The Spartacus Road

by Peter Stothard

  Capuans had much to make them content. Their city was a Las Vegas of its age and they had prospered mightily from their lack of political power. Hucksters and traders like Batiatus could be respectable burghers here. There were theatres and temples, an amphitheatre and all the businesses which went with the luxury tourist trade. Capua had long been famed for scents and carpets, bronzes, elegant black-figured pottery. It was now rich from that fame. Safinius’ house and shop, with its signed and decorated floors, built by him (as he boasts) ‘from foundation to roof ’, was just one example.

  For the previous twenty years he and his fellow citizens had finally had the vote in Rome too, the Romans deciding that their neighbours’ discontents had a degree of just cause. Rome’s senators had acquired a new taste for profitable empire overseas, wanted no old troubles at home, and had settled their ‘Social War’ against the Italian towns on terms that, while not risking any real shift in power, gave citizenship and votes and hastened the creation of a whole country, the first united Italy.

  At the time of the escape from the gladiator school, Rome had no need to fear Capua. Its control was total, and totally justified to all concerned. There had been only ‘just wars’ to that end – a fact which Roman historians had carefully defined and of which they were fiercely proud. Capuans had no need to fear Rome either. The road had done its job. It ran now only like a great black pipe through the countryside to the capital, pulling travellers and traders down, pushing art, wine, fruit, wheat and money back.

  One temptation of the Via Appia for Spartacus and the escapers was its familiarity. It was the closest route to where they first stood outside their former cells. Capua’s gladiatorial amphitheatre had been built unusually close to where the Appia’s black stones forced their way into the city – on the north-west of the central block, near to all the most popular places to live and work, the doctor’s surgeries and the philosophers’ schools. It was a road designed to be seen – to be seen and understood.

  Some cities had their entertainment centres at their obscurer edges, at safer and smarter sites for wild men and beasts to be enjoyed. But Capua kept to the spirit of Rome itself. Gladiator contests had begun in the middle of the Roman Forum, central to the religion, politics and geography of the early citizens. So it was too in Capua, whose highest men talked where its lowest men fought. The proud Campanian poet Naevius, one of those ‘other people’ whom the Romans relied upon to tell their history, had once described the verbal closeness of lingua, the tongue, and lingula, the short sword. But there is no need of poetry to prove his point here, only the sites of the amphitheatre and the Capuan forum, in clear brick and marble, side by side.

  An escape route north-west along the Via Appia would be the quickest way out of town. This road to Rome also occupied a gap in what was by 73 BC an extraordinary encirclement of amphitheatres and gladiator schools around a city which, while Italy’s second in size, was indisputably first for blood and amusements. This was the area where the very idea of gladiator contests began. One of Batiatus’ fighters might recognise any part of the local terrain by the places around here where he had fought – at Teanum, at Cales, at Telesia, Abellinum, Abella, Suessa Arunca, Pompeii, Nola, Puteoli, Cumae, Liternum. Each of these towns, in a circle barely thirty-five miles wide, had an arena which vied with its fellows for business. In all of the rest of Italy there were only two.

  The massive amphitheatre at Pompeii, built while Spartacus was in training and now the oldest survivor of its kind, held 20,000 spectators. The Koreans have already seen it. There were separate entrances for those buying the best seats and, if they had to wait for admission, a fascinating zoo of animals that were about to die. Audiences could inspect some of the theatrical stars in advance. On an especially auspicious day, there might be free gifts and free food and scented waters sprayed over the crowd.

  Competition in advertising was fierce. How many lions? Watch a fight between flocks of birds. See man on man, bull on woman, bear on bull; watch pantomimes and crucifixions and a mixture of the two; enjoy painted mountains, dead men walking, the wounded dying. Watch the spectators who were watching the shows, their political leaders and each other. Were some of these entertainments the inventions of poets? The gladiators came to know which were and which were not.

