The Spartacus Road

by Peter Stothard

  Yet few bronze statues of the Greek classical age have survived. The first Roman collectors appreciated them although Horace was an influential voice that deplored the national obsession with the spectacles of plunder. Later there were better uses for scarce metal: if a man needs a wheelbarrow or a cannon, and no one is prepared to pay him the premium for art, gardening and the gun win every time. These two have lasted because they were lost, probably cast off from a ship in trouble on the coastline that guided Greek art to Rome, bound for connoisseurs of spectacular plunder like Piso at Herculaneum, Pliny at Como or even the Emperors Hadrian or Nero.

  Their origins were perhaps the shrines of Olympia, where sport and religion attracted a host of memorial statuary, or Plutarch’s workplace at Delphi. Epic bodies like these stood there alongside the heads of poets and philosophers, ideals of beauty next to the realism of intellect, a stone library of all Greece. Estimates of the bronzes’ date vary from the fifth century BC to the first. Time is truly nothing with works as ominous and luminous as these. One of the latest theories is that they came from Argos. Chemical analysis of mineral contents suggests an original home in the city that sent the Seven against Thebes and proudly commemorated them in its temples.

  These are the statues that Statius never saw although they may have represented two of his Thebaid killers, two archetypes of his terrible, irrational, ineradicable enemies of life. Man B is said to be Amphiaraus, the old prophet who entered the war knowing the catastrophe it would bring. Man A would then be Tydeus, the instigator, the champion of sport and war, the chewer of his enemy’s skull.

  Via Stefano Brun, Buccino-Volcei

  When the slave army arrived here, the rings of hills around Volcei had still not recovered from the burnings of the previous year. The grass was still black, the buildings charred, the air damp with the cold scent of ash. Sulphur bubbled into pools from deep beneath the earth and competed with the air. Only the icy lake was sweeter, swollen with fresh winter streams which every year flowed fiercely into the brackish, bitter pools of the summer.

  The Germans were in the vanguard, making camp between the waterside and the town. Plutarch gives their leaders names, Castus and Gaius Cannicus. The main army followed closely behind, carefully manoeuvring through the high circles of ground. The landscape was hard to read. It seemed laid in rolls, in circles, like pottery plates made by children or like the relics, ancient even then, scattered around by lost peoples who had lived here before. Each day there was some new centre. From each small peak the best place to fight appeared to change.

  Spartacus knew some of the ground. Crassus’ scouts, scouring through the same deceptive hills, knew more. The Romans could not know their enemies’ intentions. Would there be the thrust north against Rome that many still feared or an escape over the mountains to the east? Did the slaves know themselves? Either choice was possible or none. Our ancient histories, even read here in this place of the battlegrounds, allow a familiarly restricted truth for these final chapters. Sallust and Plutarch report disagreements between the two parts of the slave army: modern critics have been more doubtful.

  Crassus’ own priority was the clearest. He had to crush the slaves quickly and without assistance. He had the problem of Pompey to consider, the great man imminently returning from Spain, eager to add the head of Spartacus to his other laurels and to humiliate his Roman rival. From the east there was news of another returning Roman army, from Macedonia and led by Marcus Lucullus, the brother of one of Pompey’s many enemies in the Senate. The banker was in danger of becoming a bit player in a bigger game.

  Crassus found the Germans by the lakeside first. He sent a detachment of his men to gain the highest ground above them. But when the battle began it quickly became chaotic. Spartacus himself arrived with his own vanguard forces. Confusion in the sulphurous oakwoods and olive groves around the Palo lake was no use to the Roman general. Crassus withdrew to take stock, dividing his forces so that the Germans should be blocked from the path to Rome, the necessity that was absolute, and that Spartacus’ army might be caught before it escaped east, if that was what it intended to do.

