The Spartacus Road

by Peter Stothard

  It was Plutarch who had the last word. He identified the kind of story that other people wanted to repeat. He tells how Pythagoras worked out the height of Hercules by translating his shoe-size into the answer ‘six foot three inches tall’. The key was the number of Herculean footsteps around the Olympic running track and for anyone in the Tibur temple, or any other temple to Hercules, this gave a good idea of what size of superhero was there to be worshipped.

  Aulus Gellius had the same sense for trivia. He tells us how to deal with bookshop boasters, the kind that pretend to know their Sallust when they cannot tell one failed Roman general from another. He describes the famed ‘Campanian pride’ of Capua. He was the first to tell us about Archytas and his selfpropelling dove – all of these items surprisingly useful on the Spartacus Road.

  Via Chianalea, Scilla

  The Korean woman looks sadder than before. She thought she had already found the place to which Spartacus had retreated. She has her map on which that ‘best defensive line’ has been drawn, from the same map book as before, the same set of nets piled upon nets, motorway service stations beneath the crossed swords of battles, lakes, long ago drained, in which churches now sit. She now thinks she has been misled. There is a better answer here.

  The Scilla peninsula stretches like a Yale key into the Messina Straits. In front of us is its highest part, a flat-topped fortress. Beyond that are lower jagged teeth of different sizes. The houses of fishermen hang from the cliffs below.

  We have picked up our conversation as though we have been travelling together since Capua. In one sense we have done precisely that. I have not thought of her since that glimpse in the cave of the archangel at Garganus. She is a companion only of a very uncertain sort. But on the Spartacus Road that makes her almost a marching partner.

  She wears the same coral-red dress. Her hair seems flatter and streaked, like that of an exotic deer. But maybe I had not noticed enough before. Her husband has returned home, she says briskly. She has stayed in order to cross over into Sicily, to see one last ‘great historical events’ site, the ruined walls of Motya where in the time of Plato and Archytas the Greeks used the world’s first military catapult.

  She also wants to finish the Spartacus story. She has sat in caves named after Spartacus, stood on top of hills named after Crassus and his aides. She has pondered the possibility of there being real military remains of Rome’s struggle with its slaves. But were they Roman traps for rebel slaves or Renaissance traps for tourists? She is thinking sadly that, like all the caves of Odysseus and rocks of the Sirens, they have been named to deceive the unwary.

  Plutarch says that Spartacus wanted to cross the Messina Straits from here to start a Third Slave War in the place where the previous two had succeeded for a while so well. That, at least, seems highly likely. In Sicily the charismatic commander Eunus had kept his forces united, had taken the cities of Enna and Taormina, had inspired emulators, and had looked for some time as though he might administer as well as terrorise. Only five miles away from here were still the Romans’ great Sicilian farms where hundreds of thousands of slaves worked in the grimmest conditions, still the most willing and able rebel recruits.

  In Sicily in 71 BC any slave of the Romans digging irrigation trenches or planting corn could find the lead shot left from those wars of 135 and 104 BC, bullets fired from slings and etched with good-luck messages for the sender and evil words for their targets, lead decorated with lightning bolts and scorpions. Victory under Herakles! Victory under Athenion! Thirty years on, and sixty years on, there seemed an opportunity for the size of revolt that this time could make a difference.

  Spartacus’ transport ships were to be those of the Cilicians, a tribe which had its homeland in the mountains of what is now south-eastern Turkey but which maintained its greatest power at sea. Among these rulers of the waves were former citizens of many countries who had fallen between the cracks of rising Rome and decaying Greece. The Cilicians were known as ‘pirates’, men who fell the wrong side of what constituted legitimacy in the ancient world, unpredictable people who might do deals with slave armies as well as slave traders, enemies as well as friends of Rome. The essence of piracy was to be mobile, not necessarily as strong as neighbouring forces but quicker to strike and retreat, to make a pact and break a pact. Occasionally pirates attacked others’ ships, boarding with cutlasses in what came to be their successors’ favourite roles; most often they raided unprotected land, taking whatever they could steal to whichever part of their inhospitable homeland could hide it best until it could be sold.

