The Spartacus Road

by Peter Stothard

  How had the escape happened? Laxity? Treachery? Leadership? Probably a bit of all three: tired guards, tip-seeking food-sellers, high fences with gaps of decay, not so different from the view this afternoon. The surviving bits of exposed wall from the first century BC, like all Roman walls, look strong enough to hold an army of gladiators. Little economy was used in this construction. The sections beside the card-players are thick enough to have held men and beasts and a naval lake. But there will always be human error.

  The couple from Seoul, each with the same bifocal spectacles, are dissatisfied with their guides and guidebooks. The man has short brown hair, straight cut across his forehead, and a face more metallic bronze than brown. He is a doctor. While touring the site I have heard him talking about bone disease and broken toes as though he had asked to see some fallen arches and been surprised to see so much marble. This is not the kind of study he likes; it lacks certainty, even plausibility; and, to judge from his dark-eyed yawns, it lacks interest too. The woman has high cheeks and lighter hair cut close to her scalp. She is a teacher. She is the one who admits to the reasons they are here, her plans for illustrated lessons in ‘great sites of history’ for her students back home. Her notebook questions are as neat as the inscription on a gravestone.

  Surely the gladiators would have been chained at night, locked down in the tiny cells that she could see underneath the massive circular arena? Were they allowed to sleep with their weapons? She thought not. The moment that a trained killer was given his sword, just before he set foot on the sand, would have been the most dangerous of all. A gladiator might wake at night, fighting from his sleep, screaming from his dreams. But in his dormitory cell he would have nothing with which to end a real life – either a guard’s or his own.

  So how had it all begun? There was no public inquiry at the time of the escape. There were private inquiries down in the underground pits, place of the rack and the whip. But no notes survive of those. All the big questions would be asked later. Among the Vespas and electric wheelchairs, parked above the place where it all is said to have happened, those questions are still occasionally asked – and unreliably answered.

  The break-out began with kitchen knives and skewers. There was a plan, a betrayal, a bit of luck and, before the guards could regroup to stop the insurrection, it was too late. Some two hundred gladiators had planned to take part. About seventy succeeded in absconding beyond the gates. Outside in the narrow streets the escapers found a wagon of the very same theatrical weapons that they had been trained to use in the arena. With these they beat back the assault of the betterarmed local militia. With new armour, stripped from the bodies of this Capuan Home Guard, they moved out towards the countryside. They had exchanged their butchers’ blades for soldiers’ swords in three rapid moves. Then they needed a decision about what was to happen next. What to do? Where to go? Who was in command?

  At the first official consideration of these events, at first light next morning in the summer of 73 BC, it was merely the Capuan gladiator school which had the questions to answer. Like Symmachus’ show 466 years later, it had lost some of its stars. But the questions were hardly huge. The shows would go on, and could go on. Even when the full scale of the escape was clear, the problem for the games promoter would not seem as great as that confronting his sometime pupils. The missing men were mostly new arrivals from Germany and Gaul, prisoners traded for other prisoners, prisoners of tribes first captured far beyond the Danube, prisoners-of-war, knowing nothing of Capua, speaking a little Latin perhaps but happier in languages used hundreds of miles away. They would not get far. The incident could not have seemed a catastrophe – more a minor schedulers’ issue for those planning the next weeks’ entertainments.

  If any of the missing men had been promised to the great games shows of the capital the predicament would have been more pressing. The promoters of Rome sometimes paid the Capuans in advance, watching their property grow fit and oiled like absentee racehorse owners until their time was ripe. If they had noticed Spartacus, they might object that he was no longer there. More probably they had not.

  Lentulus Batiatus’ remaining fighters would just have to be spread more thinly through the running order and the order book. There was always a market for something a bit different; it was a matter of imaginative showmanship. Some men might have to fight twice, switching costumes and weapons, short shields for long, round for rectangular, scimitars for spears, anything to make the second half of the afternoon look different from the first. That was almost routine.

