Читать книгу On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey through Ancient Italy - Peter Stothard - Страница 13

Or, to choose another version of the spectacular, the performing poet’s version: semi-naked women who knew nothing of the sword condemned to fight one another in the arena, Amazons playing the parts of men, pregnant dancers from the kingdom of Croesus, fist-fighting dwarfs, local girls for sale, corpse-eating cranes, dough-balls raining down on to the crowd. These sights are the first on the Spartacus Road to come from the pen of Statius. One of his own showiest triumphs took place a few hundred yards from here up the hill towards the summer house of the Pope.

The poet was writing about the Kalends of December, spectacular, bizarre games given by the homicidal god-emperor Domitian, successor and brother to the Emperor Titus who inaugurated the Colosseum. Killer freaks, killer birds, food to die for: ‘amid noise and novelties a spectator’s pleasure flies lightly by: hos inter fremitus novosque luxus Spectandi levis effugit voluptas’. There were Roman spectaculars for all tastes and times. The Alban literary games, celebrated here 1,900 years ago beside the mountain lake where the Pope has his holiday palace, included a poetry competition, an opportunity for highbrow performance art. On a games day the competitors would vie to impress the Emperor with carefully prepared improvisations while the statesmen of Rome would picnic on the steep banks of the crater, each with one eye on the poet and the other (their better eye if they were wise) on their master.

The less literary spectaculars were always the more popular. Statius was one of the grateful winners of that Alban poetry prize but gives us a vivid version of a people’s stadium show, a lower-brow occasion for birds to eat small but expensive men, for men to eat small but expensive cakes, and for slave-women of the Black Sea to take up gladiatorial swords in a snuff-movie mixture of female mud-wrestling and Rocky IV. Here too it was wise for spectators to watch the Emperor as closely as they watched the slave-dwarfs and duellistes. Were pregnant Lydians funny or not? Only one man at that time could safely say.

Statius was born around AD 45 near Capua in a Greek ghetto of Naples, one of the tiny parts of Italy where the pure Greek language survived. The Romans had mixed their Latin into most of the colonies that Athens, Corinth and Sparta had centuries before sent to Italy. Greek thought was deeply dyed into Rome from the earliest times, whatever Symmachus and his friends might have later tried to pretend. But a few neighbourhoods of the Italian south remained exclusively and resolutely Greek.

Poplios Papinios Statios, in the native version of his name, was a child poet star, son of a poet scholar who ran a Greek school for Roman grandees. Statius’ literacy and learning were not the classroom-acquired kind of his father’s pupils. The poetry of Homer and the philosophy of Plato were in his first language. Statius was married to a fellow performer’s widow, a woman who looked after her daughter and the literary interests of both her husbands. He was a professional’s professional who personified the spectacular idea in art.

His main rival, the Spaniard Martial, is the poet of this time who is the more often read today. Martial wrote short, sharp sex scenes as well as paeans to the great, some pithy abuse of his enemies, and his turgid match commentary to open the Colosseum. He gives a dutiful account in his De spectaculis of how the greatest beasts of the natural world must kneel and fall before the Emperor. But his treatment of spectator sport was happiest when he moaned that his mistress liked to be watched while they were making love: ‘a spectator pleases you more than a lover since joys unseen are no joys at all: et plus spectator quam te delectat adulter; Nec sunt grata tibi gaudia si qua latent’.

Statius preferred the longer style. The extra words gave him more opportunities and surfaces to shine, and more cover for his back. He was a writer who polished every possible superficiality in an age when it was dangerous to dig too deep. A few hours with Statius is like a mind-sharpening shot of chemical in the skull. His subjects shine out from sharply lit edges. His golden crown for poetry, given to him in Ariccia by his emperor, was his perfect reward. The smallest jewels, fragments of marble, mosaic, metal, flash as though on giant screens.

