He began at the beginning of history. Theseus, cousin of Hercules and mythical founder of Athens, was matched with Romulus, founder of Rome. Both men fell out with their fellow citizens in the end, showing, as so many later journalists and biographers loved to show, that there was no gratitude in any public life and that even the finest political careers end in failure.
The life of Alexander the Great paralleled that of Julius Caesar. Alexander of Macedon was the one man who might have altered the balance between Greece and Rome. But he had conquered eastward and Italy had been spared to strike another day. These were Plutarch’s two longest Lives. Pompey shares his life with the failed Spartan king Agesilaus, a local bogeyman of Delphi and Chaeronea. Brutus, killer of Caesar, stands beside Dion, tyrannicide of Syracuse. The Roman dictator Sulla and the Spartan king Lysander were paired as talented generals who had both ravaged Athens and who had both come to bad ends.
Plutarch compares Crassus to Nicias, one of the Athenian commanders in the great war with Sparta in the golden age of Greece. Both men were exceptionally rich for their time, Nicias from silver mines where chained slaves died in underground water, Crassus from proscription, property speculation and the skilful use of his personal fire service. Plutarch considers Crassus’ methods the more reprehensible. Both spent heavily on bribes to their publics, Crassus the more uselessly squandering his resources, as Plutarch sees it. Both were unfortunate in treading the stage in the age of greater stars. Nicias was a religious obsessive while Crassus had no care for religion at all. Crassus was violent and tyrannical while Nicias was timid and cautious to equal excess. Nicias was famous as a peace-maker, a worthy title which Crassus could not claim. Making peace with slaves was not an option, winning it not much of an achievement.
With skilfully manipulated strokes, Plutarch takes us through Crassus’ life to the point of his campaign against Spartacus. Like his literary successors, he showed how the child was father to the man. An avaricious plutocrat from a family of avaricious plutocrats is a less powerful story than that of a poor boy from a proud beginning. Crassus’ family had a modest home and, even after acquiring his colossal wealth, the general maintained a modest household, in a marriage to the wife of his dead brother, entertaining generously but without luxury. If he pursued women, it was only for their money; his reputation for mere financial pursuit had to save him on one occasion from the capital charge of violating a Vestal virgin. Plutarch has this prominently in his story.
Crassus had known exile and hardship after the deaths of his father and brother in the first phase of Roman proscription and terror. But his was a more comfortable retreat from the thuggish grip of Marius than that of many, a hideout in a Spanish cave with an interior like a secret temple and two maidservants sent in by his protector to meet his young male requirements. Food and sex, essential for life itself, have to be brought appropriately into any profile of a life.
Plutarch does not pretend that his selection of events is sanctified by the discipline of history. He writes how ‘excellence or baseness’, the character question with which he is so concerned, comes out not always in conspicuous acts but just as often in a single word, an incautious comment or a joke.
He thinks like a painter, comparing his attention to the ‘little things’ of life with an artist’s preference for the revealing detail in a face.
He likes any kind of rhetorical contrast. In creating the profiles of others, he is always putting himself on show too. He is Plutarch the public performer, defender of both sides, pleader for Caesar as well as for Alexander, for Nicias as well as for Crassus. He was born within a few years of Statius and it is not hard to imagine him declaiming at the same literary spectaculars, circling, lightening, darkening, dazzling, giving cause to decide between his parallel subjects but leaving the final decision for those looking on. It is easy to imagine him in a modern newspaper office, edging his article this way and that, showing balance in both sententiousness and sentence because balance is what must always seem to be there.
Crassus is a man defined by contrasts and parallels. He gained his money by politics and he saved it for political use. He lent his tame philosopher a coat for their shared outings and reclaimed it when the trip was over. He lent fiercely but fairly. When he fought against slaves, he did so with a special understanding of slaves: he had invented a whole new Roman business of training clever Greeks to be architects and accountants and hiring these ‘living tools’ to those who could not be bothered to improve their tools themselves. All pieces of the past are selected to explain pieces of the future.
