The Spartacus Road

by Peter Stothard

  He described how Pliny had collected statues of emperors, how he liked to look around him and see the fatherly Augustus, the troubled Tiberius, sweet Caligula (in the marble version), Claudius without his limp and Nero with his favourite musical instrument. There was Vespasian the squinter who came from nowhere, his cheeks folded like piles of cushions, the emperor who began the building of the Colosseum. There was his smug, bulging-browed, narrowmouthed son Titus, the hammer of the Jews, the Elder Pliny’s friend from German-fighting days, the emperor who completed the world’s greatest stadium. After him Vespasian’s second son, the lascivious, sideways-laughing Domitian. Finally, the plain and puritan Trajan, pursing his lips.

  There is no contemporary portrait bust of Pliny himself. The statue that he chose to commemorate his achievements was a small Corinthian bronze, with a lengthy marble inscription of his own best deeds. This was a typically careful choice. To commission a very splendid bust of oneself might have been excessively showy (a practice best left to the emperors in his garden). To do nothing might have been perversely modest (like dear Frontinus, collector of water and stratagems, who banned any tomb for himself because his aqueducts were quite enough). A good-quality antique with some suitably deathless prose? The perfect compromise.

  For the man who sold Como its yogurts there was no greater pleasure than to sit by the intermittent spring at the Villa Pliniana, reading Pliny’s description of it, picnicking as Pliny had done (but as was not always possible in years of abandonment and war), placing a ring on the dry margins (as Pliny had) and waiting for the inundation. ‘Is there some force of water hidden out of sight which sets the spring in motion when it has drained away but checks and cuts off the flow when it has filled up?’ He did not know the answer to his hero’s question. He just wanted to take himself back there to when the question was asked. In 1964 he was soon about to retire from milk-products and to smile his tubby way through Latin books instead.

  By the time that I had left him and spent a year in Oxford, that kind of identification with the classical past was foolishness, fraud and fallacy. The Latin never again flowed so easily into my head; and no one could admit then to a gap-year with a ghost-hunter. Back here now, I am back in his mind and a bit closer to his hopes. It is possible to recreate parts of the ancient world, and not only with Hollywood togas. We can know and imagine. We can build upon others’ knowledge and imaginations. We can select from our sources as from a guidebook or anthology. We do not need them all. An ancient source – a text of Pliny or Statius or Horace – is just what it says it is, no more so, no less. It is the spring or well, not its water. The source has always been there, sometimes hidden but unchanged in itself. The source is the same in every age. The water is not the same. We find the source. We drink the water. The water is different every day.

  Even on a high blue afternoon the air is heavy. The cypresses seem capricious guards, sometimes protecting the narrow house from the mountains, at other times seeming to lever it into the lake. Not even a line of blocking, black Mercedes limousines can crush every spirit. If we were on the Pliny Road rather than that of Spartacus, it would be very much easier to bring our subject solidly and certainly from our thoughts.

  Pliny never mentions Spartacus. He would have been disturbed to know that a gladiator’s ghost was worth anyone’s pursuit – unless, perhaps, to improve the prospects of a house sale. Like many thoughtful men of his time, he was ambivalent about the arena. He wrote proudly to a friend of not paying for public games or gladiator contests but paying for a children’s home instead. He recognised that an inscription over a library or bronze masterpiece would be visible for longer than would a few hours of violence. But when the occasion was the funeral of a very dear wife there was still need for the ‘most powerful spectacle of all’, a gladiatorial gift to her departing spirit. No one knows now how many pairs he thought appropriate. It seems unlikely that Amazons or dwarfs were part of the show.

  The Colosseum was a tool of calculation for a man of sensibility, a way of thinking about decisions even when he was not choosing the gladiators themselves. The arena was a metaphor and a means of communicating problems at law and in life, rather as we use football and cricket today. Pliny had its customs in mind even when he was presiding officer of the Senate, when he and his colleagues faced a judgement similar to that in the case of the city prefect, Pedanius Secundus, four decades before. When a senator had been killed in his own house, what should be the verdict on the freedmen of his household? The slaves had to die, but should the ex-slaves be considered guilty too? And if the freedmen were guilty what should be their punishment, exile or execution?