  Some of the plotters left behind would have been doubly unlucky. The guards needed to put a plausible number to the rack and rod. Even if the school-owner might resent the separation of good fighting arms from their sockets, the waste of flesh which might never heal, he needed to explain himself to the public officials.

  What did the escapers do next? The torturers would have asked that same question. What was the plan? Who was in charge? Where did the rats intend to go? However cruelly the questions were posed, Lentulus Batiatus is unlikely to have put much store by the answers. The Romans were neither credulous nor subtle appliers of pain. They believed in the power of fear and example. They did not believe that the tortured told the truth.

  This ‘where next?’ question is the same one that the scholastic Koreans are asking of the Capuan gamblers now. In which direction did the killers go? Which direction does the Spartacus Road take? Most travellers to the Capua Vetere amphitheatre are easier for the locals to satisfy. Most are like those in Rome, Carlo’s customers, the ones who come with Kirk Douglas and Russell Crowe in their minds – or even a faint image of Louis-Philippe’s Foyatier from the Louvre. The books and postcards on sale in the ticket booth suggest a regular clientele keen to pay brief homage to film stars forced to kill each other for fat emperors.

  The entry-ticket for the Capua stadium allows entry also to a grunting ‘Silenzio! Silenzio!’ son-et-lumiere in the fifty-year-old Museo dei Gladiatori. A waxwork lion stands before a sturdy netman. The sand is scattered with simulations of blood and weaponry. After the scratchy pleas for silence come roars from beasts and crowd, the most decorous whimpers of death and a pervasive appeal for sympathy to all concerned. Only a few visitors see even this display, mostly while they make mobile-phone calls in the shade.

  For the Korean couple, arguing softly now into their individual copies of the Guida della Città, the appeal of this fair-ground fodder seems particularly low. Would I like to join them, asks the woman, thin lipped as she moulds the words, sharply dressed in coral red, exuding a manic energy that these sands can hardly have felt since the games ended. Are we even sure that this is Spartacus’ school? Might all the guides be wrong? The husband, dampening down the fringe over his forehead, looks on with a cooler welcome. He is wondering perhaps whether an English addition to their day might allow them to concentrate on something else, gauzeeyed lizards, sub-tropical insects, insanitary housing, water closets ancient and modern, all subjects on which there is ample evidence all around.

  Examination of the gladiators’ options is what his wife most wants. This is the only site here that looks like a school for the arena. This has to be the right place. So where were the escape routes? Where were the battles waged? She has already been to the sites of 218–216 BC where Hannibal fought. She is fresh from the killing fields of Cannae, contesting the precise numbers of Roman dead as though their bodies were still warm. She is single-minded, carefully carving the letters on to her pages, and not easily to be stopped.

  The stones are hot. A scent of crushed mint rises from every footstep. The bushes bulge with tiny birds taking shelter from the sun. Shiny pigeons, brown moths and ragged butterflies are the only creatures brave enough to be visible. All that, if nothing else, is little different, we agree, from what it looked and sounded like 2,000 years before.

  The amphitheatre is like a broken bowl. It is not Batiatus’ but five circles of walls built by the Emperors Augustus and Hadrian on the sam
e site and pillaged for bricks by everyone who lived after the fall of Rome. Just two of its eighty arches are upright. The water tanks can no longer turn the sands into a lake. There are no more lifts to haul men, animals and mountain scenery from the underground store, only the holes where Mussolini’s men found bones of antelope, elephant and tiger. Even when this Colosseum was first opened for business (with or without a triumphant poem by a Spaniard or a Greek) its jagged evening shadows would have looked like a ruin. Inside it now, we can try, as far as we can, to mix present and past, see what slips away and what stays, find what we might know.

  There is an age of time this afternoon. There is always an age of time among the card-players by the amphitheatre kiosk. Carlo in Rome had been anxious I might find the wrong place, the newer Capua of designer wine-bars, big business and Catholic churches, the other Capua in the river bend that was the safer refuge from the Saracens in the early Middle Ages. But this is absolutely the place he called home, the town which lost its glory well before its people, a place from which an ambitious guide, even an ambitious Spartacus guide, might reasonably flee. This is like a seaside resort where even the sea has fled. It is hard to count the passing of the hours at all.

