The Spartacus Road

by Peter Stothard

  The result is a quilt of tiny patches. Symmachus’ own speeches survived much better from this same process of chance, rescued in 1815 from the Latin translation of the ‘Canons of Chalcedon’, re-emerging from injunctions of the early Church against theft from dead bishops and appointments of deaconesses under forty. Sallust’s account of Spartacus survived in shreds through the wielding of an unknown bookbinder’s knife. All that we have are a few powerful paragraphs and an intermittent stream of passing facts.

  Here on this pitted table of Herculaneum rock, alongside canine excrement and broken glass, are the photocopied pages, fresh from the book bag, of what happened when two new Roman praetors, Varinius and Cossinius, were sent to clear up the mess left by the first: ‘they had lit fires to frighten the soldiers of Varinius into flight.… a journey… to turn aside from… but Varinius, noticing in the daylight the absence of abuse . . .’

  Write each fragment on a piece of card. There is soon a small pack: sick and deserting Roman soldiers, corpses propped up on the walls of the gladiators’ camp, Varinius terrified of ambush, Varinius rashly leading his new and inexperienced soldiers. Dissent seems to be growing in the slave army’s leadership, with Crixus and his Gauls and Germans wanting to fight while Spartacus remains more cautious. There are notes of rage and rape, assaults on married women and young girls which Spartacus cannot stop.

  Sit in a library and there are various versions of how these words – with others from other chance places – might stick together to make a narrative. Sallust had strong views and the prose style to tell a good story. Like every Roman historian, he wrote to make a point, about the failings of Rome, their most reprehensible causes and characters. He also had a cold honesty which comes through even the most ‘lacunose’ pages. Lacunose? Full of holes. A miserable-sounding word for a miserable state of affairs if you are trying to read a history as it was never meant to be read – in tiny pieces.

  Many of Sallust’s characters were very like himself. His first book, which has survived with barely a lacuna at all, was a tirade against political corruption during Rome’s war against King Jugurtha of Numidia. From that came his most famous phrase for later quotation dictionaries, put into Jugurtha’s mouth, that Rome was ‘a city for sale and would perish if it could only find a buyer: urbem venalem et mature perituram, si emptorem invenerit’. Sallust’s own notorious and massive wealth came from Numidia too, a province which he had governed on behalf of Julius Caesar. He was a preacher of morality possessing all the power of the reformed sinner.

  In his later years he sat in one of Rome’s finest private homes, a retreat built from the proceeds of extortion and corruption by a man whose retirement message was how extortion and corruption had sapped the Roman character. Self-knowledge was not his greatest strength. But applying modern objections to hypocrisy would not leave many ancients standing.

  Philosophical consistency was not his strength either. Sallust saw slavish greed and barbarian avarice everywhere, in civilised Romans and uncivilised foreigners. Were greed and corruption then the natural states of man? He seems to suggest so. Yet his fellow Romans had once been honest men and true before the foreign flood of slaves and money. So were they somehow born different, a chosen race before the rot set in?

  His answer was that public virtue in Rome, by public discipline, had become more highly concentrated than in Asia and Africa. Romans had made themselves special. They had their land, their religion, their piety: the combination was absolutely special. But if that was Rome’s glory it was not a glory that made Rome more secure. Corruption could always come from sudden changes in culture, sudden opportunities and interactions. Not even Rome was immune. As the Vicar of Great Baddow would later translate, ‘A noble and famous cytie’ might easily be ‘corrupt and accloyed with infect cytesyns’. Its very success endangered it most. Pernicious individuality and restlessness for change were forever and everywhere threats to hard-won public virtues.

  Sallust enjoyed his anxiety and arguments but, most of all, the historian wanted to tell his tales. Grumpy rich expoliticians, turning to history in their later years, have a long-proven record of rhetoric over reason and conviction over consistency. Yet Sallust was a good source on what he knew. Later writers recognised that. Domitian’s palace tutor, Quintilian, a subtle judge, quotes him constantly, much more than he uses Livy’s moral guidance.

