The Spartacus Road

by Peter Stothard

  Statius was a subtle man of this literary theatre, flexible and imaginative in projecting his images. Domitian’s beautiful boy favourite, Earinus, has his picture fixed shut in Cupid’s mirror (‘et speculum seclusit imagine rapta’), the first camera lens in literature. A statue of Hercules is small but a giant in its appearance: ‘parvusque videri, sentirique ingens’. A statue of Domitian on horseback exceeds the wooden horse of Troy in every way. Domitian was notoriously fussy about the weight of the statues of himself in gold. The poet knew that. He knew his emperor personally. The elder Statius had tutored them both. They had villas close by in these Alban hillsides that Pompey once owned. They even shared a water-supply connection, not a small matter when one of the heights of civilisation was the hottest bath. For his prize-winning Alban poem Statius stuck to the safest of all subjects, the glories of grinding down the Germans.

  This town of Ariccia, scene of that triumph, is only a first and very short stop on this Spartacus Road. There are some massive ivy-covered remains here of the Via Appia, the first great Roman highway, the one that slave-wagons, armies and fleeing poets all once took. There are no signposts to it now. Only the irregular limestone blocks, with the marks of thousands of chisels still on them, place it at the beginning of the age of roads. By climbing over fences into tomato fields, by vaulting over a rusted tractor and pushing down the barbed wire over the Valvoline grease guns in the grass, the traveller can get some small sense of how solidly and menacingly it once stood.

  The father of anthropology, James Frazer, began and ended The Golden Bough near here at Lake Nemi, Diana’s mirror as it was known, her speculum. In his twelve volumes of comparative myth he likened the local worship of the goddess to ceremonies of South Sea islanders, camel-herders and Aztecs. Long before Spartacus and long after Statius there was a killer priest here who lived a sleepless life in fear of the successor who had to fight and kill him in turn.

  At the bottom of Diana’s mirror-lake two large ancient ships were found by Mussolini’s archaeologists in the 1920s, to the excitement of scholars who had doubted whether Rome’s naval architecture had ever quite matched its road-building. These were true floating palaces and well proved their makers’ prowess with lead and timber. No local tribes had sunk them in a naval battle. These imperial vantage places – for blood-in-the-water sports and other pleasures – would have been a worthwhile destination in themselves had not German soldiers on 1 June 1944, exacting who knows what kind of Saxon revenge, burnt them to black ash.

  Via Appia, Foro Appio

  Ariccia long ago rose above its low origins. Domitian set a tone for his childhood and imperial home which lasted into the era of Symmachus, his Christian foes and beyond. The townscape in the rear-view mirror is papal, grand, palatial, baroque – with almost nothing left but the tomato-plantation bridge and a chalk grotto in its Chigi Palace to bring back the days when travellers, fresh out of dying Republican Rome, found only a single modest inn. Ask where that inn originally was, and the answer now is either a traffic island or the Flavio factory producing porchetta, the local pig delicacy. The porchetta option appears to have the greater support.

  This next stop, the gateway town into what for 1,500 years after the fall of Rome were the vast and open Pomptine Marshes, is less changed by time. Bernini and his seven-teenth-century designer friends did none of their business here in Foro Appio – which was wild in Roman times and is still wild today. A single bizarre ‘boutique hotel’ sits within a reclaimed swamp of agri-businesses, surrounded by telegraph poles, lead-blue sky and yelping birds. Only a few of the ancient watery paths remain: Mussolini removed most of the region’s stagnant mud when the creation of new Italian land became easier than conquering bits of Africa. But this small part can speak loudly and clearly enough for what has gone.

  The sludge beside the restaurant here passes under another bridge of the old Via Appia, smaller than that in Ariccia, equally unappreciated, noticed or cared for but clearly there. On the surface of the bright-green chemical slime squat frogs and turtles. There are comatose catfish in the watercress below, which the local boys catch as easily as from a tank of pets. Dragonflies dart above them. In the sky are crop-sprayers and herons; an owl flutters over the metal barn.

