Gaius Cassius Longinus was the next to lead the national response. He had been consul in the year the rebellion began. He too was a friend of Pompey the Great. A later bearer of his name became one of the most famous Romans of them all, the assassin of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s man with ‘the lean and hungry look’, the only successful commander when the cause of the tyrant-killers, with Horace on the wrong side, collapsed near the Greek town of Philippi. Defeat by Spartacus, somewhere near the balsamic vinegar and Ferrari factories of modern Modena, did not figure high on the family curriculum vitae, then or since. His descendant was still repaying the debt, and bearing the same name as a burden perhaps, when he called for the death of every slave in the household of the murdered City Prefect more than a century later.
Spartacus was now in the high ascendant. If his war had been like Statius’ boxing match, between the massive power of a Capaneus and the quick-footed wiles of an Adrastus, between the infinitely resourced and the merely resourceful, this would have been the time for a sporting umpire to call it off.
Via Vignolese, Modena
Carlo is from Cracow. He is on the pavement outside the bicycle-repair shops and TV stores. He has his own twelveinch screen and a suitcase of DVDs, many of them imprinted with newspaper titles, the Telegraph, The Times and the Mail. During the 1990s Britain became a world-leader in the wiles of selling news with free gifts. As a result there are tomatosmeared ‘special copies’ of Paddington Bear. There is a How to Get Ahead in Advertising that has long lost its gloss. Or would I like An Inconvenient Truth in French or La Dolce Vita, with matching mudstains and mascara, courtesy of the Observer? Almost anything is possible. For more than a decade many films suffered this fate. After a Hollywood release, a bankholiday TV showing, a few weeks on a 747, a cable premiere in Kabul and a targeted campaign to make C1 under-twentyfives see the benefits of a free press, even the best movies have ended up here in Carlo’s case.
It is probably not his real name. I have been beginning to doubt whether Carlo from Capua, my tin-armed, chemodyed guide in Rome, was called Carlo either. It does not matter much. This man is more like a ghost than a centurion. His skin is the colour of a water glass with a few drops of coffee. His neck is threaded like a thin steel bolt. In the tiny alley behind him, hardly more than a fissure between two walls, the sort of space which a rumbling lorry on the next street, or an earthquake a thousand miles away, might close for ever, there is a leather sofa. He places the TV at one end.
Would I like a preview before I make a purchase? I need not worry about Chinese knock-offs. His are the real thing. He has Romeo and Juliet and Roget’s Thesaurus, Driving for Beginners and Dr Johnson’s Dictionary.
Does he have the original Spartacus? I have wanted to watch Kirk Douglas again ever since leaving Rome. I am too far along this journey now to have only memories from school. Did we see the whole film even then, or just a part or just a trailer? I have no idea.
Carlo gives me a curious look, removing his dark glasses and revealing pin-like pupils and unevenly plucked eyebrows. He unzips a side pocket of his case and brings out a seethrough DVD travel pack plastered with the words ‘Bombay, Bahrain, Penang’, the Spartacus gay cruising guides to the world. Nakedness, whips, cruelty and sweat have made Spartacus a gay trademark. This is now, it seems, what my subject is known for best.
It could have been worse. Carlo might have offered the collected speeches of Rosa Luxemburg. The Spartacus Road took many turnings as it left the ancient world. German communism and gay fetishism were only two of its destinations. The combination of Karl Marx and beautiful Greek bodies was irresistible. When revolutionary muscle was yoked to buggery and beating on demand, the result was a potent brand. It still survives in the criminal charges against Bush and Sharon, hammered-and-sickled on to the philosophy-school walls of Capua.
But not tonight, thank you. Surely Carlo had a copy of the Kirk Douglas epic? A digital guide to gay clubs in East Berlin is not what I need. At least one desperate newspaper, somewhere, at some time, must have given away Spartacus the movie. He goes to another zipped pocket, this one full of DVD specials, triple sets, Mozart operas, original collectors’ items. He pulls out a plastic cover that protected a scrap of deep saffron paper, flocked and pitted, fit best to repair a stain on an Indian restaurant wall. On it was a sword-arm, torn off at the wrist, and the letters ACU. He puts the disc in his player and turns away.
