The Spartacus Road Read online

  The events of that year in which a Thracian slave had escaped from his gladiator school, turned on his captors, summoned a rebellion and terrorised the country were a blot on the city record even though the battles had taken place almost half a millennium before. A very successful Socrates might be able to explain it away as a lesson for the future. But Symmachus and his fellow scholars were not easily philosophical about memories such as this. Socratic justifications were little comfort. Slave wars formed a nasty part of Rome’s narrative of decline – when greed overcame good sense, when the governable became ungovernable, when the rubbish rose to the top of the heap. Rome was rotten from the inside. There was always the nagging question of when the rot had set in. The Spartacus devastation (only the common herd called it a war) was one such moment.

  This bit of the city is almost awake now. The actor gladiators are creeping out of their beds. The plastic gladiators are back on the tables where they will best attract trade. The light rises on Colosseum ivy, its ancestors as old as the Colosseum itself, and over a mass of Mexican daisies, more recent arrivals who love the same damp, dark places as the rats. A coffee outside the creperia costs fifty cents, the pre-tourist, beggars’ breakfast rate.

  Why bother with the mind of Symmachus? Not because of his charm or his prose but because he was here close to the end. Within a few decades of the date of his letter to his brother the Western Roman Empire would be dead. The homes on the Caelian Hill would be razed by Visigoths from around the forests where Spartacus was born. Gladiatorial games would not just be difficult, they would be history. Symmachus does not know any of that. Characters from the past never know what is coming next. That is one of the less acknowledged reasons we like to think about them.

  Today’s traveller to Rome may know that gladiatorial combat – and much else that Symmachus loved in Roman life – was already as doomed in ad 393 as its combatants had mostly been. The public fight-to-the-death was by then a peculiar old custom, ready to begin its journey into the history books of a different age, a ‘dark age’ to a classical scholar, an age of light to a lover of the gospels.

  Modern historians know Symmachus’ personal future after his year of the dead Saxons – that he would live for about another decade, still indulging his guilty morbum fabricatoris, his passion for building houses; that he would still be importing crocodiles, leopards, men and bears, for one last pagan extravaganza in 401, before one last and fatal ambassadorial trip, to a besieged and snowbound Milan, in 402. What Symmachus could claim to know was only his own and his city’s past.

  This was a Rome which had struggled from the muddy banks of the Tiber river at a time when Greeks already had their Olympic Games. There were thick-packed oak forests on the Caelian when Greek city statesmen were inventing modern politics. Rome’s leaders, however, had prospered quickly, creating their own young state by sharing a little power with their people, first conquering their near neighbours, Latins, Sabines and Samnites, and soon afterwards their far neighbours, dark Sicilians and Italian Greeks. Romans had next defeated their Mediterranean rivals, Hannibal’s Carthage and Greece itself, then the Syrians (a name for every servile eastern type) and finally, after nine hundred years, almost the whole of the known world.

  Roman rulers had built their own extraordinary structures of stone, not just killing grounds and temples but stages for history and horror stories, tragedy and laughter. Even now, one of the prides of the capital was the theatre of Pompey the Great, soaring tiers of red and grey arcades, stage-sets with secret doors into painted forests, seats for 10,000 living spectators and hundreds of the bronze and marble dead. So how come that Rome was now beset by Goths and by other human garbage it had imported once to shift its scenery, clean its water closets and do all its most menial tasks?

  This was a common question then. It is always a common question for civilisations of a certain age. Some spectators looked up at Pompey’s theatre, saw the statues of bisexuals, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, sex pets, sex pests, mothers of thirty children, mothers of elephant men, and wondered. Had these been their ancestors? Had Roman lives been less pious and pure than their teachers told? Had foreign decadence and magic been Roman from the beginning? Much old Roman practice was now seen by Christians as evil mysticism, unacceptable adultery, unnatural crudity, the kind of behaviour that got senators killed by the state. Was there justification for such a view?

