The Spartacus Road

by Peter Stothard

  But, even here, anxiety about the slave army was hard to avoid. How mad, how measured were the men on their southward march from the Alps? Some of them, it was said, had the discipline of legionaries, learnt by marching in chains, ankle to ankle, neck to neck, in rhythms that recurred and recurred with every step. Some had never marched further than from clerical office to kitchen, a routine that now made their muscles seem new every day. Why had they not just left over the Alps? In Italy they were free but not free, like prisoners who had exchanged one set of walls for another, like wild animals who had escaped their wooden boxes but were now pacing back and forth in a larger cage. Tibur was in that same cage. That was the problem for the heirs of Tiburtus now.

  Life had not yet changed here in any serious way as a result of the revolt. The wine still came from its makers, the corn from the ports. The road from the capital was no more than usually packed with the tired and troubled. Italy was large and the slave army was small. The seventy who had left the school of Lentulus Batiatus, those that had survived both their own successes and those of Gellius Publicola, were leading 70,000, or so one rumour ran. But many millions of slaves were still working, in mines and kitchens, quarries and bedrooms, behind bars and behind desks, for the avoidance of punishment and pain or, if not that, for the best human hopes of another day alive.

  The sounds of the river winds in Tibur were ceaseless. They were proof of something beyond the fears of any man’s mind. They were as calming as the hum of bees and as meaningless as the din of others’ thoughts. They mingled with the sound of bells that has always pealed from deep down in the caverns of the Anio, as otherworldly to the hearer on earth as it is reassuring to his ear.

  To most of those living between Como and Tibur the marching men were still nothing. Only to those who stood in their way had they suddenly become everything, every sort of pain, thought and fear, until the thinkers themselves had become nothing. Some had escaped from the army’s path, and had told people who had told other people who had told people in Tibur, told stories of rolling horror, of what happened when a hundred men-of-rage hit a house of ten men, twenty women, slaves who pleaded to join them, slaves who simply pleaded.

  There are things that people see which stay always in their original colours, not dead tones of flesh but the last blue or green of an eye, not one dark sex forced upon another but the chalked-in-purple pattern of a stare. Some memories, some memories of memories, are bright and solid for ever. Some fade to black and white. Some last only in words, like prodigies, like diamond swords of moon and rain in the sky. Some disappear for ever in spray. It has always been the art of Tibur to make as many anxieties as possible disappear – under high and heavy white stars like those hanging now over its falls.

  Statius described a villa here, one of his brightest pieces of praise for bricks and mortar, blurring the lines between what the builder sees and what the artist sees. His is an imagination in which a flooded river is held back by a man, where the leaves of a tree are jumbled with the heavens and where flying waters and a painting of the waters are the same. A mansion floats on waves of glass.

  The poet’s client, the politician owner of the house which once stretched along both banks here, was a poet himself and a convert to the life of an Epicurean. None of the poems of Manlius Vopiscus survives. But we have pieces of his marble columns, sections of the brickwork which held up his hillside and Statius’ description of river nymphs flowing to cool his dining rooms. As Frontinus the water-man complained, there were always wealthy men who thought that public pipes were there to be tapped for private pleasure.

  Hercules, a favourite subject for Statius, was the presiding deity at Tibur. His statues often stood throughout Campania in the name of his bellicose title, Hercules Victor. But here he was Hercules the haggler, god of market-traders and cattleherders, devourer of leftovers, the god to whom anything could be offered and everything omnivorously accepted, a semi-divinity slipping in and out of the water clouds.

  Horace praised Tibur too. A few years after his Journey to Brundisium, the poet was given his own house near here as an imperial reward for loyalty and fine words. A few years after that, when Augustus had defeated Mark Antony (he of the ‘solid gold piss-pot’: how far that was from those wonderful anti-materialist Spartacus virtues, explained Pliny the Elder), seven decades of civil wars were finally over and Horace began to mention Tibur more and more, his beloved land with its ‘orchards watered by restless rivulets’. Archaeologists and tourism entrepreneurs have expended enormous effort in not quite establishing where this was. Piranesi drew a map that mocked them for their pains. But anyone can read what Horace wrote, his description of himself composing like a waterside bee and of Tibur itself as ‘supinum’, leaning backwards, not the keenest city for the young and ambitious, a bit laid back in the modern sense perhaps.