Flies settle on the furthest plastic sofa arm as though it were genuinely the cow-skin it was once meant to resemble. They burrow into the horsehair as though it really were the hair from a horse. A dark-blue cloud fills the screen. For several minutes there is nothing but music, bouncy marches struggling from the base of the machine, trilling romantic hints dulled by insect-infested cushions. Even on a Chinese knock-off you get some sort of picture. So far this could be ‘Favourite Tunes of the Fifties’, a free gift from your friends at the Daily Express.
Then credits roll. The letters SPARTACUS appear in expanding angular capitals, as though written on pleated curtains blown by the wind. This is, at least, the right film. There is a swirl of blue and terracotta, like watching a landmine slowly explode or a seaside picture postcard stretched in all directions. The lash of whip and yellow sky suggest we may have reached the desert mines of Libya which the soundtrack has promised. The slave ship which brings the hero to Italy is a grey-black beetle; the gladiator school of Capua a cowpat with creeping grubs; until Carlo returns, bounces the monitor on an exposed metal spring and there is a man’s head in a boiling pot of soup. The story has begun.
The escape from Batiatus’ kitchens is easier and clearer than the Koreans and I imagined it back in Santa Maria Vetere. Kirk Douglas’s school is not in the town by the site of the later amphitheatre but safely, maybe even correctly (who knows?), in the most isolated countryside. It is so unprotected as to be abandoned after the break-out. The gladiators even return there to make a pair of captured farmers poke swords at each other while the former netmen and pikemen look on – a show which Crixus organises and Spartacus nobly brings to a halt.
The gladiators gather on Mount Vesuvius, setting up what is almost a small town there with women and children and new arrivals to be trained in the arts of war. Spartacus has his own woman, not a Thracian priestess but Varinia from Britannia. As the plot flickers on, the sense of a love story overwhelms the sense of any other kind of story. It might look different in CinemaScope but the fighting slaves do not seem to fight anything, or even do anything. They do not make the abseiling escape from the mountain top that Frontinus reports. They do not defeat Glaber’s irregular army; they simply occupy the camp. By the time we reach the big battle which they are going to lose we have not seen any of the battles which the slaves actually won. More than an hour and a half has slipped by, painlessly for audience and Romans alike.
Somewhere near here in Modena there occurred one of the biggest upsets in military history, the defeats of two Roman consuls and the governor of northern Italy by a band of slaves led by a few gladiators. Anyone making an epic movie of a rebellion that ‘came close to destroying Rome’, as a dark voice intoned at the start, might reasonably have shown scenes of slaves fighting and winning. It is near the end now and there has not been a victory of any kind.
Carlo comes back. He blanks the picture. Do I want the DVD? I am not sure I will get another chance to play it but, for ten euros, it is worth it anyway. What was it about? he asks. He gets impatient. ‘So an army of Germans, Greeks and other trash like me has a good time in Italy for a while and then gets kicked over?’
There is not even much pillage, and certainly no rape, in the film. The gladiators’ treasure-chests fill up with gold without apparent violence. Kirk Douglas is a benign Pied Piper, charming childlike followers from the countryside. There are no funeral games for Crixus, none of the sacrifices of Roman prisoners that Appian describes, nothing at all of the crucifixions of Romans, the staging of spectaculars in which Roman fought Roman to the
death. This is a peculiarly wimpy Spartacus, without victory, without viciousness, without violence, without anything much except the love of a good woman and an eye on a very distant future.
Varinia’s eyes are very much the sharpest thing on the screen, flashing, shining, speeding from side to side like a soccer linesman in a glow-black vest. She is a spectacular in herself, looking, being looked at, as if she were nothing but an eye. She must be even better on the big screen.
