Varinius , the surviving praetor, still had 4,000 legionaries, some of them feverish from the cold of fighting at the end of the season, many of them the unenthusiastic survivors of the earlier debacles. He fought on none the less. That was his task. He was a man who played by the rule book. The message that he gave to Toranius is lost.
He then chose a camp site near to the slaves’ own encampment, curbing their freedom to hunt for food. He built walls, a moat and protective towers in the approved way which Glaber had so disastrously abandoned. Spartacus countered with a night-time escape. He impaled corpses on stakes outside his gates and dressed them as sentries. He lit campfires as though for an evening of watchful eating. He set heads of the dead as guards above his palisades. His army retreated and regrouped a few miles away, where they could forage for supplies without immediate threat of attack.
In guerrilla warfare the slaves had a better chance for longer. That was why Frontinus wrote his Stratagems with a star role for the staking up of dead bodies to look like watchmen. Book One: section V: On Escapes from Difficult Places. The slaves seemed to the Romans as devious as Odysseus and the Greeks at Troy, slipping off the beaches at night in order to come back later with deadly force. Which side was the besieger and which the besieged? Probably, neither had so fixed a position. It was watch and wait for both. When Varinius noticed that he was facing an empty enemy camp, with none of the usual dawn chorus of rock throwing and abuse, he sent cavalry to the nearest high hill to see where his enemy had gone. Fear of ambush brought the riders back. Thus the dance went on.
Varinius sought reinforcements on the coast at Cumae, just south of Vesuvius. He must have realised by now, and hoped that the Senate did, that he needed much bigger forces to be sure of success in these strange times. With his new legionaries, still far from the best men that Rome could offer, he grew more confident. There were still more hit-and-run successes for the slaves. When the decisive encounter with Varinius came it was a devastating defeat for Rome. The conflict began to have an impact even on towns that escaped the slave army. Farmers left behind the autumn wheat that was ripe in their fields and headed for the hills, the beginning of a life-beforefood policy that was another risk to the safety of the Republic.
It was now possible, indeed unavoidable, to speak of a ‘victory’ by the sometime Thracian gladiator. He may have been in dispute with his original colleagues, with Oenomaus whose name disappears from the story and with Crixus who would play a much bigger part in it. But Spartacus had a collection now of fasces, the symbolic bundled axe and rods which accompanied a Roman magistrate wherever he went. Varinius’ lictors, who carried these fasces on their shoulders, were Spartacus’ prisoners. The instruments of punishment and execution by which Romans defined their power were with rebel slaves. So was the general’s horse.
Florus, as usual, gives the headlines and the outlines. The Greek biographer Plutarch adds details of his own. If there remained more at this point than some bookbinder’s fragments of Sallust’s Histories, there might be more of what Toranius was told to tell the Senate. What Varinius wrote for him will have been a careful selection of relevant facts that would best protect the writer’s back from the knives of Rome. What Sallust wrote was his own selection from that, designed to show the dire morale of the legions when generals took more care for their own futures than for the city’s. What readers have now is a vivid reminder not to trust any account too much.
The terror campaign grew fiercer before the final battle against Varinius. Spartacus led a vicious recruiting expedition southwards to Forum Annii, a bid for support which, for the women and girls who came their way, became a repetition of the rape of Nola. Lacerated bodies lay dying slowly in the streets. Local slaves joined the rebellion and gave up their masters and mistresses, the family treasure, whatever they could bring; in Sallust’s words, there was nothing, no matter its moral or religious meaning, which was inviolate ‘to the enraged, enslaved minds of the foreigners’.
Individually and in small groups, slaves from the fields and towns of Campania swelled the triumphing forces. The need to discipline the newcomers even to the level of the first arrivals was immense. There were more disagreements about tactics. Early problems of food supply were solved from the stores of the ravaged towns. Early problems of organisation were not. Sallust tells us that Spartacus himself tried to stop the mutilation and abuse. He begged his men repeatedly to recruit rather than avenge. They should speed up the process of levying new forces and stop the sex and slaughter. He was ‘wholly powerless’ to make a difference.
