Their main military aim was to do more in 72 BC of what they had done in 73 BC. The Romans had instructed their two new consuls for that year to make sure that the 72 BC result was different. Their names were Lucius Gellius Publicola and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus. Both were friends of Pompey, the most powerful Roman of the age, who was then away in Spain fighting other rebels. Both were military veterans and adept political survivors – Publicola, a gentlemanly intellectual in his sixties, especially so. They were not the finest generals Rome ever put into the field; the 70s were not a vintage decade for leadership. They were probably the best available.
Sallust tended to dislike all friends of Pompey. Lentulus seems to have been a Pompeian whom he disliked particularly. The new commander was irritating, one of those whom the historian could not quite define. He defied the senatorial categories of stolidi or vani, heavyweight or featherweight. It was difficult to work out whether he was anything at all. Publicola was simpler, the pontificating type. Neither was one of nature’s born conquerors. They did, however, command regular Roman legions, unarguably the world’s most successful fighting men.
Viale Europa, Montescaglioso, Basilicata
On the concrete blocks behind this roadside bar, a few miles north of Metaponto, a man in a tight, washable suit is sitting studiously at a metal table. In front of his face he holds a large black square of film, raising each corner in turn towards the midday sun and noting what he sees on a lined yellow pad. Struggling in his unhelpful jacket, he places a second film over the first, then a third over them both until even the most blistering sunlight is blocked and he has nothing new to write at all.
Although his struggle to keep the layers aligned is over, the perspiration does not stop. He wipes his forehead, strips down too late to his pale-brown shirt, and tries to keep the sweat from the linen map that lies beside his coffee. Maybe he is himself a map-maker or an improver of maps, a maker of cartographical novelties, with new restaurants, next to old battle sites, the kind the Koreans liked. There does not seem too pressing a need for new guides to the roads of this upland plateau. The line of antique-pink train stations, the one regular reassurance for drivers, does not suggest much past or future movement of the tracks. But there is always a market for novelty and perhaps his job today is to satisfy it.
Alternatively, he may be a fellow journalist, a photographer, an art director for some local magazine. Not so long ago, designers often used to hold up their negatives as he is now doing for the second time, checking ‘colour separations’, for pages long forgotten, in technologies that are in most places obsolete. My father used to do much the same thing at home, peering through giant circuit diagrams the size of a broadsheet newspaper page, taping one to another, the next to the next, until he had a finished diagram of some ingenious machine for seeing submarines or missiles far away.
Doctors still use shadowed film to show us the hidden parts of our bodies. The first time I studied carefully what was inside my own was in a display like the one now intensifying at the metal table – with a commentary from a man who was also in a slightly too tailored suit, also sweating damp on to his ghostly pictures. The objects of our attentions looked first like fishes secreted among swaying reeds, rubber tyres and ragged carrier bags: webs of veins spread like netting all around. With added images the creatures became clearer. A thumbprint pointed to a place behind the stomach, below the liver, a pike-like shape marked out by meandering intestines. Then came a show of colour pictures, no longer a dark pond scene but a bright tropical tank. The connection between these watery images and the wilder sights that a cancer can produce was a long time in coming clear.
The man at the table makes his last yellow notes, refolds the linen that he has spidered with fresh blue lines and walks quickly down to his car, letting his jacket flutter lightly on to the back seat. Map-making is all that he appears to have in his mind. There are dozens of pathways from here towards Gargano, some skirting the sites of old Roman villas, some passing directly through the farmyards and fields. The few main roads are clear. There are minor ones too. In 72 BC there were many more minor ones – and many anxious people ahead wondering which route the armies of Spartacus and Crixus might take.
Botromagno, Gravina di Puglia
There was once a high farmhouse here with a view over its furthest fields, standing in a broken line of settlements between Metapontum and the Garganus mountains. Southwards to the Mediterranean ran the thin Bradanus river; towards Naples and the Greek cities of the west were the drover paths packed hard for centuries by the feet of sheep exchanging the winter grass of the coast for summer hillsides. Immediately above was Mount Irsi, visible for miles about, and behind it miles of hills like calm waves on the sea.
In 72 BC, in the spring haze of midday, the landscape was warped and twisted, frustratingly so. On this day the farmers badly needed the surrounding earth to be level, more like the tables on which they ate, less like wooden boards left out in the yards and soaked by rain. Whatever was happening in the distance, the sight ahead was of the same shimmering patch-work of brown and yellow stains, some straight-sided fields drawn by their own hard labours, some rounded blots like spilt ink, oil or wine, some constantly changing as the clouds cast down their shadows from the pale sky, some fixed as boundaries that for centuries had been there.
This prospect to the south was broken in many parts. A stranger might walk north towards them, emerging clearly for a while before melding back into the hills. The smoke of approaching fires, as pale as the edges of the clouds, might do the same. So too might an army of many strangers and many fires, seeming for hours to be moving away towards other farms, then suddenly to be approaching their own home in a storm of fly-eating birds and flesh-eating flies.
