The Spartacus Road

by Peter Stothard

  Some reconstructors see racial differences as evidence of freedom and slavery. Most are heads that were simply short and wide or narrow and long, many poisoned by lead since not even Frontinus, six hundred years later, knew of killer water pipes. There are heads from colonies of dwarfs, nicely fit for the Colosseum trade. Many of the skulls here have patched and pocked walls, with parts as soft as sponge proving the presence of malaria. The dead in this cemetery also suffered syphilis, 2,000 years before any European met those American natives who have traditionally borne the blame for Venus’ disease.

  International science now sits alongside poetry here. Arnold Toynbee, who likened his writer’s imagination to that of a palaeontologist, would doubtless have approved. On a timeless road like this one the new is no impediment. It need not displace the old baggage. It just adds its weight. The skull is not the brain. The sack of Troy, which happened centuries before these men and women drank lead or exchanged syphilis, was remembered in their great epic songs. The Metapontans’ identity with that mythic history is still as certain as any identification through diseases borne by sex, pipes and mosquitoes.

  Greeks vs Trojans? That game was the constant reminder of how the wanderings of their distant forefathers matched their own. Both Agamemnon’s and King Priam’s heroes had left Troy when the great fight was over, the winners to come home, the losers because they no longer had a home. Any city in this area with any claim to top-division status had to have a founder who had fought in that war in some way or other. This was not the Seven against Thebes. Troy had been a good war.

  Which side they had been on was quickly not of great importance. What mattered more was how famous they had been. When the big players had all been allocated, any member of the Greek or Trojan squadrons would do. Wealthy Capua had the Trojan Capys. Aristotle wrote that Rome was founded by unknown Greeks who, like Odysseus, had been blown from their homeward course. At Rome itself the choice eventually fell on a Trojan prince, Aeneas, who also features on vases found here. In 73 BC the hero of the Aeneid was still a minor figure: his story had not yet had the benefit of Dido’s suicide, prophecies of global domination from the underworld and all the other enhancements from the poet Virgil, Horace’s travelling companion and the Emperor Augustus’ most successful myth-maker.

  At Metapontum the founding hero was Epeius, the boxer in Homer’s Iliad, the same man who inspired Statius by preferring sport to war. Epeius was also a factotum carpenter. He mended ships’ timbers and carried water buckets in and out of Agamemnon’s tent until his big moment when the besiegers needed a wooden horse in a hurry. The sporting boxer, with a little divine help, made the world’s first armoured personnel carrier. Odysseus and other heroic Greeks were the armoured personnel. The Trojans towed the beast inside their own walls, thinking that the Greeks had abandoned the siege. The rest, as they say, is mythology.

  The people of Metapontum kept Epeius’ adzes, saws and other tools in the temple of Hera in their main square. Neighbouring cities also claimed the horse-builder and his toolkit as their own but this was no cause for conflict. A carpenter might have many blades. These tools were not like the foreskins of future Christian saints. The quantity of entombed axes, brackets and nails found here suggests much more than a society of wealthy woodworkers. Epeius was claimed as founder both by Lagaria a little way along the coast and by Pisa, about as faraway in Italy as a Metapontan could imagine. That did not matter. The Trojan toolkit stayed in the temple and all was right with the world. It told them who they were.

  Sometimes there was the rekindling of the old war and the fighting of new ones. Greeks fought among themselves, often following their loyalties to their mother cities back home. In the sixth century BC, the Metapontans joined some other Greek colonies to destroy one of their neighbours, Siris, whose founders, like Rome’s, came from the Trojan side. There is a clay obelisk from here inscribed in praise of Hercules from this time, and inscribed too with the plea that its maker, Nicomachus, should be known in future for his double effort in the art of poem and pottery.

  Nicomachus chose his routes to immortality well. On his pale-brown tower of clay visitors can still read the words he fired on his work, the greeting to Hercules with each new line written left to right, right to left, left to right, the ploughing style. In the early years when the potters of Italy were free men, we know many of their names. When the manufacturing moved to factories of slaves, the signatures stopped.

