Читать книгу On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey through Ancient Italy - Peter Stothard - Страница 14

Seaside Formia, a few miles past gleaming Anxur on the Appian Way, was known 2,000 years ago as a wine-maker (only the most expensive wines) and as the home of Mamurra, an exceptional sexual and financial predator even by the standards of Julius Caesar’s engineering staff. Today fine wines are still grown from the pale sparkling sands, and drunk here over long lunchtimes like today’s when nothing stirs bar yellow-legged gulls, bees the size of meat-balls and a single harassed priest, sweating under a black cowl, muttering, shading his face in response to a request for directions. Mamurra? Yes, that bastard knew how to live. His house was still standing when the Germans came in 1943 and smashed it, marble by marble, to the ground.

The churchman waits. We talk. He wants to show me the town’s tiny museum. When will it open? Maybe 4.00 p.m., maybe 5.00 p.m. He cannot wait. He suggests we share some Falernian later, the only original Roman grape in the world, he says. Avoid any wine from Sorrento, he warns, ‘noble vinegar’ an emperor once called it, a ‘very wise emperor’.

At 5.30 p.m., when any of Italy’s vintages would be much more welcome than its antiquities, the museum door opens and then immediately closes, as though evening sun and evening tourists are equally unwelcome. Inside stand ill-lit statues of heavy Roman men, wary hosts with thick hands and hard lips, slender shadowed women with swinging hips and hands high in ritual greeting. Theirs is the only welcome. There is no sound at all. It is not so hard to imagine Julius Caesar’s road-man here, the local hero Mamurra who brought his billions home from Britain, Spain and Gaul (he had a fancy Caelian Hill house too), without doing much more for the cash than building a few bridges and, so the poet Catullus tells us, buggering his boss from time to time.

Mamurra, I am thinking, would have been paunchy, puffy-eyed, imperious, snapping his fingers, striking blows and poses alike. Here he is: a sodomite Romulus ‘superbus et superfluens … striding from bed to bed … swallower of anything he can see’. Sex with anything, sex with everything: that is the state your reputation reaches if you offend a poet like Catullus.

It is not so very hard to imagine others who lived here too when Spartacus passed by on his journey to Capua from Rome. It was the fashion then to carve men and women as they were, with warts and worse-than-warts and all. Families chose to remember their dead as they had lived, with chickennecks, bat-ears, hack-saw teeth, sandpaper complexions. Local sculptors may have exaggerated some of the grotesqueries: if the art market seemed to favour thick lips and boss eyes, there will be some lips more thickened and some eyes more bossed. But a visible truth remains.

Curators claim to date quite precisely some of the centre-parted hairstyles here. Some of the facial expressions in the busts, while they defy anyone’s precise dating, are recognisably those of the southern Italian rich of the Republican age, those like Mamurra, soft-faced men who did well out of the wars. Others look angrier, suggesting somewhat humbler citizens, a junior religious official like my new friend or a small farmer, faces of a fragile provincial community, not quite worthy of a life-sized statue. Even after so many centuries a man with fat eyes and hair over his ears seems still ablaze and outraged—at some slight or scandal perhaps, a murder, an uppity slave, a lost contract, or merely that he himself is so undeniably dead.

There is a certain sense of parsimony in the faces of the buyers preserved here in stone. This is not a museum of great art but a place to meet the ordinary, the men and women who were spectators of Spartacus and his kind. As well as images of themselves, they collected lamps and ornaments decorated with gladiator motifs. Thousands survive of these pottery figures—some in silver and bronze—with their spears, nets, emblazoned helmets and blank faces. A carved or moulded head of any individual? Only the most ambitious imagination could find such a thing in Formia or anywhere else. What did the soon-to-be famous gladiator look like in his Capua school? There was no demand at all for statues of rebel slaves.

A window briefly opens, wafting a dust-cloud of light along the dark marble lines. The statues here with fewer flaws, or no flaws at all, are from a later time, the imperial age when Greek ideals of beauty were preferred, when the youthful body became more important than the characterful face. Local sculptors had then to carve what the conquerors could not bring back from Greece itself. There were copies made of ancient masterpieces and gradual adaptations to meet the needs of this different market—with a sharply varying eye on quality and only at prices that careful buyers were prepared to pay.

In every phase of fashion most of the artists of Rome originated far away from Rome. Sculptors from other places carved the Romans’ statues just as they wrote the Romans’ poems. They produced what was wanted. It was to become firmly fixed in the city’s founding mythology that only other peoples breathed life into bronze and stone. Roman men and women had altogether different duties.

The most famous image of Spartacus before the age of the movies, the one most commonly seen on books and postcards, was inspired by this later classical style. It came from the chisel of a nineteenth-century French sculptor, six foot six inches of the whitest Carrara marble, a hero made to be seen not in death but at the bright moment of his first freedom. This naked Greek, naked in his best Greek pose, is leaning back in anticipation of his glories to come, with his hands still crossed in the shape of the straitjacket of chains he has cast away.

Its creator, Denis Foyatier, was a fortunate man in finding his own small place on the Spartacus Road. He completed his statue just at the right time, in 1830, when a more liberal imperial regime was taking over in France. His seriously thoughtful freed slave was just the sort of soft white symbol required. Foyatier had conceived his glowing contribution to garden furnishings, and even carved much of the rock, long before Louis-Philippe’s coup. But the romance of the King’s July Monarchy made the work an instant masterpiece, neither the first nor the last time at which Spartacus has swayed to the demands of changing times.

