The second half of the piece is very different. In it he calls his own slave boy for perfume (‘I, pete unguentum, puer’), for fine wine that has survived those old Italian wars and a favourite mistress so that he can celebrate this homecoming in his own way. But if the girl cannot be prised from her house, too bad. He is not now as enthusiastic for a party as he once was in his youth.
This is a little-loved poem. It has been hard for readers to sympathise with grateful devotion to a ‘dear leader’ who has made possible a life without terror. This fourteenth ode is criticised as cold and obsequious, not just chilly formality to an autocrat but a sickening combination of public and private, of ‘Hail to the Chief’ and ‘Horace at Home’. The two parts, taken together, have long been decried as even worse than each one alone. Readers have always preferred the poems of Horace that highlight what we like in ourselves, irony, wit, the association of human feelings with the natural world. One of the best loved is the ode immediately before this one in Book Three, ‘O fons Bandusiae, more glittering than glass . . .’
‘Herculis ritu’ merges private and public fears for a frightened age. Vim and tumultum were common Latin words for making light of the very worst of events. They were the source of terror, of the fear that comes from the inability to trust what is closest at hand. ‘Slave war’ was a phrase to avoid. Horace’s father, his home town and countryside had known every kind of fear founded on that source of violence. Horace himself had travelled the cattle-roads here around Mount Irsi as a herdsman, doing the work that slaves, in the years after Spartacus, could no longer be trusted to do. He had known the breadth and depth of terrorised insecurity and now is established, a man with a place.
Part of his job was, in his own small way, to help Augustus stabilise the future. He could subtly rewrite the past. He could soothe, refine and calm. Augustus wanted an ordered, dignified history for his country and a foreign influence that was restricted, as far as he could make it, to the metrical subtleties of poetry. Horace has a personal stake in this comforting illusion of old and certain morality. He knows Augustus and his family. He knows Augustus’ daughter, Julia, who has already welcomed home her husband Marcellus, Augustus’ nephew and favoured heir. His fear for them all is real. As for his own homecoming party, he is pleased that he too, like the politics of Rome, is less erratic and irascible than he was in the year he fought for Caesar’s assassins against Caesar’s adopted son at Philippi.
Is there any wine that escaped the war which enslaved his father? Bring it out. Is there any of it that escaped the ravages of Spartacus? Not too much, it seems. Wine itself may not have a memory. But some wines will be forever flavoured by the events of their vintage year. How does Horace describe Spartacus? He is ‘vagantem’, wandering aimlessly violent around the Italian south or, as one manuscript has the line, ‘vagacem’, a word which appears nowhere else in Latin, meaning more or less the same but with a sour dismissive taste.
In the spring of 72 BC the armies of Spartacus and Crixus are still on their way north. Some tellers of this story like to place the fate of this region – the desolation of its farms, the destruction of its weaving-looms, spinners and weavers, its broken dolia of fine wine and after-wine – all under the charge sheet against Crixus, the monster of Metapontum. Botromagno is certainly in the line of march for the renegades-of-renegades who were heading for Garganus. But Spartacus was never far away: ‘Go, seek perfume, my boy, and garlands and a jar recording the Marsic war, if some amphora managed to elude pillaging Spartacus: I, pete unguentum, puer, et coronas Et cadum Marsi memorem duelli, Spartacum si qua potuit vagantem Fallere testa.’
The archaeological evidence from these fields is that at some sharp time between 80 and 70 BC organised society ceased to exist, not just here but higher on Mount Irsi and at Bantia near where the poet was born. Cicero describes the burnt-out villas and shattered economies that followed the assault. Decades later all that had been restored here was a tiny area of habitation in the middle of a plateau whose lands all around had been worked and occupied for nine hundred years.
As the slave army approached, there was not much time for the slaves of this farm to decide whose side they were on. Archaeologists are used to surveying chaos and seeking a sense of how quickly that chaos came about. The excavators of Botromagno in 1991 found a pear-shaped pit in the southeast corner of the farm, a hole full of pottery and animal remains, the evidence of a latrine and a place piled rapidly with household wreckage.