  They also knew that, for all the variety in the shows on offer, there was a uniformity of harshness in the measures to assure public safety. Some towns might offer a more refined menu of entertainments, more theatre, less killing, more artistry, less butchery, more admiring of the body beautiful, fewer bodies to be carried out at the end of the afternoon. But in every place of gladiators there were the same militias trained to hunt any that might escape. The Via Appia offered a brief opportunity to break away, to avoid the professional prison warders and private armies. But the fugitives would not be able to follow it for long before turning off to safer terrain, to the emptier pink-and-green spaces on the Barrington maps.

  The Korean doctor has a pointer with a sharp light at its end. If he needed to, he could mark dots and lines on a distant blackboard. It seems as though he might prefer to be doing that. He would rather be lecturing about feet to anatomy students than listening to his wife and her new friend. He is not, however, going to lose the plot, despite the story not being the one he would have chosen. Taped to his briefcase beside the red-and-yellow sign for KAL is a photocopied chart, with the simplest map of southern Italy on one side and a time-line of writers, heroes and rulers on the other. ‘Everyone should have one of these,’ says his wife, in a voice suggesting that she, at least, has no need of the crib. He pulls two more copies from his zipped jacket pocket. So now each one of us has it.

  He pushes his pointer from Capua towards the sea, returning us to our rehearsal of the gladiators’ best routes. There was high ground where the Appia hit the coast – at Mount Massicus above Sinuessa. But this was already core Roman territory. The Capuans had been forced to cede Massicus to Rome even before they heard the news from Cannae, flirted with Hannibal and ceded themselves. If the gladiators wanted high ground here, they would have to fight for it. There had been a particularly unpleasant crucifixion of slaves at Sinuessa at the end of one of those earlier escapes and uprisings in Sicily. Support here among their fellows might not be strong.

  Slaves knew best the parts of the Via Appia much further north where the road-surface most often needed repair, the parts near those many bridges in the Pomptine Marshes, the parts where the layers were eroded away even in ancient times by seawater, trundling carts and tramping feet. In the marshes a band of slaves might even hide if they had helpers, guides and food. There were few wolves in the swamps but skinsores and fevers were more deadly than animals. Circling kites, visible every day over Campania, were there to clear away what the flux had killed. Legions were less of a threat here than locusts but, without local help, the marsh was still no place to be. The surrounding farms were small, kept by slaves who were tamed, trusted or closely confined. The Greeks who tended the most treasured grapes, in the fields full of the owners’ ancestral tombs, were more likely to betray the escapers than to join them.

  How detailed were the plans the gladiators had made before their break-out? Two thousand years later the British who escaped from Fascist camps talked afterwards about how no amount of planning, no obsession with the right ink for documents or the locally available maps and permits, was a real preparation for the fact of being free. The Capua escape, like so many, had to take place earlier than planned in order to prevent discovery. It is not hard to imagine this soon-to-be-famous band of trained killers, men trained to kill each other, men who would have had to kill each other or die a different death, confused now in freedom, weighing options, wondering whether their leader or leaders could be trusted.

  No one anywhere but in central Capua yet knew of the events at the Batiatus school. No one beyond the school guards might ever have known. This might still have been a non-event, like the loss of Symmachus’ Saxons, an occurr
ence of no future account. Before the slaves could consolidate their freedom, counter their owners and encourage others, they had to stay free. If any of them had ambitions beyond the next hour or day, hopes of freedom for their own age or any later age, they had to stay free. If the Romans had a legionary detachment near by and decided to put the gladiators immediately back in their places, the Via Appia was the road on which the soldiers would come. Even to make the fastest possible exit from Capua, for the slaves to use it was a risk too far.

  Their second option was to the north-east. The highest of the city’s five eastern streets would take them out past the settlements of Mount Tifata, through the narrow valleys which spread from the peak like drawstrings for a sack. They could see these on every clear day from the arena. Here was the mountain temple of the huntress Diana, the tourist attraction of Capua that outranked even the amphitheatre. It was not as wild as her temple of the Golden Bough in Ariccia. The Tifata priest did not have to live alone in daily fear of death by single combat. This was a sunny destination whose exhibits included a massive drinking cup and other tourist relics from the war at Troy: Capys, the founder of the city, had been a Trojan. There was an elephant skull from the war with Hannibal. Many visitors to the gladiator shows came also to worship the goddess of the hunt. They spent money on both spectacles. They loved seeing the goddess whose sword and shield inspired their sense of being Roman, just as they loved seeing the arena fighters whose swords and shields did something of the same.