  ‘Laid back’ was always fine here, except in one of the worst of those Italian war years before the benefits of permanent imperial rule had begun. To be supinum was to take something of a risk when a slave army was marching from one end of Italy to the other, with an interest (pausing or passing?) in the country’s capital only fifteen miles away.

  Via Roma, Tivoli

  Some inhabitants of Tibur lived here all the time. Some came for holidays. Some had built their own villas. Others had acquired property through political connections. All were concerned about the route which Spartacus might take. But for anyone with a country house for which he had not fully paid there were already new problems as a result of the rebellion.

  In the previous decade there had been many examples of state assets turning up, after only tiny payments if any payment at all, in the hands of those deemed useful to the top man at the time. Most of those assets, from fashionable street addresses to vast country farms, had been taken from enemies of that same temporary top man. Like the dukes of Bedford after Henry VIII had ‘dissolved’ the monasteries, the recipients of this legal largesse were nervous for a while that their gains might be removed. But not for long. Like Russian oligarchs after Boris Yeltsin’s dissolution of communist party businesses, many men in proud possession of pretty villas bought by loyalty rather than cash had grown quickly used to so satisfying a state of affairs.

  It was only ten years since the brief but bloody dictatorship of the last Roman leader to have ‘proscribed’ his opponents and put their assets up for sale. Lucius Cornelius Sulla, lover of Campania and promoter of its Hercules cults, had been leader of the aristocratic faction in a civil war against his commoner rival Gaius Marius. These warlords had spent their early lives struggling against Rome’s rivals at home and abroad and their latter years fighting each other. Both were now gone, Marius, the big man who brought the poor and even a few slaves into the Roman army, dead for thirteen years and Sulla, the lucky man who feared the power of all lower orders, dead for five. While few of the original owners of proscribed properties were likely now to claim their Tibur villas back, the Roman state, reeling from the costs of war on three fronts, had recently begun to remember the debts that might be collected for the Treasury.

  The official mover of the bill to collect the outstanding payments was Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus, the consul of that year whose army had been so conspicuously unable to repeat the success of his colleague Publicola on Mount Garganus, and whose defeated troops were gradually dribbling back home to disgrace. The mover of the motion behind the scenes is likely to have been Pompey, the soldier-politician who had twice married into the family of Sulla and whom the Dictator had called his ‘young butcher’. For five years he had been away from Italy, suppressing the revolt against Roman rule in Spain and freelancing fiercely for his own supremacy.

  Lentulus and Publicola were both friends of Pompey, a link which ensured that their defeat by Spartacus cost them only their consular commands, nothing more than temporary disgrace. Lentulus had been working to refill the Roman coffers by collecting unpaid debts. He could also be relied upon to win votes for his master. He was a ma
n far too useful to suffer long for merely losing a battle against slaves.

  Another supporter of Sulla had risen rather more slowly to be one of the praetors of 72 BC, the rank immediately below that of consul. Marcus Licinius Crassus had done greater service and paid a higher price than anything achieved or suffered by Pompey. He had lost both his father and his brother to the enmity of Marius. According to Appian, the father killed his son first and then himself, in the best old Roman way when there was no other way out. After seeing his father’s severed head on the speakers’ rostra in the Forum, Crassus had spent years in Spanish exile, with three friends and ten slaves, some of the time in the back of a cave, and had returned, in his early thirties, to win decisive battles for Sulla in Italy, the last and most crucial in 82 BC at Rome’s Colline Gate.

  The constitution which Sulla put in place after that victory, with only the most token powers for those outside the Senatorial elite, was the one under which Rome faced the threat from Spartacus. Prospects for a new Sulla were still excellent. If a Pompey wished to emulate the military and political supremacy of his predecessor, there was not so very much to stop him. Any other man, Marcus Crassus or Julius Caesar, had also to act in the knowledge of what was possible for Pompey.