Plutarch’s Crassus becomes more substantial because the Roman is not compared only with Nicias of Athens, his parallel life, but with the Greek slave against whom he earned such a part of his reputation. When compared with Nicias the hesitant Athenian who lost both control of his people and the turning-point battles of the war with Sparta, even Crassus gets the author’s vote, grudgingly and on points. But Plutarch disapproves deeply of Crassus, his obsessive acquisition of wealth most of all. He cannot approve of Spartacus either; but whenever he can make the slave-leader look good and the Roman leader bad he does so.
His Spartacus needs to be a big figure. The gladiator had done so much damage to the might of Rome. He could not be a mere nothing. He had to have not only great bodily strength but ‘a great spirit’, to be ‘more intelligent and nobler than his fate and more Greek than his Thracian background might suggest’. When he first escapes from Capua, he finds new weapons and rejects his gladiatorial arms as ‘barbaric’: the cluck-cluck approval of the Delphi priest comes louder than the relief of the freed fighter. Plutarch, no enthusiast for Rome’s favourite spectator sport, is the prime source of the ‘great hero Spartacus’, the one whom the likes of Symmachus so wanted to spit out and forget and which later writers so much wished to glorify.
From virtually the moment of Plutarch’s death, this version of the classical verities, Athens vs Rome, hero vs hero, became the authorised version of the classical age. The balance shifted between the two but stayed between the two. The process began immediately with Aulus Gellius, an early collector of the literary scrapbooks we call his Attic Nights. It continued past the fall of Rome and survived into the Renaissance and into Shakespeare and beyond, with Spartacus just a tiny part of the whole, forgotten by those who wanted to forget it but recreated in passion by those who wanted to remember.
In 71 BC, the defeat of Mummius’ misguided forces added another victory to the slave army’s battle standards. Crassus, Plutarch tells us, gave the young man a rough reception and his runaway troops a rougher one. When he handed out new weapons he made the soldiers solemnly pledge that this time they would hold them to their deaths.
Some of the men who had thrown away their weapons may have been survivors of the defeats suffered earlier by the armies of Pompey’s friends. There was ‘an effeminacy and laxity’ among those men of Lentulus and Publicola, says Plutarch. The dangers of a viral defeatism entering the bloodstream of his army were too great. Five hundred soldiers were divided into fifty groups of ten. From each group of ten, one was chosen by lot to be clubbed to death by his colleagues.
Decimation was a disgusting act which Plutarch, writing for his respectable readership, could mention but did not elucidate. The smashing of friend by friend was a sight that the gladiators would have often seen. It was what they might have once done themselves on any day. This decimation was a spectacle for the whole army to watch, enough spectators to fill the mightiest amphitheatre in this region of amphitheatres.
In normal circumstances, a standard gladiator show, a common reward and inspiration for soldiers, would have been enough to boost morale. Showing the ‘good deaths’ of netmen and pikemen to the troops was a tradition. Showing the shameful deaths of fellow Romans was a revival of a more ancient history. But sometimes a revival is the most potent show to put on any stage. Plutarch had no criticism of this act. It made another powerful parallel within his parallel lives.
The army of Spartacus, maybe recognising the benefit of self-slaughter to Roman morale, moved away from Crassus. It may have suffered a defeat first, losing some 6,000 men as Appian reports. Its next direction was back down south towards the Straits of Messina, new territory where it could recruit and regroup.
IX
REGGIO CALABRIA to BUCCINO ˜ VOLCEI
Santa Trada di Cannitello, Reggio Calabria
The second half of the film is in shining clarity compared to the first. It is on the same DVD, courtesy of Carlo from Cracow, but on wide-screen TV courtesy of a fortress hotel overlooking the sea towards Sicily. The blue skies are brighter, the terracottas warmer, the dimple on Kirk Douglas’s chin looks deep enough to hold a cocktail olive or a piece of popcorn – and there are olives here to test that theory, Calabrian home-cinema snacks in a shallow pot.