  Painted terracotta was the art of Metapontum. There was little stone for building. There was no great harbour. There was fertile land and the ingenuity and slavery to work it. Valuable houses were distinguished from the humdrum by fired panels depicting their owners’ long-legged horses, their women and their workers. Over the centuries after the fall of Troy, there were intense cultural and commercial rivalries. There were spats, sometimes nasty spats, but nothing to match the Homeric battles of their founders. The presiding spirit here became the practical and the devious, the carpenter’s way not the warrior’s.

  Metapontum had the biggest and oldest political arena in the Greek world, the biggest purpose-built talking shop, almost seventy yards across with space for 8,000 people, an amphitheatre of words, most of the rhetoric eloquently empty once Roman rule began. It had a famous stoa, a long shady colonnade open to the air on one side, the distinctive mark of a Greek town where philosophers and traders met. Its public decorations there were domestic as well as heroic: the terra-cotta figure of a reclining man toasts his son in his wife’s arms, the ‘wetting cup’ of wine directly beside the struggling baby’s head. Wealthy families had exquisite miniature fishbowls for their dolls’ houses in the Gnathian style. The city’s silver coins carried the insect-like imprint of an ear of barley. Its fields and streets were neatly marked in rectangles, befitting the boast that in one of them lay the bones of Pythagoras. The Greek mathematician’s house was an Italian tourist destination. Cicero, combative student of all thought that was Greek, was one of many over the years who came.

  In 72 BC it was still a civil haven in the southern countryside. Roman Metapontum had become a capital of science. Its farmers were masters of breeding and owned the biggest cattle in the world. To have the heaviest bulls was not just a benefit in beef; it gave the people of Metapontum the biggest tractors of their time, the best ploughing, the best chance of driving back the inland forests where bear, wolves and elk thrived and of extending their fields of sheep and goats and barley.

  Like the Capuans the men of Metapontum had supported Hannibal against Rome. After that their freedoms and privileges were similarly reduced. Their stoa became a warehouse for the occupiers’ camp. Much of their business had moved to new Roman towns encroaching from the north, like Venusia, birthplace of Horace. This street outside the town museum is now named amicably after the invading poet.

  Metapontum had suffered like Capua, and it had succeeded like Capua too. Money for luxury had long been the most important requirement in a place faded from its greatest days of extravagance but still a prize. On the land between their two rivers, the Bradano, straight as a Roman road, and the Basento, bent like a corkscrew, they piled wealth on top of their memories until the forces of Spartacus brought back their earliest memory of all, the sack of Troy, and this time the people of Epeius the carpenter were on the losing side.

  Tavole Palatine, Metaponto

  For Arthur Koestler, writing his first novel, The Gladiators, in the mid-1930s, the rape of Metapontum was the night when the Spartacus revolt was doomed. Koestler’s quest was to match the story of the slave war with two events of his own time, the Russian Revolution that had succeeded and the global communist revolution that had failed. He turned Roman Italy into a model of twentieth-century Europe. He examined causes, the real and the imaginary. He analysed reaction and its absence. He showed the impact of the conquered on the conquerors and the stresses that come from importing empire into the cities of imperial states.

  The economics of slavery fascinated him, the mo
bility of cheap labour from abroad, the opportunities and the threats to citizens at home. He had come across, by accident he said, an aristocratic Roman political system which could not meet the challenges it had brought upon itself. He saw the conditions for a Roman revolution and he sought the reasons why the Spartacus revolt, like others later, had failed to match the rebels’ hopes.

  The Gladiators is more about Lenin and Stalin than about Spartacus. It is gripping fiction, far more solidly constructed than the American successor on which the famous film was based. The guide at Hera’s temple here has read it. So has his father. It is the only novel that he has ever read which mentions Metaponto.