  Pliny’s problem was how to put the options to the vote. His preference was for leniency. How would that outcome best be won? Guilty vs Not Guilty was one way, a one-onone contest that everyone could understand. Another way was taking all the options together, Not Guilty vs Exile vs Death in a simultaneous three-way fight.

  In ad 61, the year of Pliny’s birth, Nero had allowed the slaves of Pedanius to be executed while intervening on the side of public opinion to save the freedmen. In the summer of ad 105, in a new era of freedom after the death of Domitian, the Senate could decide on the freedmen for itself. Pliny supported the Senate group wanting a total acquittal for the freed staff of Afranius Dexter. There was reason to believe that it had been not murder but assisted suicide. Other groups in the Senate, equally matched in numbers, wanted banishment to a barren island or execution.

  How the votes were taken, as later parliamentarians would better understand, would critically affect the outcome. Pliny went for the three-way simultaneous option, estimating that some of the votes for banishment would come over to those wanting acquittal. Instead, the death-penalty advocates moved en bloc behind the banishers. The freedmen were thus condemned to rot on some Mediterranean rock.

  ‘In some of the public games,’ Pliny wrote ruefully to a friend, ‘one gladiator draws a lot which entitles him to stand aside and fight the victor.’ He could have tried first for a notguilty verdict before pitting the executors against the banishers if he lost. As this self-consciously decent man struggled with the birth of tactical voting, the squeeze and other developments of later democracy, the only analogy in his mind was the Colosseum.

  Slave-owning was a practice that could, he thought, be modified. The worst masters might be encouraged to behave like the best. There were proper means of making the slaveowner safer. He kept slaves on his farms but he prided himself on never keeping them chained and on judging each by reputation or character not, like livestock, by their appearance.

  This did not, he recognised, make him safe. He describes the murder of a man at Formiae by slaves who surrounded his bath and stabbed him in the stomach, neck and groin. This particular master had been cruel, horribly forgetful of the fact that, like Horace, his father too had been a slave. But even kindness and consideration were no protection. Reasoning capacity could not be relied upon in a slave. Brutal character could not always be spotted before purchase. An owner could never feel wholly safe.

  In the Galbani man’s view, if one were to have been a slave in ancient Como, Pliny’s would have been the house in which to serve. He offered lettuce, eggs and beetroot at his table and mocked providers of sows’ innards, sea urchins and Spanish dancing girls. He would have helped you write your will. He thought that a man’s last written words were the best testament to his character. He loyally honoured his uncle’s memory, compiling one of our earliest bibliographies. The listed works included a twenty-volume history of Rome’s wars with Germany, a project inspired, its author said, by the ghost of a dead commander and which Symmachus, three hundred years later, would have surely had on his shelves.

  Pliny wrote plays that have not survived and poetry which has survived in just enough quantity for his reputation to have been better without it. But his prose, a companion to the poems of Statius, is a portrait of a world far away and how one inhabitant of it wanted to stay in our memory.
To the milk salesman he was simply ‘simpatico’, a man he could understand, and there were not many people of any age of whom he could say that.

  Pliny wanted always to be seen as a civilised man. He tried to be humane in his application of the law, including the law on the freeing of slaves. Like Statius and Spartacus he even won a place in the favour of the Church. He left behind in his letters one of the first independent accounts of Christianity: and the use of torture on two deaconesses to gather his evidence does not seem to have been held against him. The Younger and Elder are enthroned today like thinfaced bishops on either side of the great Duomo door in their home town, local heroes caged against the pigeons, casting their eyes with disapproval on the tourists and beggars below.