Reliable about what happened in the Colosseum? Not wholly. He would not have quite understood what we meant had we asked him that. The knotted dwarfs and semi-naked swordswomen are there in his poem on the Kalends of December show, and then they are gone. They may have existed ‘in the flesh’. They may not. Women did fight as gladiators. Laws were passed to stop them, then ignored and passed again. No one knows how often they fought.

Sexual exhibitionism, random couplings in the street, beatings as an alternative or preliminary to sex: all were part of the earliest Roman games, however much anxious Romans tried to deny it. When the licence became too political, too radical, too encouraging to the disorderly, it was curbed, sometimes stopped, but never wholly lost. How amusing were those pregnant Lydians? It was perilous to predict. Domitian was not the first politician to want both to recall the past and to control it.

In the theatre there were favoured subjects for history plays: the ‘rape of the Sabine women’ was always popular, a foundation myth that was itself set at an early Roman gladiator show. Favourites for mythological dramas were the stories of beautiful Andromeda tied to her rock and other tales of naked nymphs pursued by gods and monsters. When did the rot set in? With Greeks and Celts and other alien imports or was it there at the start? Symmachus’ historians and their successors have every opportunity to argue among themselves on this Spartacus Road. Library disciplines need not always apply.

Statius would have had his own answers while being careful to whom he gave them. He was the great performer and the great spectator, ever on the lookout for new ways of describing the present and the past, a new show or statue, a new road or swimming pool, a pet eunuch or pet parrot. His listeners loved him. He had the crooner’s sweet voice. He toured like a rock star, competed like a sports star and, in reward for his skills, was stared at like all stars are stared at. His appearances were sell-outs. As soon as he had fixed a date, the tickets were gone. He sold his poems as party pieces to the Emperor’s favourite actors. He never made as much money as he had expected. But he was a success in his career and in his art.

Later readers looking for grand Roman ideals have never much liked Statius. He was a ‘silver age’ artist, an imitator and flatterer. He wrote quickly like a journalist, and was proud of his speed as a journalist is. He sometimes took longer in writing than he pretended to take, again like a journalist. For Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante and countless lesser writers he was a mine to be plundered. For travellers today who appreciate an artist’s eye on how their ancient road was built, on the statues in the roadside tombs, on what the gardens might have looked like, on what we might have seen when entertainers were killing each other, he is still a literary star.

‘See those untrained swordswomen, standing their ground, holding their lines, shameless in the battle roles of men: Stat sexus rudis insciusque ferri: Et pugnas capit improbus viriles.’ Statius was an especially self-conscious expert in the literature of fighting and killing, in death and in sport. His literary hero, Homer, had been first to put words to the world of war, Greek words. Statius knew about fist-fights, track-sweat and the butcher’s knife. He knew the jargon and used it. He had learnt at his father’s knee.

Killing was absolutely an art. It was a subject for argument and expert appreciation, for commentary and verbal conflict. At the Kalends we can imagine problems with those women fighters. Might they be a bit ‘amateur-night’ with their blades? Were they totally untrained or only half trained? As deadly as the male? Maybe. Their odds were harder to call. There was not the usual form book. It was all mere holiday-betting.

Death-dealing women were mythical monsters: ‘Like Amazons at war by rivers faraway: Credas ad Tanain ferumque Phasin Thermodontiacas calere turmas’. At games like this the fighters were not on show to be inspirational. A man could hardly look into a female face for spurs to his own courage. A dying Amazon or dwarf was something different from the standard fare, an alternative type of spectacular pleasure, a reminder of what would never happen to Romans, only to other people. ‘Other people’ were always needed to be looked down on and laughed at. When women fought in the stadium every man could be a know-all as well as a see-all. The feeblest fellow in the stands could puff up some critique of how the blonde from the Don blocked and parried, how the face of the River Rion missed her best chance to kill in the opening moments of the bout. Amazon style? Black Sea bravado? Enough to keep the men on the benches bantering for hours.