  Two reliable Roman officers were sent to keep a good eye on – and a safe distance from – the Thracian gladiator. Crassus himself pursued the Germans, sending forces again to the highest ground and ordering the troops’ helmets to be bound with cloth to stop the reflection of the sun. This stratagem again was foiled – this time by two Gallic women sacrificing on the hills and sounding the alarm. Crassus immediately feigned a cavalry retreat, drawing his opponents between the two wings of his army. This was a tactic of the old Roman training ground but one no less satisfying when it worked. There were no prizes for military originality here, except in words that would not be written for two hundred years.

  Some 12,000 slaves died in the battle by the bitter-sweet lake, all but two of them, Plutarch approvingly notes, with wounds in their fronts and not their backs. This was the ‘hardest of all battles that Crassus ever fought’. It was his first clear victory of the campaign. Inside the commander’s tent there was now the first proof of Roman honour restored. The Germans had kept five eagle standards, one for each of the legions they had conquered in their campaigns from Metapontum to the Alps. These were the symbols of power lost by Cassius Longinus, Lentulus and Publicola, Varinius, Cossinius and Glaber. All were back with Crassus.

  Beyond the canvas of the victorious command posts, the memories of the immediate past were less easy to efface. It was extraordinary to any civilised Roman that this threat from within, not a vast foreign force, had left such a legacy of abandonment and destruction. For miles around this had become a landscape fit for Statius’ worst nightmares of the future, smoke on the lakes, polluted fields, rivers choked with bodies, terrified inhabitants. History, archaeology and imagination produce together the same dark picture. Twice ravaged in the Third Slave War, the lands around Volcei did not even begin to recover until the rule of Augustus. No dated objects have been found for the next forty years. The little farms became latifundia, a word first used in the time of Pliny for giant, sparsely populated tracts.

  Today the lands are lakeless. Lago di Palo kept its waters till two hundred years ago when it was drained to produce fertile farmland and fewer mosquitoes. Some of the browntopped hills have villages where few but their inhabitants ever go. There are highland streets where every house is windowless, every door open to the wild dogs and the magpies. The sulphur streams fuel thermal baths for German tourists. Buccino is ‘twinned with Corinth’ and keeps its old Roman name beside its new Italian one. Buccino-Volcei is a twisted stack of houses, churches and archaeologists’ netting, strapped perilously around its ancient mountain peak.

  Spartacus’ men, according to Plutarch, were undaunted by the defeat of their German vanguard. They surprised part of the Roman scouting party, forced it to flee and wounded Gnaeus Tremelius Scrofa, one of Crassus’ officers. Plutarch says that this defeat of the scouts was the decisive blow that the slaves laid upon their own bodies. It made them think that they could truly achieve anything. ‘This success was the ruin of Spartacus’ army, the point at which mere runaway slaves came to think too highly of themselves, no longer seeing honour in constant retreat and no longer prepared to obey their leaders.’

  This is Plutarch at his journalistic best. Overconfidence followed by catastrophe was always a strong theme, one loved by the tragic playwrights and lively in any sort of newspaper story too. The motive of the writer is more on show here than that of his subjects. It is hard to believe that the slaves felt genuinely invincible at this desperate point. Perhaps Spartacus knew now that Lucullus was approaching him from Brundisium and that his escape route was blocked. Perhaps he was simply ready for one decisive encounter with Crassus.

  The ancient historians describe such aspects of that last battle as made sense for their purposes, how Spartacus kills his horse and fights in the front line on the ground, how he is left alone among his dead comrades, defending himself to
the end, how he is wounded, fights down on one knee, how his body is never found amid the mass of the slaughtered. To Appian this was a truly ‘epic’ end, well worthy of the ancient poetic models in his mind. Florus describes Spartacus’ place in the front line as that of ‘a true general’, with a comparison implied between the less heroic Romans and a man who must surely have been something of a hero to have threatened Rome as much as he had. Koestler has him fall to a ‘short, hard terrible blow between his eyes’ and his last sight that of Crassus’ own eyes, their brows ‘slightly raised’. Whatever the truth of anything that the writers would think or say, the war was over.

