The Spartacus Road

by Peter Stothard

  This may not even be a slave-dealer’s memorial at all. It may just be that of a man who wanted his picture in death to be accompanied by some ordinary scene of everyday life. Selling slaves was as much a part of living as baking bread or cutting corn. A sale of the prisoners would have been possible, acceptable, not an abnormal choice if it had been made. Some punishment of the leaders was probably inevitable. At the end of earlier slave wars there had been crucifixions as well as imprisonment and sale. Crassus could have been expected to do the same, to crucify a few as a warning and to sell the rest to defray expenses.

  Instead, Crassus had a true showman’s plans for the slaves against whom he had intended to risk a little and had ended by risking so much. Only the most fitting finale would suffice. In the words of Orosius, pupil of St Augustine and horrified describer of the day when Romans had to fight in the arena before an audience of slaves, the whole story of Spartacus had been one of horrors. The slave war had been ‘not a mere spectacle reserved for the sight of a few but the cause of universal fear’. At its ending 6,000 men had to be crucified between Capua and Rome along the 115-mile course of the Appian Way. That was to be his great spectacular.

  For the Romans this was much more trouble than a slave market. Mass crucifixion was a rare and complex feat of punishment, the cutting of the trees, the marshalling of the condemned, the marching of conveniently sized groups to their allotted place. Spartacus was already dead. No one had seen him die. The people of Rome, and their slaves, would see the remains of his army die. Crucifixion was normally considered too slow a punishment for an official entertainment. This was to be an exception. Nothing on such a scale had been seen before. The first crosses were raised here where the Via Appia passed by the Colosseum of Capua – where there now stands also the brick arch built by Hadrian and the park where the Vespa-drivers play cards, confuse visitors and argue. The rest of the line stretched ahead out towards the Volturnus river, planks and poles, telegraphing and amplifying the commander’s message.

  A core argument for the Epicureans was that death is quick, that the moment of dying is quickly past. Philodemus says that the atoms of the body are so tiny and ready to spring apart that insensibility comes at extraordinary speed. Separation is their natural state. Fear of pain is wholly legitimate, indeed natural, for animals as well as men. But any severe pain cannot last; and any lesser pain can easily be borne.

  All disciples knew that the process of dying had been hard for Epicurus himself. But the master had endured the severity in his own ways, through memories and images of pleasure. His moment of death had been as quick as all moments when it came. Someone had become nothing. That was the nature of all things. The uniquely human failure was fear of death. Seventeen centuries on, William Drummond elegantly agreed: ‘Now although Death were an extreme Paine, sith it comes in an Instant, what can it bee? Naye, though it were most painefull, long continuing, and terrible uglie, why should wee feare it?’

  But for any Epicureans beside the Appian Way such logic must have struggled against sights and sounds. Death by crucifixion did come in an instant – but it was only one of a million instants. Outside the schools of theory, these deaths had no half-brothers called sleep. In the training schools for the arena the commonest fear was dying too soon. On the cross the fear was of dying too late. In the theatre of life there was some argument, not decisive but reasonable and serious, for dying in Act Four rather than Act One. On the cross a death in Act One was best by far.

  The 6,000 crosses, one every thirty or forty yards past the white rock of Terracina, through Formia, through the marshes of Foro Appio, up to the sacred lakes of Ariccia and on to Rome, were a theatre of pain for Crassus, an exhibit, part entertainment, part education, a warning that there should never be another slave war. There was perhaps a certain pleasure for the general in feeling so little while others felt so much. Maybe the local philosophers had a point and pleasure and pain were really all there was – but only a passing point, a debating point for the hours after a victory dinner.

  For those hanging up high above the ‘queen of roads’ (or tied to little more than gateposts when the wood supplies had run low) there was fear and pain beyond the boundaries of dispute. For slave-labourers and slave-teachers, swordsmen and herdsmen, veterans of Vesuvius or new recruits from the Volcei farms, there were only the inner sounds of dissolving self. There was no sense of time forward or back, no thought, no memory of rape or wine, no theatrical acts, no division of the hours except the uncertain swings of night and day, the darkness that fell over the sun and the shattering lights under the moon, the ice cold that came in the afternoon, the heat of the dew. That is some of the very little of what is known of a crucifixion.