Those same male spectators could have argued too about the technique of the retiarius, the net-wielding fighter who battled without a helmet and whose eyes were always satisfyingly on show. He was one of the more traditional games characters. His art was to entwine sword and shield with yards of enveloping rope, to neutralise the gladiator in the same way that a fisherman netted carp or a hunter neutered the claws of a bear. But, in a few words about the warrior women, Statius projects more vivid possibilities than from any ordinary blood-on-the-sand bout. There was no point in the ordinary in the best of art or the best of death. A skilled pikeman was formidable but commonplace. Women with swords, some of them hardly knowing which end to hold, were different, much easier on male egos, not spectacular in the purest sense but potent.

When gladiatorial games began in Rome, most of the spectators had their own experience in wielding sword and shield: these first spectaculars were mere added education for the army. Then came the theatre of naval battles, fought by gladiator marines, designed to show to land-loving Roman citizens the new techniques of war at sea. The Romans used to flood stadia to make artificial lakes or use natural ones like those in the hills around here. Thousands of prisoners died in these demonstrations, and there are reports of at least one who killed himself, like Symmachus’ Saxons, to avoid his death by drowning.

By the time that Statius was writing, the need for mass military education had passed. Roman citizens now preferred other peoples to win their wars, concentrating on how to survive their own rulers as best they could. The known seas were uncontested except by the occasional pirate band. The spectaculars of Rome had found other purposes.

The most famous legacy of the age of Domitian is his invitation to terrified senators for a dinner party in total darkness, with coffins for tables, charcoaled slaves in naked attendance and silence except from the host. In the mid-twentieth century it became fashionable to offer Domitian a little rehabilitation, to see him as a Roman King John, a decent administrator who had ‘his little ways’ but was forced to wait too long for the deaths of Vespasian and Titus, his Colosseum-building father and brother. One of his remembered good deeds was to ban the castration of boy slaves; he was exemplary in his modest intake of food and drink. He collected statues of subjects other than himself: a violent mythological blinding and a vicious female monster survive from his gardens. He wrote poetry of his own and a textbook on hair care. ‘Able and intelligent’ was the mischievous verdict of an Oxford admirer in the 1920s. Statius’ vision takes us, cautiously, to the more traditional view, to the first of Rome’s self-styled gods on earth, to an erratic tyrant who filled every corner of the screen and was never quite satisfied with his exposure.

Domitian plays the divinely generous host on the Kalends of December. When his spectator guests grow bored with the female swordfights, there are other attractions, the parade of the pregnant Lydians, musicians and match-sellers, and those pot-bellied dwarf cohorts, so very keen to stop themselves becoming bird-food or kebabs. Even if these men and women of stunted growth did not have swords, they could throw a few good punches before the net-carriers scooped them up like forest pigs.

There are the most delicious items of food, some of it cooked and some of it, the pheasants and guinea fowl, still alive and flapping, available, like home-run baseballs, to be taken home by the lucky ones in the crowd who caught them. Domitian delivers everything—from the women-for-hire to the free figs from Ibiza. Popularity-seeking politicians once staged games to get the highest Republican offices. By this point in the imperial era only an emperor could produce anything as spectacular as this. He asks nothing in return. His sole intervention is to stop the crowd hailing him as their lord—while at the same time wanting them to do so.

Statius was a subtle man of this literary theatre, flexible and imaginative in projecting his images. Domitian’s beautiful boy favourite, Earinus, has his picture fixed shut in Cupid’s mirror (‘et speculum seclusit imagine rapta’), the first camera lens in literature. A statue of Hercules is small but a giant in its appearance: ‘parvusque videri, sentirique ingens’. A statue of Domitian on horseback exceeds the wooden horse of Troy in every way. Domitian was notoriously fussy about the weight of the statues of himself in gold. The poet knew that. He knew his emperor personally. The elder Statius had tutored them both. They had villas close by in these Alban hillsides that Pompey once owned. They even shared a water-supply connection, not a small matter when one of the heights of civilisation was the hottest bath. For his prize-winning Alban poem Statius stuck to the safest of all subjects, the glories of grinding down the Germans.

