Toynbee came from a family with recurring intellectuals, as the Bachs had musicians and the Statius clan had poets. All things recurred. Modern paleaontologists could reconstruct a lost dinosaur from a backbone or a tooth; so too, from no less mysterious relics, a historian’s awe-inspired imagination could bring a great army to life, ‘through something of the same miracle performed on the intellectual plane’. The author of A Study of History was a twentieth-century British intellectual who took the long view of life in southern Italy. Power and poverty came around and around. He could almost see such truths for himself, bringing the old to the new in his own mind’s eye.
The Korean woman is right about our modern attitude to Toynbee – and persuasive, here and now at least, in her gently implied criticism of his neglect. Arguments for all of history circling back on itself – in art, wealth, technology – have long been out of fashion in the west. In the east, the idea that civilisations rise and fall like the sun and stars, driven up by their elites, driven to destruction by their elites’ mistakes, remains more palatable, certainly so to this elegant educator from the Seoul academy. ‘Toyby, Toyby’. Her father had told her about him while she was still at school herself.
‘Teano, Teano’. The oldest of the scooter men, his shirt worn to a shine on his back, has a different idea of that word. To an Italian patriot this tiny town has nothing to do with Spartacus or Toynbee, everything to do with the ‘handshake’ in October 1860 when Garibaldi, freedom-fighter against the foreign monarchs, self-proclaimed follower in Spartacus’ footsteps, gave up his full republican revolution and accepted the monarchy of Victor Emmanuel II. ‘Saluto il Re d’Italia,’ the card-player whispers with a mocking sigh. There is a memorial monument, he adds, as though thinking I don’t believe him. No one ever visits. I will have to climb over the railings. He will show me if I take him there.
Garibaldi was a poorer general than Spartacus, or so Karl Marx said. But he was a more successful political insurgent and he used his predecessor aggressively to promote his own image, writing a foreword to the first best-selling novel on the slave revolt. Garibaldi’s legacy remains also as dominated as that of Spartacus by arguments of strategy and tactics, by questions still posed long after the events, about ‘what if he had done differently or more?’
The teacher in red, it transpires, has triumphed on her own trip to Teano – and not just because she has reasserted her relationship with her father’s favourite British historian. Her guidebook says that no trace of the ancient amphitheatre survives. But she asked and asked – and found the traces of a circular brick bowl among the scrubby trees of an apiary whose bee-hives kept the less committed away. She could hardly have been more pleased if she had met Spartacus himself.
Our Korean–British joint inquiry, along with the sunlight, is reaching its end for the day. To the east of us, as we sit among waking dogs and wining Vespas by the amphitheatre, is the cloak-maker’s house and the sites, no doubt, of other businesses either unexcavated or unpreserved. To the south there are the grocery stores, the racks of recycling bins, a launderette. There would have been just the same services in Sabbio’s and Spartacus’ time. Slave societies recycled everything, from old socks to old stories from history.
Where my studious tourist friends thought the ‘killers’ would go depended finally on what they thought the ‘killers’ wanted to do. They argued between themselves about that. Rape and pillage until they were caught? For that they would have gone straight to the Appian Way, the Corso Aldo Moro, named now after the Prime Minister who became modern Italy’s most prominent victim of terrorism. Pillage first and rape later? Find lonelier houses further away. Freedom? The defeat of Rome? Which of these and how? Surely the escapers headed quickly down what is now the Via Arco Felice towards Mount Vesuvius? Most writers have thought so. At this time the mountain was only a former and future volcano.
Via della Civiltà: Contadina, San Tammaro
On a pink wall only a hundred yards from the amphitheatre is a red-painted ‘Bush e Sharon = criminali’ slogan. The signature, dripping with paint as though it were blood, is in bigger letters than even the abuse of the Israeli–American alliance: ‘SPARTAKO’. This is the local students’ homage, displayed between their philosophy schools and the red-pepper sellers, ornamented with exclamation marks, hammers and sickles, queries about revolutionary purity and the signature of Spartacus.
For the next twenty miles there is simpler travel than in the town, with geography and nature as guides, less vivid than poetry, prose, modern politics or buried mosaic, less precise than Koreans but reliable in different ways. Scholars argue about whether the background tells more than the fore-ground, the place more than the people, the unchanging more than the changing. There are those who look always to find change – and those who look always to find what stays the same. What they seek is normally what they find. After so many years working for newspapers and accentuating daily novelties in the world, if I veer now to either of their extremes, it is to the side of things staying the same.
Over the empty earth and grasses, the terrain and temperatures are close enough to how they were 2,000 years ago. The Roman town of Calatia, where the Appian Way turned east into the mountains, is gone, represented, it is said now, only by a church. But the land where the escapers walked keeps its old contours. Somehow, the sense of the escapers is also easier to grasp in this countryside, the exhilaration of being out and away, the pleasure, for however long it lasted, of having softedged satisfactions rather than hard prison choices.
