The Spartacus Road Read online

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  This edition first published in paperback in the United States in 2012 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

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  Copyright © 2010 by Asp Words

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-158-8

  To Anna and Michael

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  I

  Rome to Ariccia

  II

  Ariccia to Benevento

  III

  Capua to Acerra

  IV

  Vesuvius to Pompeii

  V

  Pompeii to Nuceria

  VI

  Egnazia to Botromagno

  VII

  Gargano to Pognana

  VIII

  Torno to Picentino

  IX

  Reggio Calabria to Buccino ˜ Volcei

  X

  Sorrento to Rome

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  About the Author

  Prologue

  In the final century of the first Roman Republic an army of slaves brought a peculiar terror to the people of Italy. Its leaders were gladiators. Its purpose was incomprehensible. Its success was something no one had ever known. Never before had the world’s greatest state been threatened from the lowest places that its citizens could imagine, from inside its own kitchens, laundries, mines, fields and theatres. Never again, the victors said when Spartacus was dead and his war was over.

  The Spartacus Road is the route along which the slave army fought its Roman enemies between 73 and 71 BC. It is a road much travelled then and since by poets and philosophers, politicians and teachers, torturers and terrorisers of different times, those living today and those long ago dead, innovative thinkers about fear and death, some with truths to teach us, others whom we can try to forget. It stretches through 2,000 miles of Italian countryside and out into 2,000 years of world history. From Sicily to the Alps and from Paris to Hollywood, it has never wholly left the modern mind.

  This book is a diary of a journey on that Spartacus Road. It is, in part, a journalist’s notebook because I have been a journalist – a newspaper reporter and editor – for most of my life. It is a classicist’s notebook, written with half-remembered classical books for company, because while reporting politics in our own time I have so often felt the beat of ancient feet. It is also the notebook of a grateful survivor: ten years ago I was given no chance of living to make this trip and, on the Spartacus Road, the memory of a fatal cancer and its fortuitous cure shone stronger, and stranger, than I ever thought it could.

  Little of this book is as I thought it might be. It began as notes written night by night, on bar tables and brick walls, in the places where the Spartacus War was fought. It became a history of that war, the best that I could write, and the history of how I came to know anything about that war, other wars, and many other things.

  Thanks are owed to Greek and Roman writers whom I thought I knew when I was young and know differently now. Returning to old books is like returning to old friends. They have changed, both the familiar characters studied at school and some of the less read ancients, a director of Roman water supplies, a historian who was a lovable tabloid hack, a pioneer writer on interior décor and on the apocalypse. Thanks too to some equally little-known twenty-first-century travellers, a pair of Koreans, an actor seeking centurion roles, a Pole selling DVDs and a bibulous priest.

  The barest facts about Spartacus, like the road itself, are often hard to find. They disappear and reappear – in the landscape and in the memory of succeeding centuries. They have been twisted in the service of cinema, politics and art. There is Spartacus the romantic gladiator from Thrace, the fighter for freedom, the man who lives on in the memory of emulators; and there is Spartacus the terrorist and threat to life, the one who survives in others’ fears. There is the hidden man and the man of the Spectacular, the word which appeared on the first page of my first notes, the Romans’ own name for the theatrical games and aesthetic of death that so powerfully defined both their lives and our memories of them.

  I

  ROME to ARICCIA

  Via di S. Stefano Rotondo, Rome

  This Spartacus Road begins high on Rome’s most southeasterly hill, the Caelian, with questions that were asked here first some five hundred years after the great slave revolt. How could twenty-nine gladiators have strangled themselves in their underground pens? How did they dare to do it? How had they succeeded in doing it? There was no rope, no cloth, nothing to make a noose. The games had barely begun and twenty-nine men had suddenly been their own stranglers. Somehow it had happened. How?

  These were not the questions which Quintus Aurelius Symmachus most wanted to ask. A power-broker of an age when his city had lost so much power liked to think of better things. Life was too short, its needs too great, for anyone, let alone him, to agonise over some ingeniously suicidal Saxons.

  He had his duties as ambassador between the old Rome and the new, the pagan and the Christian. Rome’s rulers in Constantinople and Milan were militant leaders of the new ruling faith. Many of their subjects, his own people here among the empty barracks and neglected temples, were more relaxed in their religious commitments. Symmachus needed all his old Roman’s diplomatic skills to mediate between the two.

  He had serious private interests as a writer and intellectual, a word he would happily have used of himself had he known it. He was self-important, self-reliant, subtle in his own cause, fond of focusing on himself in every way. Now one of the least read writers of ancient Rome, his nine hundred surviving letters and forty-nine reports to the rulers of his world are reminders of a time when he could demand to be read.

  In the year ad 393, he was just over fifty years old. He had already held the thousand-year-old office of city prefect, a title whose antiquity was of some importance to him. True, he had not held the city prefecture very long: but brief tenures in office were nothing now of which to be ashamed. Holding on to any job, or even any consistent line of thought, was difficult when commands and signals came from two imperial courts, in east and west, so very far away and apart.

