knows the names of anyone who was there.
Even Livy, Symmachus’ favourite traditionalist, was not certain which side had been Roman and which for the opposition. There were no written records. The Romans later pretended that invading Gauls had burnt the sources of their history; but the words had probably never existed. No one knows if King Tullus of Rome was there or whether he ever was Rome’s king. But for centuries afterwards there were tourists at competing sites who felt that they had seen the fight between the three brothers Horatius and the three brothers Curatius. Their lives were somehow linked to its outcome.
What, more exactly, is a spectacular? From the Latin, spectaculum, say the dictionaries, a show, usually a public show, an attraction for the ‘carnal mind’, an object of public curiosity, contempt or admiration, often of blood but also of song and dance. Or a means of seeing, an opportunity, a front-row seat, a window, a mirror. Or a standard, an example to watchers of an event. Or an example to be passed on to those who have not seen it for themselves, a means of teaching, to angels or to men. Or a sport, a wonder, one of the world’s seven wonders, and then, descending blearily down columns of tiny type, something about phonographs and railway engines, a transparent shield over the eyes of certain snakes.
Spectacular is to spectacle as oracular is to oracle – lavish, amazing, strikingly large, addicted, addicted to spectacle. It is a figure in painted marble up high somewhere, the higher the better, in the oculatissimo, the place with specularity, the place most eyed. It is a play with actors in boots and ballooning togas, declaiming to the sound of flutes, disappearing down trapdoors, rope-walking between columns of red stone while scented water-streams cool and decorate the aisles. Roman politicians long distrusted the theatre; the first building in stone had been dismantled under pressure from the pious while it was still under construction; an edict was passed that one should never be built; but permanent theatre eventually came to Rome.
Castel Gandolfo, Ariccia
Or, to choose another version of the spectacular, the performing poet’s version: semi-naked women who knew nothing of the sword condemned to fight one another in the arena, Amazons playing the parts of men, pregnant dancers from the kingdom of Croesus, fist-fighting dwarfs, local girls for sale, corpse-eating cranes, dough-balls raining down on to the crowd. These sights are the first on the Spartacus Road to come from the pen of Statius. One of his own showiest triumphs took place a few hundred yards from here up the hill towards the summer house of the Pope.
The poet was writing about the Kalends of December, spectacular, bizarre games given by the homicidal god-emperor Domitian, successor and brother to the Emperor Titus who inaugurated the Colosseum. Killer freaks, killer birds, food to die for: ‘amid noise and novelties a spectator’s pleasure flies lightly by: hos inter fremitus novosque luxus Spectandi levis effugit voluptas’. There were Roman spectaculars for all tastes and times. The Alban literary games, celebrated here 1,900 years ago beside the mountain lake where the Pope has his holiday palace, included a poetry competition, an opportunity for highbrow performance art. On a games day the competitors would vie to impress the Emperor with carefully prepared improvisations while the statesmen of Rome would picnic on the steep banks of the crater, each with one eye on the poet and the other (their better eye if they were wise) on their master.
The less literary spectaculars were always the more popular. Statius was one of the grateful winners of that Alban poetry prize but gives us a vivid version of a people’s stadium show, a lower-brow occasion for birds to eat small but expensive men, for men to eat small but expensive cakes, and for slave-women of the Black Sea to take up gladiatorial swords in a snuff-movie mixture of female mud-wrestling and Rocky IV. Here too it was wise for spectators to watch the Emperor as closely as they watched the slave-dwarfs and duellistes. Were pregnant Lydians funny or not? Only one man at that time could safely say.
Statius was born around ad 45 near Capua in a Greek ghetto of Naples, one of the tiny parts of Italy where the pure Greek language survived. The Romans had mixed their Latin into most of the colonies that Athens, Corinth and Sparta had centuries before sent to Italy. Greek thought was deeply dyed into Rome from the earliest times, whatever Symmachus and his friends might have later tried to pretend. But a few neighbourhoods of the Italian south remained exclusively and resolutely Greek.
Poplios Papinios Statios, in the native version of his
name, was a child poet star, son of a poet scholar who ran a Greek school for Roman grandees. Statius’ literacy and learning were not the classroom-acquired kind of his father’s pupils. The poetry of Homer and the philosophy of Plato were in his first language. Statius was married to a fellow performer’s widow, a woman who looked after her daughter and the literary interests of both her husbands. He was a professional’s professional who personified the spectacular idea in art.