  Plutarch describes how the Cilicians negotiated and received a downpayment of gifts from Spartacus. But, whatever pact was made, they failed to keep it. It might not have reflected well on Spartacus’ reputation if they had. Even transporting the 2,000 men mentioned in Plutarch’s account would have been a massive task. More than ten times that number would have had to be left behind in Italy, to be taken across later if Crassus had allowed them any ‘later’. To have abandoned the bulk of his forces in order to return later with greater force would have been an act of revolutionary ruthlessness. It would have certainly changed Arthur Koestler’s view of the story. It did not happen.

  Did Crassus himself pay the pirates to sail away? Some writers have thought so. There were informal links between Romans and Cilicians of the sort that always exist between long-standing enemies. Crassus’ father had fought them. So too had both the father and grandfather of Mark Antony. Pirate-hunting could be a family business. In the year before the break-out from Capua, Marcus Antonius Creticus, the jovial incompetent father of Shakespeare’s future hero, had fought a typically desultory pirate war to a typically messy pirate peace. He had been about as successful as the first Romans sent on land against Spartacus but probably more respectful to his prey: pirates were beyond the pale of civilisation but not as far beyond as gladiators.

  The Cilicians may have done a deal with Crassus for more money. They were slave-traders who both fought Romans and met their demands for slaves. They cared for neither group. More likely, though, they looked at Spartacus’ prospects and had second thoughts. Stronger than any kind of back-channel promise was the nervous view that the pirates must have taken of Crassus’ legions, now heading fast into the foot of Italy. The art of piracy was to profit by the projection of force into the places which armies left behind – not to carry out rescue operations under approaching fire.

  In the early months of 71 BC Crassus did not attempt to drive Spartacus directly into the sea. He drew a line and then he stopped. He had some knowledge of the terrain. This was where he had stolen the villa that had estranged him from Sulla. He hoped to besiege his adversaries behind a wall from where he could dispirit, starve and defeat them with the minimum cost to his own men and reputation. Where exactly was that line? My Korean friend had thought that she knew – and has become seriously disappointed. She has now come to Scilla instead. Yet this place too, this thin key of land, once home to Homer’s sixheaded monster, once the killing partner of the whirlpool Charybdis, seems still not where she had hoped to be.

  She is not the first to feel dissatisfied here. Scilla and Charybdis have been a disappointment for as long as tourists have taken any kind of classical trail. There are caves where sailors have imagined the six-at-a-time devourers of Odysseus’ sailors. Some have heard moaning noises from deeper in the rocks. But in modern times, and probably in Spartacus’ time, it has not been a strait of sucking whirlpools, merely a fourmile stretch of water which a slave army without transport could not possibly cross.

  Today its greatest pride is a massive modern mural of Christ the sun-seeker, with shoulder-length blond hair, golden-belted white gown, a colossus rising to the heavens from the Scilla rock with a guard of five white gulls. The monsters here are the ones which the fishermen of Chianalea catch, the Stella Gorgon (Astropartus mediterraneus), the golden sea-horse (Hippocampus antiquorum) and the rana pesatrice which hides its thin blue eyes in the sand of the
seabed and which visitors, except on menus, may easily avoid.

  Plutarch says nothing of Scilla. He tells how Crassus’ soldiers, somewhere around here, hacked a trench from coast to coast, five yards deep and five yards wide and some thirty-five miles long. This description has suggested two much grander possibilities for the Spartacus Road. Both coastlines undulate vigorously in this lowest part of Italy, creating a bruised and swollen toe on which two routes for the wall can easily be found. The first route, and the one closest to thirty-five miles long – runs east to west across from Thurii on the Gulf of Tarentum. The German scholar Theodor Mommsen, historian of Rome and tireless collector of classical inscriptions in these parts, declared confidently that this was the line of Crassus’ rampart.

  Many successors, thinking that Plutarch and Mommsen made a powerful combination and recalling much longer trench lines in later wars, have agreed. Other scholars and promoters of local tourism suggested a slightly shorter line, between the next two indented bays to the south, running eastwards along the mountainous ridge from the town of Locris. My Korean friend, with her own national experience of sales promotion and long divisive earthworks, has very reasonably pursued these thoughts.

