The incident is part of Tacitus’ account of the year ad 61. Nero was Rome’s emperor, the last of Julius Caesar’s line, a theatrical young man who began his reign benignly and ended it as a murderer driven to suicide, a man who loved the arena as both performer and spectator, one of many failings which lowered his reputation in the eyes of the high-minded. In this same year Nero had his mother murdered in a beach house not far from here; his generals were planning an equally nasty fate for Boadicea in faraway Britain. The murder victim in Cassius’ mind, however, was not an imperial parent or rebel queen, more a man like himself, like Tacitus too, a pillar of Roman society.
Pedanius Secundus, holder of the same city prefect title that Symmachus would later prize, wielder of wide powers granted to venerable men for the general welfare, had been killed by one of his four hundred household slaves. This was a rare event for which ancient Roman law dictated a rare reprisal. Every one of the four hundred had to be executed. How could it be otherwise, argued Cassius to his Senate colleagues, in a city which had long ago taken upon itself to have ‘whole nations as slaves within its houses, men and women of different faiths and no faith’? What means apart from ‘fear’ could ensure that slaves who heard of plots against their masters betrayed those plots rather than, through silence, joining them?
The slaves of Rome, as he saw them, were a ‘cesspool’ which could be controlled only by the ways which had been set down in the past. It did not matter precisely why Pedanius had been killed or whether there had been one of those ‘just causes’ so dear to disputing Greek philosophers. Perhaps the murderer and his victim had come to blows over an agreement to sell the slave his freedom. Perhaps the City Prefect was demanding sex from a slave boy whom the murderer wanted for himself alone. Neither justification, if justification it be, was relevant in any way. What mattered was the method of preventing mass uprising by the slaves upon whom Rome had come to rely for its very existence.
Not all of Cassius’ colleagues in the Senate that day agreed. Some argued for a greater mercy. The slaves of Pedanius’ family, like the slaves of their own families, were their cooks and their maids, their children’s teachers as well as the cleaners of their latrines, their letter-writers as well as the carriers of their litters, the men who understood their vines, the women who understood their wives, the objects of sexual passions, past and present, temporary and long-standing, experienced in different ways by all the family. Those whom Cassius wanted to condemn to strangulation outside the city walls included not only the young and innocent but the necessary and the expensive, the workers whose skills were often the only investment, apart from land, which a rich Roman ever made. Yet, according to Roman law, as explained by one of Rome’s most respected lawyers, all the slaves had to die. This was economically as well as morally a wrong.
If the senators needed any further encouragement to mercy beyond their account books, there was the roar of support for the condemned from the city mob. The crowds of Rome were not always on the side of slaves. Many had lost livelihoods to the foreigners who filled Italy after every Roman conquest. On this occasion the mood beyond the Senate’s high bronze doors was unambiguous. Rocks and torches sailed through the air and crashed on the pavement stones, reminders of Republican times.
The elders in their pressed white togas were not required to take any notice of the noise outside. Under the rule of Caesar’s heirs the Emperor’s judgement outweighed all others. But a mob was still a mob. It still meant danger. Any show of noisy opinion was also a reminder to the senators of how objectionable were the common people and how very useful were the slaves who accompanied them whenever they had to leave their homes. Well-trained attendants were the buffer between any great man and the ubiquitous mass of the urban poor, protecting his carriage, passing up the occasional note from a petitioner, pushing away many more, simultaneously connecting and separating.
The concept of the ‘household’, more than any concrete, brick or marble, was the building-block of Rome. The household, by law and custom, included its slaves as much as it included any other part. When homes were small, a master, his wife and a few human chattels at most, there was maybe some crude purpose in the rule that Cassius now invoked. But in Nero’s Rome it made no sense, ran the argument both inside and outside the Senate. How did it deter another Spartacus to strangle those pretty little pedisequae who attended the wife of Pedanius when she visited the theatre? What a waste of the fortune it had cost to train that accountant!