My clerical friend returns filled with wine, wakefulness and local pride that the museum ever opened and that his visitor is still here. Spartacus? His black eyes wrinkle like drying olives. He frowns knowingly before a broken limb that could be a Hercules or a sea-monster. He measures its circumference as though some deep secret lay in the answer. He then says suddenly that, if we are thinking of the hours before the break-out from Capua, Foyatier’s nakedness may be just about right, though not, he whispers with distaste, the whiteness nor the cleanliness nor even the uprightness of his statue.

This priest knows about Spartacus: ‘the killer would have smelt like a rat’. His torso would have been striped like the back of a game bird and ticked and crossed like a stone column of tax accounts. The cells that he has seen under the local amphitheatres do not show many spaces where a tall man could stand. The Frenchman’s choice of physique was ‘probably right’. Spartacus was a big man, a slave from the east, selected for strength, schooled in violence and probably not much more. He would have been a closely confined prisoner both in Capua and before, precisely because of his physical power, a more knotted, muscled, scar-corrugated power than Foyatier shows. He was one of those men who thrive and become a hard man among prison hard men.

‘Immense strength’ was an accolade not given lightly in the ancient world. ‘Muscle’ was important for an owner of men: slavery was the energy industry of its time. In prison life the same muscle meant the power to press the blood out of an adversary’s arm or neck; it meant the power to enforce will and to will the force of others. The French sculptor of the Romantic age captured too the sense of self-discipline, the sort that other strong men recognise as necessary sometimes even though they lack it themselves, the ability to focus strength and be one of those men who thrive in leadership, prisms able to direct the scattered beams of others into a single hot line.

Romantic admirers of Spartacus inspired Foyatier to make him more like an Athenian Greek than a Thracian one, two types which were very different in ancient eyes. Athenians were philosophers and artists, with a potential Socrates or stupendous vase-painter at their every street corner. Spartacus came from northern Greek tribes in Thrace, people whom the Romans, echoing local neighbours as well as their own experience, recognised as the most savage in the world.

A good gladiator for a games promoter had to be a ‘barbarian’s barbarian’, a title something like our modern respect for the ‘professional’s professional’, the ‘criminal’s criminal’. He could be and would be the object of fascinated observation—but only if he were firmly in his place. If Spartacus had been loose tonight in this room full of thugs and molls in Formia, even the most military Roman would have been hiding behind the pillars, calling out the guard. My man in Catholic black has no doubts about that. Spartacus was a trained assassin, master of the stabbing sword, the push to the throat, the rip of the face. If he had not been a slave, an object of sympathy now, we could call him a professional killer, with the certain respect we allow for that group too.

Spartacus was one of many. He was never marked out by the Romans for anything very special. Capuan gladiator shows in 73 BC were mere scraps in dustbowls when compared to the spectaculars that were commoner later and the more remembered ever since. There might already have been ‘rare wild beasts’ on the play-bill that Spartacus would miss by his escape. There might not. Many in the audience would hardly have expected or seen much difference between Spartacus and a beast.

There was also a ‘sophisticated set’ in the city of Capua, some of whom watched the gladiators in training and looked forward to the chance of being there for the kill, for the moment when a dying man’s eyes became a dead man’s. This was not mere sadism but a kind of therapy. The Romans cared deeply how they died, how they might look to others when they looked out themselves for the last time. But could anyone ever properly imagine himself when dying turned to death? It was very hard. The more one thought about it the harder it became. To watch others die was a training for the imagination, important training because a Roman man’s whole life depended on others seeing his death well.

It is becoming darker now in the Formia museum. The ropes are gradually falling in front of the galleries so that only one of these ancient party rooms is now open, the place of the minor tradesmen, the lesser men and women of the old town of Mamurra, the types with the most to lose in a slave revolt, the almost prosperous, the always vulnerable. Time is nearly up. The curators of these antiquities, chatting softly beside their predatory sea-snake, cluck-cluck as though the very chastity of their marble Roman matrons might be at risk before the English intruder. It is as well he has a priest to keep an eye on him.

We are guessing further and faster now—whether Spartacus had the square face and red hair of the Celtic upper class in Thrace or the longer facial features of the lesser locals, lupine and slow. Did that matter? However smoothly his image has emerged in the minds of a modern priest, sympathetic ancient Greeks and a mildly liberal Frenchman of the 1820s, Spartacus himself would have been the most dangerous of animals in this room beside the Appian Way.

The gladiator had once had, and maybe in 73 BC possessed still—his Dionysiac priestess wife who had seen snakes twisted around his head, a sure sign of something mysterious to any Roman eyes who cared to see such things. Spartacus carried all manner of alien marks from the east. Whether these were marks of very good or very ill fortune, even the best Greek texts are unclear. It depended on who was copying them down.

The ropes close the last room. Outside in the street, there is a choice of tours to two local tombs. The first, in a bright-green taxi, is to that of Munatius Plancus, a military adventurer who backed almost every side in the Republican civil wars but won his immortality in a drinking poem by Horace. The second, in a minibus, is to that attributed to one of many politicians betrayed by Plancus, Marcus Tullius Cicero, a man who won his enduring reputation from literary works of his own.

Cicero had the boldness once to compare his enemy Mark Antony to Spartacus, a fatal enmity as it proved. But neither Cicero’s tomb nor that of Plancus is a necessary diversion on this road. There is instead a golden choice of wine in the bars here, both for the off-duty churchman and for his dinner companion who, following the reporter’s discipline he long ago set for himself, has first to write down these notes on the day.