This town of Ariccia, scene of that triumph, is only a first and very short stop on this Spartacus Road. There are some massive ivy-covered remains here of the Via Appia, the first great Roman highway, the one that slave-wagons, armies and fleeing poets all once took. There are no signposts to it now. Only the irregular limestone blocks, with the marks of thousands of chisels still on them, place it at the beginning of the age of roads. By climbing over fences into tomato fields, by vaulting over a rusted tractor and pushing down the barbed wire over the Valvoline grease guns in the grass, the traveller can get some small sense of how solidly and menacingly it once stood.

The father of anthropology, James Frazer, began and ended The Golden Bough near here at Lake Nemi, Diana’s mirror as it was known, her speculum. In his twelve volumes of comparative myth he likened the local worship of the goddess to ceremonies of South Sea islanders, camel-herders and Aztecs. Long before Spartacus and long after Statius there was a killer priest here who lived a sleepless life in fear of the successor who had to fight and kill him in turn.

At the bottom of Diana’s mirror-lake two large ancient ships were found by Mussolini’s archaeologists in the 1920s, to the excitement of scholars who had doubted whether Rome’s naval architecture had ever quite matched its road-building. These were true floating palaces and well proved their makers’ prowess with lead and timber. No local tribes had sunk them in a naval battle. These imperial vantage places—for blood-in-the-water sports and other pleasures—would have been a worthwhile destination in themselves had not German soldiers on 1 June 1944, exacting who knows what kind of Saxon revenge, burnt them to black ash.

Via Appia, Foro Appio

Ariccia long ago rose above its low origins. Domitian set a tone for his childhood and imperial home which lasted into the era of Symmachus, his Christian foes and beyond. The townscape in the rear-view mirror is papal, grand, palatial, baroque—with almost nothing left but the tomato-plantation bridge and a chalk grotto in its Chigi Palace to bring back the days when travellers, fresh out of dying Republican Rome, found only a single modest inn. Ask where that inn originally was, and the answer now is either a traffic island or the Flavio factory producing porchetta, the local pig delicacy. The porchetta option appears to have the greater support.

This next stop, the gateway town into what for 1,500 years after the fall of Rome were the vast and open Pomptine Marshes, is less changed by time. Bernini and his seventeenth-century designer friends did none of their business here in Foro Appio—which was wild in Roman times and is still wild today. A single bizarre ‘boutique hotel’ sits within a reclaimed swamp of agri-businesses, surrounded by telegraph poles, lead-blue sky and yelping birds. Only a few of the ancient watery paths remain: Mussolini removed most of the region’s stagnant mud when the creation of new Italian land became easier than conquering bits of Africa. But this small part can speak loudly and clearly enough for what has gone.

The sludge beside the restaurant here passes under another bridge of the old Via Appia, smaller than that in Ariccia, equally unappreciated, noticed or cared for but clearly there. On the surface of the bright-green chemical slime squat frogs and turtles. There are comatose catfish in the watercress below, which the local boys catch as easily as from a tank of pets. Dragonflies dart above them. In the sky are crop-sprayers and herons; an owl flutters over the metal barn.

On the other side of the road there is a granite-grey monument, a ring of prisoners in stone, a man with hands and a heavy weight behind his neck, a woman with a curved and crippled child whose head is not quite where a head should be. It is dedicated to victims of terrorism and cowers appropriately behind a garden hedge of bamboo, crowded by beer bottles, condoms and red-and-yellow vouchers for shoes.The Via Appia encourages long looks forward and back while distracting sideways or downwards glances. Behind is Rome. Ahead is Campania. That is all it needs to say. The man who built it was called Appius Claudius Caecus, one of the pioneering aristocrats who empowered Rome by giving power to its people, the first Roman with a firm place where myth without history merges into history with myths. He is a genuine founder and father of the city, the earliest individual of whom some sort of picture can plausibly be made: he promoted sons of freed slaves to the Senate and made the demigod Hercules the public hero of this Spartacus Road. In his later years he lost his sight. Today his most solid legacy still straddles the ancient waters here, rising barely perceptibly and barrelling on—past signs for mozzarella, palm trees and spruce, murdered innocents and size-three sandals, as though none of these newcomers were there, or would be there for long.