Such shifts in direction were not mere illusions nor even the choice of the marching slaves. The high land set its own paths, nothing so clear as a road along which so many thousands of soldiers might choose to travel, just a gentle indication of its harder and softer slopes. There were deceptive lines of dark-brown pits, then ruts of yellow earth more golden than the far distant beaches. If the army of Crixus had found the oldest paths for its vast, massed exuberance, this path to Botromagno is where it would have come.
Roman farms were sited not to be secrets but to get the best of sun and water and the trade in what they bought and sold. The high ridges were healthier than the valleys. This was a place where the east–west and north–south paths naturally crossed. Long before the building of the Via Appia a farm here was on the road to Greek Italy. Long before the Greeks came to Italy this was a settled place. In the fields grew grain and olives. Deep in the coolest parts of the riverside ground were the dolia where the wine matured, giant earthenware jars with wide collars around their rims. The farm had fine soil for growing grapes. It had rooms of looms where slavewomen worked on clothes for their masters and themselves with as much left over to sell as they could make.
‘Better have the selling habit than the buying habit’ was the motto of Cato the Elder, guru of gurus for Roman agriculturalists. He advocated yard-sales for objects past their best, old coats, old fences, old people. Much buying went on too. The farm kitchens of Botromagno were stocked with delicate pottery, not just the thick-walled red-and-black-glazed ware which ploughing has turned up in so many seasons since but pale-grey cups like porcelain and fragile bottles for hand-cream and scents.
This was not a fashionable retreat for a rich Roman looking for leisure bloodsports, art and philosophical debate. It was a ‘working farm’, the term not yet needed to represent something different from ‘gentleman’s playground’. The owner’s family lived in two storeys of the main house. There was a small colonnaded courtyard on the east towards the Adriatic and, on the western side, a walled garden with water tanks which caught the rain. To the south of the garden were three workers’ rooms, single-storey, thick-walled with interlocking blocks of soft volcanic stone, close-fitted rectangles and sharp-pointed cones.
Once there had been a clear square place for vegetables and fruit, but gradually, in the years of peace, the space for slave manager and slaves had grown, connected by a corridor to the owner’s quarters. There were stalls for six oxen close by, enough ancient tractor-power to plough all the fields they could see. Two hundred years ago the owners had built fortifications too, high walls within which the field-workers could flee at the first sight of trouble. But these were long gone.
Many of the workers were women, a group rarely remarked upon by visitors seeking stories of man-manacled-to-man in prison-factory chain-gangs. Roman experts recommended the calming presence of the ‘pastoral Venus’. Even the strictest master of a farm like this one saw himself as the father of a family. Within the greater family were lesser ones. There was argument, at the time and since, about whether it was the most productive use of slave labour to mix cooking and child-rearing with the work of plough and spade. But communities of families were a common outcome, and in many places not just the most easy and natural but the most profitable too.
The need for thread-spinners and cloth-weavers was immense. Their output, unlike that of the potters and stone-cutters, has long ago decayed to dust – though not before use and reuse in its day that would have impressed their most parsimonious successors. In the spring of 72 BC the women of this farm were producing more than future children to be future slaves. A single toga fetched a serious price in the shops of Capua or Rome. For the buyer it was a big investment. Whiteness was especially hard to achieve, by cleaning, shrinking and bleaching, the ‘fuller’s arts’. Thread-spinning, like childcare, was work for women alone and less recorded even than cloth-weaving, which men might sometimes do.
The woollen thread for a single weaver required around a dozen spinners. Archaeological historians have made both economic and wooden models, willing and counting themselves into the workplace here, estimating that it took more than three forty-hour weeks to spin the woollen thread for one soldier’s tunic. Spinning and weaving a tunic might take a month. The shops of Sabbio in Capua, his competitors in the other Colosseum towns, his colleagues and their customers in the Roman army, all had to be supplied with cloth. Even the two approaching legions of Lentulus and Publicola, a fraction of the total Roman forces that then held territory from Syria to Spain, wore cloaks and coats that had taken 2,000 women a year to make.
The counting historians argue about what sort of machinery they should assume for their calculations. Were the looms the classic type painted on the black vases of Egnathia, with the vertical threads hung from a bar and weighted to keep them taut? Or had this farm and its neighbours acquired the newer double-wood-barred looms which did not need the stone weights? This is a frustrating question for anyone who badly wants it answered. The places where the most loom weights survive, often seen as centres of the most intensive weaving, may not have been where the most cloth was made. A weavers’ room with the latest double-barred technology would have left the least traces, just as a room of microcircuits will in future leave less behind than a cash-register. Local children have long collected weavers’ weights, running new threads through the holes. Sized and shaped like lollipops, these relics are recognised easily with or without their decorations punched in patterns of crosses. The wooden beams which replaced the weights have long gone.
Did customers even always want the advanced seamless cloth, woven in larger pieces, which the new looms could provide? Marble busts of those who could afford such portraits suggest that cloth from the old looms, made in small pieces and stitched together in the manner of their forefathers, carried high status, higher for formal purposes perhaps than the smooth widths made possible by the ‘double-beamed’ machines. ‘Antique chic’ was at the heart of many a Roman wardrobe.