  Piazza del Duomo, Como

  Thirty years on from those Galbani ghost days here, I had a second experience of conjuring the spirit of Pliny the Younger. In the year 2000 I was at last undergoing some exotic chemotherapy for my cancer. Nero had been revealed as a tumour of one of the smaller pink fishes in the body’s pond, the pancreas, ‘all flesh’ in Greek, a delicacy apparently much prized by cannibals. This pain-bringer was no longer certain to kill me, merely likely to do so. There was now some possibility of escape.

  The treatment was an accelerating cycle of normality, semi-madness, delirium and normality again – with gaps between these stages at first but gradually a continuous circle of effect following cause. There was neither sharp pain nor battle pictures of the earlier kind. Every edge was blurred. By my fifth cycle the useful time that I had once called my ‘lucidity hours’ was reduced to a few mornings a month.

  My hospital nurses had plans for those mornings. I was to imagine scenes from my past, the happier the better. Arranging my personal history, like arranging my books and papers, was no longer designed only to make life complete and death almost reasonable. The memories would help me get well, just like the American chemicals that were coursing through my veins, the yellow bags of liquid that the sisters treated like Semtex. Old pleasures must enhance the will to live. I could not argue with that, or, indeed, argue much with anything.

  To prepare myself for this promised good time, free from pain and the fear of pain, I sat in the sunshine in a garden chair. Each of my legs had to be individually identified in my head, selected as though from a rack of legs and hauled next to the other. They were like Volumes One and Two of a Victorian novel, separately comprehensible, better together.

  I had ‘a long tube of red hot hay’ beside me on the grass; or, at least, those were the words written on my memory-jogging scrap of paper. The reference might have been to my right arm or my left foot or almost anything. My mouth was the most lucid thing about me, refreshed with chlorhexidine gluconate, a variety of green liquid wash, peppermintflavoured according to the label, wire-brush flavoured as it seemed to me but still scouring and cleansing for a tongue like the element in an old kettle. I had taken my warfarin to thin the blood and my vitamin B capsule to stop my hand shaking. I was even able to chew a soft yellow lozenge called Nystatin which chases fungus away. New doctors were in charge now, American and British, pugnacious scientists instead of consultants and diplomats. I was hopeful and ready to remember.

  The sun shone hot. The roses were burning red. Out came the mental pictures of family holidays, of weddings and christenings and boat trips on the Thames, fixed photographic images but full of light like the colour slides that my father used to keep in blue plastic boxes and project on to our walls. Down, as though from some system of photo-files, came pictures of newspaper colleagues calling out deadlines and congratulating each other on successes whose nature was not clear at all.

  This did not seem too hard. It was something like a brantub gamble at a fairground. I could not choose the subjects with much precision. Occasionally there was an unhappy picture and, like Athenodorus in the haunted house, I concentrated with modest success on keeping it away. But the most persistent picture was a scene very like the one I have just been writing. It was the scene of the young yogurt-buying classicist on the shores of Lake Como – and with him the ghost-finder and, with them both, another figure, unnamed, dressed in Roman style, not likely to have been Caesar, Spartacus or Pontius Pilate. It was the younger Pliny. It could have been no other. There was no sound from the image but Pliny was speaking to the yogurt man and the yogurt man was speaking to me. I never saw Pliny back in 1969. I did not see him in my chemo-fuelled rose garden three decades later. But I did see myself in Como seeing Pliny in Como.

  Ten years later still, now again in Como, I cannot call up that figure from the ancient past, much as I would like to, much as I play with every idea of the fighter I have chosen to follow on his road. I can only call up my own recollecting of that past. I can only remember myself struggling – with deformed and distorted will – to make pictures disappear and appear. The Spartacus Road is not a ghost-hunt but I do have here the image of a ghost-hunt, an event of recollection that I have every reason to believe in.

  A few months after those memory games in the garden, the chemical poisons and a surgeon’s knife put an end to Nero. The source of so many violent pains and picture shows ended on a white slab the size of a dinner plate. He looked like whale blubber. There was the simplest photograph of him in my hospital file, a print not a negative, needing no one to hold up any dark transparent corners to the light.