Mercy towards the innocent was the smallest part of the argument for sparing the slaves of Pedanius. Although land investments made the debaters respectable and rich, their investments in human capital made them much the richer. A slave who understood book-keeping or banking was a multiple advantage to his owner: he did the owner’s work, he saved the owner from too much of the taint of that work (a gentleman should avoid trade) and he could not set up in competition with the owner. There was no point in training a free man to be quick with figures; he might take your investment and use it to help himself or someone else. A slave was much safer. That was why the system worked, and had, for everyone’s sake, to be kept working.
Inside the Senate in ad 61 Cassius prevailed over his critics. He pointed out that the ‘exemplary principle’ applied to their fellow Romans as well as to the ‘cesspool’ of foreigners. When even a magnificent legion was disgraced in defeat, every tenth man was executed, bludgeoned by his own comrades. Were the brave and the faultless then spared? No. Every great ‘example’ had its innocent victims, but the individual harm was repaid by the public good.
Individually these slaves were the people whom the family of Pedanius Secundus trusted most; collectively they and their fellows were the group that the state most feared. So collectively they had to go the place of execution. Cassius criticised himself for having been too tolerant when past decrees had been proposed ‘in place of the laws of our ancestors’. He had done so because he wanted to keep his authority intact for when it was truly needed. This was ‘that time’.
Outside in the Forum, it needed an edict from Nero to stem the unrest. The soldiers from the city garrison, like Glaber’s before, were not the finest in the Empire. But they were fierce enough, lined in sufficient quantity along the execution route, to ensure that the traditional verdict would be taken to its end.
The scene must have resembled some grisly house sale after bailiffs have swept through the rooms. No one in the crowd could have known exactly the value of each slave, their place in the Pedanius family, their role, if any, in the master’s murder. From the colour of their faces the children skilled in grafting fruit-trees might be distinguished from those who carried the silver cups from bedroom to bedroom. The careful blonde pedisequa or burly disperser of crowds might walk with greater confidence outdoors than did the kitchen staff. The trusty barber might look lost without the knives of his trade.
To modern eyes the whole long line would have seemed a youthful group: a thirty-year-old man or woman, slave or free, was entering the old age of ancient Rome. That was another good reason for keeping talent alive: enough investment was failing and dying without this. There were those in the line who would soon have regained their freedom, men and women who had kept profits from their business activities on behalf of their master and had agreed a price. There were those, like the killer, it was said, who believed that they should already be free. Informal contracts between owner and slave were a source of constant misunderstandings and deceits. Some of the condemned column, identifiable by crippled shoulders and useless legs, seemed to have been questioned about the crime. Others, no less stumbling, were survivors of previous interrogations upon lesser matters.
Some murmured Greek words and words from other parts of the Empire that few onlookers understood. Populations of whole cities, if not quite whole nations as Cassius had claimed, were now Rome’s slaves. There were Gauls in the gardens and farms, Persians by the dining couches, Thracians, Africans and Spaniards in flooded mines and c
hoking factories which a civilised Roman preferred not to think about too much. Some may have been teachers of Greek, or even teachers of the Greek philosophers that Gaius Cassius so despised. In the most sophisticated households a course of lessons that began with schoolroom debates (is there ever a just cause for a son to kill his father or a maid her mistress?) could end with no less subversive thoughts on whether it was rational to have a public life or to fear death, or to fear only premature death, or only the pain of dying. The Emperor Nero loved all things Greek.
Left behind in Pedanius’ household were only slaves who had already been freed. Another Senator had argued that they too should be removed, not executed but deported from Italy. Nero had countermanded this proposal, as Tacitus tells us at the end of his account, ‘lest ancient custom, which pity had not relaxed, should turn into cruelty’.
Traversa Mercato, Ercolano
This is Ercolano’s business district, the new investment zone of the second city which Vesuvius destroyed in ad 79. The hustling businessmen of old Pompeii had the hot rocks and ash. The wealthy holidaymakers of old Herculaneum got the superheated steam and mud. Both events are celebrated now in an electronic version in this market square.