His main rival, the Spaniard Martial, is the poet of this time who is the more often read today. Martial wrote short, sharp sex scenes as well as paeans to the great, some pithy abuse of his enemies, and his turgid match commentary to open the Colosseum. He gives a dutiful account in his De spectaculis of how the greatest beasts of the natural world must kneel and fall before the Emperor. But his treatment of spectator sport was happiest when he moaned that his mistress liked to be watched while they were making love: ‘a spectator pleases you more than a lover since joys unseen are no joys at all: et plus spectator quam te delectat adulter; Nec sunt grata tibi gaudia si qua latent’.
Statius preferred the longer style. The extra words gave him more opportunities and surfaces to shine, and more cover for his back. He was a writer who polished every possible superficiality in an age when it was dangerous to dig too deep. A few hours with Statius is like a mind-sharpening shot of chemical in the skull. His subjects shine out from sharply lit edges. His golden crown for poetry, given to him in Ariccia by his emperor, was his perfect reward. The smallest jewels, fragments of marble, mosaic, metal, flash as though on giant screens.
Reliable about what happened in the Colosseum? Not wholly. He would not have quite understood what we meant had we asked him that. The knotted dwarfs and semi-naked swordswomen are there in his poem on the Kalends of December show, and then they are gone. They may have existed ‘in the flesh’. They may not. Women did fight as gladiators. Laws were passed to stop them, then ignored and passed again. No one knows how often they fought.
Sexual exhibitionism, random couplings in the street, beatings as an alternative or preliminary to sex: all were part of the earliest Roman games, however much anxious Romans tried to deny it. When the licence became too political, too radical, too encouraging to the disorderly, it was curbed, sometimes stopped, but never wholly lost. How amusing were those pregnant Lydians? It was perilous to predict. Domitian was not the first politician to want both to recall the past and to control it.
In the theatre there were favoured subjects for history plays: the ‘rape of the Sabine women’ was always popular, a foundation myth that was itself set at an early Roman gladiator show. Favourites for mythological dramas were the stories of beautiful Andromeda tied to her rock and other tales of naked nymphs pursued by gods and monsters. When did the rot set in? With Greeks and Celts and other alien imports or was it there at the start? Symmachus’ historians and their successors have every opportunity to argue among themselves on this Spartacus Road. Library disciplines need not always apply.
Statius would have had his own answers while being careful to whom he gave them. He was the great performer and the great spectator, ever on the lookout for new ways of describing the present and the past, a new show or statue, a new road or swimming pool, a pet eunuch or pet parrot. His listeners loved him. He had the crooner’s sweet voice. He toured like a rock star, competed like a sports star and, in reward for his skills, was stared at like all stars are stared at. His appearances were sell-outs. As soon as he had fixed a date, the tickets were gone. He sold his poems as party pieces to the Emperor’s favourite actors. He never made as much money as he had expected. But he was a success in his career and in his art.
Later readers looking for grand Roman ideals have never much liked Statius. He was a ‘silver age’ artist, an imitator and flatterer. He wrote quickly like a journalist, and was proud of his speed as a journalist is. He sometimes took longer in writing than he pretended to take, again like a journalist. For Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante and countless lesser writers he was a mine to be plundered. For travellers today who appreciate an artist’s eye on how their ancient road was built, on the statues in the roadside tombs, on what the gardens might have looked like, on what we might have seen when entertainers were killing each other, he is still a literary star.
‘See those untrained swordswomen, standing their ground, holding their lines, shameless in the battle roles of men: Stat sexus rudis insciusque ferri: Et pugnas capit improbus viriles.’ Statius was an especially self-conscious expert in the literature of fighting and killing, in death and in sport. His literary hero, Homer, had been first to put words to the world of war, Greek words. Statius knew about fist-fights, track-sweat and the butcher’s knife. He knew the jargon and used it. He had learnt at his father’s knee.
Killing was absolutely an art. It was a subject for argument and expert appreciation, for commentary and verbal conflict. At the Kalends we can imagine problems with those women fighters. Might they be a bit ‘amateur-night’ with their blades? Were they totally untrained or only half trained? As deadly as the male? Maybe. Their odds were harder to call. There was not the usual form book. It was all mere holiday-betting.