  Would it be wise for foreign gladiators to approach the huntress? Italian shrines welcomed worshippers of any god, eastern or otherwise, and many slaves worshipped Roman gods. That was the freedom which Symmachus would struggle vainly to preserve. But this Diana of Tifata was a goddess more suited to the cause of those who volunteered to kill animals than those condemned to do so. Before his escape Spartacus’ likeliest meeting with a lion would not have been an act of hunter’s courage, of his human free will which a Roman deity was there to make iron. It would have followed some infringement of his school’s disciplinary code and consequent consignment from star of the show to beast-fodder.

  To the south-east the Via Appia continued its way to the Adriatic coast. There they might find a ship, to Greece, to Thrace or, for those who wanted to go to other homes, to Germany and Gaul. The climb was steep. That much was clear from the lowest slopes. The ground rolled over cliffs and gorges, rolling like the sea itself until it reached the highest plains, places of wandering herds where it was said that armed slaves ran free while remaining the property of their owners. These men had to be armed in order to protect their master’s cattle from other masters’ slaves. They had to run free because cattle, in this landscape of spiny succulents, waterless grass and pricking birds, must find food wherever they can. Those plains were certainly places where a slave army might be made. But they were far away and high, favoured home of falcons, harriers, the eagle owl of death, and, like its brother road north-west back to Rome, this Via Appia was still the greatest of military highways.

  The road southwards was another way they might choose, the way to Naples, the Greek ‘new city’ of Italy, founded when the Forum of Rome was still a swamp. Field slaves knew the most about the vineyards along this route, the rows of vines trained to produce grapes as close as possible to the ground, the place of youth and light, chosen by slaves who knew the thickness of leaves, the sharpness of stems and what fruit produced the wine their masters desired. The soil was like sand. The farms were like beaches long before they touched the sea. From Naples there might be boats to Sicily, where slaves had risen against their masters before and where, under leaders better trained in war, they might more successfully rise again.

  These roadside fields were a temptation to any traveller, narrow passages lined by figs, wild olive and thyme, oily nuts and pink fruits imported from the east. When the thyme and olive flowered together, the ground seemed on fire with flaming, scented pillars of violet and red. Once this show was over, the ground was a carpet of crisp leaves and vines filled with the tiniest grapes, too small to harvest, left ripening into raisins for scavenging men and birds.

  There were many people between Capua and Naples, men and women from everywhere, not devotedly Roman perhaps though many of the greatest Romans had country homes along this way. Places for rape and robbery? Yes, opportunities beyond dreams. Places to plan, to think, to deploy? Few opportunities at all unless they went for the final possibility, the last available answer to the ‘what next?’ question, just a little off the beaten tracks, the most directly south of Capua, the country paths to Mount Vesuvius. The land was flat. There were broad fields, small houses, lichen-covered rocks and gravestones. There were caves where strange airs hissed from the walls, where wolves and cattle, even men, might fall, cease to breathe and come back to life when brought outside. Many had seen this happen. There were statues of frowning mothers enthroned with their swaddled children, goddesses who might as well be dead since no one stopped by them any more. Or so it was said.

  Some of the living here had made openings to paradise. On one of their walls stood painted trees and birds, a female dancer, a flute-player, a single red-wreathed man with straight-cut hair. My new friends have already seen it in the museum. From places like these someone was thinking that there was something else beyond what they had, beyond what they had lost, a new spiritual world for everyone by way of a Greek garden. The Romans who believed in Diana did not believe in that. Diana’s offer of paradise was for gods alone, or for half-gods like Hercules or those rare and occasional men who might aim to be gods.