This had been a house of hard work and low luxury, one of the earliest examples of ‘the Roman villa’ before those words came to stand for leisure rather than business. There is much that the connoisseur can deduce from the shape of a broken lamp (once purchased in Metapontum), the absence of amphorae shaped with spiked bases for transport (the people here drank most of the wine they produced). Glass beads, copper jewellery, dice, charms, cosmetic spoons, lead rivets and iron spikes, all had been swept into the same pit.
With them were seventeen coins, all well worn, the newest dated thirteen years before the army of Crixus passed by. This was the currency which, when barter terms and notes of credit were not enough, was precious fuel for the farm economy. Why were the coins in the pit? That was not so easy to decide. This was not a hiding place. It was the most fly-blown hole in this farmyard ground. There was no ban in these days on taking coins to the latrine: that came only when emperors objected to their image coming close to their subjects’ excrement. A hundred years later a pile of cash could be seen as a miniature spectacular in itself, a polished display in silver, gold or bronze. Any image of a face held properties of the face itself. An autocrat did not want to see the shit of others let alone be seen in it. But that was not yet the way.
There was at all times, however, the habit of holding small change in the folds of toga or tunic, folds from which they might easily fall if their owner was interrupted suddenly in his after-work ablutions. There was no shortage of shocks for the ancient farmers of Botromagno and, on at least one occasion, a very sharp one. If archaeologists can speculate along such lines, so can any traveller on the Spartacus Road.
VII
GARGANO to POGNANA
Corso Matino, Mattinata, Promontorio del Gargano
Most men in the army of Crixus would never have noticed the Botromagno farm. The first to arrive found gardens of spring cabbage, a pond swirling and muddied by pigs, clear wine in the underground tanks, vineyards and wheatfields sparsely sprouting for the season to come. The last found lifeless water, rubble-strewn courtyards, trampled fields and the savaged bodies of slaves, split and splayed, those who had once woven and spun there and some new arrivals who had quarrelled over the spoils.
Some of the men and women from the household, slave and free, had escaped, seeking places where a mass of 10,000 fighters, advancing unopposed like a flood, might miss. There were maple groves and thick-packed oaks that a platoon might pass by rather than through. Some slaves willingly revealed the hide-outs of the free, some resignedly, some under threat of death. Some joined the household’s destroyers with the hope of having a better life.
Crixus’ first fortified camp was here on Mount Garganus. As soon as writers began to describe Italy as a boot, with its toe towards Sicily and its heel hard on Africa, this was the spur, a rough ball of rock pushing out into the Adriatic. It must have seemed a suitable place for Crixus’ purpose, too broad easily to be besieged, its steep hills and valleys lessening the advantage of the legions. It was chosen perhaps, as Vesuvius had been chosen, for safety and for visibility to new arrivals. The gladiator did not have the benefit of the pinkand-green Barrington atlas, the spider-webbed road maps of the Koreans, the latest negatives of the cartographer in the tight suit, or any reliable maps at all.
Around the shoreline of Garganus today runs a thin metal layer of railway lines and crash barriers, holiday villages, rusting factories and the cages for reinforced concrete hotels. The passing of 2,080 years has replaced one rim of impermanence wit
h another and done so many times over. The first Greek fishermen here described the circling of distant seabirds, like smoke rings over the waves, shearwaters maybe, white wings which they identified as the sailors of Diomedes, father of Tydeus the skull-chewer at Thebes, hero of the Trojan War who founded his cities from here. Benevento, where Horace fled the burning kitchen and where the sweating priest interrogated his Spartacus Road tourist, was just one of them.
The fisherman of the Middle Ages looked out over the sea for the return of the Archangel Michael, warrior saint and weigher of souls at the Last Judgement, who made his first western appearance here and whose return has been watched for since 493. The worried restaurant-owners of today look up from the main street’s barrack-like Alba Bar, with its rusted sign of a pouting, dissatisfied sun. They see the EasyJet in the sky and wonder how many on the flight will drive their hire cars this far up the coast.