In the summer of 73 BC the gladiators left behind the last houses of Capua as quickly as they could. Soon they were out in open country, on narrow tracks or none, in fields of shorn grain turning fast to forests. Some of the trees that had escaped the ship-fitting factories of the Naples bay were as tall as two men, others as high as two houses. None, except those faint, few and far away, were the size of those in Thrace, in Gaul or on the slopes beyond the Danube.
The sight of these roughly armed fighters, for those that saw them, was no great alarm. The countryside was always full of oddities, aliens, good reasons for locals to keep themselves to themselves. There were ever more frequently desertlions on the hills, beasts suddenly free from their packing cases, the price of living among cities of animal shows. The only serious consequence was a clawed human face or two, some blood-matted hair and maybe a broken-necked body by the side of a road which the beasts would quickly abandon. The chance of any ringmaster seeing his expensive charges again was slim.
Some sort of pursuit of the men, however, was a certainty. How determined would the local slave-catchers be against gladiators whose training was more specialised even than their own? The escapers could not yet know. There was hope in protection from the parched soil where camouflage patches of pale colours spread on all sides around them. Full shade fell from leaves as small as a woman’s hand. Dappled ground of light and dark might hide their escape for miles as they headed away towards an end that was no less camouflaged in their minds.
Black wings swung up and downwards in the white sky – the birds that still swing in the same sky, the birds the fighters knew from the small world above the arena, the creatures that everyone, whatever their language, knew as ‘crow’, or something very like a crow. The screams of these birds were crrrr-sounds suggesting to the superstitious that they too knew they were crows. How long was the life of these birds? Country legend claimed twenty-seven years, the magic number three twice multiplied by itself, about as long as a lucky gladiator.
Higher through the clouds soared the slowly flapping sails that every Greek knew as Gyps, the vulture. ‘The man’s worth nothing, no more than a vulture’s shadow’ was a common saying, commonly heard. These birds would be there if their escape failed. Every size and colour of crow would be there too. Vultures preferred to feed on the ground but the black wings would take eyes from corpses anywhere, on trees, on crosses. Everyone had seen them.
There were raw seeds to eat and
ground-running game birds, less familiar to the fighters, squawking ‘attagat, attagat’ in every dusty direction. To the slaves these were food. To the slave-owners these Attagats were the name for any runaway skulking in the grass. There were wagtails in their best summer yellow, determinedly picking insects from the noses of the cattle. Grasshoppers doubled the size of the thistle heads. The best food and the best protection were on the paths through the highest of the grasses.
The route to the gently rising mountain could be found easily from the sun and stars. There were distractions: slaves, chained ankle to ankle in lines the full length of a field, hoeing out weeds from wheat; trodden paths to villas where wine and meat would be found. The escapers had to find for themselves some little food and support. But a little food was enough and reinforcement with new men was not their first priority. They knew that to be a runaway, even a successful runaway, was not to join the free and easy. They knew that other slaves knew that too.
The very lowest place in a Roman household could be better for some (safer for most) than a place in no household. There was no free food in old age for the free. Even the gladiator school gave a perverse kind of security, a recognition of strength and skill, a chance to make some mark, to watch others make their marks, to be seen, to watch the watchers. No sight lasted for long. But then, as was clear all about, no life lasted for long, inside or outside the arena, either on the hot sand or on the shaded seats.
The paths of escape, the paths of not being seen, were peculiar in their eyes, much stranger to them than those of the arenas they had left behind. The heat-breathing rocks beneath their feet were familiar enough. The open expanses of fragile corn and firm-leaved carob trees were not. In the deep parts of the woods there came suddenly – just as it comes now – the sour-sweet smell of the sea. Vesuvius, its broken head wreathed in the seeming safety of clouds, loomed larger with every hour that passed.
Corso Giuseppe Garibaldi, Acerra
When came the idea of Spartacus as bright eyed, clear skinned, outward looking, resolutely royal like a movie star on a mission? What was he like before Kirk Douglas discovered him? Why is he not a long-faced, lugubrious killer, eyes deep set, thoughtful like a gangland enforcer or Apache executioner? Has anyone any idea what Spartacus was like, even what he looked like?
A writer called Publius Annius Florus might have an answer. Imagine the past as a newspaper office (a device – or perhaps just a vice – into which I sometimes fall) and he is possibly the best popular journalist for this Spartacus Road. He is a reminder that not every Roman historian writes in long winding sentences with the whiff of library and dust. Florus is snappy. He is not a man of doubt. He knows whose side he is on and why.
This is Acerra, ten miles from Vesuvius, an ancient town even in Italy though not one recommended to modern tourists. Hannibal destroyed it first. The River Clanius, now the tamest of canals, destroyed it again and again. Its fields today, near to a once great temple to Hercules, are famed as dump sites for industrial poison buried by crime gangs. Rusting barrels from northern refineries leak their contents into land owned by Mafia friends who need a warning, Mafia enemies who need a lesson and any innocent mozzarella farmer who crosses a gang-leader’s path. This is the twenty-first century’s ‘triangle of death’, the scene of the crimes in the trials to which the police have given Spartacus’ name. The statue of the Virgin Mary here is said to emit a pink light from time to time, a compensation to some, or just a nasty sign of radiation. Other local attractions include a faded mural over a bar beside the Corso Garibaldi, a familiar wartime portrait of mistrust and betrayal. There is little temptation to do anything here but sip wine (from somewhere else) and read.