Via Aldo Moro, Pognana Lario
It was now the winter of 72 BC. Spartacus had led his troops to the northernmost edge of the country, the kneebone of the Italian boot. What next? At some moments the slave army had its eyes on the Alps. At others it showed its back to them. Sometimes the whole force looked the same way, sometimes in opposite ways. There were passes through the mountains, or the local people said there were, and places of safety on the other side, or some thought that there might be. There were also roads back south that the slave soldiers knew much better, roads direct to Rome, roads bypassing Rome to the east, hundreds of towns, farms and villas where they could bring terror, take pleasure and increase their fighting strength.
Spartacus had to make a decision, sticking to a previous plan, changing it, following, leading, commanding, listening, or all or none of those things. He had momentum, the weight of a successful movement of men and machinery. He did not have a strategy but he did have some choices, two main choices, to leave Italy or to stay.
VIII
TORNO to PICENTINO
Villa Pliniana, Torno
Sometimes at night sleepers in the house awoke to the rattling of iron chains. Some of them had merely heard the noise. Some had seen the man who carried the chains, his steps crippled by the fetters on his legs. The seeing was much the worse. Once the sound had turned into vision, the image never died. Even in the daylight the horror remained, worse in the day than in the night, the memory of crushed wrists and ankles bringing more fear than the apparition itself.
This was the start of a ghost story from a first-century man of Como. A Roman senator who had two homes near to here told it to a friend from whom he was seeking advice. He described how eventually the clanking chains had made it impossible for anyone to remain in the house of the spectre. It was put up for rent or sale at the lowest price on the slim chance that some newcomer in town might move in, either foolhardy or unaware.
Eventually, a philosopher called Athenodorus saw the price, discovered the reason for it and took the challenge. He sent his servants to bed but stayed awake himself, writing in his notebooks and keeping the utmost concentration on his theories so that no imagined body should enter his mind. At first, there was nothing but the general silence of the night; then came the clanking of iron and the dragging of chains. He did not look up or stop writing but steeled his mind to shut out the sounds.
Then the noise grew louder, came nearer, was heard in the doorway and then inside the room. The philosopher looked around, stood and recognised the ghost that had been described to him, beckoning that he should follow it outside. He told it to wait and went on with his work, bending over his pen and paper while the intruder rattled its fetters over his head.
After a while, and at his own convenience, he stopped his writing, picked up his lamp and did as the creature wished. The ghost moved off slowly as though the chains were a real weight upon it, turned off into a courtyard and disappeared. The philosopher marked the spot with a pile of dried grass and leaves and went to bed. Next morning he told the local magistrates that the place should be dug up to see what lay below. They found bones twisted with metal bonds, the remains of a body that had long ago rotted away. After their removal the apparition never recurred.
This story stuck in the mind of its teller, Gaius Plinius Secundus, known in English as Pliny the Younger, one of the greatest figures of this area where the Alps make Italy’s natural northern wall. The lakeside town of Como was his birthplace and his two villas here were among his favourite homes.
This is the part of the Spartacus Road, a piece of lakeshore oppressed by cypress and sunless cliffs, where I am not a total newcomer. I heard this ghost story before I ever read it, back in 1969, here in Torno on the way to studying at the University of Perugia. I worked in a hotel at Pognana Lario a few miles back from here, rising higher than I deserved in a business whose owner deeply distrusted his fellow Italians.
Ghost-hunting seemed to be a local obsession then. Julius Caesar, the Emperor Nero, Spartacus, Hannibal, Hercules: everyone had some sort of local connection. The favourite object of pursuit was Pontius Pilate, who appeared from time to time on a shaded part of the shore, stamping on the pebbles, it was said, where the grey grass grows down now to the waves. But there were problems with Pilate. Not only were there no buried bones but Como was not alone in claiming to host his grave. There was competition with other mountain towns for the credit, principally with Lausanne, where the condemner of Christ had once bitten a diver on the neck, with Lucerne’s Mount Pilatus, where he had been seen jotting names in a notebook of his fellow damned, with Tiersee where he roared like a bull and Ehsten where he boomed like a bittern.