Inland, up the slopes of the mountain, much less has changed, maybe nothing. There are thick forests of oak and beech, some of the only reminders left in Europe of the landscape before the Romans came. Horace saw and heard them and used them to demonstrate to an anxious friend the precisely opposite point, that all things pass: ‘Not forever do the oaks of Garganus creak, nor are alders always widowed of their leaves: Non semper… Querceta Gargani laborant Et foliis viduantur orni.’
This is not Pompeii, a soil stripped back to the era when the picture of Spartacus was painted there on a wall. It is not like Herculaneum; there are no beds and curtains, no libraries of Epicurean poetry. Only the earth itself is the earth on which the armies fought the next great battle of the Third Slave War.
Capua is at this point only one hundred miles away to the south-west. The original gladiators with Crixus must have wondered what had been achieved so far. Their road had certainly not been one of great progress in distance. They had, however, taken prodigious quantities of revenge in death and rape and drink. Most importantly, they had looked at Roman men and women as Roman men and women were used to seeing them, as objects for use. All these objects were the same. While Roman households had favoured slaves, personal favourites, slaves who were trusted, even loved, the slave army did not have favourite masters. It did not have the luxury for that. Those owners who had trained and educated the foreigners in Italy, or learnt about their cultures and beliefs, were no safer than the exploiters whose means of communication were the rack and lash.
In expanding to numbers that might defeat the legions of Rome, the insurgent army had made unprecedented progress. But there were still five slaves who stayed in slavery for every one who joined the free. It had not sought out every possible recruit. Its commanders were not sure whom or what they wanted. Thracians, Germans and Gauls, all good angry men, might reasonably disagree about what numbers were needed, what risks had to be taken to attract newcomers. Agreement on that would have required agreement on something much larger, a strategy, a common intention, a plan.
Escape by sea would be best achieved by a small group, like the seventy who had originally escaped: both mountain travel west to east and the seizure of boats were complex tasks. Escape by land, fighting northwards to the Alps, would be best achieved by forces of about the size they had now. A new government for Italy, success where Hannibal had failed and for which slaves under rebel Roman command were fighting Pompey in Spain? That would require a mass revolt in Italy, victory upon victory and aggressive recruitment after every one.
The gladiators had trained and retrained in the use of weapons, recognising quickly that Roman war and Roman war-games were wholly different. They had trained slaves to use spears instead of spades, swords instead of sickles. The first escapers were now divided between two slave armies which, whatever the causes of that division, were separate centres of command which the Romans had to confront – both on the peninsular mountain of Garganus and on the flatlands, canals and sea-marshes behind. The slaves’ closeness to Capua, their failure to make progress in distance, hardly mattered now. Their former master, Lentulus Batiatus, was just one of many in the cities of Italy who were awaiting the result without the will or power to influence it in any way.
Via Carlo d’Angio, Monte Sant’Angelo, Gargano
The coming battle between Crixus, the gladiator, and Lucius Gellius Publicola, legionary commander of Rome, would be only a small event in the histories of Garganus. Much more influential, except on the Spartacus Road, was what happened five hundred years later when the local bishop three times saw the Archangel Michael here and ordered that this mountain top of primeval trees become a place of worship for the mightiest protector of Christianity’s power.
The cave of Sant’Angelo gained its first altar and angelic repute at the time of the third and final appearance before the bishop. Precisely a hundred years after Symmachus lost his Saxons and saw his ancient Rome absorbed by a new Rome, Garganus gave up its pagan obscurity for a stellar status under the new dispensation. Five hundred years after that it acquired its exquisite bronze and silver doors, carved in Constantinople with angelic feats of arms and an exhortation to pray for the man who paid for them.
Since then it has never ceased to draw pilgrims to its underground air, the first of all the Monts St Michel and Michael’s Mounts that eventually spread as far as Cornwall. There are hundreds of the faithful here now, hoping for a chance to keep the silver polished with their sleeves, Italian nuns in black and white, priests with sweat-stained books, German fathers in green leather jackets, women in brightred cashmere, an incomprehensible collection of children and air-stewardesses as though this were an excursion after a diverted flight to Lourdes.