  For as long as the men were alive there was feeling followed by fainting. Chins were choked from respite to respite, eyes swivelled but not as fast as the swirling of the dust in the men’s minds. Then the crows found the eyes, first with feathers beating, then with pecking and pecking and the systematic pursuit of blindness. Then the bigger and smaller birds.

  Almost everything could be seen by those below who wanted to see. Most of the rest could be imagined. There never was another slave war. Once the last corpses had rotted from their ropes, the crosses had been burnt, there were only the wariest mentions that there had ever been this slave war.

  The Epicureans of Campania could not – and did not – stop their arguments. Pain and death could always for them be separated by clear light and theory. The master had known it and proved it. If the two fears came back together in the darkness of night, they were phantasms, fantasies. But surely, said the critics, a death like these 6,000 deaths could be feared. Muddled thinking, the Epicureans would reply. The dying are not the true teachers. Logic is loosened by pain, its messages dissolved by the very subject it confronts. The debates of philosophers continued with shouts and shrugs. Most people in Capua were meanwhile well pleased.

  Via Appia, Porta Capena, Rome

  This is the end of the Spartacus Road, a place of picnics and broken columns not so very far from where it began. What happens next? What happened next? Which way for its inhabitants, for poets and gladiators, for Rome itself ? There are many questions left, only a few that can be answered before the last walk to the forum.

  What happened to Crassus? After his victory he emulated the dictator Sulla and ‘dedicated one-tenth of his fortune to Hercules’, an act of uncertain financial significance or sacrifice, and moved on. He briefly joined his rivals in ruling the Republic, led an army to the Euphrates, was defeated, humiliated and executed there. His Persian conquerors cut off his head, filled it with molten gold and used it as a theatrical prop in a Greek tragedy that they liked to perform. Some of his soldiers were transported as slaves to the far-eastern borders of the Persian Empire, possibly the first Europeans that a Chinese or travelling Korean ever saw. A daughter-in-law of Crassus, Caecilia Metella, has the finest surviving tomb of all those here on this street of tombs, finely carved with ox skulls and flowers.

  To Capua? It became a colony for men to whom Julius Caesar owed a debt of service. Caesar purchased his own Capuan gladiator school to promote his future career. After his assassination the city again survived and prospered in its own peculiar way until Rome, and all the Italian cities, fell to powerful outsiders from Germany, Gaul and the new lands of Islam. Symmachus’ concerns about why and how Rome weakened – through excess of Christianity, greed, old age or civil strife – are still raised anxiously by those who think themselves its successors today.

  To Carlo from Capua and Carlo from Cracow? To my own fellow-travelling Koreans? Those questions are of more immediate matters and are harder. A beribboned busload of men looking very like the first Carlo, brightly uniformed centurions, sphinxes and gladiators, has just passed by on its way back to Rome, perhaps from a wedding party in the suburbs. There is no reason to imagine changes in the DVD markets of Modena or that Korean Air Lines failed to bring its passenger home.

  Th
e Spartacus Road itself ? The Via Appia is still celebrated here where the line of the 6,000 crosses ended. In the near distance is the grove of the Golden Bough, the church where St Peter saw the risen Christ and the tomb where an emperor’s foreign secretary, a former slave, once embalmed his wife among statues of herself as Roman goddesses, in marble, clay and bronze. Priscilla’s empty plinths are still inside the ruin. Statius wrote a spectacular poem about them.

  Acknowledgements

  To the books that came on the road: Appian, The Civil Wars, Penguin Classics, 1996; Cicero, On Ends, Loeb Classical Library, 1931; Claudian, Poems, Loeb, 1922; Florus, Epitome of Roman History, Loeb, 1929; Frontinus, Stratagems, Aqueducts of Rome, Loeb, 1925; Giovagnoli Raphael, Spartacus, Albin Michel, Paris, 1920; Horace, Satires 1, Aris and Phillips Classical Texts, 1993, Opera, Oxford Classical Texts; Koestler, Arthur, The Gladiators, Vintage Classics, 1999; Livy, History of Rome, Loeb, 1929; Pliny, Letters, Loeb, 1969; Plutarch, Lives, Loeb, Vol 3, 1916; Statius, Silvae and Thebaid, Loeb, 1928 and 2003.