Statius passed through Foro Appio on his trips between Naples and Rome without, as far as anyone knows, writing a word here. Perhaps there was no one to pay him or he was always in too much of a hurry. The conceit of his Silvae, as he called them, his ‘little bits of wood’, his ‘uncultivated forest’, was that they were rapid sketches, first drafts, and did not require an epic stay. The reality, as so often, was of longer, harder work.

Prospetto del Lastricato e de’ margini dell’ antica via Appia, delineato così come si vede verso Roma poco più in quà della città d’Albano.

The subjects here could have tempted him. The clearing of muddy rivers was a favourite theme. He liked to write about the latest styles in villas and the means of making swimming pools. But he preferred imperial properties (a safer study for praise than any other) and a river not like the dirty Cavata here but the one closer to Capua itself, the Volturnus, whose very cleanliness he could credit to Domitian. The greatest road-building scheme of his emperor, ‘He who puts Peace back in place and inspects Heaven’s street-lights’, is also further south, the Via Domitiana.

Foro Appio is better known for that earlier poet who lived closer to Spartacus’ shadow, Horace, pioneer in precise description as in so much else, who set here the first of his classic ‘why are we in this flea-pit anyway?’ passages—a later theme of many a grumbling Grand Tourist. Horace’s fifth satire, the ‘Journey to Brundisium’, is the world’s first piece of recognisably modern travel-writing, packed with dirt and discomfort, asides on food and sex, all against a background of big events to which he alludes without much confronting them. William Cowper is one of many English poets who have enjoyed translating it.

‘Egressum magna me accepit Aricia Roma’, Horace begins, escaping from a Rome still terrorised by the murder of Julius Caesar with an almost audible Latin shout of ‘I’m out of here: egressum’. Only a few years before, he had been on the wrong side of a civil war, fighting for Caesar’s killers. In what was probably his first poem, one of the two in which Spartacus appears, he deplored the horrific civil disasters that had befallen the whole idea of Rome. He had even suggested a mass exodus of good men to the mythic ‘Islands of the Blessed’, a paradise of nostalgia ruled by gods older than Jupiter, the volcanic Atlantic rocks of Tenerife and Lanzarote today.

By the time of his journey to Brundisium he has found the right side, the side of Caesar’s adopted son. He is more relaxed about the future. He is adapting himself to the new official doctrine of progress—a fresh start for history. Ariccia ‘receives’ him in its ‘modest inn’ as he begins this much more agreeable poetic enterprise, sketching postcard pictures of places and people, irritations and ejaculations, bad bread and better wine.

The poet and his diplomatic companions take their canal barge towards Capua from Foro Appio. The immediate destination is the town of Anxur, perched ahead on its widely shining rocks: ‘impositum saxis late candentibus Anxur’ were Horace’s few sharp words, ‘perhaps the first time in the history of European poetry that so faithful and suggestive a picture was given’, the Oxford maestro professor, Eduard Fraenkel, wrote in one of my few well-used student textbooks. The whole trip of eyes-wide wonder would have been fine if the passengers and boatmen had not got sourly drunk, if the frogs and mosquitoes had allowed the poet some sleep and if the horse had actually moved the boat. In Horace’s day the town was crammed with cheating innkeepers and sailors, ‘differtum nautis, cauponibus atque malignis’, a verdict which requires a certain confidence if one is to inscribe it in large Latin letters around the walls of a chic designer bedroom. The owner of the single hotel in the town today has taken the risk. A celebrity Roman is better for a ‘boutique destination’ than no celebrity at all.