  On the other side of the road there is a granite-grey monument, a ring of prisoners in stone, a man with hands and a heavy weight behind his neck, a woman with a curved and crippled child whose head is not quite where a head should be. It is dedicated to victims of terrorism and cowers appropriately behind a garden hedge of bamboo, crowded by beer bottles, condoms and red-and-yellow vouchers for shoes.The Via Appia encourages long looks forward and back while distracting sideways or downwards glances. Behind is Rome. Ahead is Campania. That is all it needs to say. The man who built it was called Appius Claudius Caecus, one of the pioneering aristocrats who empowered Rome by giving power to its people, the first Roman with a firm place where myth without history merges into history with myths. He is a genuine founder and father of the city, the earliest individual of whom some sort of picture can plausibly be made: he promoted sons of freed slaves to the Senate and made the demigod Hercules the public hero of this Spartacus Road. In his later years he lost his sight. Today his most solid legacy still straddles the ancient waters here, rising barely perceptibly and barrelling on – past signs for mozzarella, palm trees and spruce, murdered innocents and size-three sandals, as though none of these newcomers were there, or would be there for long.

  Statius passed through Foro Appio on his trips between Naples and Rome without, as far as anyone knows, writing a word here. Perhaps there was no one to pay him or he was always in too much of a hurry. The conceit of his Silvae, as he called them, his ‘little bits of wood’, his ‘uncultivated forest’, was that they were rapid sketches, first drafts, and did not require an epic stay. The reality, as so often, was of longer, harder work.

  The subjects here could have tempted him. The clearing of muddy rivers was a favourite theme. He liked to write about the latest styles in villas and the means of making swimming pools. But he preferred imperial properties (a safer study for praise than any other) and a river not like the dirty Cavata here but the one closer to Capua itself, the Volturnus, whose very cleanliness he could credit to Domitian. The greatest road-building scheme of his emperor, ‘He who puts Peace back in place and inspects Heaven’s street-lights’, is also further south, the Via Domitiana.

  Foro Appio is better known for that earlier poet who lived closer to Spartacus’ shadow, Horace, pioneer in precise description as in so much else, who set here the first of his classic ‘why are we in this flea-pit anyway?’ passages – a later theme of many a grumbling Grand Tourist. Horace’s fifth satire, the ‘Journey to Brundisium’, is the world’s first piece of recognisably modern travel-writing, packed with dirt and discomfort, asides on food and sex, all against a background of big events to which he alludes without much confronting them. William Cowper is one of many English poets who have enjoyed translating it.

  ‘Egressum magna me accepit Aricia Roma’, Horace begins, escaping from a Rome still terrorised by the murder of Julius Caesar with an almost audible Latin shout of ‘I’m out of here: egressum’. Only a few years before, he had been on the wrong side of a civil war, fighting for Caesar’s killers. In what was probably his first poem, one of the two in which Spartacus appears, he deplored the horrific civil disasters that had befallen the whole idea of Rome. He had even suggested a mass exodus of good men to the mythic ‘Islands of the Blessed’, a paradise of nostalgia ruled by gods older than Jupiter, the volcanic Atlantic rocks of Tenerife and Lanzarote today.

  By the time of his journey to Brundisium he has found the right side, the side of Caesar’s adopted son. He is more relaxed about the future. He is adapting himself to the new official doctrine of progress – a fresh start for history. Ariccia ‘receives’ him in its ‘modest inn’ as he begins this much more agreeable poetic enterprise, sketching postcard pictures of places and people,
irritations and ejaculations, bad bread and better wine.

  The poet and his diplomatic companions take their canal barge towards Capua from Foro Appio. The immediate destination is the town of Anxur, perched ahead on its widely shining rocks: ‘impositum saxis late candentibus Anxur’ were Horace’s few sharp words, ‘perhaps the first time in the history of European poetry that so faithful and suggestive a picture was given’, the Oxford maestro professor, Eduard Fraenkel, wrote in one of my few well-used student textbooks. The whole trip of eyes-wide wonder would have been fine if the passengers and boatmen had not got sourly drunk, if the frogs and mosquitoes had allowed the poet some sleep and if the horse had actually moved the boat. In Horace’s day the town was crammed with cheating innkeepers and sailors, ‘differtum nautis, cauponibus atque malignis’, a verdict which requires a certain confidence if one is to inscribe it in large Latin letters around the walls of a chic designer bedroom. The owner of the single hotel in the town today has taken the risk. A celebrity Roman is better for a ‘boutique destination’ than no celebrity at all.