Whatever wearers wanted, on and off the farm, and however quickly the new techniques came to Italy, the need for thread remained the same. The spinners had husbands who worked these fields. To judge from where the loom weights are found, much of the weaving took place outside too. The families had children who would work these fields and spin and weave in future. Conservatism in a Roman household meant not just keeping life as it was but stalling the natural process of decline.
Here the slaves had their half-jar of wine a day. It might have been the dregs, the watered-down brew of the third pressings, the lora; but it was sugar and pleasure in a place where many men and women, slave or free, had neither. There were more vegetables than meats on their tables. But there are ‘faunal remains’ – sheep, goat and pig with a three-foot shark and tortoise – in the latrines. Not all of that was from the masters. Lentils, the ‘poor man’s meat’ which Roman experts highly recommended for slaves, were rich in vitamin C and calcium that helped its consumers survive.
Rural life was not that of the literary idyll, not for anyone bar the politicians and poetry lovers who sought their otium from the negotia of Rome, mostly on the western coast rather than here. But when we build a picture from this farm, and from others like it, we see small rooms where a slave family would live, hearths where they could bake their own bread and bring up families, some of whom might survive and stay with them. Although there was no certainty of that and families could be split and sold, certainty and stability were available to few of any kind of any class.
War took the free before the slave. Farms here were destroyed when Hannibal was fighting Rome. Destruction came again when the southern cities were fighting Rome. Disease took both free and slave the same. Only one set of lungs has been preserved from this time, from Rome itself, those of the so-called Grotta Rossa mummy, and their condition is that of a sixty-a-day coal-miner with a DIY asbestosdisposal habit. The air inside the farmhouse may have been as fetid as a city hovel from sheep-fat light and dung fire but outside in the fields it was sweet.
Outside in the fields, in the first spring days of 72 BC, came the first whispers that three armies were on the move, the Romans south from the city down the Appian Way, the main slave force under Spartacus somewhere northward from the Gulf of Tarentum, the second force of slaves under Crixus coming more directly north to Garganus from Metapontum, in broken lines, their numbers uncountable, their main mass heavy along the banks of the Bradanus. Master and slave stared out together into the shimmering circles of hills to see whether or where they should run.
Almost fifty years later, Horace is casting his mind back to what happened next. He knows nothing of Spartacus from his own memory. He was not born until seven years after the march to Garganus. But he knows what the slave army did and what it meant.
Horace’s birthplace was nearby, Venusia, the small town whose founding had been the first fixed Roman assault on the local Greeks. His father had been a slave, very likely a free man who had been enslaved during Rome’s war against the Marsi, the Latins, the Venusians and other associated allies who wanted better rights, citizenship and votes at Rome as well as the privilege of fighting its wars.
His early boyhood was spent among the military families from the legions who, in reprisal after that Social War, had taken over the Venusians’ homes and schools. His own education, after his father regained the freedom to be the generous parent, was in Rome, far away from the patronising big-boned centurions’ sons he so disliked. His university was at Athens where he met Brutus, Julius Caesar’s assassin. Aged twenty-three, fuelled by idealism and friendship, he had risked slavery or death himself by backing Brutus and Cassius in their failed fight against Caesar’s heirs.
Horace knew directly of Italy’s civil wars and never wanted another. One of his earliest poems took the theme that the present age of destruction was even worse than those of the past: ‘A second generation is wearing itself away in civil strife and Rome the city that neither treacherous Capua nor violent Spartacus destroyed is collapsing from its own power: Altera iam teritur bellis civilibus aetas Suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit. Quam neque… nec virtus Capuae nec Spartacus acer . . .’ If a future Spartacus and other destroyers were to be kept at bay, Rome needed a
n answer, a surer means of saving a civilisation which, while seeming sometimes strong, was so very fundamentally frail.
After backing the wrong answers to his problem, Horace had restored his fortunes by luck, literature and charm. He last appeared on the Spartacus Road, still as a young man, at Egnathia, near the end of his Journey to Brundisium. By then his support for Caesar’s killers had been fully forgiven. He had become accepted as a junior member of the Caesarian party, aged twenty-six, travelling across Italy with a diplomatic mission to reconcile the future Emperor Augustus with his rival, Mark Antony. There was then still one last civil war in his life ahead, the one which finally brought one man to undisputed power.
Eighteen years after that, now aged forty-four, Horace is looking back in his second Spartacus poem at all the events which have shaped his life. His father, to whom he owes so much, is dead. The poet now has his own country house, modest but close to fashionable Tibur in the hills outside Rome. Augustus is in charge. Tota Italia is at peace, proudly bearing that name from the Alps to the Messina Straits – but everything depends, he thinks, on Augustus remaining in charge.
‘Herculis ritu’ is the fourteenth ode in his third book. ‘People of Rome’, it begins, we thought that Augustus had lost his life on campaign in Spain. But now he is back, a monster-slaying saviour like Hercules: ‘let his wife go out rejoicing to greet him! And the sister of our dear leader too. And every mother here of men who’ve been fighting and maidens who await those men’s return.’ Horace declares that he will never fear death through tumultum and vim while his leader is alive and in command of the world.
The Spartacus Road Page 18