  The idea that Sallust’s history of the events here in 73 BC might be read later only in fragments would not have pleased its author. Broken words on pieces of card would have been a rejection of everything he stood for. Modern writers on warfare have grown used to the notion that the closer the stance to the action the less clear the truth of the whole; that the individual soldier, and often the individual general, has little idea from his place in the lines whether the battle is being won or lost; that the best the participants can hope for is a few facts passing by like cloud. The author of these fragments would not have recognised such doubts.

  Sallust belonged to an age where big men were confident of what they did and what they saw. A survival in some five hundred shards – scattered observation and severed sentences – is what he would have wanted least. He was a big beast, a politician whom a Frontinus or a Symmachus would have recognised as an equal. He was no mere artist like Statius – although he wrote his own romances on Trojans and Amazons. He was no hack like Florus – for all that he had some fine headline-writer’s skills. He was not cowed as so many later writers were. He was no genius, not the Roman Thucydides, not the scientific and analytical master of history that his later admirers wanted him to have been. But he had a real sense of what a Roman Thucydides would have needed to be. If anyone were to find the complete text of his Histories, a clear narrative of this part of Rome’s slave wars would surely be there.

  A peculiar frustration on this stop on the Spartacus Road is that, if such a text were ever to be found, this is also one of the most likely places. Beneath the earth in this section of Herculaneum, beyond the perimeter of the tourist site, lies the immense villa once owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, the infamously yellow-toothed and sallow-skinned bohemian Lucius Calpurnius Piso. Fifteen years before the defeat on Vesuvius, Piso had planned a peculiarly ruthless campaign against a friendly tribe in Thrace, one of many attacks that brought gladiators to Rome. When the mountain erupted in ad 79 and buried this town in its mud, it buried his library, his military history, his collections of musical theories, poetry and plays – and those added by his heirs. When these rooms with pigeonholes for scrolls were entered again by tunnel 1,800 years later, hundreds of works were recovered, hundreds more destroyed and thousands left behind.

  The villa once contained a substantial sculpture collection too, with one of the liveliest busts of Homer, old and blind, with his ear cocked as though listening to divine instructions or the latest teller of a war story. Among the marbles and bronzes were also busts of philosophers, Epicurus and his successors, men of self-contained calm who had nothing to do with war or politics, who denied that the gods had anything to do with humanity, whose mantra was that, if gods existed, they had nothing to do with us, did not care about us, and we should not care about them. To think otherwise, ran the message from these portraits, was the way of avoidable madness and misery.

  Most of the written works found beneath this soil were by Epicureans too, detailed formulae for banishing the fear of death, arguments that so influenced the upper echelons of the amphitheatre audience in these pleasure towns. The writer with most words in the library of the Villa dei Papiri was Philodemus of Gadara, a friend and client of Piso who probably taught Horace too. This Syrian disciple of Epicurus argued not only the logical case for despising death but the psychological case too. He wrote a book called On Death and selected from his master’s metaphors well. All humanity lived in ‘an unwalled city’. There was no defence against mortality. Romans could defend themselves against many attacks, more successfully than any predecessors anywhere. But there was no wall
against the obliteration of a body and mind.

  He wrote on other subjects which scholars have reconstructed from the first discoveries at this palatial seaside villa. Much effort has been devoted to explaining his charred thoughts on sound and meaning in language, most of it proving Philodemus’s mediocrity more than his magic. But there might yet be much more still in this library, if it were to be excavated fully from above – with appropriate compensation, of course, to the tomato-growers and dog-breeders, the carnation-sellers and car-washers, the fortunate apartment dwellers who enjoy the view enjoyed once by Caesar and Horace.