  Fifteen columns of the ruin still stand upright beside the motorway to Taranto, survivors known locally as the Tavoline Palatine, proudly outliving the rival shrine in the town centre where Epeius’ toolkit was kept. There is not much of ancient Metapontum taller than the orange-groves and cornfields which this morning are lashed with hailstorms from a blue-black sky.

  Koestler’s explanation of the Third Slave War was that Spartacus was too weak. He did not eradicate dissent. The problem of his leadership was not being too rapine and ruthless, rather that, in ruthlessness if not in rape, he offered too little. In the novel the attack on Metapontum is carried out against Spartacus’ orders. A breakaway group, led by his fellow gladiator, the German Crixus, leave their fictional winter home, Sun City, for a new bout of insurrection and plunder. Spartacus has constituted Sun City as a community without gold or silver or traditional orders of rank. Crixus is tired of seeing Spartacus act as statesman, signing treaties with Rome’s enemies, coalition-building for the war ahead. He wants to maintain the revolutionary fire by taking more revenge and more wealth, more quickly, from the rich. Metapontum is the place chosen for his massacre. ‘What will the girls be like in Metapontum?’ his men ask. ‘Like opened oranges,’ comes the reply, ‘that’s what they will be like.’

  Fury, death and lust were mingling in a horrible chorus which strangled the thundering of the surf… ‘All the cities the slaves had sacked in the course of their campaign had suffered and been maimed through the wrath of the oppressed; but the town Metapontum suffered only for one night, for in the morning the town Metapontum was no more.’

  What does Spartacus do? He sends troops to arrest Crixus and his faction. After heavy losses on both sides, he brings them back to Sun City, sets up thirty crosses and crucifies his colleagues, including some who escaped with him from the Capua school. The men are tied and hung and spend the night screaming and abusing the revolution. ‘In steadily lengthening intervals they had been screaming. When one of them fainted with pain and exhaustion, he was torn back into consciousness by the cries of the rest, and he cried with them.’

  Crixus’ support grows among the men who watch these long executions. Large parts of the newly communist slave army back the insubordinate against their leader. Instead of continuing the crucifixions, instead of defying Crixus with yet greater force, instead of letting the ends justify the means, following what Koestler called ‘the law of detours’ from a noble revolutionary’s noble aims, Spartacus does the opposite. He signals his humanity.

  ‘The crucified men screamed again, with hope this time.’ He cuts down the destroyers of Metapontum from their crosses. Only one has died. Spartacus allows Crixus and his supporters to set off north on their own in search of other wealth to redistribute. He loses his own faith in the ideals of Sun City. He fails the big revolutionary test that, in Koestler’s analysis for this novel, every successful revolutionary must pass.

  Like every guide on the Spartacus Road the novelist and philosopher of communism brings his own light. He had been a witness to communist revolution. He had direct knowledge of what groups of the armed and enraged will do to those who are neither. We do not know where Spartacus’ army spent its first winter. Since no town could have accommodated it, either practically or politically, without ceasing to be a town, it is likely that Spartacus set up one of his own, a winter camp that would have looked like a town after a few months, just as army camps, and refugee camps, have always done. Koestler plausibly describes how his own Spartacus did a deal with the elders of Thurii, a former Athenian colony some sixty miles from Metapontum, a pact in which his army was supplied with food in return for not invading to steal it.

  The pattern for criticising The Gladiators was set by George Orwell. Koestler’s Spartacus was a mere ‘modern man dressed up… a primitive version of a proletarian dictator’. Koestler lacked the imagination of a Flaubert who, in the crucifixions and human roastings of Salammbô, could ‘think himself into the stony cruelty of antiquity’. Flaubert was writing his horror story of ancient Carthage in a midnineteenth-century time when there was ‘peace of mind’ and the mental space to seek cruelties in the past; Koestler and Orwell had only to look around them for political terror. More importantly in Orwell’s eyes Spartacus is presented as neither power-hungry nor visionary but as the subject of ‘some obscure force which he does not understand’.