  Money and military prestige were the prime currencies. In Rome, Crassus was amassing unprecedented wealth from property, investment, land and slaves. In Spain, against the last, stubborn survivors of Marius’ faction, Pompey the Great was winning mostly military glory. The move by Lentulus to make the owners of proscribed property pay their bills may not have been directly aimed at Crassus but it was a warning shot.

  There were many disputes about proscribed houses and land, some of them reaching the courts and making great rhetorical reputations for those who won the cases. Crassus was directly accused of adding a name to the proscription lists to get a farm in the south of Italy that he coveted. One of Cicero’s first cases was to protect an heir whose property was coveted by one of Sulla’s aides.

  Horace had a friend with a house here, Lucius Munatius Plancus, the chancer whose memorial near that of his enemy Cicero was almost part of our Spartacus Road at Formiae. Plancus had arranged proscription for his own brother, Plotius, so that he could get his property, and Horace’s seventh ode is dedicated to the plunderer. It is one of his most loving hymns to Tibur: ‘its groves and orchards made soft by rapid streams: lucus et uda Mobilibus pomaria rivis’.

  It is his delight and duty, Horace tells Plancus, to praise their holiday home over more famous beauty spots: this is ‘some talk of Alexander and some of Hercules’ with Tibur as the ‘British grenadier’. He says how much he is looking forward to seeing his friend here, and gives no hint of poor Plotius’ fate, hunted down as a friend of Caesar’s killers and captured because his perfume betrayed his hiding place. Pliny the Elder thought that any man who wore perfume deserved anything he got, indeed that the death of perfume-wearers justified proscription in itself.

  Does a decent Roman wear perfume? This sounds just the right sort of conversation topic for an evening here at any time over the high Roman centuries. Alternatively, the men at their Tibur dinner could take another favourite issue for old Pliny: why all the undiscovered gold and silver of Italy, which surely had to exist somewhere in so wonderful a country, was best left under the ground, flavouring the grapes and removing the moral hazards of its discovery.

  In 72 BC, beset by financial and political demands to secure its very safety, the Roman state decided that it needed more money faster than even some new enthusiasm for mining could provide. It wanted a bigger share of the proscription proceeds that had so pleasurably and profitably changed hands. Even if the army of Spartacus were to bypass Rome this time, and bypass Tibur on its way to somewhere else (who knew where?), there was much that summer to disturb the peace-seekers on the Anio’s spray-drenched banks.

  Piazza del Risorgimento, Picentino

  The army of Spartacus avoided Rome and spared Tibur too. It returned to the southern hills and plains where it had begun, stronger than it had ever been in every respect bar that of a strategy.

  The Roman Senate responded by removing military command from Pompey’s juniors, the two defeated consuls, and giving it to Pompey’s rival, Marcus Licinius Crassus. The job was not one that could now be easily refused, even by a politician who had willingly exchanged the routines of soldiering for the then most radical forms of capitalism. The threat was real. The opportunity for glory was greater than anyone could have imagined a year before.

  Crassus had the personal resources for taking on the task. Thanks to city property, industrial farming and an innovative employment agency with thousands of specially trained slaves on its books, Crassus had the money to recruit and finance his own legions. In a sneer at the cash-squandering Pompey (‘why did anyone call him “the Great”?’) he said that no one should ever be considered rich unless he could pay for an army of his own. At a time when most aristocrats avoided business, when property deals were for the countryside not the town and a gentleman’s slaves were for himself and not for hire, Crassus had no competitors in meeting the ‘private army’ criterion of wealth, the one that he himself had set.

  He also had a pressing political motive. Pompey’s war in Spain was almost over. Soon he would be home, with an inevitable demand for the consulship in 70 and the threat of civil war if he did not get it. Crassus needed to be certain that he was the second consul that year. Victory over Spartacus was his best chance of ensuring that.

