Appian was the younger man. Later in his life he would write one of the longest accounts of the war between Rome and its ‘gladiators, slaves and riff-raff’. At this time he was a refugee in another war, in the mud and grey-green flax fields of the Nile delta, where in the spring of ad 115 Jewish settlers had suddenly, and for reasons still obscure, risen violently against their hosts.
In order to save his life, Appian had to find his boat in a shifting landscape of silt-choked inlets and short-lived lakes. There was no other human in sight. This was dawn in a war zone and he did not expect to see anyone who could help. The insurgents were not far behind. A revolt which had begun hundreds of miles away on the African coast closest to Greece had now reached almost to the Jews’ lost homelands.
These rebels, who had won a terrifying reputation for rage and destruction, were commandeering ships at the delta from west to east, from Alexandria itself, which had attracted a massive population of the Jews expelled from Roman Palestine forty-five years before, to Pelusion, near modern Port Said, which he and his Arab guide were attempting to reach that morning. The Jews had torn down Greek temples at Cyrene, modern Libya, a Roman province since the year of the Spartacus horrors. Shrines of Apollo, Artemis and Hecate were now shattered wrecks, no longer an affront to the newcomers who believed that there was only one God, their God, and that Olympian variety (or any other kind) was an abomination.
The behaviour of these fighters – and their solidarity with one another – was extraordinary to Greek and Roman historians. The Jews would ‘eat the flesh of their victims, make belts from their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood and clothe themselves with their skins: they sawed prisoners in two from the head; others they fed to animals; and still others they forced to fight as gladiators’. The atrocities are mentioned in a range of sources. Jews were believed to roast their captives alive. The people of Pelusium represented an especially pernicious example of religious bastardy to the Jews, favouring a deity with features of both Zeus and Baal, a multiple god served by crazy priests whose dietary laws banned onions. The Jewish rebels had destroyed bath-houses and colonnades because they were Roman, and killed to the orders, so it was said, of a man they called their Messiah. The whole of their society seemed to take part. Even if some of these charges were formulaic or false, there is no reason to think that Appian would have disbelieved them.
High in the sky the crow called again. The future historian had no reason to think that this sign was any more propitious than the previous two. But this time, as he later wrote, the screeching was not bad news but good: ‘when the Arab heard the bird for the third time, he was very glad. This was a prophetic cry. We have been lucky to lose the way, he said. This is a short-cut.’
Appian had no more faith in Arab prophecy than in the Jewish kind. He was a sophisticated Greek, a proud citizen of the world’s first metropolis, and saw himself as above all such superstitions. But, on this occasion, he did not have much choice but to follow the hopes of the guide who counted brownnecked crows. ‘I smiled,’ he wrote, ‘although I thought we were still lost and feared for my life. Everything was hostile. I believed his prophecy. Right then, we unexpectedly saw another branch of the river, the part that is closest to Pelusium, and saw a galley passing. I went aboard, and this turned out to save my life: my vessel on the other branch had been captured by the Jews.’
After this escape Appian lived on to enjoy a life in Rome as well as Alexandria. He saw how after two-and-a-half years of struggle, Hadrian’s legions crushed the revolt, the most dangerous Jewish uprising in Roman history, and how the Senate taxed the survivors to restore the ruined roads and temples. He became a Roman citizen and wrote a history of his new home, stressing the benefits of imperial rule, the desirability of a grateful populace and the dangers of civil strife. In Egypt the once threatening King of the Jews was turned into a theatrical effigy, an Alexandrian Guy Fawkes, and made a regular and exemplary spectacle to discourage imitators.
Appian made himself a pioneer of geography as history; he took each part of the world in turn and portrayed its progress towards a good and Roman life. He loved Rome but never stopped being Greek. He is one of those many ancient historians damned in schools with the charge of unreliability about government institutions. More important on the Spartacus Road are his claims that the slave leaders banned the use of gold and paid fair prices for their bronze and iron, his notes of how humans change under pressure of events: his words were the ones which introduced Spartacus to Karl Marx. He liked writing about Roman victories but considered, like Symmachus, that it was important to learn the lessons of failure. An occasional disaster could have a salutary effect. He read and rewrote the work of other writers, including different sources from those used by Sallust and Livy. He is also the only writer on the slave war who we know spent a morning in his youth being himself pursued by vicious foreign fighters who were suddenly and inexplicably rising up to destroy his country.
From the pages of Appian, sitting in academic comfort, some two hundred years after the defeat of Crixus on Mount Garganus, comes the sober report that 2,000 men fell before the army of the philosophical Consul, Publicola. For the slaves this was the first defeat. For one old Roman this was his finest hour. When Publicola’s colleagues had spoken of his earlier political triumphs, reconciling the schools of Epicureans with their intellectual adversaries in Athens, it was with a wry smile on their faces. This victory may have been only against slaves but this was beginning to be a real war which needed real victories. Publicola was its first Roman winner.
