Far from wanting to take their citizens’ minds away from death, the city’s elders wanted to keep them there. Romans defined themselves by the memories of what their dead had achieved. They lived among the images of their ancestors so that they should better emulate their achievements. They worshipped their gods because their gods had helped their ancestors. A great civilisation could not be built on maximum pleasure and minimum pain. That was fine for days of otium at Tivoli or on the bay of Naples, but not for the negotium that had uniquely created Rome.
Cicero understood and argued this with vigour. He divided his time between philosophy and politics. He was more openminded than most and saw the benefits in understanding what he did not agree with. All critical thought was Roman discipline of a kind. All thinking was like drill and ditch-digging in its way. An officer who could use his mind for abstraction as well as action was a better officer. An educated soldier was part of a club to which the barbarian could not belong. Yet, for all that, some directions of thought were more desirable than others. Avoidance of pain and the search for pleasure, whatever the intellectual rigour attached, were not the best basis for a political handbook.
Cicero had trained hard and worked hard for his success, and saw that effort as a virtue in itself. He was a novus homo, a New Man in society. He was self-made in an age when that was a disadvantage. Like Horace, he lacked the masks of his own meritorious ancestors, the images of death in solid form, masks of gold or wood that the best Roman families could keep, adapt and polish as versatile examples and warnings. Cicero had Greek statues for his dining room but no wax masks for his family funerals. Unlike Horace, the proud Epicurean son of a freedman, he cared about his lack. Cicero, always insecure, saw Rome’s success as others striving as he had done, and successful Roman philosophy as encouraging them to do so.
His political art was in finding the fine lines in public life, cajoling the powerful, keeping Pompey away from Caesar when he could, edging away from every imminent catastrophe of dictatorship and civil war. Did he believe gladiatorial games to be ‘cruel and inhumane’? He had considered the question and did not want to make up his mind. At the end of Spartacus’ revolt, Cicero was on his way to gaining his consulship and ensuring his family’s future masks of respectability. But his own enduring fame was from his intellect, in the law courts and in the translation of Greek thought to Rome.
His work on this subject of pleasure and pain is famous in unexpected places. Page 36 of my travelling edition of De finibus, known in English as The Ends of Goods and Evils, begins with the words ‘lorem ipsum’, a familiar sight but not from any previous thinking about Cicero and Epicurus. Lorem is not itself a Latin word but it does begin some of the most reproduced Latin of modern times. It forms the start of the dummy-text that designers of newspapers and books around the world use to fill the space between their pictures.
‘Dolorem’ is the word Cicero uses for pain; the ‘do-’ is left behind on page 35; and the ‘lorem’ of page 36 begins miles of international lay-outs for pages, most of which will never exist in any other form. If all the texts of the ancient world were slowly and systematically to decay, Cicero’s thoughts on the seeking of pain for pleasant purposes, a ‘trivial example’ from the gymnasium, would be the last to be lost. Understanding the passage would be like deciphering Sallust’s account of the Spartacus war from the relics of the bookbinder’s knife.
CICERO DE FINIBUS
lorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia nonnumquam eiusmodi tempora incidunt ut labor et delore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur?
Cicero was happy to explain the tenets of Epicurus. It was a dangerous philosophy for his dangerous times, but it was better to know one’s enemy than to be ignorant of his strengths. He also wanted to refute the Epicureans, not just to reject them as bad for Rome but to confront them on their own terms, to prove that their reasoning was wrong. Criticising them for their rejection of public duties was insufficient. He sought the weakest parts of their argument and attempted to use those to bring down the whole.
With his best courtroom instinct, he went hard for the man himself. Epicurus had claimed that in his last days in his Athens garden, unable to urinate and collapsing from kidney stones, he had relieved his agonies by recalling his most pleasurable philosophical discussions of the past. Ten years ago, my hospital nurse was acting herself like a secret Epicurean, suggesting deliberate distractions from chemotherapy in the memory of happy times in Italy. Cicero mocks all this as absurd, enjoying the absurdity of the old Greek soothing his bladder with a compilation of his greatest philosophical hits. His ataraxia, his so carefully acquired calm, would have made him a dull companion for a Naples holiday as well as a socially useless misfit. The man was a humbug as well as an aimless example to youth.
Epicurus had even made a will, Cicero objected, and not just a simple will but a complex legal ploy for ensuring that his school survived after his death. How could someone who saw only nothingness after death plan so obsessively for his legacy? The making of wills, says Cicero, was for ordinary men the equivalent of erecting statues, building memorial tombs, seeking favourable mentions in the history books. It was a central act of civilised life, of seeing beyond one’s own life, as Epicurus, by his simple actions rather than his fancy words, had comprehensively proved. For a philosopher whose essence was the unification of his thought and his life, a prosecution for hypocrisy was the most damning indictment of all.
This debate went on over many books, many dialogues set in country homes and gardens by the bay of Naples. Later writers argued that the complete Epicurean exercise was futile: fear of death was fused deep in the human psyche; it differentiated us from animals; to remove it would be to remove our humanity. There were soon those who believed, in bewilderingly different ways, that there was an immortal soul that survived our deaths, that some part of those Christians forced to fight and die in the arena ended at the right hand of God. For 2,000 years, critics of Epicurus would become both bolder and more subtle than Cicero, and there would be some equally well-armed defenders of the doctrine too. For a while, in Oxford days, I followed closely both sides and cheerfully called myself an Epicurean when the question was asked.