St Michael, so the bishop said, led followers to his cave by diverting an arrow fired at a stray bull, not just saving the bull but sending the shaft straight back at the archer who had fired it. A magic bow was always a powerful theme. Any pagan in ad 493 seeking a smooth adjustment to the latest true faith – from prophetic Amphiaraus in the Theban wars, through the Roman war gods, to the wars of Christianity – found this a comfortable place to begin. Michael was no kind of turn-theother-cheek saint, no feet-washing apostle. He was the field commander of the Army of God, the captain of the host of the Lord, protector of Adam and Moses: the ‘saint’ was a courtesy title.
Some early Christians preferred to adopt military champions from their own time, St George, St Theodore and others who had died in the torture chambers or gladiatorial arenas of Rome. But there must have been an easier comfort from an archangel, a suitably distant figure, identified by prophetic arrows like those of ancient Thebes, by mystic skills like medicine, by the healing of dreamers in womb-like caves, by the diversion of rivers by lightning blasts like those of Jupiter. When this hero for all eras was deemed to have appeared in Garganus, his first apparition outside the lands of the Bible, there began a force which endures to this day.
At the beginning of this trip, in a first flush of sympathy for Symmachus, I avoided the Quo Vadis church where a stone footprint marks Christ’s last appearance before St Peter. To wait for an hour to see the landing place of St Michael does not seem right either. There is a long queue of devotees in the white-floored rectangular courtyard, some of their faces covered, others obscured by candle shadow but occasionally one lit brightly by an overhanging lamp. ‘This is a place of fear,’ reads the inscription in Latin over the entrance, ‘house of God and doorway to the sky.’
I am looking idly over the crowd. There are black-eyed, black-hatted priests but not the man who now knows so much of my family past. The face in its borrowed veil escapes me completely, so too the little red hat which merges with those of the Virgin flight crew. Only when the Korean woman from Capua comes quickly under the lamp is it clearly her, or almost clearly. She is gone as quickly as she has seemed to come, down into the tunnel, the same determined swish of shoulder, the same look back to the doctor with the shiny black case, who must be there somewhere but whom I cannot see at all.
Why is she here? This is hardly a ‘great site of histo
ry’ for the edification of the children of Seoul. Garganus is a place of two stories, the Third Slave War and the appearance of an angel, both lacking much in the evidence that history teachers crave. She is not a Catholic. She never seemed or suggested so. Perhaps she changed her plans after Capua. Perhaps she has given up the itinerary that would have taken her from Cannae to the Rubicon, beyond Rome itself into the battle sites of the Empire. Perhaps she too has stayed on the Spartacus Road.
She will not have knowingly visited the exact site where Lucius Gellius Publicola lined up his 20,000 legionaries against the 30,000-man army of Crixus. Unlike the place of the archangelic visitation, we do not know where the battle site was. She may, as a knowledgeable student of the times, have queried those military numbers, arguing that the Romans liked to triumph over greater forces than their own whenever it was at all possible to claim so. She may have imagined the battle scene, a melee of slingshot and bright shields, stabbing swords, sharp on both sides, crunching through khaki-wool and leather, the unbeaten slaves against their first full legionary test. She will certainly have known the result, total defeat for the army of Crixus, the slaughter of thousands of his men, the deaths of both early converts to the cause of the gladiators and those who had joined them only a few days before around the Mount Irsi farms.
Via Guerra Giuseppe, Mattinata, Gargano
One ancient writer about Spartacus knew exactly what it was like to be pursued by ruthless and inexplicable rebels. His name was Appian and, before he came to Rome, his home was Roman Alexandria. A fragment of his lost autobiography survives which explains why.
There had been the call of a brown-necked crow in the sky over oozing black land. The sun was rising over the water and the two men who heard the bird were happy to have survived another night of the rebel advance. They knew that their boat was close by and that within hours they could be away and safe. But the call of the crow was not a good sign. The older of the two was acting as guide. He stiffened and became confused. We have lost the way, he said in panic, pointing towards the place from where the cry had seemed to come. The crow screeched again, sounding even more like a human voice in the hot, flat swamp that glittered brighter with each new minute of morning. Now we have completely lost the way, he moaned.
The Spartacus Road Page 19