  This is my first time in this place where Horace set his scene of pioneer satire in around 38 BC, even though its familiarity from words and pictures makes that hard to believe. This has become a great egressum for me too. When I was a student in the 1970s, distracted into journalism, terrified of Fraenkel and awed by the massive quantity of classical literature, I read the Roman poets without ever travelling to where they lived and wrote. That was somehow what we were encouraged to do: to stick to the text and to the texts behind the texts; to note that Statius wrote an affecting and affectionate poem about his father, just as Horace had; to know that when Statius was cleaning rivers he was writing with Greek models in his mind; to note, with appropriate examples, how Statius wrote as a luxury-lover and Horace as an apostle of simplicity. No one needed to visit Naples or Rome to do any of that.

  Later, as a newspaper journalist, I travelled without reading or, at least, without reading anything much in Latin or Greek. The decent ‘classicist’, when I could call myself such a thing, concentrated on the elaborately interlocking words on his page. The reporter looks primarily for what no one has yet written at all. Between these two extremes of seriousness was a space I had never much visited, certainly not visited enough, a past in part impossibly alien but recognisable in flashes, a space now to make pictures out of words and faces out of diagrams and fragments.

  Horace and Spartacus both passed by here, some forty years apart. The poet, whose father had been a slave, was on a sensitive peace mission on behalf of the man who would soon become the first Roman emperor. The Thracian slave, whose father is wholly unknown, a nomad or a man from the Maedi tribe depending on how a particular piece of Greek is understood, was on his way to gladiator school in Capua from the auction blocks of the Roman Republic.

  The superficial symmetry of a thought like that appeals to the reporter more than the scholar. How does the scholar know that Horace was not imagining his stop in Foro Appio when he wrote his satire, or copying it almost completely from a literary model now lost? How does he know that Spartacus’ slave-wagon took the shortest and best road from Rome to Capua? He does not. But there are clues, in words as well as stones, more survivors from this age and place than from many that are nearer and closer. There is good material for imagination here. For all the proper historical scepticism in its proper place, some certainties can be sought and celebrated too.

  Tourists from London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries loved to read Horace, who was modest, witty, bold, almost British. They were not so keen on Statius, who was toady, terrified, too glossy, dangerously continental. Readers of ancient poetry then had, and still have, different perspectives, some based on places and others on time. The young have sometimes the better facility in reading the language, the greater naivety of imagination; the older have the better experience of what the writers were writing about. The best travellers have always looked to understand as much as they could from different ages in the past and their own different ages, a bit of linguistic argument here, a bit of imagination and compression there. This is a small experiment in doing the same, with the expectation that neither the scholar nor the reporter in me will be fully satisfied but with the feeling that both those masters have been served already quite enough.

  There is the lure of the gladiator on this trip too, not just the ghost of Spartacus but all the men and women like him who made the spectaculars of Rome. Like the best newspaper stories, the gladiator is always a ‘story’. Like every ‘good story’ in a newspaper it is good in both what is there and what is not there, what is known of it and what is not known. The idea of the gladiator has been squeezed into so many clichés over the centuries, rung in, wrung out, alien to modern experiences like so much of the ancient world, but somehow, once approached, perversely close.

  Curiosity about dying in its most visible forms is curiously addictive. Most of us face death before we are ready to face it. A fatal disease is a gladiatorial experience of a kind, a final appointment with a certain end at a near but not quite specified time. Cancer patients learn of bodily organs that they never knew they had, body parts that will kill them none the less. We imagine those deadly pieces of ourselves. We sometimes call them names. When I had a cancer, I called it Nero.