Via Stefano Brun, Buccino-Volcei
In the rolls of hills around Volcei, Crassus divided his victorious forces and sought out every survivor. He knew that he was not entitled to a triumphal procession by chariot through Rome, the traditional honour for those who defeated foreign foes. He would have an ovatio instead, a pedestrian parade suitable for those whose victories, as Aulus Gellius puts it, were ‘bloodless’ and ‘without dust’. The best official reward he could arrange was a triumpher’s laurel crown on his ovation day rather than the common one of myrtle leaves, a distinction which, while significant in Roman eyes, was modest in scale beside his sense of achievement in bringing the Spartacus rebellion to an end. But he had other plans too by which his glory should be remembered.
X
SORRENTO to ROME
Trav Punto Capo, Sorrento
What we do not know cannot harm us. That part of the Epicurean phrasebook has survived cheerfully into English. An important line of battle against Epicurus is held by those who deny that this proverb is true, who say that what we do not know can harm us a great deal, that harms do not have to be perceived in order to be harmful. If an individual can be harmed by something he knows nothing about, he can in theory be harmed by death. Therefore, he should be allowed to fear death. Therefore, Epicurus was wrong.
Suggestions for these ‘unperceived harms’ have included hidden disease, brain damage that leaves a boxer content with his lot but half the man he used to be; or hostile reviews that damage ticket sales without the actors or producers being aware of them; or happy children in the Balkans whose lives would have been transformed if they had been born as Italians
. But nothing much of that was part of the Roman debate. Epicurus’ populist opponents stressed the difficulty of combining Epicurean theory with civilised life and work. How could life be tolerable if everyone were pursuing their personal pleasure and avoiding personal pain? It would be chaos. Who would pay for the gladiatorial games?
Bolder defenders of Epicurus responded by trying to reinterpret the master’s life and work – to bring them closer to the demands of ordinary life. They pointed out that the man who has achieved ataraxia, while mentally organised for burial, was not thereby a lazy parasite. He could still enjoy his life, for many years ahead, and others could gain enjoyment from him.
Why had Epicurus made his will? His aim was to please his friends at the time. He was not betraying obsessive anxiety about his future. The will was complex because he needed to ensure that the laws of Athens would protect his students. Without it his students might have been evicted from the school on his death. Many of them lacked the native rights of the city and would, without his efforts for their present calm, have been fearful legitimately and in a respectable Epicurean way.
Philodemus, the Epicurean teacher whose works are buried at Herculaneum, recognised especially the danger to the argument of requiring consistency and perfection. Excessive love, fear or anger, actions outside the limits of blessed ataraxia, inevitably happened from time to time. We might call them blips. He called them ‘pangs’ or ‘bites’. One could make one’s will with the best aim of present pleasure and preventing pain; one could dream of a happy future for friends or children quietly spending one’s money; one could wail at the possibility that the terms were not proof against city bailiffs or greedy husbands of one’s daughters. The central aim had simply to be a return, as quickly as possible, to the true path. Epicureanism was a doctrine of human health as well as philosophical theory. Its proof was in how it improved the life of each of its followers, each one of whom, individually, when finally death came, was utterly and absolutely vulnerable, a ‘city without walls’.
The teachings of Epicurus made lives better. They gave succour to the depressed, to those tired of struggle, to the childless, to all who looked around for reasons to go on living and failed. Live for the present. Gather ye rosebuds. ‘Carpe diem’, in Horace’s contribution. Seize the day. These too became proverbial reassurances, made always against the deep-seated public sense that, while beneficial in many ways, they were not wholly true or good.
There were fresh arguments from time to time. What was the difference between the future after death and the past before birth? The individual had perception of neither. The world after we are dead, however civilisations may rise or fall, was surely no more to us than the ancient customs of the first king of Argos. Since no one fears an earlier birth, why should anyone fear a future death? This became a potent tenet for the poet Lucretius, the first writer to set down Epicureanism sympathetically and systematically in a language other than Greek. But Lucretius changed the setting. The example of the past that the Latin poet chose was not Argos, the city that sent the Seven against Thebes, but the cities of Italy ravaged by more recent war.
Of all those met, however briefly, on this Spartacus Road, Lucretius is the writer whose name comes with the blankest picture of himself attached. His art is all there is, and it is art in the cause of philosophy. Some of his most beautiful words, ‘Suave mari magno . . .’, were written by the window of a room in Pompeii: ‘Sweet it is, when the winds stir up the waters on the wide sea, to stare from dry land upon the troubles of others’. But archaeology has added nothing about their writer. He remains merely the man whose language most mocks man’s fear of the gods, the poet who first stripped the mystery from thunder, rain and death. In 71 BC, the high days of Crassus, he was just beginning De rerum natura, the hymn to Epicurean philosophy whose power so long preserved the doctrine of the Naples schools when generals and emperors would have destroyed it.