  He raised six new legions, bearing most of the cost himself. Army veterans, with small farms to defend, were enthusiastic recruits to the ranks. Distinguished men of Rome also joined the city’s benefactor in what, this time, with new legions and leadership, with 45,000 men in the field, would surely be a sharp success. Crassus quickly ordered one of his junior officers, a man called Mummius and known in no other context but this, to take 8,000 men southwards on a scouting expedition.

  Crassus was famed as a man of strict, unfussy character. His law-court speeches were practical and plain. His moneylending practices were demanding on repayment day but, by the standards of his time, not extortionate in their rates of interest. His personal Greek philosopher was no Epicurean but an austere follower of Aristotle. He kept careful hold on his plans. When a soldier asked him what time he was going to break camp, he replied, ‘Are you afraid you will not hear the trumpet?’, a story told in Frontinus’ rules on keeping essential secrecy.

  Crassus’ orders to watch Spartacus, to follow him but on no account to engage in even a skirmish, were unlikely to have been unclear. Mummius ignored them nonetheless. There was the lure of glory and the sense still, perhaps, that a slave army needed no more attention than that of a young legate. The result was another rout of Roman forces, somewhere in these low wine-and-chestnut-growing hills, another battle that Roman historians have not wanted to record in any detail, a defeat that spurred the commander to delve deep in the ancient army manuals of discipline.

  Sallust’s account of this time has vanished except for the tiniest pieces. But we can pick up the Spartacus Road now with a guide who had studied Sallust closely. It is only thanks to Plutarch, the father of biography, that we know of Spartacus’ priestess wife, the one who so intrigued Carlo the Capuan in Rome, the Thracian bacchante who saw the snakes coiled around her husband’s head as he slept in the slave market. It is Plutarch who reports the first signs of Rome taking Spartacus seriously after the defeats of Varinius and Cossinius, and tells us of the battle of Mutina.

  So far my green-backed classroom copy of Plutarch has stayed in the book bag. It has remained unread because its main subject is not Spartacus but Crassus. Plutarch’s purpose in telling us of the warrior slave was to illuminate the Roman politician, businessman and general. His popular Lives of Great Men has long been studied and admired. If we want to draw the character of Spartacus from the biographer’s account of him, we need always to keep Crassus in mind too. Each adversary defined the
other, as in so much of the political caricaturing, in newspaper profiles and cartoons, that Plutarch pioneered.

  This father of all biographers was a Greek who lived a long life under the rule of emperors in Rome, from Nero in his childhood in the 50s to Hadrian at his death around 120. A contemporary of Pliny the letter-writer and Statius the poet, younger than Appian the historian, older than Frontinus the man of water and military tricks, he shared with all of them the need to adapt as writers and thinkers to an age when freedom was variously and unpredictably constrained.

  His family came from central Greece close to ancient Thebes, from Chaeronea, a name once known for worldshaking battles between Greek states but, in Plutarch’s day, a place of Roman students, travelling artists and businessmen adventurers. He did much of his writing during his priestly career at nearby Delphi whose prophets had once guided great wars but who now advised on wedding dates and marital infidelity. Delphi’s centre was the omphalos rock, recognised in the Greek world as the smooth round navel of the whole world. Delphi’s ‘freedom wall’, on the side of Apollo’s temple, had been the place where former slaves from everywhere had once come to record their freedom. But in the first century ad a priest at Delphi had become a tourist guide more than a political one, a diminution in status which did not stop it being a desirable and respected position for a proud family man with a passion to interpret the not so distant past.

  Plutarch admired Roman power. That was wise. The Romans admired Greek art and philosophy. That was their equal wisdom. But Plutarch was dissatisfied with the official conceit that Greeks made bronzes breathe in imitation of life while Romans used the metal to kill people. Plutarch was a fine prose stylist and lived in a vast museum of art, but he did not think that aesthetics were the highest aims of man. He had hardly more respect for marble statues than his contemporary Frontinus the water-man. He wanted to make men come to life in his words. Through words he could show that the Greeks and Romans each had their great political and military figures, had always had them, similar, subtly different but in many ways equal. He formed the plan of matching parallel lives of Greeks and Romans, choosing pairs whose virtues and failings illuminated those of the other. It was a transforming idea.