  At least he had added a prefect’s distinction to his family line. Symmachus was still a Roman senator, a senior priest whose sway extended from Vestal virgins to omens of war, a man of wealth in gold and land to protect against what sometimes seemed the end of his world. On this troubled Roman morning, four centuries after the death of the first Caesar, he had greater anxieties to express in his letter to his brother than a mass immolation of twenty-nine men from the cold, dank north.

  How much did he or anyone really care how the gladiators had died? They were captives condemned to appear in the Colosseum arena. He could see down to their last killing place from up here at his Caelian home. Their miserable heads had been unable to save their miserable necks. Those same heads had decided to break those necks. How had they done it? Who could tell?

  He could see silvery streaks in the southern Roman sky, the first morning lights on the high arches built by great warrior emperors of old. This was only the second day of his ga
mes, only the start of his latest personal offering for the entertainment of the Roman people. Yesterday had been disastrous but there was much more still to come. Above the soaring marble was the fading array of stars at dawn. Symmachus, like many in uncertain times, found much contemplative comfort in the stars.

  His first thought? No one had directly killed himself. Not even the toughest gladiator is tough enough to be his own strangler. All human grip fails before the body is dead. Second thought. Maybe the Saxons had a leader, an elected executioner or one chosen by lot, who stood behind each prisoner in line, choking the breath of one, then another, breaking the bones, stopping the blood. That was possible but not likely. Leadership of such an enterprising kind would surely have been detected – and corrected – before they arrived.

  Third thought. Maybe the twenty-nine formed themselves up in pairs, as they should have done in the arena on this second day of his spectacular. Fourteen against fourteen. Or rather fourteen for fourteen, since they seemed to have agreed on their suicide, with one of them just watching from the wooden beams or wet brick walls. Then fifteen left in the cells, seven on seven, with a different one watching. Seven against seven, the most mythical numbers. Strangling a strong man is hard work, even if the strong man wants to die. It could have taken thirty seconds before each death came.

  Then four on four, with no one sitting out the show. It was strange how odd numbers eventually divided into even. The chance of a three-on-three fight, once one of the most prized gifts for the Emperor and people of Rome, was gone for ever. In the cramped, low-ceilinged darkness, the blue-fleshed faces would by now have had hardly a place to fall. Then two on two. Another great spectacle he had paid for. The finest moment of a double duel in the arena brought two simultaneous sets of dying eyes, one to remind the spectator that he was still alive, the second to tell him that one day he too had death to face. But this time the eyes had been seen by no one.

  Till one on one, the final, but a pathetic parody of what he had hoped to offer to the puppet-man on the imperial balcony. A gladiator who died in the dark need never have lived. Symmachus was this week celebrating the latest promotion of his son, a boy who one day might follow his father to the rank of consul. It was important to remind everyone that, while Christianity had its place in this new Rome, there were old Roman traditions which needed patronage and protection too.

  And after that? Surely at least one of the men would be left at the end. That was the troubling question, though none of his household slaves had mentioned a survivor. Had the Saxons cast lots for who that survivor would be? Had they decided for themselves who would be the one to fall, feeling the other’s thumbs at his throat, and who would be left alive as the last gladiator in this shameful night’s work? Symmachus was someone who liked a long, tendentious, apparently logical, mildly melodramatic question like that. He was famed throughout the city as a man of many words. Had one of the bastards fixed to cheat his fellows? Had the last man held some last hope of escape, of fighting in the games, of pretending to die, of avoiding the hooks of the body-clearers, of hiding in the wagon that, every hour or so during a week like this, hauled the corpses outside the walls? Who could tell?

  Perhaps the two last determined men, knowledgeable in all the ways to kill and be killed, could have arranged that each died almost simultaneously. Possible again. But only in the old story books. Symmachus was beginning to be impatient with the whole bloody business. Words piled upon words until even the man who could demand that listeners hear him was doubtful whether he wanted an audience.

  It was a brutal truth that the awakening city he could see from his home was little more now than a city of words.Deeds were not done in Rome as deeds had been done before. For more than half a century the city that had defined the world’s centre had been pushed to its edge. He had once described the Senate, his Senate, as the ‘better part of humankind’. But being ‘better’ was not the same as making anything happen. Easterners, northerners and even southerners did that now. Goths, Gauls and Saxons did that. Even Saxons – especially so now, it seemed.

  The names of the emperor in charge of Rome changed at challenging speeds. Thugs and puppets of thugs followed one after the other. Six years before, Symmachus had made a dangerous mistake, publicly pouring one of his famous speeches of praise over a chancer who did not last very long. He hoped not to make that kind of error again.