  There could be the lost Spartacus books of Livy, of Sallust, of Caecilius from Calacte, whose history of slave wars was known in antiquity but is not known even in fragments to us. There could be lost history plays by Naevius about the myth of Rome’s foundation; or tragi-comedies by Andronicus, a Greek who took the Roman name Livius and wrote so many of the city’s dramatic spectacles, not ones respectable enough to survive, in which riotous sex and nudity were forever at the service of carefully selected plots.

  There might be unknown works by Nero’s ‘arbiter of taste’, Petronius, who set near here his Trimalchio’s Feast, a literary masterpiece of exotic sexuality, cookery and cemetery architecture. This is a place of many philosophies, many philosophers and much teaching. Petronius wrote that it was human fear which created the gods: ‘Primos in orbe deos fecit timor.’ Statius of Naples borrowed the same line and gave it to his giant boxer of the Thebaid, Capaneus. Giambattista Vico of Naples, summarising human knowledge 1,700 years later, borrowed it again. In the pigeonholes of the Villa dei Papiri there could be thousands of clues to lost corners of antiquity, from stratagems for invading Thrace to the prettiest pantomimes of subversion.

  There might even be more Statius. The poet of Naples was thirty-four years old when ‘Vesuvius rolled out its fires’. Sixteen years on, back home beneath the ‘broken anger’ of the mountain, he pondered whether future generations would ever believe that whole cities, an ancestral landscape, lay dead beneath its recovered fields. He was expressing, with all the particular power of this place, that most common fear of those obsessed by decline and fall, the fear of being obliterated even in others’ minds.

  In the library there could be more examples of the poetry that, in Statius’ case, albeit from only two tattered manuscripts, disproved his prophetic gloom. There could be unknown early works by the writer who pioneered our most spectacular poetry of doomsday and the designer swimming pool. Or, as opponents of the excavation counter, there could be just more music criticism from Philodemus.

  Archaeologists will not know unless they are allowed to look. The case for delay is that the techniques needed for safely reclaiming and reading the fragile rolls improve every year. The case for excavating soon is that Vesuvius is set to erupt again and that, while the businesses above may be insured against their losses, the unclaimed library of Piso would be lost without any hope of recompense.

  In the meantime, to look at Sallust’s Histories here is like sitting an impossible examination when the answers are locked away on the other side of a small door. Or it is like recreating the likeness of an ancient rebel from a few chestnut-red chalked lines, of a philosopher from a word or two and some pieces of marble, of a faceless general whose whole statue is undamaged behind a screen. It is an irritant, a peculiarly persistent one.

  Piazza Guerritore, Nocera Inferiore

  After defeating Glaber, the free slaves struck two nearby towns, robbed, raped, burnt and moved on again. The citizens of Nola were the first to face the new enemy. They were army veterans. Their houses and gardens were their prize for fighting. They had fortifications and the knowledge of how to use them. None of that kept Nola’s narrow streets from the rage of the slaves who took their first tastes of freedom and power in a place of plenty.

  For the victims this was a shock beyond anything they had imagined before. They knew of their own violent exploits. They had heard the tales of Homer. They understood the epic savagery of human seas that hammered and bludgeoned in huge waves. But the defeat of freemen by slaves was no part of any epic story or any experience in their lives. This was the unthought, the unthinkable. The survivors of civil war who had settled in Nola had plundered and pillaged cities themselves, as their commanders had ordered. But this was destruction without precedent or order, with no time for anyone to wonder, if even they could, whether mass destruction always looked like this to the objects of hungry, angry, thirsty men determined to rape and kill.

  Their daughters and wives were stamped on and stabbed like the Trojan women of the poems that everyone best knew. That is how the Greeks and Romans saw their wars, how they connected their present with their past, how they made sense of life and death. In Nola every horror was here and gone in a few hours. Those that the slaves could not rape themselves they raped with spears and spikes, leaving body parts for the dogs of the streets. Only a few women were stolen away to new slave lives as the Greeks stole the women of Troy. The men from Capua and Vesuvius were not yet organised enough for that. Their leaders were not yet generals of an army. They did not yet take slaves of their own.