There are already a few points that were not quite clear on Carlo’s back-alley sofa. The gladiators in the arena wear strange top-knots in their hair, little tails borrowed as though from some Comanche tribe. Batiatus tells his new recruits to wear them with pride as a symbol of their special status as spectacular killers and men-about-to-die. It hardly matters: but none of our ancient Spartacus Road guides ever mentions gladiatorial hairstyles. Perhaps there was a hairdresser on the set who needed something to do.
Snatches of Roman politics appear from time to time, as though snipped at random from a children’s history book. Carlo from Capua might properly have queried the Senate House in which poor Glaber (renamed Glabrus) reports his Vesuvian disaster. The place where the senators deliberated in the 70s BC was a rectangle, similar in shape and size to the one on the same site that survives for tourist trips today. In the film it is shaped in a semi-circle as if the speakers were themselves arena fighters. But this has a certain cinematic purpose. The wretched Glabrus looks ripe for his coup de grâce.
Only to a reader fresh from Plutarch is the character of Crassus himself so jarring. It is as though every sentence in the Life has been rewritten by the script-writers with an added ‘not’. Laurence Olivier’s Crassus lives in a vast colonnaded mansion instead of the modest family home that Plutarch describes. He is sexually voracious, both towards Varinia from Britannia and towards the Greek slave Antoninus. This DVD version contains what the sleeve-note describes as the originally censored ‘oysters and snails’ scene in which Olivier attempts to probe Tony Curtis’s proclivities in a sunken bath. This Marcus Crassus is uniquely ambitious to be a dictator himself, declaring states of emergency in which he can become sole ruler of the Roman world. The original model for this portrayal was playing on a stage where others, much more ruthless and talented, wanted it much, much more.
On the balcony outside my bedroom cinema the light is fading over the Messina Straits. Sicily is almost as black as the sea. The prosecco is flat and abandoned in the glass. Just imagine for a moment. What if Crassus were to be seeing this? The film is as good a portrait as the general could ever have made for himself, as good as any that Pliny made of his own life with all his subtle literary skills. If Marcus Licinius Crassus, son of an obscure Italian mother, dutiful husband of his brother’s widow, moderately successful rival of Pompey and Caesar, were to come through this hotel-room door he would be legitimately prouder than he ever was in life.
We might not know at first who he was. At the ghostly sight of the great man in the entrance hall, no one today, not even this follower of the Spartacus Road, would recognise him. A bit of reputed baldness in the ancient sources would hardly be enough to differentiate the richest Roman from any returning contemporary. I might readily identify his bête noire Pompey from his chubby round adolescent butcher’s face and kiss-curl fringe modelled on the busts of Alexander the Great. But Sulla’s other butcher has no certain portrait that has survived, no image that lasted much beyond his death.
For Crassus to see himself onscreen as the absolute symbol of Rome, the Hollywood summation of all that was most Roman, would satisfy his steeliest dreams. How extraordinary for him to see immortalised the years when he, Marcus Licinius Crassus, was at the heart of the action, when that other man, Pompey, was looking on jealously from Spain and when Julius Caesar was a sinister kid who barely makes it to the main credits.
Even as a patriot he would have loved it. Rome never loses. The strangest aspect of watching Kirk Douglas uninterrupted from beginning to end is that he is never shown winning anything except his woman. He occupies an abandoned camp at the foot of Mount Vesuvius in his first weeks of freedom but, after that, nothing. There is barely even a reference to his winning a battle, although Spartacus himself won maybe nine. The DVD contains the original cinema trailer and in this promotional footage Crassus does say that Rome is under threat for its very existence as a result of the rebellion. But he never says it in the film itself.