  Via Camere, Raito, Vietri sul Mare

  The news of the victory spread fast. It was received with the simplest relief in places which Spartacus had passed by on his two-year campaign, pleasant places that he might have not passed by if he had been allowed to continue it, in Tibur, in Puteoli, in Pompeii, in the pottery factories of Vietri here above the port of Salernum. Normal life had continued throughout the revolt – but with unwanted and unwonted questions. Could any slave be trusted? How could owners decide? How normal was a life when the Gallic gardener, the German bodyguard, even the Greek maid, had an alternative to what and where they were?

  While Spartacus was alive and at large, there had been new security measures, new costs in money and in security of mind. Visitors still climbed Mount Tifata to see the two-handled cup from Troy, the elephant’s head and the fast-expanding temple of Diana. Sabbio’s cloak factory in Capua kept up its profits: military suppliers fared well from the financing of new legions by the richest man in Rome. But wage-earners were needed to take herds across the mountains now that slaves could not be trusted quite so much.

  To the politicians, and to the historians who followed them, what mattered most was whether Crassus won the credit in Rome, or Pompey, or whether the up-and-coming Caesar could gain some advantage at the expense of them both. Around the bays of Naples what mattered much more was that their way of life was secure, their prospects improved, a peculiar fear of premature, unpredictable death removed, the memories of Nola, Nuceria and Metaponto avenged and allowed to fade.

  The leisure industries of philosophical study had continued without hindrance while the slave war went on. The fashionable Epicureans were not supposed to fear death at all. But the revolt had heightened fears of death even among those who told themselves they knew better. There had been all the greater need to repeat as a mantra the message that ‘Death is not to be feared’. Students chanted the words together. This instruction came second in the master’s four-step plan by which they pledged to live their lives, just one step below ‘God should not concern us’.

  Like much ancient learning this was learning by rote. Epicurus had not encouraged disciples to modify his work only to learn it by heart. It was the repetition that produced the beneficial effects. During the Spartacus revolt the schools continued to offer otium to those whose daily lives denied them its peace. The bay below Vesuvius did not close its universities just because of what had begun two years before on the mountain’s heights. Abandoning the fear of death, always easier to follow in logic than in living, was never more elusive than in the past few years. Epicurus had insisted both that his arguments were philosophi-cally sound and that the result of understanding his arguments was a better life. Times of intense danger made the attainment of calm more desirable but also, it seemed, more difficult.

  Any disciple – then or later, even now – had first to work his way through Epicurus’ theories and accept their force. One: fear is nothing but the feeling induced by future harm. Two: only what we can perceive can be a harm. Three: death is nothing to us because it cannot be perceived. After death every bit of a man dissolved into atoms. There was then no perception, no harm and therefore no reason for fear. The teachings of Epicurus were supposed to be a design for life, not merely a classroom exercise. A student who did not follow the master, or try to, was no student at all. This was not a creed that could be left at the school door.

  Gladiatorial games had also continued in the arena towns throughout the revolt. There was an added thrill from the watching of trained killers whose colleagues, in different places not so far away, were killing their potential audiences, not just educating and entertaining them. The arenas had become comforting places of pretence too, places where normality could be staged, where gladiators had their allotted place and knew it. On the theatrical sands a slave-leader could be brought to his knees every afternoon. What the slave armies were doing to the women and men of Botromagno could be forgotten for a few hours.

  No one knows the purpose of that cartoon outline of Spartacus from the priest’s house at Pompeii. Maybe it was advertising a character not a man. Perhaps it was a way of saying that a new player would take the starring role each day, that here could be as many understudies as were needed, until the script itself became dull. Even when Spartacus was gone, he could continue to be killed each afternoon for as long as necessary, until he had become yesterday’s bogeyman. For a troubled Epicurean in the stands, theatre was a welcome relief from reality, a pleasure, the sort of pursuit that fell below his master’s highest standards of quiet peace but was perhaps part of the means to achieve it. Cicero’s closest friend Atticus, a wealthy Epicurean of this time, even had his own gladiatorial school.