Via Archita, Mattinata, Gargano
Beside the recycling bins for the white-cubed hotels and shops of Mattinata lies dusty newsprint left by pilgrims and tourists from around the world, curled copies of Ola! and OK! in Portuguese, sports pages from all the publishing cities of Italy, Il Mattino from Naples, La Corriere from Milan, La Stampa, La Repubblica, two sections of the Washington Post and a single copy of The Times from London, folded and refolded like paper hats. There are fading words about footballers and film stars, Obama and Berlusconi, and the Mafia refuse crisis which has left so much of southern Italy, away from the tourist streets, a dump site for black bags.
ll Corriere has also the story of Viola and Cristina Ibramovitc, two girls aged fifteen and thirteen, two Roms, as gypsy immigrants from the Balkans are known in Rome. They are said to have been working together selling trinkets on the beach at Torregavata, north of Naples, when a wave knocked them down in the shallows, dashed them against some rocks and left them ‘annegate’. That was the headline. Both were drowned. Both bodies were removed from the surf and laid out on the sand. After a while both were covered with towels, taking their place in the line of all the others stretched out for the weekend afternoon.
The life of the beach was not disturbed in any way. As the indignant reporter describes, the corpses’ neighbours continued to apply their sunscreen, keep a close eye on their picnic baskets, telephone their friends, crack open the minerale as Neapolitans do on every Neapolitan beach.
After an hour an official vehicle arrived and a cortège of men in casual uniform identified which of the bodies were dead and carried them away. The front-page picture told that part of the story. The raised brown knee of a woman sunbather, her head lying back under a green umbrella, represented Torregavata’s farewell.
The reporter had clearly enjoyed his own part in these events. It was not his job (though maybe he would like that job in future) to write leading articles or comment, to ask why this had happened in that way, why it seemed so wrong or what he and the God-fearing readers of Il Corriere would have done, or should have done, if they had been on the beach.
If the two girls had drowned before the writer’s eyes, would he too have continued with lunch? He thinks not. If they had been Roman girls rather than Rom would that have made a difference to the beach parties? He thinks so. If the Ambre Solaire had stayed in its tube, the prosciutto in its basket, would that have been because the
picnickers felt too upset or ill to continue, or because it was the right thing to do? He has no space to pursue that thought.
Presumably it was not a matter of the girls’ immortal souls since that issue for Catholics – Neapolitans and Romans as well as Roms – is decided elsewhere. It would have been a matter of common respect which, if it exists for the living, is there for the corpse. Neapolitans see the gypsies as criminal trash who have no business on their beaches. For those without the protection of friends, family, fellow citizens, popularity or the law, there is no respect, no responsibility, and no need to spoil the day if they drown.
Corpses on a beach? That is the next part of this Spartacus story. Time is collapsed on our road. Two dead from the upper Danube would have meant nothing much here in 72 BC. But 2,000 dead men, perhaps three times that number, here and all across the Gargano, must surely have made some impact. There might easily have been thousands of slaves floating around here after the defeat of Crixus and his men.
There was no requirement for Publicola’s legions to do anything except, if it became absolutely necessary, to get the nuisances out of the way. There would have been little looting opportunity. When slaves defeated Romans, they stripped the bodies for cloaks, weapons and armour; victories were their fuel. But the Romans had no need to reciprocate. There was no reason to do anything but leave the remains to rot, no beliefs that made them guilty in any way of ignoring all corpses altogether.
They will have left any bodies of their own men on the rocks and hillsides too. The commanders knew well the Theban legends of Greece, the sharply different fates of the two dead brothers when their war was over, the home-boy Eteocles buried, the invading Polynices unburied, their sister Antigone punished for giving them equal respect. These were mere stories to the Romans. For weeks after the defeat of Crixus there would have been flesh everywhere here, not all of it the flesh of slaves, every part decaying into the sand and soil.
Corpses on a beach? It was a surprise when I came upon this street today. It is named after the most famous corpse ever buried here. My notebook is open on a low white wall along the Via Archita, sole memorial in Mattinata to an ancient inventor, numerologist, astronomer and autocrat, the inspiration of a single mysterious poem in Latin and of mathematics and geometry in every language. Archytas of Tarentum was once, it is said, a dead body on these sands. Horace wrote about him and set his poem here.
Roman poetry did not run by the Roman military code. Most of it was Greek to the core. Poets were allowed, even encouraged, to show that death was not the end. There were other possibilities after the last breath. There was a poet’s convention that on a beach, indeed especially on a beach, a dead body might even speak, might ask for its traditional Greek burial, the three handfuls of sand that were a price of entry to other worlds. Horace’s thirty-six lines form one of the stranger works on this theme, and one of his own strangest, set near what is now the Via Archita where the pilgrims sunbathe after their exertions for St Michael and the hoteliers watch anxiously for anyone who might fill their empty rooms.
Archytas is not himself the speaker in the poem. This pioneering scientist and sometime ruler of Metapontum’s neighbour, Tarentum, already has his burial. His gravestone is being addressed by someone else: ‘You measured out the globe and made mathematics from a million grains of sand, but none of that much helped you’ is the opening cry: ‘Te maris et terrae numeroque carentis arenae Mensorem cohibent, Archyta.’ The praise for earthly achievement was well deserved, as Horace’s more learned readers might have known. Archytas had been the autocratic elected ruler of what was once the greatest city on Italy’s southern coast, Greek Tarentum, home too of Livius Andronicus, the popular playwright whose woman-in-chains drama Andromeda had once been such a draw. From Archytas’ city had come many lost writers of the risqué and burlesque, the comic spectaculars on tragic themes which filled the game days before the gladiators began.