There are few foreign tourists here at virtual Herculaneum in the late-morning sunshine. There were only a few more Leica-bearers and waterbottle-carriers a quarter of a mile away, clicking and gurgling through the original ancient shops. Ercolano has long been the also-ran of the race to volcanic fame. Technology has made little difference. It is a municipal election season. A melon-man with a loudhailer is selling fruit with a passion that makes sense only if he is also buying votes. And, in this least promising part of the Spartacus Road, where the European Union is the benefactor, the relics of saints the true reality and the ancient ruins more profitable in holograms and on screens, there is my first sight of a Spartacus as he was drawn in his own lifetime.
The picture sits on a table in the first hall of gadgetry. Tourists are about to be invited to see Ercolano as it used to be, to put their feet in the fish ponds and hear the splash of the water, to wander though the rooms of rich men’s houses, to cower before the fires of Vesuvius, to thrill to the opportunities of digital power. This Spartacus is, by contrast, the simplest of images, mere reddish ink on paper, two gladiators fighting each other from horseback to the musical accompaniment of a masked trumpeter. The names of both men are written backwards; this was the local style, only slowly replaced by Latin order here. The first is FEL POMP, Felix the Pompeian, the lucky man from Pompeii. The second reads SPARTAKS. The caption on the printed page claims that the lettering and the language suggest a date just before 70 BC.
Nothing in my tour of Pompeii was as useful as this, certainly not the Frontinus night in the bar or the next morning of swordsmanship for boys. The lashing rain had left the guides amazed that any tourist, even an English one, would be mad enough to walk their streets. The gladiators’ quarters, where skeletons, chains and helmets were once found? Closed. The amphitheatre? Open. It provided a little shelter from the pounding storm. But nothing like that in Pompeii was ever used for anything except the gentler spectaculars, pantomimes and poetry improvisations. So said my self-appointed companion, the friend of the boy whose job was to protect parked cars.
The vineyards? Those were much more interesting. Look, I could see how the stakes were placed by the roots – and how the volcanic preservatives from the mountain saved the secrets of Pompeii’s gardeners. The ancients grew their plants much closer together than we do now and here was the concrete proof. Time, surely, now for everyone to take shelter and try some of the produce. There was wine from these vines on sale, made in the ancient way and sold at imperial prices. And there was good wine too.
Ercolano has been a better experience – not just for the sense of things preserved closer to their ancient life here (there are ropes and fabrics and wooden beams among the ruins) but because I had missed SPARTAKS till now. The fresco cartoon is itself Pompeian. It was found in the doorway of a house identified by archaeologists there as that of a priest, Sacerdos Amandus. But it has its due prominence today in the library of the Herculaneum Experience, a temporary promotion in this place where the earth moves every day, whenever a new visitor arrives.
Precise dating is difficult. But the words and pictures of SPARTAKS and FEL POMP are agreed to be some of the earliest from either town. No one knows who the picture’s original owner was, but the idea of a prosperous householder in the mid-70s BC with a collection of ‘big fight’ memorabilia has a certain appeal. The picture may not refer directly to the Spartacus who escaped from Capua. Spartacus could have been a stage name of many gladiators, the living nominees daily replacing the dead. Yet from now onwards it is at least an image upon which to hang the story. It is only the roughest outline, a piece of graffiti flattered by the designation ‘fresco’. It has lines of the human form and a name but does not exclude many possibilities of the truth. As in a children’s book, the spaces for head, helmet, reins and shield can be tentatively, or maybe boldly, coloured in.
After defeating Glaber, what did Spartacus do next? That is a harder question than the one asked by the Koreans at Capua. Somewhere around here in 73 BC, the victor of Vesuvius must have stood much emboldened after the Roman retreat. There was not just his success in arms but the growing numbers who began to join the gladiator force. The escapers could suddenly imagine the anger that would be felt in Rome, imagine it with pleasure before they had to imagine it in fear. But what then? The government of Rome did not take humiliation well. New legions would rapidly return.