Death-dealing women were mythical monsters: ‘Like Amazons at war by rivers faraway: Credas ad Tanain ferumque Phasin Thermodontiacas calere turmas’. At games like this the fighters were not on show to be inspirational. A man could hardly look into a female face for spurs to his own courage. A dying Amazon or dwarf was something different from the standard fare, an alternative type of spectacular pleasure, a reminder of what would never happen to Romans, only to other people. ‘Other people’ were always needed to be looked down on and laughed at. When women fought in the stadium every man could be a know-all as well as a see-all. The feeblest fellow in the stands could puff up some critique of how the blonde from the Don blocked and parried, how the face of the River Rion missed her best chance to kill in the opening moments of the bout. Amazon style? Black Sea bravado? Enough to keep the men on the benches bantering for hours.
Those same male spectators could have argued too about the technique of the retiarius, the net-wielding fighter who battled without a helmet and whose eyes were always satisfyingly on show. He was one of the more traditional games characters. His art was to entwine sword and shield with yards of enveloping rope, to neutralise the gladiator in the same way that a fisherman netted carp or a hunter neutered the claws of a bear. But, in a few words about the warrior women, Statius projects more vivid possibilities than from any ordinary blood-on-the-sand bout. There was no point in the ordinary in the best of art or the best of death. A skilled pikeman was formidable but commonplace. Women with swords, some of them hardly knowing which end to hold, were different, much easier on male egos, not spectacular in the purest sense but potent.
When gladiatorial games began in Rome, most of the spectators had their own experience in wielding sword and shield: these first spectaculars were mere added education for the army. Then came the theatre of naval battles, fought by gladiator marines, designed to show to land-loving Roman citizens the new techniques of war at sea. The Romans used to flood stadia to make artificial lakes or use natural ones like those in the hills around here. Thousands of prisoners died in these demonstrations, and there are reports of at least one who killed himself, like Symmachus’ Saxons, to avoid his death by drowning.
By the time that Statius was writing, the need for mass military education had passed. Roman citizens now preferred other peoples to win their wars, concentrating on how to survive their own rulers as best they could. The known seas were uncontested except by the occasional pirate band. The spectaculars of Rome had found other purposes.
The most famous legacy of the age of Domitian is his invitation to terrified senators for a dinner party in total darkness, with coffins for tables, charcoaled slaves in naked attendance and silence except from the host. In the midtwentieth century it became fashionable to offer Domitian a little rehabilitation, to see him as a Roman King
John, a decent administrator who had ‘his little ways’ but was forced to wait too long for the deaths of Vespasian and Titus, his Colosseum-building father and brother. One of his remembered good deeds was to ban the castration of boy slaves; he was exemplary in his modest intake of food and drink. He collected statues of subjects other than himself: a violent mythological blinding and a vicious female monster survive from his gardens. He wrote poetry of his own and a textbook on hair care. ‘Able and intelligent’ was the mischievous verdict of an Oxford admirer in the 1920s. Statius’ vision takes us, cautiously, to the more traditional view, to the first of Rome’s self-styled gods on earth, to an erratic tyrant who filled every corner of the screen and was never quite satisfied with his exposure.
Domitian plays the divinely generous host on the Kalends of December. When his spectator guests grow bored with the female swordfights, there are other attractions, the parade of the pregnant Lydians, musicians and match-sellers, and those pot-bellied dwarf cohorts, so very keen to stop themselves becoming bird-food or kebabs. Even if these men and women of stunted growth did not have swords, they could throw a few good punches before the net-carriers scooped them up like forest pigs.
There are the most delicious items of food, some of it cooked and some of it, the pheasants and guinea fowl, still alive and flapping, available, like home-run baseballs, to be taken home by the lucky ones in the crowd who caught them. Domitian delivers everything – from the women-for-hire to the free figs from Ibiza. Popularity-seeking politicians once staged games to get the highest Republican offices. By this point in the imperial era only an emperor could produce anything as spectacular as this. He asks nothing in return. His sole intervention is to stop the crowd hailing him as their lord – while at the same time wanting them to do so.
The Spartacus Road Page 4