  This idea of Spartacus, pinned behind an ancient equivalent of the Western Front, has a high appeal to those who want the biggest possible figure for future histories. Our current alternative, imprisonment in a tiny refugee camp like Scilla and prey to the whim of bandits scarcely more respectable than himself, seemed no fate for a hero. Spartacus was a man considered worthy of a kingdom. Behind either of the long walls conjectured for Crassus, the slave leader would have been lord over hundreds of square miles, with his own ports, new possibilities of acquiring or even building ships, and plenteous food for his fighters, their families and their pack-animals. Like Eunus in Sicily, he would have been a slave king.

  But the mathematics of the Korean classroom has dissuaded my critical friend. She has with her the work of modern historians with an equally realistic view of numbers. She scribbles tiny figures, multiplies, divides, squares and cubes and sighs. The quantity of earth to be moved for the long walls would have been vast. Even the shorter and easier of the proposed routes would have matched the greatest spectaculars of the ancient world. Either would have challenged even the ancient pharaohs, digging without constraint of time, and certainly every engineer for whom time did matter, at least until the Napoleonic Wars. Crassus could not have wasted such time. He had an impatient Senate in Rome and two rivals for glory determined to exploit his delay. He did not have enough men to build or defend such a long siegework. A short trench across this slim Scilla promontory seems much the likeliest course.

  Wherever the lines were drawn, Spartacus was careless in choosing his camp and slow to recognise the danger of being besieged. Perhaps he trusted in a Cilician rescue too long. He ordered rafts to be made, earthenware jars lashed to logs with straps of hide, futile for the winter currents of the Messina Straits. There was no need to imagine the mythical monsters of Homer, the Scylla with her bloody teeth, the Charybdis who sucked down those who evaded Scylla’s jaws. The reality was quite rough enough. Florus enjoys the impending doom, ‘the casks bound together with twigs’. One of the tiny fragments of Sallust suggests that he too saw the pathetic drama of a desperate army tying barrels under beams of wood.

  There is the first sense, here on this rugged, narrow rock, of eventual defeat. The slave army was two years old. It had had time to lose some of its rage but neither time nor leadership to replace the missing anger with other motivation. Its weapons of wicker, made by basket weavers, had to stand against Roman bronze, made in the finest armouries of the Republic. Its stock of provisions, along with its morale, was low and falling. Cold damp rose from the ground and fell from the skies. Across the straits in Sicily there was a Roman governor, Gaius Verres, who was cracking down on the slightest sign of sympathetic revolts. There were crucifixions to discourage any slave who might have heard of Spartacus and wish to join him.

  On Scilla the slaves had to escape by land. They tested the Roman line, burning brushwood, making sallies at what seemed to be the weaker points. Crassus’ fresh and decimated legions held firm. Spartacus took a Roman prisoner and crucified him to create terror on both sides of the wall. For the Romans, there can have been nothing more impossibly alien than the flogging of a fellow citizen and soldier by slaves, the binding of his arms to the wooden crossbar, the hauling of the bar into the sky and the screams as he lost and found breath for days until he died. For the slaves there was the intimation of what fate could await them if the wall could not be breached and their war was over.

  Their morale was sufficient for one last effort, a night-time break-out under cover of cold and snow when the Romans were off guard. It is Appian, the source most hostile to Spartacus, who tells of the crucifixion. Sallust, Plutarch and Frontinus all note the feat of escape. Only a third of Spartacus’ forces struggled across the bridge of human corpses, dead cattle and earth that they had thrown across the Roman trench. But that was enough for the siege of Scilla to be lifted. Crassus could not afford to risk attack from the rear. According to one of Sallust’s fragments, the slaves escaped to Mount Sila, the high ground immediately behind us as we look way from the sea. That is enough to persuade my Korean friend that this time she is certainly in the right place – in as much as there is any certainty to be had on this journey.