  Corso Aldo Moro, Santa Maria Capua Vetere

  We all three of us have maps by which to walk. Theirs are Korean atlases of Italy – with lines of oriental letters cross-hatching an already complex web of paths. Mine, less useful except for exercises in imagination, is the appropriate page of the Barrington Classical Atlas – an American work which shows only what its editors know was there in ancient times. Their maps from Seoul are palimpsests of motorway upon battle site, spidery nets, perfect for tour planning. My map is a mass of pink-and-green open space.

  We can decide to use their folded encyclopaedias of facts, interlocked, webbed and linked and perfect snares for capturing any preferred part of the past, modernising, motivating, masking. Or we can prefer the teeming emptiness of ancient Campania and the emptiness of what is known, absolutely known according to lofty Barrington standards, about what happened here 2,000 years ago.

  We take my map first. How does it work? Korea does not feature on classical atlases. I cannot be polite by starting with the shapes most familiar. So I start as a British traveller, pointing out the British islands. We begin high in Orkney, which the ancients barely knew except through the reports of a certain Pytheas, a man from Marseilles whom not everyone believed. Then a quick slip down the east coast of Britannia, noting that the Wash seems to have been broader and that a large chunk of Kent was accessible only by sea. By now we have missed York, Roman Eburacum, which, if I were not trying to think like Symmachus, would be the site of the most important event ever to happen on British soil, the acclamation of Constantine as emperor of Rome and the man who would put Christianity at the heart of his state.

  Geography seems much the most reliable friend on a road trip back in time like this one. What has always been there? What is new? Leap to where Paris is today and we find a place called Lutetia, no big, bold-lettered capital city at the time when Caesar was dividing Gaul into three parts or when it was favourite home for the Emperor Julian (that ‘good’ emperor for pagans such as Symmachus) who tried briefly to undo what Constantine had done. Turn a page and fly over to Bohemia (were the ancient Bohemians ‘bohemian’? There is a mildly obscene passage by the playwright Plautus, writing well before the time of the Capuan escape, which suggests that they might have been) or, if we want to get immediately to the Spartacus Road, rather than zig-zag as the atlas sequence encourages, go southwards to Rome, then further south to where we are now.

  The range of these luxurious, pale-pink-and-green pages covers the full extent of the classical world: my trip that begins above the Scottish Highlands can end in Spanish Bilbilis where Martial was born or on the plains of the Upper Nile. After Samosata, home of Lucian, our second swordfight reporter at the beginning of this journey, we can leave Roman Syria for Sardis and follow the Persian wanderings of Xenophon’s ‘Ten Thousand’ until they sight their first familiar waters and shout, ‘Thalatta, Thalatta, the Sea, the Sea’; and we can make the whole trip without disturbance from what has grown up along the way since the death of Symmachus and his world.

  We can leave Rome by the Appian Way, as Spartacus did when he was first sold to Capua, and follow the poet Horace’s route to Brindisi, the diplomatic mission that he describes in his fifth satire. The maps do not show the noisy frogs, lazy boatmen and fraudulent innkeepers, but at least we can see the way clear from the clutter of succeeding centuries. We can follow Spartacus through victories and defeats without the hopes of Voltaire, Marx, Garibaldi and Hollywood. These are magic maps.

  Yes, the Koreans agree. But their modern maps, with the political and archaeological scribbles, are more useful. A few minutes away, in the middle of the first century BC so their scribbles show, was a small businessman’s home. In 1995, while excavating new foundations, workmen found much older ones, the domed rooms and mosaic floors of a house beside the Appian Way belonging to Publius Confuleius Sabbio, a cloak-maker. That is ‘more useful’ to us. That much is agreed.