  But the games also brought problems to an Epicurean. The spectator could see the speed of death, the moment of dying, the last gasp, the sudden dissolution of a life, all the evidence of why the end of a life should not be feared. But he could also see the bodies, the flames and jaws of animals around them, and it was hard for him sometimes not to see himself, to imagine himself as dead and torn apart, even if not by the lion of the day, then by rot and worms and crows.

  If he believed that the headless corpse on the sand was still conscious in some way, he was in serious need of extra tuition. If he decided that the dead body had wishes and demands like the dead in the dramas of the Greeks, he needed to go back to grade one of the Epicurean school. But those were not the only fears he might find at the arena. He might stare at a corpse and imagine his own corpse; he might imagine what he himself would look like as a dead man. These were fears of death that it was hard to destroy by logic. Ridding himself of those terrors was a higher-grade task. The answer from school was only to work harder, to learn the mantras, to repeat the slogans and apply the arguments as before.

  At the end would surely come the blessed imperturbable state that the master called ‘ataraxia’. Epicurus, despite the reputation that has since attached to his name, did not seek to intensify or lengthen his own pleasures. He was not famed personally for excess of food, drink or sex. The highest pleasure for him was that produced by the absence of pain. That in itself was ambition enough.

  In the arena there was much to inspire the Epicurean on the journey towards the ataraxia that he sought. There was much exquisite human pleasure there, even if the master himself had seemed not to want that. There was the clearest pain to be avoided. There was also the useful reminder that everything, in life and its arts, in soldiery and in sport, had its due time, that, however spectacular the show might be, one did not want it to go on for ever. Theatre showed the shape of a life, a beginning, a middle and an end, a place where death need not be sought but hardly feared.

  Abandoning the fear of death did not mean embracing it or bring it upon oneself. Acts of suicide were no part of the Epicurean programme. It was the traditional old Romans, their minds crippled by irrational terrors, who slit their wrists and slumped into their warm baths. Such was the superiority they saw for themselves in their luxurious gardens here, comforted and inspired by the busts they kept of their great thinkers from the past. Epicureans were unique among philosophers in their veneration of sculpture. Looking and imitating were their paths to the true good.

  The games did not solve every argument about whether harm was brought by death, a harm that, if it existed, could be legitimately feared. The c
ommon kind of fighters in the ring had few pleasures to live for and much pain to endure. So for them, most clearly for them, death was not a harm. The rich, the politicians? They could look after their own peculiar concerns. But what about the common spectator in the cheap seats, the man with the happy home, the loving wife and young children? After he was dead, he would miss these pleasures. Surely he would be harmed by the loss of them?

  No, said the teacher. A good Epicurean might be harmed if his wife and children were taken away from him. But he could not be harmed if it was he who died and left them. In that case, there would be no ‘he’ left to desire. There would be no unsatisfied desire to be felt. Only the living can be harmed by pain or fear of pain. There are many things to be feared but death is not one of them. Remove the fear of death and the pupil can concentrate freely on avoiding pain, enhancing pleasure and the rest of the master’s precepts.

  This did not sound right to most Romans, especially to those untrained to argue against it. It has not sounded right to later students, even to those taught specifically to pull apart its chains of reason. Of course, we fear death. In the Italian-Greek towns from Vietri to Vesuvius, many who knew of the Epicurean doctrines distrusted them. Their arena was a place not of mystic contemplation but of tradition, a school for swordsmanship, a place for strengthening shared values not for healing the anxieties of the individual. A man like Crassus was less concerned with the theory of whether non-existence before birth was the same as non-existence after death, fascinating though a talk about this might be at the end of a pleasurable dinner. His anxiety was the harm that the holding of such beliefs might do for the interests of Rome, its institutions and its leadership.