There is something silkily subtle about Frontinus. He used his obscurer facts not just to help future stewards of the emperor’s water but to warn opponents of how much he knew about them, how they should stop diverting the flow if they knew what was good for them, and how they should be wary of what else he knew. He was a prototype of the later civil service aristocrat – an artist of management, tricky on tactics, reliable on facts. He had the pessimism that Symmachus and his kind would always recognise, and the success against northern barbarians that his successors could only imagine. Outspoken in praising the superiority of good water pipes over every useless glory of Greek art or Egyptian pyramid, he had no faith that technology would ever get better. His Roman water pipes – and his careful descriptions of their operation – were as good as anything was ever going to get.
In mentioning the early achievements of Spartacus, he was not making any moral point about past or future. He was not placing Spartacus in any context. He was not trying to make the facts in his writing lead on to any other facts. He thought that, just like the arts of clean water, a guide to devious military stratagems would be true and useful. Making ladders from wild vines and dropping them down the cliffsides of Vesuvius was one such trick. It had worked for Spartacus against Gaius Claudius Glaber. Perhaps other outnumbered rebels might try the same scheme. Perhaps some imaginative Roman general might need to use the same plan on his own account. Anyone who knew as much about stratagems as he, Sextus Julius Frontinus, did was not to be ignored.
Vesuvio, Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio
A decade ago, in the hours when I was in the heaviest unexplained pain, I used sometimes to see battlefields like this one. I was never quite sure why. When a biting, bruising clash of enemies was happening below my ribs, it maybe made a certain sense to imagine other battles of blood and guts. Perhaps the free mind has its own way with a blasted body, its ways to make the time pass by, regularly some nine hours of time between the first sense that my Nero was stirring (the name was a classicist’s joke at first) and his retirement from the flattened field.
Only every few months did these horrors come, but once they had begun each time they were inexorable and followed the same absolutely predictable course. Although I would later describe the pains to doctors in lurid but wholly unsuccessful detail, I never mentioned the palliative pictures. It was hard enough to get a medical answer without seeming like a late-night history channel. It took many spectaculars to discover that Nero was a large lump of cancer. During that time the pictures became the most memorable part of the experience. Looking back from this wooden table halfway up Vesuvius, the battle scenes seem certainly the only part worth remembering now.
The subjects then were never ones I deliberately chose. To attempt to reconstruct the ancient suddenness that happened on these volcanic slopes would have been absurd. Any truth about Spartacus’ first battle has long lain far beyond the power of recall or reason. The facts are still far beyond even the wildest argument. There is nothing solid surviving of the battle between Glaber and the gladiators, no swords, no wineflagons, no words.
The pain pictures were a different experience altogether, random, like a roulette ball cast into the wheeling rays of the sun. Scenes from a classical education came unwilled. During some of Nero’s visits I had vivid views of this first fight in the Spartacus war, not those of a general watching high up on a nearby hill but those of a soldier seeing what was close before his eyes. It was as though I had been at the centre of this and other slaughters, hour after hour after hour.
This Vesuvius scene was one of the commonest, an assault of iron on the upholstery of my stomach, ribs grasped like ladders, alien objects left behind, broken glass, blunt knives, wave upon wave of pain, slow like an hour then blurred like a second, warfare in its unique and maddest way. After the first hot attack there came shivers and stabbing icicle shards. After the nausea of fear came the thud of the drum and the muffled horn. I might face a baton-wielding field officer. I was suddenly one of ‘the wretched wounded’, begging to be hit on the jaw by a drunken field-surgeon or any decent man administering the battlefield anaesthetic of his age. The aggression was grotesque. What was it all about? Such violent pain had to have some progression. It had to be saying something. It could not be without some cause or purpose.
As the dust and confusion cleared, a more organised picture show was presented on the surface of my skin. My body pumped up tight, as though with poisoned liquids and gases, the fluid components of pain. Then, on the tight surface of this slowly expanding balloon, as though from some imageprojector above, appeared all the peculiarly recognisable scenes, the ladders clinging to the rocks, the climbers, the killers, the escapers, the men who killed themselves to avoid torture by the unknown. I was not hallucinating. These were more like memories than fantasies or dreams. As my stomach seemed to grow, so the pictures on it grew too and spread further apart. Then smaller images became visible, things I could not see before, people beyond the battle site on the mountain, watchers on other slopes, in the skies, in distant cities. Then the balloon subsided, briefly restoring proper proportions before shrinking into a jumbled mess.
There were no ill effects next morning. My mind was often quicker and clearer after the chaos had passed. Poets have often claimed that opium sharpens their thoughts. Perhaps pain too releases its sharpeners into the bloodstream. Perhaps the poetic drive comes not from the drug at all but from the pain which the drug is supposed to dispel? Are drug and disease in that respect the same? These questions and the shows continued until one of my long line of doctors identified both the cancerous cause and the impossibility – after so long – of doing anything to remove it. At that point the days of imagination were over. My days of argument and forensic medicine began, none of that of any relevance now on the Spartacus Road.