  Koestler has faltered between allegory and history. If Spartacus is the prototype of the modern revolutionary, and obviously he is intended as that, he should have gone astray because of the impossibility of combining power with righteousness. As it is, he is an almost passive figure, acted upon rather than acting. The serious weakness of this story is that the motives of Spartacus himself are never made clear.

  Orwell is persuasive. Koestler, however, was right about the likely facts, too right for the success of his novel. The motives of Spartacus have never been clear. They are as difficult for historians to find as for novelists. There is agreement that at around this time the stoa of Metapontum took its final fall, that a thick layer of finest pottery began to be covered by broken tiles and burnt earth. The city was never a force again. Maybe Spartacus was indeed too soft to be a true revolutionary. Maybe he did prefer individual humanity to absolute power. The distinction is not likely to have meant much to those who crossed his path in that first winter of freedom.

  When his army was wrecking Metapontum, Spartacus was most likely here with them. The patch of ground on this journey where Spartacus most plausibly stood is on the podium in the middle of Metapontum’s amphitheatre of words, with its three Greek temples beyond the terraces in front of his eyes and the shattered Roman camp in the sweep of his left hand. He would have seen how one group of landless foreigners had built new lives in a new country centuries before, and he may have wondered how his slave army, or any part of it, might do the same.

  Today it is a park for archaeologists and fighting childen, both deploying their own forms of imagination here. Except at these Tavoline on the edge of the old town, there is much imagination required in Metapontum. The main temples in the centre have gone except for foundations pitted with algae and grass. There are small column sections rolled close to their original places like wheels of harvested corn. There is just enough of the once giant theatre to weigh the conflicting arguments in a place built to hear them. Even at the Tavoline the hailstorm is a bigger attraction than the standing stones themselves, drawing the single guide and a single postcard-seeker from their shelter, all of us thrilled to watch the anxious swallows, the balls of ice pinging against the pediments and the rising steam from crushed oranges and corn.

  Viale Orazio Flacco, Metaponto

  The slave army began the year 72 BC in two parts. Crixus led his followers back northwards past Brundisium and Egnathia to the Garganus mountains, the bulbous boil on the Italian east coast where he may have hoped to repeat the triumphs of Vesuvius. Spartacus led the larger part of the force northwards too, separately and behind. Whether this represented disarray or convenience is hard to say. If Spartacus was conducting a wholly different strategy from Crixus and trying to leave Italy for home, Brundisium would have been the place to take a boat, or a fleet of boats, for Thrace. Instead, both parts of the army headed north, keeping on the move, living off the land, terrorising everywhere they went, looking fo
r opportunities to defeat Romans and to grow in strength and power.

  There must surely have been voices raised for a fast departure from Italy. At least some of the slaves had fresh memories of freedom at home. In a fragment of Sallust, saved in the Vatican thanks to the book-cutter’s knife, the historian describes some of the slave army wanting to leave somewhere as fast as they can: ‘in the fear that wandering about disbanded as they were at that time they would be surrounded and cut down… at the same time… the worry… hence it was necessary to leave as quickly as possible’.

  But there will also have been those with no memory of freedom anywhere but in the slave army. Many Gallic slaves in Capua would have been slaves in Gaul too. German slaves from the Vesuvius towns might have been slaves in Saxony. The same was later true of African slaves taken to the Americas. Some had been free, some had been temporary prisoners-of-war; but debt and other crimes had already made thousands slaves for life in their own home country. For the whole army of Spartacus there was no haven of freedom. For even a part of it a haven might have been hard to find.

  Florus says the slaves also sacked nearby Thurii. This part of the Spartacus Road is recorded as one of exultation and display. The slaves took prisoners. They put on shows. One woman whom the slaves had raped committed suicide. The gladiators staged a mock Roman funeral for her at which four hundred male prisoners were forced to fight as though in the arenas around Capua. ‘Those who had once been the spectacle were now to be the spectators,’ wrote the Christian commentator Orosius. ‘It was as gladiatorial entrepreneurs rather than as military commanders that they staged these games’: the slave-leaders even charged admission.