  After more than an hour of sipping cold waters and gritted coffees we decide that Spartacus must have considered an exit from Capua along the pavement where we are sitting, the Corso Aldo Moro, formerly Corso Umberto I, formerly Corso Adriano, formerly Via Appia. It was, and is, the best road out of town. It had shops like Sabbio’s, not heavily protected like those of the rich, not worthless like those of the poor, the perfect place for plunder. And yet, did he choose that way or another way? North, south, east, west. The air is filled with the hot salt smell of old men shelling mussels for their restaurant. The discussion ebbs and flows, pleasurably, methodically, endlessly, like the sea that is not even here.

  Both of the Koreans are staring down through their lenses. They look like a pair of choristers pretending to pray but they are concentrating hard. This part of the Via Appia is a central section of the Spartacus Road. It was built almost two hundred years before the gladiators’ escape, at a time when Rome’s grip on the lands to its south was still insecure, when some of the local towns were reliable allies and some were not, and its role was to ensure that no revolt against Rome could ever take place again. It was the symbol of Roman power over its backyard – the whole peninsula newly known as Italy – as well as a very solid fact, a metaphor as well as mile after marching mile of square-cut stones and squat bridges like those by the lakes of Ariccia and at Foro Appio where the marshes and malaria began.

  The Appia was straight where it could be, sinuous where it had to be, wide enough for a cart of wine jars going one way to pass a senator’s carriage going the other, a wonder of the world in its day. This was the road that the gladiators saw as they arrived at the amphitheatre wherever they were arriving from. For most free Capuans in Spartacus’ time it meant trade and money. The ornate floors of the cloak-maker’s house, with its flower-and-leaf designs and florid descriptions of ownership, are vivid reminders of that. This was where Publius Confuleius Sabbio presided over his business in heavy woollen uniforms for soldiers and slaves. This would have been a house of hope and pride in dangerous times.

  For a few older Capuan families the Via Appia was still a sharp reminder of lost independence, the catastrophe that came upon their forefathers who had supported Hannibal in the Carthaginian’s bid to destroy Rome more than a century before. The history of Capua had long been one of alternating alliance and enmity with its rival on the Tiber. In 308 BC the two cities had fought side by side against the Samnites. Even then Livy sniffed at how the Capuans had celebrated the joint victory with gladiators fighting in enemy armour beside their dinner tables. Other writers added details of blood and wine stains mixed amid the rich Capuan food.

  Capua had disgraced itself in Roman eyes by backing Carthage. The Second Punic War, the conflict which began with Hannibal’s elephants crossing the Alps, had threatened the Republic for more than a decade. Capua�
�s only gift to Rome was that it had also smothered Hannibal’s warlike instincts. This had been such a beautiful and luxurious city in those days that it became the Carthaginian general’s ‘second fatherland’. The man who killed 50,000 Roman soldiers in a single day at Cannae suffered his own ‘Cannae of the spirit’, his military mind softened by the idle amusements for which Capua was famed. The teacher from Seoul loves the horrors of Cannae: ‘and the Carthaginians invented crucifixion’, she adds, pushing her pen into her book.

  For the gladiators of Capua in 73 BC, objects of both money-making and amusement for the politically neutered local populace, the Via Appia meant much less, almost nothing. Once they were out of the school, the road was merely a means to a possible end – escape, escape to anywhere. Escape to who knows where? Perhaps they took it for their first few miles after they broke for freedom. They needed to get away fast.

  The gladiators had little hope of support close by. There were many landowners and businessmen in Capua who might have liked life to be different, with lighter city taxes, less military service, more influence over Roman politics and over their own. Sabbio himself was a former slave. He and his architect, Safinius, were rising members of a new business class. Safinius is still recognised by name in white mosaic on the floor he decorated in designs of ivy and grapes. But this cloak-maker and his factory-designer were not the type to support a slave rebellion. They and their kind did not want life to be so different that gladiators no longer fought in the arena or so different that all slaves would be free. The escapers could expect no help on the Via Appia here from anyone. Not even the most traditional anti-Roman conservatives, those whose families were the most nearly expunged in the wake of Hannibal’s defeat, would want an anti-Roman slave band on the loose. Ending nonsense like that was just what Rome was supposed to do, meant to do, asked to do.