There are surviving fragments of Sallust’s Histories which have no certain place in the narrative, which could apply to countless battles against Spartacus in which Roman soldiers faced their deaths. There are moments in any war which little change, hour to hour, day to day, millennium to millennium. The statement that ‘each man recalled the one most dear to him… the final duties of a soldier’ is one of these flexible lines of words which fits all the many places that textual critics have put it. But the idea of its original home being in the fears of the army of Varinius before the last battle of 73 BC is an especially attractive one here, a moment on the Spartacus Road when we are aware of facts we have long lost and can recall others recalling what they too were soon about to lose.
The final duties of a soldier? He might write his will, sign over his goods to his wife or children or comrades, arrange the witnessing of his will, or all of these. There were many spectacular deaths in ancient warfare, lauded and recorded, but many that happened hidden under airless heaps of other corpses. If no one sees a man’s death or notices how he dies, his written will becomes the last testament to his character.
VI
EGNAZIA to BOTROMAGNO
Via Traiana, Egnazia
After their victory, the army that had begun as seventy escaped gladiators and had now defeated four Roman commanders went south for the winter. Without the immediate threat of reprisal, the Thracians, Germans and Gauls, with camp-followers now and animals, a total fighting force of perhaps 40,000, could consider what they had won so far and what they might aim to win.
Egnathia was a town at the beginning of a long arc of south-eastern ports from which boats could be bought, hired or hijacked for Greece. It was the last stop on the road to Brundisium, the most tempting target for a Thracian slaveleader whose ambition was to get home. Some of Egnathia’s merchants and manufacturers spoke the Messapic languages from Troy and Thrace. Their words are known from inscriptions written in characters that are like Greek but are not Greek. Their pottery is still found for miles around, shaped simply, painted solid black, with tiny yellow and purple birds, white eyes, white impressions of looms and feathers.
Today Egnathia is a dead city by the sea, so close to the sea and so low beside the sea that it seems extraordinary that any of it has survived, a brushland of limestone and marble, with stunted columns spread over field after field. There is an amphitheatre, for actors not gladiators, shaped like a small pear. There are shopping arcades, streets and theatres stretching along more than a mile of dunes that would otherwise be bunkers for the golfers of Brindisi. Some of the old homes are small, square rock-pools now, with niches in the walls where lobsters live like forgotten gods and tiny fish swim in and out like parlourmaids. Egnathia has stood with its windows open to the Adriatic for 2,500 years, defying its frailty. Today even the clouds look more permanent than the stones, great piles of superimposed black on white, stamp-albums in the sky.
The road from Capua arrives here like the bed of a dried river. The limestone blocks of the imperial age, the ones that Statius or Frontinus would have seen, lie on top of a layer of earlier stones from the age of Spartacus and Horace, and beaten mudtracks from centuries before that. The Via Trajana runs directly above the Via Minucia that the slave army followed, above earlier paths with names long lost, square-cut stones above ancient sediment, with the current surface strewn with rocks from later antiquity when the travelling stopped
and Egnathia was buried by shingle and sand. There was no single dramatic action of the earth here, merely tides and floods, no volcano, merely the abandonment that Symmachus feared when the north of Europe came to dominate the south.
This town of the mysterious Messapics has been an exotic antiquity for most of its life. It became a Greek city and then a Roman one. Like Capua it suffered by backing Hannibal, the wrong enemy of Rome at the wrong time. Horace came here on his Journey to Brundisium: the poem that began in Ariccia and Foro Appio ended a few miles further to the south. His last flurry of the trip is to mock the Jewish magicians of Egnathia who make incense burst spontaneously into flame and bewitch the unwary with their powers. Horace has no problem with other peoples’ religions. There could be any number of foreign gods. Probably there are. But they have nothing to do with him, his welfare, his future, or with the foreigners either.