Pliny, by contrast, was indisputably the local man made good. My ghost-hunting guide was the sixty-year-old salesman who brought Galbani yogurts to the hotel. It did not take us long to negotiate appropriate discounts for naturale, fragola and frutti di bosco. The rest of our time, which, like the man himself, was never less than ample, was spent spiriting personalities from the past. Pliny the Younger was his absolute favourite, a man of sympathy and understanding who thought and wrote about apparitions as well as, if I were watchful and acute, sometimes becoming one.
This hero had a glancing contact with many of the people and places of the Spartacus Road so far. He was a seventeenyear-old witness to the great eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79 in which his mother’s brother, the Pliny known as the Elder, died a scientist’s death, sailing too close to the scene in order to understand it more precisely, gassed by its incandescent dust. He knew Statius, the poet whose father had died while at work on a poem about the same eruption. He was a friend of Frontinus the water-man and took over his priestly job as augur when Frontinus died. He also shared his friend’s interest in water sources if not in the stratagems of slave wars. The great attraction of the house known today as Villa Pliniana was – and is – a spring which overflows into a basin three times a day, some kind of natural siphon which Pliny described with a painter’s care.
Pliny would be pleased that he was still being pursued and read so long after his death – but not surprised. His legacy was something to which he gave serious thought. He had reached the consulship, the acme of a political career even under the Empire. He had endowed foundations. He had collected art. He had won famous cases at law. He had written letters too which he expected to be influential long after their writer was gone.
In one of them he writes to Tacitus describing what he had witnessed twenty-five years before at the eruption of Vesuvius and how a decision to stay at home and study his Livy had saved him from the same nasty death as his uncle. He hopes that his reputation will win him his own place in Tacitus’ work. Unlike his uncle, who had fought cavalry battles on the Rhine, he was never a fighter himself. Risk and danger were not his choices in life. But he had powerful friends with whom he corresponded on gossip and ghosts, warfare and water mechanics.
Pliny’s letters did not survive quite as he intended. Like so many companions on the Spartacus Road, they exist now only through the thinnest thread of chance. The popularity of Symmachus’ letters, four hundred years later, was key to the collection and publication of Pliny’s too. Symmachus set a brief fashion and Pliny was the bigger beneficiary. But he stands firmly now at the beginning of a long line of men and women who have created careful images of themselves, not in stone but in autobiography.
These letters bring us unusually close to an individual personality. My Galbani salesman approved Pliny’s interests in strength and healt
h, subjects newly associated with yogurt in the 1960s. From this plump seller of milk products I learnt about Pliny’s marriages (three), his sadness at his third wife’s inability to have children, the stresses of his personal and courtroom trials – and the description of Vesuvius, remembered almost word for word, how death came like sleep to those who inhaled the gases of the mountain.
He was angry at how much less we knew about natural disasters that had happened so much more recently. There had ‘never been a newspaper reporter like Plinio’, he said, ignoring the quarter-century gap between the eruption and Pliny’s decision to file his story. I did not appreciate Pliny the Younger then: or recognise how, by getting close to the greatest spectacular of his time but not too close, by mixing vivid bravura with judicious modesty, by staying alive and filing crisp copy to the correct address, albeit a little late, he had good claim for induction in the journalists’ halls of fame.
Pliny had a strong feel for ‘human interest’. He tells the story of a Roman matron who agonisingly conceals the death of her son from her dying husband until, finally, broken by grief, she stabs herself and hands the sword on to him with the words, ‘It does not hurt, Paetus.’ Pliny’s verdict on this was: ‘immortal, almost divine’. My Galbani friend liked it too. It reminded him, he ruminated, of the years after the war, of how long the pains of the conflict were repressed, of how eventually they had to emerge. There were no suicides while Mussolini was alive, only when he was dead, and long after he was dead, shot near here at Monte Tremezzo; his father’s sister had seen it.
The philosophical milkman rambled along the path to the Villa Pliniana, through the world of his old friend, as though no part of it had changed. He had little interest in the new houses by the silver-striped bays of the lake. The Galbani seller was cautious about whether he had ever himself seen the ghost of his hero; he hinted he had come close. He always spoke about him as one would a newly deceased neighbour and friend.
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