  When did the rot really set in? Some remembered Pompey’s war with Caesar, one of those many civil wars between ambitious warlords that ended the Roman Republic. Afterwards had come other civil wars and the Empire – with just one warlord who ruled for life – until that system too had broken into West and East under its own colossal weight. There were now Roman citizens so remote that they had never known a Roman, neither past nor present. Their masters might just as well have been a mythical hero as a modern thug, a Theodosius or an Aeneas, a Caesar or an Agamemnon, mere names spread indiscriminately through a space as vast as time.

  On this dirty Roman sidestreet south of the Colosseum, with 1,900-year-old prison cells down below and a shopfront of books and statues behind, there is a wide range of spurs to the modern imagination of what went right and wrong. There are stone slabs here, 2,500 years old, antiquities in Symmachus’ time and kept to mourn the best of the ancient past; there are others, designed by Mussolini’s Fascists some seventy years ago, to keep alive that same past. Often an ancient mourning stone has been used for a second time or a third. It has become a modern monument, losing most of its original force but maintaining a little momentum still; most monuments here keep something of their mourning origins.

  It is not so hard, in the grey start of a city day, to imagine these men of ancient Rome who saw their own past so clearly. There is no need ourselves to mourn their lost grandeur as Symmachus did. We are more likely to mourn those desperate Saxons, driven to suicide by an impending fate in an arena so repugnant to us now. But we can imagine old Symmachus mourning without sharing his anxieties. He has left enough monuments in stones and words to let us do that.

  He seems a modern politician in many ways, someone we can identify, for better or worse, with our own. He was practical. He preached tolerance. He cited Socrates more enthusiastically than he attempted to understand him. He wheeled and dealed. He played his bad hands of cards as best he could. He took his wife away to the seaside when times were too hard. He talked about more wars than he fought, seeing action only in a skirmish against the Germans, an unusually one-sided show that had been staged for visiting dignitaries almost as in an arena. He was pleased that there was no rape of sleeping tribeswomen on that occasion – not while he, the man of sensibility, was watching the show. He wrote carefully about how pleased he was.

  He was conscious of his image. He was famed during his short time as city prefect for rejecting the new foreign extravagance of a silver-panelled carriage paid for by the state. Like a British prime minister pointedly refusing a private jet, he chose the drabbest and most traditional means for his transport, running into trouble only when the Emperor wanted back the money for the silver panels. He told his story in letters, always keeping a copy so that he might have history’s last word. If we can imagine Symmachus – not a well-known figure and from a time that most of us do not know well – we can picture other builders and writers, and through them those who did not build or write but who, like the Saxons, still inspire our feelings. We can see both the terrorisers from ancient Rome and those who were terrorised and how sometimes, very often, they were the same people.

  Spartacus and his armies had been a special part of that terror. Civil wars were always catastrophic. But when a slave army was rampaging through Italy, no one could trust the very men or women on whom they depended for everything, the foreigners whom they had brought into their houses and fields and who might suddenly, despite every threat to their own lives, slaughter the masters in their beds.

  A slave war placed doubts over so much. Pessimism about decline was a nec
essary part of Symmachus’ old Roman way of seeing the world. It was one of his and his kind’s great legacies to later minds. Pessimism had been at the root of Rome even in the good times. There had always been an earlier and better golden age, even when this had been a city of success, when barbarians were routinely routed in battle rather than regularly victorious. There was much now to be properly and justifiably pessimistic about. Where had it started? That was the common and weary question, spat out from angry mouths, a wholly understandable reason, in ad 393, to abuse a pile of Saxons ‘worse than Spartacus’.

  The tour-guides are arriving now with their Evianpowered flocks, tiny children from China, towering women from the Caribbean, Americans, Africans. Coffee prices are advancing with the clock. Two linen-clad English tourists, with a BlackBerry and an 1890 Baedeker and little enthusiasm for using either, ask the way to the ‘Ludus Magnus, the school where the gladiators were trained’. The husband, in beige from brow to shoelace, begins the question and his wife, grey from head to sock, completes it, making ‘school’ sound ‘preparatory’ and ‘trained’ as though it means the same as ‘taught their manners’. The Ludus that they are looking for is a small semi-excavated arena with a surround of prisoner pens, standing now a dirty yard of pavement from where they ask their question. In one sense this was both a ‘prep school’ and a ‘finishing school’; doubtless there were bad pupils who were ‘worse than Spartacus’ and better ones who were not.