This ruler of Tarentum was an equal of Pythagoras and a friend of Plato, the promoter of philosopher kingship and the immortality of the soul. Archytas was even famed for once having saved Plato from slavery – in the hands of a less thoughtful Sicilian monarch. He had also founded the science of mechanics – and made a flying wooden dove which propelled itself on unseen strings as though by magic. He had studied the stars and invented various forms of what we now call solid geometry, the measurement of shapes which are not there and which we cannot see. This was useful: it taught priests how they could double the volume of an altar if that was what their gods required. This formula was a longlasting truth, a rare thing on this Spartacus Road. It was also a liberator of other imaginations. However much or little his readers knew of this military sage, Horace recognised Archytas as a champion expander of the human mind.
The nameless speaker on the beach is wondering how such an extraordinary figure, a king who once measured earth, sea, skies and altars, can be confined in so tiny a space on a beach. ‘A few offerings of dust confine you now by the Mattinata shore and it makes no difference that you drew maps of the stars: ‘Pulveris exigui prope litus parva Matinum Munera, nec quidquam tibi prodest Aerias tentasse . . .’ Shakespeare took the same thought when he had Prince Hal consider the corpse of Harry Hotspur in Henry IV Part One.
‘When that this body did contain a spirit, A kingdom for it was too small a bound; But now two paces of the vilest earth Is room enough.’ Shakespeare’s speaker, however, is alive, and on his way to becoming King Henry V. After some twenty lines of Horace’s poem it becomes clear that his unnamed speaker too, like Archytas, is already dead. The words come from an unburied body, a neglected prey to the lapping waves.
This is an angry and defiant corpse, spitting out its message that some men are spectacula whom the Furies give to the god of war while others end their lives in the sea. Young and old stand equally in the rush to death. The tour of the world’s horizons taken by the great thinker Archytas was of no more benefit than the journeyings of any soldier or sailor. That is the message of the corpse on the beach, aimed at conceptual conquerors, pioneers of solid geometry, manipulators of curve and plane, at everyone, friend of Plato or simplest fighter, who meets the same end and needs the same burial rite, the three handfuls of sand or soil or dust.
The drama takes an unexpected last, dark turn. The corpse’s final lines are spoken not to Archytas, nor to anyone else who is already dead, but to whichever living human is closest, to the reader, to whomever is alive and passing by on the beach. Fail to do your duty and eternal damnation on you and on your children.
Horace did not himself believe in the route to eternity paid for with a handful of dust. He hoped for immortality for his works, for his civilisation, but not for himself. He recognised the needs of tradition and respect but knew that those gifts were not universal. He was fascinated by the beliefs and disbeliefs of others and knew how a poet could use them, creating an everyman of this peculiar peninsular place, home to temporary tourists, pilgrims packed in one small cave, wraith-like seabirds that the ancients here saw as drowned sailors from Troy, the burial place of a defeated slave army and a philosopher king.
There may have been once a solid, stone monument to Archytas here. The ruler of Tarentum was believed to have fallen in battle on this Mattinata beach, leading his forces against the locals of Apulia. Horace may have heard the story in his childhood and seen the evidence. He may have seen it only in his mind. It is just as well that neither Horace nor the character in his poem can see the Via Archita today, twenty yards of rubbish bins and graffiti which, even 2,500 years on, seems a poor reward for such a pioneer.
There were other shifting memorials to great men by the seashore which Horace would certainly have known – including that of Pompey, builder of Rome’s first permanent theatre, patron of Publicola, loser in his Roman civil war against Julius Caesar, beheaded on the Egyptian sands in 48 BC by men seeking favour with the winner. When first erected, Pompey’s headstone bore the legend ‘Rich was this man in temples, poo
r now is his tomb’, an understated tribute to as ignominious a death as that of any Roman, stabbed at the water’s edge, unwatched by any but slaves of foreigners, his head hacked from his body and sent in a box to his all-conquering rival. By the time the young Appian’s ship was reaching Pelusium, chased by killers, guided by crows, the memorial was just another target of Jewish destruction in the mud of the Mediterranean Nile. The old Appian was later able to see its restoration by the Emperor Hadrian, a grave that became a tourist attraction, a place to watch the waves and contemplate the death of famous men for centuries to come.
Via Guerra Giuseppe, Mattinata, Gargano
Spartacus and his main army moved out from here towards the north. The coming months were those of his greatest success, the source of his inspirational repute in centuries ahead. Garganus was the exception. There were no more Roman winners that year. Lentulus and Publicola were defeated in swift succession in encounters which the Roman writers obscured. Appian suggests that even Italian towns, from their own hatred of Rome, were helping the slaves now. Roman soldiers tried to join the army of Spartacus and were rejected by the slaves.
The Spartacus Road Page 20