The Epitome, as it is known, is packed with tightly compressed stories like a newspaper. In his first few pages Florus has already dramatised the first spectacular of this trip, that three-on-three fight, the Horatii vs Curatii affair commemorated back in Ariccia. His vivid version ends with three wounded Curatii for the Alban side against one surviving unwounded Horatius for the Romans. Horatius retreats, drawing his weakened opponents to him one by one in the order that each is strong enough to reach him. One by one he kills his enemies, including the one who is in love with his sister. Then he runs his sword through this sister when he sees her crying for her dead lover. Florus adds a short approving comment on the legal aftermath: ‘The law pursued the crime, but his courage removed the curse of family murder; guilt was judged less than glory: Citavere leges nefas, sed abstulit virtus parricidium, et facinus infra gloriam fuit.’
Florus tells the story of Rome from its first kings to its first emperor, concentrating on every hero and villain he can find. He seems just the sort of phrase-maker to have given us a good description of Spartacus. Easy history is his métier. Entertainment is a big part of his aim. Whenever there is a bit of ‘colour’, he finds it. Like Statius, his fellow literary sufferer in the reign of Domitian, Florus is derided today as something of a hack. He certainly fitted the facts to his stories, guessed what he did not know and ignored what he did not like. But Livy himself was only a little better. A good hack can be a good friend on any road.
This one was born in the African part of the Roman Empire, not then the source of many slaves, and he lived much of his life in Spain, the province whose silver mines were probably the worst place that any slave from anywhere could be sent. Here was the ancient economic system at its most profitable and its potentially most explosive, half-flooded tunnels below ground, choking air above and gangs of men chained leg to leg gouging out the galena ore whose lead and silver made the water pipes and wealth of the capital. Many gladiators spent time in the mines, and Florus must have known what that meant for a man and his mind.
He knows about rebellion too. He writes with delighted detail about Spanish rebels against Rome, the self-styled prophet Olyndicus with his silver spear, the cunning Viriatus with his mountain lair full of trophy togas and his ambitions to be the ‘Romulus of Spain’. The pirate boys of Majorca, he explains, learnt their ship-wrecking catapult skills by getting nothing to eat at home but the birds they brought down with their stones. Florus’ Thracians are much worse than Majorcans. They smoke their victims to death as though they are meat or fish. They drink blood and wine from human skulls. The only way to deal with such wild country Greeks was to cut off their hands and let them live. Execution by fire and sword was much too good for them.
Florus came to Rome as a boy and took part, like Statius, in some of Domitian’s dangerous literary spectaculars. Unlike Statius, he never won – despite choosing one of the Emperor’s favourite wars as his theme. It was a ‘fix’, he said. He sought shelter from future rebuffs in the southern Spanish coastal town of Tarraco, which had an amphitheatre, a tomb of the Scipios and much else to make comfortable a writer who would rather have been in Rome. When Hadrian became emperor, Florus was back at the centre of affairs.
Hadrian was as confident as Domitian was paranoid. He liked to see himself as a man of culture too, and later admirers more than indulged that wish. He became Florus’ patron. Florus, like Statius, was close to his emperor, close enough in the new and more relaxed times to write a poem saying how awful it must be to have the top job in the world, and how he could not think of anything worse than tramping around Britain and other bits of the frozen north as Hadrian needed to do. He even got a poem back from the palace – a vivid retort of how terrible it must be to be a tabloid hack like Florus, tramping around crowded bars and flea-infested pie-shops.
Florus was not a man who shied from a sharp judgement if he had one. He had his own convenient version of the cyclical theory of history: Rome had been weak in its beginnings, strong in its heyday, enfeebled in a premature old age under Domitian, and reborn again under Trajan and Hadrian. He enjoyed a joust. He was part of an early school of professional pundits, ‘concert speakers’, as they later came to be known, whose audiences loved displays of rhetorical fireworks, especially if they could repeat some of the tricks f
or themselves back home. While Statius declaimed his poems for prize-money in lakeside stadia, Florus read aloud his dramatic yarns.
He studied previous accounts of the wars that had made the city great, and ‘gutted’ them, as later exponents of the same editing art would say, for his own Epitome of Roman history, a compression of everything the busy reader of his time needed to know. He took most of his ideas from Livy, editing out the dull bits. He revels in place-names like Mad Mountain and River of Oblivion. He makes his readers feel even now the pain of defeated war elephants. He makes us mock with him those foolish foreign kings who were so frightened of losing their money that they threw it into the sea. He is a writer who would never have been out of work in any age.
Until about three hundred years ago Florus’ efforts were well known to European schoolboys; they loved his stories of mountain Greek captives so wild that they bit their neck-bonds with their teeth and offered their throats to each other for strangulation. Who could forget King Orgiacon’s wife? Raped by a Roman centurion, she escaped from prison, cut off the rapist’s head and took it proudly home to her husband. A popular heroine for any day.
The Spartacus Road Page 9