  Had Spartacus and his colleagues commanded the carnage, compelled it, taken part in it, tried to stop it or, as is common enough, held all these positions at different times? Nothing was clear. The only true clarity was the result, a terror beyond the terrors of which anyone and everyone knew.

  Here and in the coming months began the myth of Spartacus and a peculiar kind of fear. Slave wars brought the horrors of which Homer had written but from a different place, from their own homes. Family slaves might suddenly not only look like rootless foreigners but act like them, viciously, vainly, with an anarchic sense of their independent worth. There was exaggeration of these fears. There was denial. There were questions. How different was a Gaul from a Roman? How different was a slave? Did anything new need to be done beyond defeating and punishing the insurgents with all possible speed?

  Hundreds of thousands of Gauls were slaves in Italy. Most had arrived in the past decade. Some had been free men and women at home. Some had not. All Gauls were notorious for nasty practices. Nailing their enemies’ heads to doorways was one of them, a delight that was beloved, it seems, both by the savages themselves and by those, like Florus, who made their living by writing about them. Gauls wore the tightest trousers and carried the longest swords, aliens to be feared in every way. What did such things mean? Backwardness? Stunted development? Development in different directions?

  Subtler men than Florus, historians of the time like Pompey’s friend Posidonius, came to see the moral and cultural significance of customs such as the nailing of heads. Posidonius, a tutor to Cicero, had been born in the same Syrian town as Eunus, the leader of the first Sicilian slave war. He had travelled to Gaul, spoken to Gauls and tried to understand what they did and why. He is only a minor character on this road but the first whose surviving portrait in stone catches something of his mind. His bust in the Naples museum is a copy of an original carved in the years of the Spartacus war, a sorrowful image of a thinker, his head twisted to one side, his eyes deep set and his mouth in an eternal act of admonition. He seems to have been a most unusual man of his time, believing in the equality of fellow human beings, attacking cruelty to provincials and slaves, arguing that Romans should live up in public to their private ideals of austerity. But pioneers of difficulty are easily forgotten. Unlike Florus’ horror comics, Posidonius’ work has survived in only a few scraps.

  Most Romans never quite understood why Gauls and Thracians might be different, and never wanted to. When slaves revolted it was as though some ordinary stuff of life, bread, flower, olive oil, were suddenly discovered to be, in certain fixed but unknown proportions, the most inflammatory explosive. Later slave-owners transported their possessions from Africa to the West Indies, from one faraway place to another. The Romans brought their slaves home. In every house was the common kindling of the hottest forest
fire.

  The achievement of overwhelming Nola was terrifying to all around who heard of it. Ancient cities would normally fall to a siege when one political party inside the walls did a deal with those outside. There was no slave party in Nola. There was no slave party anywhere, certainly none here in neighbouring Nuceria, now a place of pink houses and erotic fountains, then the leading ally of Rome south of Vesuvius, a tempting target which suffered in the same devastating way.

  By the time that the second Roman force arrived to succeed where Glaber had failed, the slaves were more formidable still. They were better armed, with looted iron weapons and fire-hardened spear-tips. They were more numerous. The broad farms and pastures south of Nuceria, towards the bitter lakes of Volcei and the rich villas of Vittimose, were recruiting fields for an army that could now both threaten and inspire.

  Cossinius discovered for himself the new threat to the established order. Feeling sufficiently relaxed to take a bath in a spring, he was forced into ignominious retreat when some of Spartacus’ men swept down in his direction. The praetor escaped with his life, if not his dignity, intact – though not for long. His death was the first senior casualty of the rebellion. His camp was captured. His supplies were lost to the slaves. His legate Furius, whose leadership skills seem to have been stronger in the courtroom than on the battlefield, led his force of 2,000 men to an even greater defeat. There were defections to the slaves from those who survived, a devastating disciplinary failure for the Romans. A junior legate, Toranius, had the unenviable job of travelling back up the Via Appia to explain to the Senate what had been going on.