  Plutarch’s long walls are just an aggrandising of the battle scene. This Theban journalist of the old school is once again making his adversaries worthy of each other. Neither manbites-slave nor slave-bites-man is much of a story. Both were commonplace. Flawed Roman (weakened by impatience and excess of wealth) faces masterly gladiator (strengthened by Greek heritage). That is a tale to remember.

  Florus wants his story too. He turns Spartacus into a Roman. This slave does not breathe fire or wear fake regalia. He forces some of his prisoners to fight in gladiatorial contests, just as the Romans did. He crucifies other prisoners for the best punitive and theatrical effect, just as the Romans did. He is as vengeful. He is a brave military leader, fighting in the front line just where the best Roman generals fought.

  The Korean woman has her Florus and her Plutarch now. Behind her bifocal lenses her eyes move quickly up and down, from page to marbled pediment, from ancient to modern and back. We idly discuss the two writers’ methods and aims. Where did the slaves break through? Perhaps it was on the cliff edge where now stands the bronze statue of a naked man wrestling a swordfish, left knee bent back, mouth screaming effort at the sky. Or by the Mitologico Scilla, a bare-breasted woman in stone, with one head of her own and three belonging to killer dogs, the version of Homer’s monster preferred by Roman art-collectors and poets. Or by the town’s vivid war memorial to twentieth-century wars, a soldier holding open his enemy’s eyes so as not only to punch them out but to be seen by him punching them out, seen in the kneeling man’s last living act.

  Piazza San Rocco, Scilla

  I thought that we might later perhaps have dinner, discuss our trips, what happened next, what happens next. She had never been to Gargano, she said. Plutarch describes how Crassus had panicked and asked for reinforcements from Macedonia. Was this so? He describes a battle by a lake whose waters were sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter. This could be by the sea somewhere – or at one of the mountain lakes which survived in Italy for another 1,900 years before being drained for farming. Scholars, combining the arts of Greek and Latin with ruler and compass, have decided on what was once the Lago di Palo, near Buccino, satisfyingly close to where the rebellion began.

  There is a museum near by in Reggio with not only common objects from Republican times but two of the world’s finest Greek sculptures, seen only by the few who pass by here. There is much more to speculate about Spartacus, many possibilities from which we can choose. We make a half-plan to meet later. When ‘later’ comes she has gone.

  Piazza de Nava, Reggio

  The arm
that stretched from the sand and weeds of the seabed was Herculean in stature, a little longer than life-size though not by enough to reassure its finder that it had not been once from a real life. This is the part of Italy famed for exotic murder. Anyone on a scuba-diving expedition in the 1970s might reasonably have suspected the worst. Once grasped by the diver, the hand was clearly of metal, not flesh but bronze. A long body was attached and a luxuriant bearded head. Beside it, after a little more searching, was another, the statues known here now as Man A and Man B, in terms still reminiscent of Mafia trial witnesses or pathological killers whose real names must for some reason not be made known.

  Both figures are of fighters from the heroic age whose left arms would once have had a shield and whose right held a spear. Even without their weapons, still somewhere in transit, these are dangerous men, held alone in a cold, white basement room under the Piazza de Nava, to protect them as much, it seems, from gangland rivals as from future accidents like that which 2,000 years ago hurled them to the bottom of the sea.

  Their identities have defied all assaults by scholars. Man A is the younger, the more relaxed in pose but also the more ready to spring and strike. He has wide-open, white-bone eyes, a mouth that is set as though taking a breath, five sharp white teeth, gleaming cheekbones above the well-brushed curls of his facial hair.

  Man B has the older wearier look, his mouth more closed, his beard less coiffed. One of his eyes is missing, open only to the hollow of his head. If his spear had been with him, instead of somewhere snagging nets, the grooves on his hand and shoulder show that it would have slanted obliquely, ‘at ease’.

  Both have the closely observed thighs, the tight, almost feminine buttocks, the impossible waists, massive chests and shoulders that are still for some the ideal male physique. There are many body-builders who seem much less alive than these extraordinary works of sculpture, each vein and muscle first carved on a clay core in wax, next transferred to plaster moulds, before being finally given their bronze permanence.