The task here of battlefield reconstruction is back with the historians and the poets. It is Statius again who comes closest to the terror of rebels routing sleepers – in his epic Thebaid, his description of Polynices’ night-time attack on Thebes, a time at first of no sound, no thunder from the sky, no movement, a time, he writes, when the clouds clung together in silence, the breath of the earth stunted the grass and the sleepers’ cloaks exhaled cold. Within minutes there is mayhem. ‘Blood formed black sodden lawns, tents tottered over bloody streams: stagnant nigrantia tabo Gramina, sanguineis nutant tentoria rivis.’ Then comes the fire. ‘The earth smoked as the breath of sleep rolled into the gasps of death; and not one of those who slumbered lifted up his face: Fumat humus, somnique et mortis anhelitus una Volvitur; haud quisquam visus aut ora iacentum Erexit.’
There was no honour of the ancients in this kind of assault. In Statius’ account, the god-defying boxer Capaneus thinks a night attack the cheapest stratagem and refuses to take part. The rest of the Seven assaulters of Thebes find their prey stretched out on the ground, as though already run through by swords: ‘ceu iam exanimes multoque peracti Ense’. The attackers stab randomly at backs and chests. They leave the cries of the slaughtered locked and stifled in their helmets: ‘galeis inclusa relinquit Murmura’. A final cloud of darkness falls over those who a few hours before have fallen in drunken sleep on their couches.
In the imagination of the sleepless writer in Domitian’s Rome, even the attackers’ dead return to watch the show, armed and mounted anew, freed from the earth exactly as in life. Only their horses retain the shadows of the underworld. Here on the still dormant volcano, in the summer of 73 BC, the exalted escapers from Capua occupied Glaber’s camp, watched his surviving soldiers scatter and run, rested from their killing, resupplied themselves and, as a tiny new army, marched next in uneven formations towards the richer cities further south.
V
POMPEII to NUCERIA
Porta Marina, Pompeii
Back now in Pompeii, this is a different town, the one to which the tourists come though few have come here yet this morning. There is so far only the darkest daylight in the line of b
ars that skirt the ruins. Last night’s rain is still smashing down on the roads outside, deluging the Spartacus campsite, sliding over the new municipal tarmac, running in rivers along the high kerbstones in the lucrative ancient streets. Old Pompeii was built on a hillside, its thoroughfares designed to become rushing waterfalls when the weather was like it is today. But that is not protection enough for those who seek the sunny side of antiquity.
This is a café that should be packed with perspiring Pompeii-seekers. But there are only five thin, shaven-headed boys fighting in front of a TV and the same number of seated men and women, Romanians, possibly responsible for the children, passing the time next to books that they would normally be selling to tourists outside. The barman looks on benignly. The little fighters, somehow both too young and too old for adult control, shout in too many different accents for them all, or any of them, to be his own family. But he treats them as though they were some part of his responsibility, not speaking harshly but trying to help by example, not taking away their wooden swords and plastic shields, as a parent might, but, in a grandfatherly way, showing how the toy weapons might be more safely held.
His advice is briefly taken and quickly ignored. The old man wants the young to block and parry like duellists, feeling the weight of each other’s blows, seeking the cuts that their weapons would make if their edges were sharp. What the children want to do is to poke punches into each other’s stomachs.
I still have in my book bag the two brief accounts of ancient gladiatorial combat, the Syrian’s and the Spaniard’s. The barman urges more of the spirit of Lucian’s day out at the stadium, the subtle interplay of flashing blade. The boys want more of Martial’s version, a bruising fest of endurance. They are strong and determined. They are playing their own fictional parts. They hit as though they would break each other’s jaws. They look sideways occasionally to where we are sitting by the polished glasses, but not expectantly at us, only with the fear that their bouts might be ended by a beer-pourer’s decree. Maybe this is a regular event. The frustrated souvenirsellers make no move at all, as though they have nothing to do with the young swordsmen, which may be the truth.
The boys use their shields with as much aggression as their swords, not defending against blows but pushing as though the wood-and-plastic disc were an offensive tool in itself. One of them crouches and springs forward. One is unbalanced, gasps and falls. Two attack the faller on the ground, then stop, with their swords pointing to his neck.
This is the only theatrical moment in this game, the only part that might be recognised in the Syrian school of duelling. None of it, I suppose, would have been alien to the Spartacus school. Swordfighting has long been refined to a mere sporting art. The new swordsman has rules; he has skills like a conjuror; he draws an arm away with his eye; he nips, he cuts, he grazes; he comes from one side while seeming to come from the other. The old swordsman wants to kill as quickly as he can.
Gladiators had to learn the earliest tricks of the theatre. They were in at their creation. The promoter of their shows, the owner of their schools, could make a fight more artful by altering the length and shape of weapons, the size and scope of armour. A man with a curved sword has no choice but to slash like a pantomime pirate. Arming the upper body and leaving the legs bare will encourage spectacular sweeps against the thighs and hamstrings. But a gladiator storming into a camp of somnolent soldiers punches his target with his shield and stabs him with a straight sword in his face, his neck or his heart.