  When Symmachus used those words he was himself being a bit of an old buffer, a fish-out-of-water and proud of it, boldly but self-consciously conservative, loose-lipped in the aristocratic tradition, like Prince Philip speaking of the ‘slittyeyed’ or George V saying ‘Bugger Bognor.’ It was a spit-away, throw-away line. But let us imagine Symmachus without company outside his house that morning as he first formed the syllables in his mind.

  How did others see Spartacus in the crumbling years of the Western Empire? Traditional Romans had tried to forget him – and had mostly succeeded. Christians might have been sympathetic in their own rebel days but to the new masters of the world a rebel was the worst of creatures. Symmachus’ wayward protégé St Augustine, sitting in Africa twenty years later contemplating the City of God and his own shift to faith from reason, wondered how so ‘very few’ gladiators had come to lead ‘such a very large number of fierce and cruel slaves’. Augustine’s Spanish disciple Orosius wrote of ‘the universal fear’ that Spartacus had spread among the civilised people of his time. Historians had found no satisfactory explanation for the defeats of Roman armies and the devastation of so many Italian cities. Neither had the new princes of the Church.

  The last major poet of classical Rome, the Egyptian sycophant known as Claudian, arrived from Alexandria at around the same time as the suicidal Saxons. He had a more vicious verbal wit than the senator whose pagan cause and windbag reputation he shared. The name of Spartacus appears just once in his works – in his abuse of one of Symmachus’ contacts at the Eastern court, a Christian fanatic who deploys ‘racks and whips, chains and windowless cells, before putting his opponents to the sword: cruciatus, vincla, tenebras Dilato mucrone parat’. This cruel Rufinus, claims Claudian, kills wives and children, tortures small boys in front of their fathers and ‘labours to exterminate the very race and name of Rome: exscindere cives Funditus et nomen gentis delere laborat’. Compared with this monster, screams the poet, ‘even you, Spartacus, will be seen as a do-nothing: iam Spartace segnis Rufino collatus eris’.

  There would have been some clever Greek slave to whom Symmachus dictated his letters. A trained secretary would probably have known of Spartacus – either as a problematic question like Augustine’s, perhaps as a noble hero or a biographical model, or very likely as another bit of human trash.

  Those who still enjoyed the poetry of Horace, that genius son of a freed slave in the time of the first Emperor, Augustus, might also remember the slave general. Horace used the name only twice – the first with the boldness of youth in possibly his earliest poem, written thirty years after the revolt, in which ‘fierce Spartacus: Spartacus acer’ is high on the list of fresh horrors for Rome. In a much later poem Horace wonders with a weary hauteur (or is that a mock-weary hauteur?) whether there is any decent wine left in the cellar from the years before Spartacus and his bands passed by. That question was posed about fifty years after the event. The wit even then still held a chill.

  Four centuries later, Symmachus had a good knowledge of what had happened in all the slave wars against Rome, in the Spartacus scandal and in two earlier revolts that had raged through Sicily. He knew of their colourful leaders and chaotic ends. There had once been another mass suicide, not unlike his own disaster, when a bunch of defeated Sicilian slaves, thirty years before Spartacus, had been brought to Rome as lion-kill and had preferred to kill each other. On that occasion, as he recalled, the last slave left standing had succeeded also in killing himself. Perhaps that was what had happened to his Saxons. It was hard to say.