  Pliny has two other stories from the spectral world in his letters. The first is that of a giant female Spirit of Africa which appears twice before a Roman general, predicting both his success and his death. The second is of an ethereal hair-cutter, a ghost who sheared the locks of two of his own freed slaves. He wants his correspondent to weigh up carefully the case for believing in ghosts and for not believing in them. He wants a balanced argument but also a choice. He wants the application of human reason and a firm statement, based on the evidence, for one view over the other.

  Before that he has another piece of advice from Como. He argues the case for continuing in health the disciplines we have learnt when we are diseased. If in sickness we dream not of lust and slandering our enemies but of lakes and springs, that is how we should behave when we are well. If we prosper against a cancer death sentence (as I did) while imagining the imaginings of the ancient past, we should not abandon that aim, however hard in the cold times of health and sanity it may seem.

  Via Roma, Tivoli

  No one now knows why the northward march of the slave army, its liberty march as some saw it, stalled, stopped and slid back in the direction it had come. Perhaps the marchers realised that Rome’s forces on the other side of the Alps, from Thrace to the Pyrenees, were as likely to defeat them as were those in Italy. Roman rule was rapidly tightening over the mountains of Spartacus’ own homeland. Perhaps they felt they had not finished here yet, preferring warm rape and wine to the rock and ice which were the alternative most apparent.

  There was much proper vengeance still to be taken on cowering farmers, their caves of alcohol, their daughters, wives and spinning-rooms. Terror is a drug just like freedom. Its fighters wanted more of what they had come to enjoy, the flashing eyes of those about to die, the hope-drained pleading of mistresses and masters before the sword struck.

  The army held men of increasingly divided views. There were those who refused any longer to live by Roman rules and those who saw and accepted no rules at all. Hardly any army has ever been united in where it should go and what it should do. Most armies are not asked for an opinion. Perhaps the slaves had some sort of vote. Many later writers thought and hoped that the stories of this democracy were true.

  The commanders wanted fresh slaves to join their fight. There were more recruits on the Roman road south than there ever would have been on the herdsmen’s paths into the northward hills. The case for staying together, for avoiding the fate of Crixus on Mount Garganus, was clear enough. The case for constant movement, for seeking ever fresh ground for pressing men and pillaging supplies, was no less potent. Soon the arm
y of Capua, Metapontum and Modena was back deep into Italian countryside, doing its business in undefended places.

  What did Spartacus himself want? What did the others of the original Capua escapers want? Forcing prisoners to play gladiator improved morale. Everything that built their strength had a purpose. They might plan attacks on farms or armies. If they were mad enough they might attack Rome itself, only fifteen miles from here at Tibur. This Apennine hillside town was the perfect place from which to assault the capital. If they were more measured in their ambitions they would wait and hope to grow stronger still.

  Via di Villa Adriana, Tivoli

  Meanwhile, the people of Tibur could only watch, wait, listen, talk and get on with their lives. They had leisure time to think about Spartacus but no intelligence of what he might do next. Tibur was the Capua of middle Italy. The name of Rome’s luxury suburb came from its Greek founder Tiburtus, grandson of Amphiaraus, the prophet at Thebes and most reluctant of the seven attackers, the one whose arrow flew back to its quiver, who knew that his war would end in catastrophe and that he alone would survive. Tibur’s people had preferred peace ever since, offering rural villas and water gardens to Romans who wanted a country place closer to the Forum than Campania. There was always the noise of crashing foam in a town built, long before Rome, at the place where the Anio collapses in the plain for its last stretch into the Tiber river. This was a little paradise that soothed sleepless city minds. Matters that seemed so garish in Rome, multi-coloured in blood and gold, became soft and grey among the whispering spray until only a thin wisp was left as a reminder. Or so its property agents said.