  The best emperor now would have been the very general who had captured those Saxons. His name was Arbogast. He had the military muscle but was not acceptable to traditionalists despite being a great traditionalist in spirit. So Arbogast had chosen someone else instead, a Christian schoolteacher called Eugenius who had a reputation for tolerance but little else to recommend his claim.

  Why had so much of the world ended with the so-called Christ, with that bureaucratic incompetent Pontius Pilate and the gullible fools who felt guilt for a single crucifixion? A good ruler was now a Christian who tolerated the gods that had made Rome great, one who respected the pieties that had thrived before. A bad ruler was a Christian fanatic who did not tolerate even variants in his own religion.

  Symmachus remembered the Eastern Emperor Theodosius from when he had been a lucky Spanish warlord, one of dozens: now the man sat on a throne at Constantinople as a single God’s sole representative on earth. To see him or to see any emperor ever in Rome itself was a rarity. Even the Western court was up north in Milan. The last time that Theodosius came to the one-time capital of the world was when he wanted support from the Senate for the succession plans of his son. That was how Symmachus had won his consulship, a victory showing either that his virtue and status were suddenly and inexplicably valued (he tried to be as optimistic as he could) or how unpredictable all life had become.

  During his long career, Symmachus had spent millions on Colosseum shows. The family coffers had given up uncountable gold to gladiator-sellers, some of the greediest tradesmen he had ever known. He had imported bears and paid extortionate customs duty. He had paraded leopards, antelopes and lions, recalling those great occasions of the past when the Emperor himself might shoot arrows at the neck of an ostrich and when prisoners fought wild boars and wild witches as well as each other.

  In his short time as city prefect he had written to his masters in rapture at the arrival in Rome of real prisoners-of-war for a real gladiatorial event. ‘No longer are we inferior to our ancient fathers. We have seen for ourselves the sights we used to read about with wonder: the lines of the conquered led in chains, those pallid faces that were once so savage, their hands, well used to barbarian arms, trembling at our gladiators’ weapons.’ The amphitheatre stars on that occasion were the descendants of exotic nomads from the eastern deserts, famed for a thousand years for deploying women among men as archers and cavalry. This week Symmachus had planned to be more modest. This present time was one when modesty was often best.

  He had bought some splendid wolfhounds from Scotland: all Rome viewed them with wonder, he told his brother. But this present show was still indisputably inferior to the great examples of antiquity. A dog was still only a dog. ‘I did not want my display to be in any way gaudy,’ he wrote. He had an extravagant present ready for when Emperor Eugenius made his appearance before the crowd, a carved ivory panel in two hinged parts each framed in gold. But excessive theatrical extravagance might easily be frowned upon. Even tolerant Christians could be sensitive on the subject of the Colosseum, believing, quite wrongly, that thousands of their saintly predecessors had perished on its sands. It was probably only a few hundred, Syrians, Jews and other riff-raff, vicious, violent people for the most part, their agonies and their numbers absurdly exaggerated by religious propaganda.

  The loss of twenty-nine Saxons, a few hours before their lives were meant to be lost, had depleted his cast. There was no denying that. The alien soldiers had broken every rule of their Roman school. Trained to kill in front of the country’s sharpest critics, in the open, on stage, they had chosen to die the unsee
n death of the untrained criminal. He could hardly fault his own behaviour. Even if he had paid the best of private guards, how could such reckless idiots have been stopped?

  Who needed gladiators anyway? There was still time to add more African animals to his games. He would do it without a thought. He had spent too much effort already on this wretched gang of slaves who were, he told his brother with a flourish, ‘worse than Spartacus’. There was nothing for it but to use the experience to make himself a better person. The philosopher Socrates, one of the better Greeks, had taught that disappointment brought its own rewards, that failure to attain one’s cherished goals was a lesson in itself. Failure was so often better than success; there was so much more to be learnt from it.

  Via San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome

  The name of Spartacus sounds Roman enough to those who are tourists in the city today. But the distinguished senator of the elderly Roman Empire was using a word which his fellow countrymen had for centuries preferred not to use.

  In many places, including here among the rats and recycling bins of the Via San Giovanni, Spartacus is among the most notable Romans of them all. In these streets around the Colosseum you can pay fifteen euros to a bulky Bulgarian in fancy dress and have your photograph taken with him. Behind the doorways of the bookshops where the tourist-trapping gladiators lurk, you can buy videos of Kirk Douglas in the role, DVDs of mini-series successors to what was once the most expensive film ever made, postcards of Spartacus from Pompeii, even the ‘worse than Spartacus’ letter of Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, though not translated into English.

  To the ancient Romans who lived in 73 BC, and their successors for a long time after 73 BC, the rebel leader of the Third Servile War, as modern history books describe him, was an obscenity. To Marcus Tullius Cicero, greatest orator of the Republic, his name was a term of abuse to be used against the vilest of state enemies. To such as Symmachus he stood somewhere between gnawing vermin and rotting vegetables, to use the classification of the natural world that was then so fashionably a part of an intellectual gentleman’s life.