  To other books: An Iron Age and Roman Republican Settlement on Botromagno, Gravina di Puglia, Alastair Small, British School at Rome, 1992; Archytas of Tarentum, Pythagorean, Philosopher and Mathematician King, Carl A. Huffman, CUP, 2005; Aulus Gellius, Leofranc HolfordStrevens, Duckworth, 1988; Ausonius, Poems, Loeb, 1919; Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, Richard J. A.Talbert (ed), Princeton, 2000; Cowper, William, Poetical Works, Edinburgh, 1864; Drummond, William, Poems and Prose, Scottish Academic Press, 1976; Epicurus on Freedom, Tim O’Keefe, CUP 2005; Facing Death, Epicurus and his Critics, James Warren, OUP 2004; Horace, Odes Bk III, A Commentary, R. G. M. Nisbet and Niall Rudd, OUP, 2004; Marcus Crassus and the Late Roman Republic, Allen Mason Ward, University of Missouri Press, 1977; Sallust, The Histories, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994; Statius, Silvae 5, Bruce Gibson (ed), OUP, 2006. Symmachus, A Political Biography, Cristiana Sogno, Ann Arbor, 2006; Symmachus, Letters, J. P. Callu (ed), Paris, 1972–82; Thinking Tools, Agricultural Slavery between Evidence and Models, Ulrike Roth, Institute of Classical Studies, 2008; Troy between Greece and Rome, Andrew Erskine, Oxford, 2001.

  To Sally Emerson, as ever; to Robert Wolff of Houston, Chris Russell, Martyn Caplin, Daniel Hochhauser and Bill Lees of London, masters of medicine; to Belinda Theis; to all Italian hosts, particularly the Raito Hotel in Salerno and the Tramontano in Sorrento, no better places to write about Epicurus; to William Goodacre of Tastes of Italy; to Peter Brown and Trinity College, Oxford; to Mary Beard, Christopher Kelly and Malcolm Schofield of Cambridge, who read the text; to Paul Webb; to Martin Redfern and Annabel Wright at HarperCollins; to Maureen Allen and Roz Dineen at the TLS; to my peerless agent, Ed Victor, and to my daughter and son, Anna and Michael Stothard, without whom this book would not be as it is and to whom it is dedicated.

  List of Illustrations

  PageIllustration

  1 Lake Nemi by L. Napoléon Lepic © Bibliothèque nationale de France

  3 The Colosseum, 1776, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi © Bibliothèque nationale de France

  7 Gladiator relief © Author’s own

  12 Mosaic © Author’s own

  17 A frontispiece design incorporating two skeletons in front of a tomb by Giovanni Battista Piranesi © The Trustees of the British Museum

  24–5 Detail of Mappa 44 from The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, Richard J. A. Talbert (editor) © 2000 Princeton University Press

  31 Roman brickwork © Author’s own

  34 Tiles © Author’s own

  39 Tomb of the Curiaci Brothers at Albano, 1756, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi © Bibliothèque nationale de France

  43 Lake Nemi by L. Napoléon Lepic © Bibliothèque nationale de France

  46 Marble relief with female gladiators © The Trustees of the British Museum

  50–1 ‘Domitian puts on a show. . .’ Artwork by Sarah Jane Coleman

  57 Pavement and Sides of the Appian Way by Giovanni Battista Piranesi © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

  60 ‘Horace’s Journey to Brundisium, Part I’ Artwork by Sarah Jane Coleman

  65 Spartacus, 1830, by Denis Foyatier © Musée du Louvre / P. Philibert

  75 The Amphitheater ruins at Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Campania © Alinari Archives, Florence

  77 Domenico Russo © Author’s own

  79 Korean map of Italy adapted from Wagamama Aruki: Italy originally published by Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, Ltd., Tokyo © Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha Ltd, 2008

  84 Corso Aldo Moro © Author’s own

  87 Detail of Mappa 44 from The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, Richard J. A. Talbert (editor) © 2000 Princeton University Press

  92 Terracotta group of two women playing knucklebones, Capua © The Trustees of the British Museum

  95 Writing implements, engraved headpiece after drawing by Nicola Vanni, Delle antichità di Ercolano, 1762, from Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples by Carol C. Mattusch (Thames and Hudson, 2008) © 2008 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

  101 Mosaic © Author’s own

  104 Graffiti © Author’s own

  110 Fresco © Author’s own

  117 Borra sketchbook, Wood Bequest, vol. 16. Photograph by Ken Walton. With acknowledgement to and kind permission of the Joint Library of the Hellenic and Roman Societies