That was what Epicurus taught, and Philodemus on the slopes of Vesuvius too. The fundamental obstacle to man’s happiness was his fear of anything like Hercules, Diana or fire spirits. It was proper to fear pain, including the pain of dying. But any last pains were hardly important and had to be separated absolutely from irrational fears or ridiculous hopes of life after death. In that way all pain could be better borne. Students could grasp this vital truth by emulating their master’s life and studying all his works. The nonsense of a divinity with the time and inclination to entertain tourists was one of the clearer nonsenses – easy even for a semi-detached Epicurean like Horace to expose.
A staring head of one of Egnathia’s eastern deities was found here at the point where the main road meets the main town square. He is Attis the castrated boy, blank as a drug addict, stern as a dominatrix, with hair in ringlets under a pointed cap, an object of much devotion in Thrace, in Troy, in all the lands between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Next to him was his altar, carved with flutes and tambourines, and the offerings of the priestess Flavia, devotee of the Magna Mater, great goddess from the hinterland of Troy.
It is an oppressive afternoon in the almost empty town. The sky squats like a crushing metal bowl, oiled to an iridescent sheen, fringed with frayed wisps of ribbon. There are dozens of magpies, as still as in a taxidermy museum, enough for a prophets’ convention. Two for mirth, three for a death, four for a birth, six for hell, seven for a secret, as children used to sing. Only three pairs of tourists are peering down into the sea pools and subterranean stores. Distant black rainclouds bulge in the shape of giant zeroes, threatening to break the calm with a roll from the sea towards the hills.
Imagine here the woman whom Spartacus is said to have taken on his travels, the wife who saw him sleeping in the Roman slave market with serpents coiled around his head, those portents of good fortune or ill depending on how we read the letters. She was said to be a devotee of Dionysus, the god whose cult was celebrated enthusiastically in this part of Italy once called Great Greece. It would be charming to think of Spartacus and his family among the Egnathians for a little tourism, some worship of home gods, lessons in Epicurean thought, water therapy or retail relaxation. But it is safest to say that they never were here.
Leaders of a slave army cannot take trips into the scenic destinations on their way. They either sack a city or they pass it by. They are either the ones who strew the road with temple rubble, who knock the heads off the Great Mother’s statues; or they camp outside Egnathia, maybe thinking about what it would be like to be an ordinary enemy force, to have potential allies inside, but knowing that they cannot have them. Slaves cannot take ancient towns in the normal way of their time; for slaves to take a town is to subvert all the normal ways of any town.
It is easy, however, to imagine Horace meeting his Jewish trickster here. There is a large rock, the size of a card-table, in the right place where the Via Minucia meets Oriental Religion Square. Horace has travelled cheerfully from Rome on his sensitive diplomatic mission, the one he does not want to tell us about. He has made his whooping egressum from the big city, enjoyed his modesto inn at Ariccia, survived the frogs and mosquitoes of the Foro Appio canal, suffered a burnt-thrush supper at Benevento, stomach ache at Capua, a wet dream after a woman stood him up in a mountain village, and is now almost at his journey’s end. The light is dim. The priestesses and their tambourines are close by.
Horace has eaten and drunk variably. Some decent wine has survived the years when Spartacus and his army scoured the countryside. The local bread is full of stones. He cannot be bothered to tell us much about Brundisium, ‘the mere finish of his narrative’. It is ‘The Egnatians’, as the Englishman William Cowper renders them 2,000 years later, who get his full, final attention.
The idea ‘that incense in their Temples burns, And without Fire to Ashes turns’ is fine for ‘Circumcision’s bigots’ but no good for Horace or any other pupil of Philodemus. Epicureans are happy to concede ‘that in high Heaven, unmoved by Care, the Gods eternal Quiet share’. But they must never blame those Gods for human disasters. They cannot ‘deem their Spleen the Cause why fickle Nature breaks her Laws’. The reason why the wrath of slaves eliminates a bustling town must be found elsewhere.
Thracians, Germans and Gauls pillage the fertile country-side inland of Egnathia. Soon they have bigger prizes on their minds. They are heading south and west to Metapontum, another Greek city, equally alien to Rome, even closer to the worship of Dionysus, fortunate for four centuries but since Hannibal’s war not so lucky and in this winter between 73 BC, when the slave war began, and 72 BC when it exploded, not lucky at all.