This is my first time in this place where Horace set his scene of pioneer satire in around 38 BC, even though its familiarity from words and pictures makes that hard to believe. This has become a great egressum for me too. When I was a student in the 1970s, distracted into journalism, terrified of Fraenkel and awed by the massive quantity of classical literature, I read the Roman poets without ever travelling to where they lived and wrote. That was somehow what we were encouraged to do: to stick to the text and to the texts behind the texts; to note that Statius wrote an affecting and affectionate poem about his father, just as Horace had; to know that when Statius was cleaning rivers he was writing with Greek models in his mind; to note, with appropriate examples, how Statius wrote as a luxury-lover and Horace as an apostle of simplicity. No one needed to visit Naples or Rome to do any of that.

Later, as a newspaper journalist, I travelled without reading or, at least, without reading anything much in Latin or Greek. The decent ‘classicist’, when I could call myself such a thing, concentrated on the elaborately interlocking words on his page. The reporter looks primarily for what no one has yet written at all. Between these two extremes of seriousness was a space I had never much visited, certainly not visited enough, a past in part impossibly alien but recognisable in flashes, a space now to make pictures out of words and faces out of diagrams and fragments.

Horace and Spartacus both passed by here, some forty years apart. The poet, whose father had been a slave, was on a sensitive peace mission on behalf of the man who would soon become the first Roman emperor. The Thracian slave, whose father is wholly unknown, a nomad or a man from the Maedi tribe depending on how a particular piece of Greek is understood, was on his way to gladiator school in Capua from the auction blocks of the Roman Republic.

The superficial symmetry of a thought like that appeals to the reporter more than the scholar. How does the scholar know that Horace was not imagining his stop in Foro Appio when he wrote his satire, or copying it almost completely from a literary model now lost? How does he know that Spartacus’ slave-wagon took the shortest and best road from Rome to Capua? He does not. But there are clues, in words as well as stones, more survivors from this age and place than from many that are nearer and closer. There is good material for imagination here. For all the proper historical scepticism in its proper place, some certainties can be sought and celebrated too.

Tourists from London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries loved to read Horace, who was modest, witty, bold, almost British. They were not so keen on Statius, who was toady, terrified, too glossy, dangerously continental. Readers of ancient poetry then had, and still have, different perspectives, some based on places and others on time. The young have sometimes the better facility in reading the language, the greater naivety of imagination; the older have the better experience of what the writers were writing about. The best travellers have always looked to understand as much as they could from different ages in the past and their own different ages, a bit of linguistic argument here, a bit of imagination and compression there. This is a small experiment in doing the same, with the expectation that neither the scholar nor the reporter in me will be fully satisfied but with the feeling that both those masters have been served already quite enough.

There is the lure of the gladiator on this trip too, not just the ghost of Spartacus but all the men and women like him who made the spectaculars of Rome. Like the best newspaper stories, the gladiator is always a ‘story’. Like every ‘good story’ in a newspaper it is good in both what is there and what is not there, what is known of it and what is not known. The idea of the gladiator has been squeezed into so many clichés over the centuries, rung in, wrung out, alien to modern experiences like so much of the ancient world, but somehow, once approached, perversely close.

Curiosity about dying in its most visible forms is curiously addictive. Most of us face death before we are ready to face it. A fatal disease is a gladiatorial experience of a kind, a final appointment with a certain end at a near but not quite specified time. Cancer patients learn of bodily organs that they never knew they had, body parts that will kill them none the less. We imagine those deadly pieces of ourselves. We sometimes call them names. When I had a cancer, I called it Nero.

At Foro Appio today the sludge beneath the bridge over the Cavata flows on. A white nutria rat climbs out beside a giant Australian eucalyptus, flicking the slime from its back. The fields on the banks are full of potatoes and artichokes and kiwi fruit. Below all these imports from around the world are relics that once bore the weight of thousands of Romans, tiles and amphorae, pots and plates, baked earth with sparks of shining silica, double panhandles in the shape of crouching dogs: hardcore for the first Via Appia, fresh erosions reaching daily from the river mud like limbs of the newly drowned.