Before winning the luxury of escape routes from Italy by land or by sea – or making any other choices – they had to win new victories in the place where they stood now. Military preparation was the priority. Military preparation was what a gladiator corps with new recruits was most able to do. Gladiators were well trained themselves. The men whom the Romans had once taught to fight – in their armies, their amphitheatres, on horseback or on foot – now taught fellow slaves, whose skills were in the kitchen or cattle pen, to fight against Romans too.
Exactly how and where and what did they fight? Even on this sunny day in Ercolano, with the inspiration of an ancient outline and the perpetual palest-blue view over the rooftops to the sea, the task of finding out is not a pleasant one. The evidence is confused. Assessing it requires patience better deployed in a library than in a market square – even a place so expensively and electronically equipped by so beautiful a bay.
Via Mare, Ercolano
In suburban Essex in 1962, a tweed-jacketed primary school teacher, known to us only as Mr Cook, decided that an eleven-year-old boy setting off for competitive examinations elsewhere should know a little local history. He had looked out from the low school gates, around the Great Baddow streets of boxes where the children of the radar-designers lived, and failed to find very much to his taste. He himself bicycled to Rothmans School each day from rural Danbury, several miles away, a village which owed its name and greater respectability to King Canute and his Danes.
The one man of Baddow whom Mr Cook deemed a model for an educable schoolboy was a writer called Alexander Barclay, a sixteenth-century priest, poet and vicar of the village church. Barclay, whose books included a satire in verse, The Ship of Fools, and translations from the Roman historian Sallust, had been awarded the Baddow vicarage during the short, extremist Protestant reign of Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI, a success for a former Benedictine monk which, in Mr Cook’s view, showed exemplary flexibility. Barclay’s satire had been sharp, unusually pointed for its time, and directed precisely against corrupt courts, fake intellectuals, romantic dreamers and other undesirables who flourish in every age. His translations had ‘improved the English language’, a task to which any of Mr Cook’s more literate pupils might cautiously aspire. There was certainly no better Baddow man with whom an ambitious examinee from the Rothmans Estate might usefully display acquaintance.
I took his
advice, not to any obsessive extent (The Ship of Fools is still little more to me than a name) but sufficiently to be able to write, here in Ercolano, that Sallust, historian of the Roman Republic’s greatest wars, was the first Latin author that I knew any little thing about at all. After the retirement of Mr Cook, as I later learnt, the school began a slide into a more progressive era. It changed its name, to Larkrise, after Rothmans was deemed to have unacceptable associations with cigarettes. The Duke of Edinburgh had paid a nearby visit and made some smoking-behind-the-bike-sheds joke which upset the headmistress. Vicar Barclay would have been grateful for the comic possibilities of that – and I am grateful to him for my first encounter with the writer I have been reading here over the past few hours.
Sallust was a man who could have given the very best directions on the Spartacus Road. He lived at the same time as the events he describes and was not wholly hostile to Spartacus. Sallust was thirteen when Glaber’s men were routed at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. He was in his forties when he retired to his luxurious library and gardens in Rome. As a politician, he supported Julius Caesar and hated Pompey. His successes and failures, glories and disgrace, all happened in the shadow of the Spartacus rebellion. His retirement to record the history of his age was at just the right time for some perspective on it all. He had a short, sharp way with words, a host of enemies on which to deploy these weapons and a brain that, unlike many of his kind, was not soaked solely in moral precepts. He ought to be the finest source for learning how Spartacus created his army and what he did with it next among the richest towns of southern Italy.
A manuscript of Sallust’s account survived for centuries in a French monastery and is now split between libraries in the Vatican, Orleans and Berlin. Some of it was saved, like so much classical learning, because its reverse side was used for commenting on parts of the Bible, in this case the thoughts of the acerbic St Jerome on the book of Isaiah. Once this was noticed at the end of the nineteenth century, the texts were subjected to some of the finest minds of the age, and every part compared and cross-referenced with quotations made by other writers and editors, those, like Symmachus in the last years of the Roman Empire, who had Sallust’s full text in their libraries.
The Spartacus Road Page 14