  Symmachus had read studiously in the Histories of Livy, that master of Roman morality in the age of the first Emperor. His library held all the other books by writers who had told of the Spartacus War, as well as poems dedicated to himself by his friends. The Riddle of the Number Three was not perhaps the finest work by the imperial tutor, Ausonius of Bordeaux: ‘Three the Graces, Three the Fates, Three the corners of Sicily . . .’, a wearying list of Threes including ‘Three the pairs of Thracians at Rome’s first gladiatorial games’. But the poem was his and his alone. There was true magic in the number three. Or perhaps there was. Anyway, how else would any books survive if rich men did not inspire and keep them?

  The Christians, of course, had made their own Trinity an obsession. They fought bitterly between themselves over how their Father, Son and Holy Spirit could fit together to make a single object of worship. These were absurd disputes. But why did any man’s belief in the unknowable have to stop the public practice of what Romans had always known? Bishop Ambrose, the local strongman whom Symmachus hated with a passion, was a master bully in the battles to show that three could be equally one. Ambrose had a peculiar policy too of persuading women to remain virgins. None of Symmachus’ fellow priests of Vesta, at any time in a thousand years, had ever suggested that what was right for Vestal virgins was necessary for everyone else. The Bishop was both brutal and absurd.

  Romans were inexorably losing the battle for their own minds. There had been many self-styled historians since the first century BC but not much history in Latin worth the name since the death of Tacitus three hundred years before. The real Roman historians had always written to praise Rome, to prove that Rome was just as smart as any foreigner as well as infinitely mightier. All their Roman wars had been just wars. In recent years there had been ever less to praise and to rival. The diplomat and politician who mourned his lost gladiators that morning in ad 393 was a proud scholar – with not quite enough to be proud about.

  He made no claims himself to be historian or poet. There had never been any Roman poets of real account, none born here in this city. The Romans made other peoples’ poets their subjects – and then gave them their subjects. That was the mission – to turn Neapolitans, Greeks, Spaniards and Gauls into artists of Rome. Symmachus himself was more a man of rhetoric, of words that led to actions, a man well known in his time as a physical protector of Roman values, most gloriously and dangerously against Christians who a few years before had torn the goddess Victory out of his Senate chamber. A mob had smashed her statue to pieces. That was one of his finest rhetorical hours.

  He had, however, edited some of the texts of Livy, the books that began with the myths of Troy and Romulus and went on to tell of the great Republican days before the generals began fighting among themselves, before the common people got above themselves and everything went wrong. ‘One history’ was to be preferred to any ‘one god’. He could relate the history of Rome from before there were emperors, from before there was an empire, from before h
is society, as he saw it, had been suffused by the peculiar imaginations of Greeks and Jews, gladiators and other slaves from everywhere on earth. He had read many fine words – as well as speaking and writing some of the weariest words to have survived for us from the whole of the ancient world.

  How exactly did his Saxons die? Where? Was it under this street, where the sun rises every day over the Colosseum to form sickle-shaped shadows on holding pens and cells? Was it in the larger of the semi-excavated rooms, the one where the sewer smell also rises? Take away the pink drinking-straws and Red Bull cans. Imagine the place as it once was, dark, piled with corpses, cloacal then as now.

  Via Sacra, Rome

  These are the first days on my Spartacus Road. This is where an English newspaperman, after four decades of interrupted love for the language of ancient Rome, tries to understand what he has sometimes glimpsed. I could have chosen the roads of many different men, Hannibal or a Caesar, Horace or a Symmachus. But Spartacus has got the call. He has form. He has worked for me before, in pictures and in words, not always when or how I was expecting him, but reliably enough over the years for this to be his journey as well as mine.

  First there was the film. In the 1960s Spartacus was there for everyone, even on the wall of our Essex school science room where the light of only improving films was shone. Through toxic whiffs of sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide and whatever our sixth-form manufacturers of hallucinogens were cooking up that week there emerged the words ‘SPARTACUS, the most spectacular movie ever made’, Kirk Douglas, pathfinder for the liberating power of Christ, his face projected over equations of organic chemistry, the famous dimple on his chin dipping up and down like a lightpen over the formulae for oxides on the wall.