Capo Sorrento
One hundred and fifty years later a much lesser poet and local businessman, Pollius Felix, was polishing his own Epicurean lines here at his sprawling villa at the tip of Sorrento’s cape, the type of pleasure dome that got his philosophy a bad name. He had built twin temples to Hercules and Poseidon, twin pools of rough and calm, urban colonnades and country gardens, windows with views of Vesuvius and Ischia, sweet freshwater gullies mingling with the salt. Statius describes the scene in his usual spectacular way. Where there used to be a hill, there is level ground. Where there are wooded heights, there was once not even land. Where once the sunshine shone through dust, there is now a colonnade fit for Corinth. Green marble mimics grass. There are vineyards, with no unkind mention of Sorrento’s ‘noble vinegar’, the notorious ancient wine of which my priest in Formia warned. At night this palace swims in its own glassy waters. It is itself a ‘spectulatrix’.
Its owner has retired from public life. He has experimented with different philosophies. He has made mistakes. But he has now reached ataraxia. He is ‘paratum abire’, ready to depart from life without a care. He is also carefully choosing his metres, maybe under Statius’ gentle tutorship, in order to spread further the thoughts of his final philosophical master.
Statius had not been keen to visit this pleasure dome. He had to be pressed to cross the bay from Naples after one of his stadium performances and would have preferred to be back on the Via Appia, the queen of roads, returning to Rome. But Pollius was pressing. He was probably bored, a likely state of mind for even the most accomplished Epicurean who still remembered his public past.
A traveller on the Spartacus Road has unwittingly passed through other sites where Pollius wrote his poetry. The lord of Capo Sorrento had houses in Tarentum and Tivoli as well as here. He collected statues that the great Greeks had ordered to come alive, ‘iussum est quod vivere’. He had a study with busts of rulers and writers. He too would have liked to own Man A and Man B from Reggio. Of how he acquired his money there is no record, only, thanks to Statius, of how he spent it.
A visit today to the home here of Pollius Felix requires a short walk from the centre of the town, beyond the big hotels and bars, where Pavarotti’s Sorrento songs have taken on Statius’ former role, and away to the low cape on the southern side. The narrow way is dark behind high walls until there appears the same double view of mountain and islands, the high arch into the shaded rock-pool, the square brick pillars where the bath-houses stood, the pedestals for the twin temples. The ground plan seems precisely as Statius, our arts and architecture correspondent for the occasion, describes. We can assume some legitimate exaggeration of the fixtures and fittings. There is now some graffiti added by later dwellers. There are no surviving words by the original owner, not in the libraries here or anywhere.
Corso Aldo Moro, Santa Maria Capua Vetere
Some members of the slave army escaped after their defeat. Pompey’s legions found the largest group, some 5,000, and marched over them with short, stabbing swords as though it were just another day in Spain. A letter from their commander arrived at the Senate saying, in Plutarch’s words, that ‘although Crassus had defeated the gladiators in battle it was Pompey who had exterminated the war at its roots’.
There were also smaller bands of fugitives. Appian describes four separate squadrons which Crassus despatched against those who evaded death on the battlefield. There were said to be a few survivors still sheltering inland from Thurii twenty years later. The Emperor Augustus had the childhood name of Thurinus, possibly from the actions his father Octavius had taken against these remnants of the revolt.
A few may have killed themselves, or each other, though we have no record of that. In peaceful times, when untimely deaths might create problems for theatrical producers, suicides by gladiators – by a sponge-stick down a throat or a neck between the spokes of a cart-wheel – were rare enough to be remarked upon. But at this time a few suicides would not have been noted, might not have been noticed. Slaves trained to kill could be inventive in self-destruction, as Symmach
us later found.
In earlier days the mass of slaves captured by Crassus would have gone back to their masters. They would have been branded, given new work in the quarries or the mines, made in other ways to pay the cost of their absence. From the town of Polla, a few miles from the decisive battlefield of the Spartacus war, there survives a stone plaque erected by a Roman magistrate who had built the 321-mile road from Reggio to Capua some sixty years before. He boasts of restoring 917 runaways to their Italian owners after the first of the slave wars in Sicily. The commissioner at Polla was a man of precise numerical detail, in men, road mileage and the needs of the economy.
Alternatively, the captives could have been stood on their blocks and sold for the state treasury – or for the private accounts of Crassus and his officers. From Mount Tifata, by Diana’s temple in sight of the Capuan amphitheatre, there is a proud slave-trader’s gravestone, a memorial to a man called Publilius Satyr, with a vigorous portrayal of how his business was done. On the left is the seller, very clearly the seller, dressed in the Greek style, his left arm waving high in Greek enthusiasm, his right arm back to balance his weight, his whole body leaning towards his wares, his back leg pushing forward to force the purchase. On the right is the buyer, very much the buyer, in Roman toga, with lowered right arm lightly disparaging the offered object, with left arm on hip as though he would rather be somewhere else, leaning backwards away from the deal. Between them, staring forward, arms away from his body and hanging down, naked except for a loincloth, raised on his sale-block, is the little man for sale.
The Spartacus Road Page 27