The face gives the greatest reward for anger. Enemy eyeballs crushed into blood are great recompense, the greatest revenge. A punch to the heart, from a sword held straight ahead, from a position slightly crouched, against none of the bones that stand in the way of the slasher or cutter: that is the way of massive rage, of the few against the many, until the many are few and fled or gone, and the victors, like the forces of Spartacus, are picking up their enemies’ swords from the ground.
After failing once more to inculcate some chivalry into the fighting boys, the barman retires into his newspaper. It falls to his assistant to throw the brawlers out into the flooded streets, having ascertained that their parents, if any of the adults were indeed their parents, have already resumed their tourism or their trade. The rain is falling even harder now on the roof. It does not even feel like daytime any more. Soon the afternoon will never have happened and the evening will have already begun. The air is like fat cheese. Even one of Italy’s eternal football matches would be a relief but the TV screen too is silk-covered, slightly damp and dark.
There are still some neglected books in the bag. Out from the bottom comes a pile of four novels, one of them with the text and title only in Italian, more histories, the Koreans’ map of amphitheatre sites. The problem of what happens next on the Spartacus Road is becoming complex. The original sources disagree, the fictional reconstructors even more so.
Another look at the Kirk Douglas movie would be one good idea. At least this would show what I once thought happened next. Perhaps the barman has a copy on his shelf of DVDs. We could all watch how Hollywood gladiators fought in the arena and in battle. Was Frontinus’ vine-ropes-down-the-mountain trick included somewhere? It surely must have been, although I cannot recall it right now. It would have been sensible to watch Spartacus again before beginning the road: forty years after the flickerings on the chemistry-lab wall it could all come back to life.
The Vesuvius scene must have been the purest Hollywood joy – epic Rome with a touch of Tarzan. I do not recall it. Was it not there? Was it too expensive to put on film? Did the producers not believe Frontinus? Would that have really mattered? Surely no one would have wasted a second on the credibility of the old water-inspector, if they had even heard of him.
Raphael Giovagnoli’s blue, hard-backed, two-volumed nineteenth-century novel has a dramatic version of the descent down the sheer rocks and the brief but bloody combat which followed. This is the book whose author was thanked by Garibaldi for sculpting the ‘Christ figure of Spartacus with the chisel of Michelangelo’, an endorsement which helped both writer and politician achieve huge success.
Arthur Koestler did not succeed so well with his own novel, The Gladiators. Kirk Douglas made his movie from an American version instead. The Hungarian polymath never claimed to be much of a novelist. He preferred his opinions to his story. But, judging from his Vesuvius scene, he did enjoy the journey of his flawed heroes down the wild-vine ladders (strengthened by torn linen for fictional verisimilitude). There was the ‘evenly distributed moonshine’, the butchery which left the killers unsatisfied, the strident yells ‘not human, but demons let loose’.
The television screen finally brightens into life. Juventus kick off against Napoli, a match from a season gone by. The day has become evening without much change in the light.
Osservatorio, Parco Vesuvio
There were new arrivals after the gladiators’ victory over Gaius Claudius Glaber. There were household and agricultural chattels who had not escaped en masse like the fighters from Capua but had simply slipped away into the woods. The countryside kept alive many from the margins of Roman society, the abandoned, the adventurous, the landless poor, children forgotten by their owners, the hungry, the curious and the desperate.
Most, however, were slaves. There were old men with plain iron collars around their necks, young men in collars marked with the import tax their buyers had unwillingly paid, others wearing metal tags marking their owners’ names. Some men – and even a few women – wore letters on their foreheads urging that they be sent home. In Thrace the ink marks of black and blue on a man’s skin were an ornament, a chosen way of identification, like the butterfly and swastika tattoos of today. In Italy the stigmata were stamps made upon an object by its owner. Spartacus and his colleagues watched, wondered, welcomed and waited to see how many more would come.
Some men heading towards Vesuvius had no tongues. ‘Speaking tool’ was the name given to slaves when the farmers were conductin
g their inventories. But recalcitrant runaways, mutilated for one offence or many, could work on without needing to be able to speak. A silent slave, able only to grunt what he had seen in cellar or bedroom, had much to recommend him.
There were those who had been ‘slaves of two masters’, slaves part owned and part free, objects of dispute. There were slaves who had been told they might become free and did not believe it, those who had been too often cheated or denied, objects of deceit. And for every slave that joined there were far more who did not. For every one that joined the forces of Spartacus and the gladiators, the not-quite-yet-an-army readying itself to move south, there were countless more who stayed behind.
Corso Umberto I, Ercolano
Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, spitting out his anger at the loss of his Saxons, had, at least, used Spartacus’ name. Gaius Cassius Longinus did not.
Cassius had good reasons for his reticence as he gave what became his notorious opinion in the case of the murdered city prefect. He was a revered Roman lawyer speaking publicly in the Senate, not a disappointed pagan-rights campaigner grumbling privately to his brother. He was speaking a mere hundred years or so after the escape from the Capua training camp, not almost five hundred years afterwards as Symmachus had been. A century was not nearly enough to sanitise the name of Spartacus in respectable Roman society. When Gaius Cassius Longinus wanted to give legal advice to his colleagues in the case of so unusually horrific a killing, he preferred the word ‘cesspool’.
The Spartacus Road Page 13