  At Foro Appio today the sludge beneath the bridge over the Cavata flows on. A white nutria rat climbs out beside a giant Australian eucalyptus, flicking the slime from its back. The fields on the banks are full of potatoes and artichokes and kiwi fruit. Below all these imports from around the world are relics that once bore the weight of thousands of Romans, tiles and amphorae, pots and plates, baked earth with sparks of shining silica, double panhandles in the shape of crouching dogs: hardcore for the first Via Appia, fresh erosions reaching daily from the river mud like limbs of the newly drowned.

  Piazza della Vittoria, Formia

  Seaside Formia, a few miles past gleaming Anxur on the Appian Way, was known 2,000 years ago as a wine-maker (only the most expensive wines) and as the home of Mamurra, an exceptional sexual and financial predator even by the standards of Julius Caesar’s engineering staff. Today fine wines are still grown from the pale sparkling sands, and drunk here over long lunchtimes like today’s when nothing stirs bar yellow-legged gulls, bees the size of meat-balls and a single harassed priest, sweating under a black cowl, muttering, shading his face in response to a request for directions. Mamurra? Yes, that bastard knew how to live. His house was still standing when the Germans came in 1943 and smashed it, marble by marble, to the ground.

  The churchman waits. We talk. He wants to show me the town’s tiny museum. When will it open? Maybe 4.00 p.m., maybe 5.00 p.m. He cannot wait. He suggests we share some Falernian later, the only original Roman grape in the world, he says. Avoid any wine from Sorrento, he warns, ‘noble vinegar’ an emperor once called it, a ‘very wise emperor’.

  At 5.30 p.m., when any of Italy’s vintages would be much more welcome than its antiquities, the museum door opens and then immediately closes, as though evening sun and evening tourists are equally unwelcome. Inside stand illlit statues of heavy Roman men, wary hosts with thick hands and hard lips, slender shadowed women with swinging hips and hands high in ritual greeting. Theirs is the only welcome. There is no sound at all. It is not so hard to imagine Julius Caesar’s road-man here, the local hero Mamurra who brought his billions home from Britain, Spain and Gaul (he had a fancy Caelian Hill house too), without doing much more for the cash than building a few bridges and, so the poet Catullus tells us, buggering his boss from time to time.

  Mamurra, I am thinking, would have been paunchy, puffyeyed, imperious, snapping his fingers, striking blows and poses alike. Here he is: a sodomite Romulus ‘superbus et superfluens … striding from bed to bed … swallower of anything he can see’. Sex with anything, sex with everything: that is the state your reputation reaches if you offend a poet like Catullus.

  It is not so very hard to imagi
ne others who lived here too when Spartacus passed by on his journey to Capua from Rome. It was the fashion then to carve men and women as they were, with warts and worse-than-warts and all. Families chose to remember their dead as they had lived, with chickennecks, bat-ears, hack-saw teeth, sandpaper complexions. Local sculptors may have exaggerated some of the grotesqueries: if the art market seemed to favour thick lips and boss eyes, there will be some lips more thickened and some eyes more bossed. But a visible truth remains.

  Curators claim to date quite precisely some of the centreparted hairstyles here. Some of the facial expressions in the busts, while they defy anyone’s precise dating, are recognisably those of the southern Italian rich of the Republican age, those like Mamurra, soft-faced men who did well out of the wars. Others look angrier, suggesting somewhat humbler citizens, a junior religious official like my new friend or a small farmer, faces of a fragile provincial community, not quite worthy of a life-sized statue. Even after so many centuries a man with fat eyes and hair over his ears seems still ablaze and outraged – at some slight or scandal perhaps, a murder, an uppity slave, a lost contract, or merely that he himself is so undeniably dead.

  There is a certain sense of parsimony in the faces of the buyers preserved here in stone. This is not a museum of great art but a place to meet the ordinary, the men and women who were spectators of Spartacus and his kind. As well as images of themselves, they collected lamps and ornaments decorated with gladiator motifs. Thousands survive of these pottery figures – some in silver and bronze – with their spears, nets, emblazoned helmets and blank faces. A carved or moulded head of any individual? Only the most ambitious imagination could find such a thing in Formia or anywhere else. What did the soon-to-be famous gladiator look like in his Capua school? There was no demand at all for statues of rebel slaves.