Viale Orazio Flacco, Metaponto
The best spectacular is a battle between two sides, two groups each with a strongly fashioned identity, Gauls vs Thracians, Greeks vs Amazons, Tanais vs Phasis, bears vs dogs, Athenians vs Spartans, Roman heroes vs Hannibal’s villains, Seven from Argos vs Seven from Thebes. Every part of the battle idea can be manufactured if necessary. A gladiator can switch from Thracian to German with the speed of a theatrical extra or a transferred footballer. The supporters do not care if half of their team was last week playing for the opposition; they care only if their team loses or they do not have a team.
In the arc of Greek colonies on Italy’s southern coast the game of Greeks vs Trojans was the best and oldest. A place in mythology was essential for civilised life. This was a rivalry that did not need any longer to be vicious or violent. The stories of Troy were remembered to everyone’s benefit, long enough ago for all wounds to have healed, powerful enough in the mind to produce a sense of belonging to more than just the local countryside.
Metapontum was not the first of these Great Greece towns. Within little more than a century of the events that inspired the Iliad and Odyssey, there were renewed Greek expeditions in search of land more fertile and less crowded than at home. After the battles at Troy around 1270 BC there was a slow exodus westward. Old rivalries came west too. Metapontum was founded here between the Basentus and Bradanus rivers as an act of seventh-century pre-emption, to prevent neighbouring Tarentum, most prosperous of the early colonies, from growing too strong.
All the new arrivals brought with them the memories of their past in pictures as well as poems. So visitors can still see today the painted images on which they thrived. From the ground at Metapontum have come vivid battle scenes of Greeks vs Amazons, with fighting women trampled under horses’ hooves, a queen with an axe above her head, a man carrying a naked maiden with blood spurting from her breasts and thigh. This is what Statius’ Greek ancestors in Italy would have known, before the different realisations of the stories in the spectaculars of Domitian’s Rome.
There are pots depicting the Theban civil wars and the wars of gods and giants. But much the most popular subjects come from Troy, the great patriotic war depicted in seventh-century images of soldiers scrabbling for dead bodies, the Greek Patroclus, the Trojan Hector (not always clear now which one, possibly not always clear then), the heroes of their shared history book, more significant for those away from Greece than
those at home.
What did the ancient colonists look like themselves? Who built this town that Spartacus and the slave army were approaching? Archaeologists here have a surprisingly clear answer to that, better than we have for anywhere without an industry of portrait sculpture, better, in fact, than for many places where the local great do get memorials in marble.
This Metaponto way of reconstructing the past is through the modelling of skulls from its first graveyards, using clay and plaster, coloured match-heads and mathematical calculation. Each face of these ancient dead comes with the best assessment of its muscles – the temporalis, masseter, buccinator and occipito-frontals, the definers of appearance, it seems, throughout any century.
Like most sporting supporters, these men and women of ancient Italy do not have too much in common with their heroes. A dour matron with thick nose and thin mouth and centre-parted hair stares out from the guidebook. More than twice as many women as men were buried in the graveyard excavated by the Basento river, the female ages averaging somewhat younger than the male, both numbers different from normal expectations and neither easily explained. There is a young boy, with huge eyes, frothing curly hair and a mouth half open as though he is about to speak. There are men with sharper noses, fuller mouths, swept-back balding hair, dimpled chins, none of them modelled on peerless Achilles.
These are the forensic scientists’ contribution to this journey. There are necks and skulls here of animal-eaters and eaten animals. Travellers who seek pictures of the past have now the work of ‘archaeozoologists’ and ‘zooarchaeologists’ as well as poets and sculptors. This is another war zone of scholars. Whenever the dust is sifted from a newly discovered tomb, there are ‘splitters’ who doubt that anything is connected to anything else and ‘lumpers’ who make massive claims from the most tiny fragments. Occasionally the two can agree.
The Spartacus Road Page 16