  There were vast farms that stretched from horizon to horizon, land-holdings assembled by the rich from the profits of early empire, the target of recent Roman reformers but still unreformed. Here slaves saw little of their masters and worked to their deaths under the lash of other slaves. These might be recruiting grounds. The escapers might make others free and find support from them. And if they did not, they would still not be lost. Only twenty miles away lay Mount Vesuvius, the giant tilted table top that commanded the land for many more miles around. No one lived on its summit, or so it was said. Why would anyone live there unless they were fugitives, wanting to rest, to regroup and to wonder what they would do next?

  Via Domenico Russo, Santa Maria Capua Vetere

  Vesuvius. Teanum. Sinuessa. Beneventum. The doctor taps out the points on his chart, prodding them as though they were the dangerous red rash of meningitis on the skin of a child, hoping that under pressure they might disappear. The Koreans are back outside the amphitheatre, looking disapprovingly at its tattered Italian flag, and carefully considering all these options for Spartacus. Their other maps and pamphlets are spread about them. Their method is as strict and austere as it would be if they were themselves escaping, as if they were pinpointing the minefields of their homeland’s demilitarised zones. ‘Vesuvio, Teano, Sinuessa,’ the doctor intones to his wife. They have no table. The gamblers lend them a box with a stiff waxy cloth.

  ‘Teano,’ she responds, sharply but after a thoughtful pause as though she has been weighing exactly what to say. No one else stirs. The card-players understand little of anything she says – and I not all of it. She sees only the slightest change in our expression, not enough for a speaker who has an important point she wants to make. Sometimes at a press conference there is a somnolent peace until the sound of a single word which alerts every reporter to a possible story. Sometimes, in an interview with an old and distinguished subject, there is a single reporter’s word which drags argument and memory from a clouded mind. This seems to be that sort of moment.

  ‘Toyby in Teano,’ she insists, the words tripping out over the motor-scooters like the tinkling of a bell but still not making the difference she is hoping for. The name of Teanum, the biggest of the amphitheatre towns in Capua’s ring of stadia, has struck a string of notes for the teacher – but not yet any chord for her hearers. Teanum, she says firmly, is a place to which ‘Mr Arnold Toynbee, a
thinker not much appreciated now except in the east’, travelled back in time to see the past. ‘Teano’ is like a password to her classroom memory of a man who experienced history like a child.

  Toynbee, she says, was one of her father’s heroes, ‘an historian of everywhere and everything’. From more than a dozen volumes of A Study of History covering thousands of years and the whole known world, ‘he could have chosen so many places for his time travel’. But he chose to go back to an event which happened near here a few years before Spartacus’ escape, a story originally from a missing book of Livy, one of those many which Symmachus could read but which we cannot.

  Its two characters are a husband and wife from Teanum, Mutilus and Bastia, he an enemy of Rome, muffled in disguise and on the run for his life in the Social War, she safe in her house making the best of Roman supremacy. After a long flight and many betrayals, Mutilus reaches his home, makes a soft cry at his wife’s window but, hearing that he is no longer welcome inside, kills himself and spatters his walls with his own blood. For most students of Roman history this was just another story surviving in a summary of a lost history book. For writers of Italian opera it must have been an occasional temptation: a dramatic end for any libretto. But for Toynbee this was ‘one of those moments, as memorable as they are rare, in which temporal and spatial barriers fall and psychic distance is annihilated; and in such moments of inspiration the historian finds himself transformed in a flash from a remote spectator into an immediate participant, as the dry bones take flesh and quicken into life’. The Korean woman has written these words into her guidebook. She reads them aloud and smiles in remembered admiration.

  I am smiling too. Thoughts like that – ‘the experience of a communion on the mundane plane with persons and events from which, in his usual state of consciousness, he is sundered by a great gulf of Time and Space’ – were one of the reasons that my own generation of classical students was never encouraged to read much Toynbee. He was an eccentric joke. In ‘a quickening sight of some historic monument or landscape’ he thought himself back there, back here, out of Oxford in 1911 and into Italy in 80 BC. This was absurd – and had been so for me for as long as I had been out of school. Our proper student task was quite the opposite, continuing what the great man described as his own academic day-job, the ‘tenuous long-distance commerce exclusively on the intellectual plane which is an historian’s normal relation to the objects of his study’.