  122 Fresco from the House of the Wedding of Alexander, Pompeii © Shmuel Magal / www.sitesandphotos.com

  127 Frontispiece of Drummond of Hawthornden by David Masson (Macmillan and Co., 1873)

  133 Dying Gaul, copy of a Greek original of 230–220 BC by Epigonos (marble) © Pinacoteca Capitolina, Palazzo Conservatori, Rome, Italy / Alinari / The Bridgeman Art Library

  136 Riace Warrior A (bronze) © Museo Nazionale, Reggio Calabria, Italy / Alinari / The Bridgeman Art Library

  140 Via Pioppaino © Author’s own

  149 Lion fountain © Author’s own

  155 Vesuvausbruch by Johann Wolfgang Goethe © Klassik Stiftung Weimar

  158 Frontispiece to Spartacus by Raphaël Giovagnoli (Albin Michel)

  163 Corso Umberto I © Author’s own

  169 Il Traversa Mercato © Author’s own

  171 ‘Spartaks’ graffito Artwork by Sarah Jane Coleman

  179 Frontispiece from Barclay’s Sallust © British Library

  184 Mosaic © Author’s own

  191 Roman ruins and part of Appian Way © David Epperson / Digital Vision / Getty Images

  195 Gnathian pottery © British Academy / Winchester College

  197 ‘Horace’s Journey to Brundisium, Part I’ Artwork by Sarah Jane Coleman

  203 Metaponto © C. Raho / ICA

  206 The Temple of Hera, Tavole Palatine © Giuseppe Aletti Alemagna

  211 Viale Orazio Flacco © Author’s own

  212–3 Detail of Mappa 45 from The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, Richard J. A. Talbert (editor) © 2000 Princeton University Press

  218 High angle view of a valley, Sinni Valley, Basilicata, Italy © De Agostini / Getty Images

  224 Satyrical Map of Horace’s Farm by Giovanni Battista Piranesi © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

  227 ‘Horace gives a speech. . .’ Artwork by Sarah Jane Coleman

  231 ‘Rocche e roccie’ (Rocks and Fortresses): view of Guiglia, in the Province of Modena © 2006 Alinari / TopFoto

  236 Via Carlo d’Angio © Author’s own

  240–1 The South Italian landscape near Lacedonia © Mario Laporta / AFP / Getty Images

  244 Via Archita © Author’s own

  248 ‘A message from a corpse. . .’ Artwork by Sarah Jane Coleman

  254–5 Detail of Mappa 39 from The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, Richard J. A. Talbert (editor) © 2000 Princeton University Press

  257 Spartacus DVD © Author’s own

  261 Villa Pliniana © Acta carsologica, 37/1, p. 96

  263 Pliniana © Author’s own

  272 Pliny © Auth
or’s own

  278 The Temple of the Sibyl, Tivoli, 1761, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi © Bibliothèque nationale de France

  280 The Waterfalls at Tivoli, 1765, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi © Bibliothèque nationale de France

  292 Writing implements, engraved headpiece after drawing by Nicola Vanni, Delle antichità di Ercolano, 1762, from Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples by Carol C. Mattusch (Thames and Hudson), 2008 © 2008 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

  297 Via Appia by Giovanni Battista Piranesi © Bibliothèque nationale de France

  305 Detail of Mappa 46 from The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, Richard J. A. Talbert (editor) © 2000 Princeton University Press

  307 Scilla from Edward Lear in Southern Italy (William Kimber & Co. Limited, 1964)

  319 Ruined village © Author’s own

  325 Bust of Epicurus (stone) © Musei Capitolini, Rome / Giraudon / Bridgeman

  330 Iron ring © Author’s own

  331 Roman Campagna, 1843, by Thomas Cole © 2009. Wadsworth Athaneum Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY / Scala, Florence

  336 Graffiti © Author’s own

  341 Sleep and his Half-Brother Death by John William Waterhouse © Fine Art Photographic Library

  345 The fountain and grotto of Egeria outside the Porta Capena (Veduta della fonte e delle spelonche d’Egeria fuor della Porta Capena or di S. Sebastiano), 1766, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi © Mackelvie Trust Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, bequest of Dr Walter Auburn, 1982

  While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in future editions.