If Plutarch were to walk in through this same hotel door he too would have applauded what he saw on the screen – even if he cavilled about its facts. This is a film portrait with a firm but subtle moral purpose. Crassus represents an authoritarian state that is running out of control, the obsessive anti-communism of Cold War. Crassus is a bad American but still an American. He represents a state that needs to be tough in a dangerous world, but chastened too from time to time. The superpower’s internal opponents, while threatening, must not be so successful as to suggest they might win. There should be a pretty love story to keep the common crowd happy. Plutarch would have gone along with that approach, balanced, cautious, realistic about power and responsibility, squeezing excellent entertainment from compromise.
Plutarch, like Pliny, is one of those ancients whom we can begin, however perilously, to think we know. Even more than Florus and his racy tabloid versions of history, he has the whiff of the newspaper office about him. His profiles of great Greeks and Romans broke ground that has been trampled ever since. His essays and talks seem today like the output of a moderately conservative columnist, smart, entertaining, not too deep or difficult, supremely well informed, not too fixed in any philosophical position, always with enough room to backtrack and trim. His prodigious quantity of output would satisfy the most demanding employer.
Moderation in all things, the motto of his Delphi shrine, was Plutarch’s personal philosophy too. Some old men, like that obstinate buffer the elder Pliny, might be opposed to guitar music, male toiletries and foreign fashion on principle. Plutarch was not like that. He just did not see why wellbrought-up men should want to become guitarists, to manufacture perfumes or to live as fashion designers.
Plutarch had nothing against people admiring celebrities of art and style. But why should they want to become these celebrities themselves? If someone said that so-and-so was an excellent piper, the right answer from Plutarch was that he must be a worthless man: ‘otherwise he would not have been so good a piper’. Such severity of argument sustained our modern columnists for decades until its collapse in our time of celebrity-culture-for-all. Now there is only the occasional grumpy Plutarchan left to moan.
The names of 227 books by Plutarch survive and the texts of 128 of them, from On Not being Angry to Whether Sea Animals are Wiser than Land Animals. He wrote pages of advice to young politicians and young brides, of the kind that has since graced many a newspaper feature page. He attacked ill will in rival writers and portrayed himself with huge success as the wise man with the big heart, the one who wanted his words to make a difference and to do good.
Humanity was not consistent about the treatment of slaves or about anything else much. So neither need Plutarch be. Aulus Gellius records in his Attic Nights how one of Plutarch’s slaves, upset at being flogged on his master’s orders, asked whether this punishment did not violate his newly published diatribe against anger. Plutarch had replied that his eyes were not blazing, his voice was not loud, so how did the slave even think he was angry. Ridiculous? Well, it was worth a thousand words, worth an argument. The overseer should continue with his whip while he and his slave worked out who was right. There
is no columnist’s story like an old columnist’s story and this one reads as though it has raised a wry smile on many a Greek evening.
Plutarch wrote about how Epicurus was wrong about death. The theory defied common sense. Plutarch was suspicious of all dogmatism. He showed much common sense of his own, although he never, even for his own time, reached the highest ranks of thinkers. In the view of Aulus Gellius’ cleverest friends, like the single-testicled, sharp-tongued philosopher Favorinus, Plutarch was not quite clever enough, not from the highest drawer of the mind. Favorinus was a destructive academic sceptic, Plutarch a pick-and-mix populist. It is not too hard to hear the disdain of the old Oxbridge don for the best-selling young colleague who writes columns for the papers and appears on daytime TV.
Plutarch, Aulus Gellius and Favorinus all wrote many books but none from the smartest of them has survived. The first two could spot a good story. Favorinus did not do that so well. He made a good story himself. He was a famed sexual athlete and adulterer whose deformity gave him both the access of a eunuch and the enthusiasm of the afflicted. He was famed too for falling out with the Emperor Hadrian and surviving. His writings were (at length) on perception and on the theory known (but not needing to be known about) as the Cataleptic Fantasy. He wrote, with ingenuity as well as length, on whether suspension of judgement led necessarily to a failure to act. But neither his prolixity nor his subtlety long outlived him.
The Spartacus Road Page 24