Читать книгу On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey through Ancient Italy - Peter Stothard - Страница 17

‘Spartacus went that way,’ says the older man at the wax-papered card-table, pointing from the ticket-kiosk into town, away from the ancient amphitheatre towards the unlit neon signs for church-approved lingerie, twenty-four-hour diesel and a play-site. He gesticulates in a timeless animation, as though the famed escape from Capua has only just occurred—and as if the police and a sole reporter had only just arrived on the scene, late (what could one expect?) but not too late.

His younger colleague disagrees, waving a thin finger in the opposite direction, back through the arches of the ruined arena and up to the hill he calls Tifata. From the way that he speaks, mechanically with a passionless level tone, it seems that he always disagrees; and that these two men, whether their subject is the latest game in town or the oldest one, will always see their hands a different way.

From the rest of the card-players in Scuba Club caps and soft workmen’s shirts, flipping aces beside the ticket-booth, there is no response at all to the question that has been asked by two studious Koreans, one man, one woman, the man with a large logo for his national airline on his shiny black plastic briefcase, the woman with a paper bag full of papers in her hands. How had some seventy gladiators, led by Spartacus and two others, broken away from the training school of Lentulus Batiatus?

Today this is a place of discount stores and graffiti. It has been repopulated many times since it was abandoned in the early Middle Ages. But it still feels like a temporary camp, lightly ruled by legitimate authorities, heavily controlled by the Camorra and other criminal gangs. The name of Spartacus is most commonly used—and with no affection at all—as police code for a seven-year investigation into a Capuan gang of contract killers, protection racketeers and buriers of illegal toxic waste. In 73 BC this was the second city of the superpower of the West. It takes some energetic imagination to begin the task of understanding that—more energy than the sun allows.

How had the escape happened? Laxity? Treachery? Leadership? Probably a bit of all three: tired guards, tipseeking food-sellers, high fences with gaps of decay, not so different from the view this afternoon. The surviving bits of exposed wall from the first century BC, like all Roman walls, look strong enough to hold an army of gladiators. Little economy was used in this construction. The sections beside the card-players are thick enough to have held men and beasts and a naval lake. But there will always be human error.

The couple from Seoul, each with the same bifocal spectacles, are dissatisfied with their guides and guidebooks. The man has short brown hair, straight cut across his forehead, and a face more metallic bronze than brown. He is a doctor. While touring the site I have heard him talking about bone disease and broken toes as though he had asked to see some fallen arches and been surprised to see so much marble. This is not the kind of study he likes; it lacks certainty, even plausibility; and, to judge from his dark-eyed yawns, it lacks interest too. The woman has high cheeks and lighter hair cut close to her scalp. She is a teacher. She is the one who admits to the reasons they are here, her plans for illustrated lessons in ‘great sites of history’ for her students back home. Her notebook questions are as neat as the inscription on a gravestone.

Surely the gladiators would have been chained at night, locked down in the tiny cells that she could see underneath the massive circular arena? Were they allowed to sleep with their weapons? She thought not. The moment that a trained killer was given his sword, just before he set foot on the sand, would have been the most dangerous of all. A gladiator might wake at night, fighting from his sleep, screaming from his dreams. But in his dormitory cell he would have nothing with which to end a real life—either a guard’s or his own.

So how had it all begun? There was no public inquiry at the time of the escape. There were private inquiries down in the underground pits, place of the rack and the whip. But no notes survive of those. All the big questions would be asked later. Among the Vespas and electric wheelchairs, parked above the place where it all is said to have happened, those questions are still occasionally asked—and unreliably answered.

The break-out began with kitchen knives and skewers. There was a plan, a betrayal, a bit of luck and, before the guards could regroup to stop the insurrection, it was too late. Some two hundred gladiators had planned to take part. About seventy succeeded in absconding beyond the gates. Outside in the narrow streets the escapers found a wagon of the very same theatrical weapons that they had been trained to use in the arena. With these they beat back the assault of the better-armed local militia. With new armour, stripped from the bodies of this Capuan Home Guard, they moved out towards the countryside. They had exchanged their butchers’ blades for soldiers’ swords in three rapid moves. Then they needed a decision about what was to happen next. What to do? Where to go? Who was in command?

At the first official consideration of these events, at first light next morning in the summer of 73 BC, it was merely the Capuan gladiator school which had the questions to answer. Like Symmachus’ show 466 years later, it had lost some of its stars. But the questions were hardly huge. The shows would go on, and could go on. Even when the full scale of the escape was clear, the problem for the games promoter would not seem as great as that confronting his sometime pupils. The missing men were mostly new arrivals from Germany and Gaul, prisoners traded for other prisoners, prisoners of tribes first captured far beyond the Danube, prisoners-of-war, knowing nothing of Capua, speaking a little Latin perhaps but happier in languages used hundreds of miles away. They would not get far. The incident could not have seemed a catastrophe—more a minor schedulers’ issue for those planning the next weeks’ entertainments.

If any of the missing men had been promised to the great games shows of the capital the predicament would have been more pressing. The promoters of Rome sometimes paid the Capuans in advance, watching their property grow fit and oiled like absentee racehorse owners until their time was ripe. If they had noticed Spartacus, they might object that he was no longer there. More probably they had not.

Lentulus Batiatus’ remaining fighters would just have to be spread more thinly through the running order and the order book. There was always a market for something a bit different; it was a matter of imaginative showmanship. Some men might have to fight twice, switching costumes and weapons, short shields for long, round for rectangular, scimitars for spears, anything to make the second half of the afternoon look different from the first. That was almost routine.

Some of the plotters left behind would have been doubly unlucky. The guards needed to put a plausible number to the rack and rod. Even if the school-owner might resent the separation of good fighting arms from their sockets, the waste of flesh which might never heal, he needed to explain himself to the public officials.

What did the escapers do next? The torturers would have asked that same question. What was the plan? Who was in charge? Where did the rats intend to go? However cruelly the questions were posed, Lentulus Batiatus is unlikely to have put much store by the answers. The Romans were neither credulous nor subtle appliers of pain. They believed in the power of fear and example. They did not believe that the tortured told the truth.

This ‘where next?’ question is the same one that the scholastic Koreans are asking of the Capuan gamblers now. In which direction did the killers go? Which direction does the Spartacus Road take? Most travellers to the Capua Vetere amphitheatre are easier for the locals to satisfy. Most are like those in Rome, Carlo’s customers, the ones who come with Kirk Douglas and Russell Crowe in their minds—or even a faint image of Louis-Philippe’s Foyatier from the Louvre. The books and postcards on sale in the ticket booth suggest a regular clientele keen to pay brief homage to film stars forced to kill each other for fat emperors.

The entry-ticket for the Capua stadium allows entry also to a grunting ‘Silenzio! Silenzio!’ son-et-lumiere in the fiftyyear-old Museo dei Gladiatori. A waxwork lion stands before a sturdy netman. The sand is scattered with simulations of blood and weaponry. After the scratchy pleas for silence come roars from beasts and crowd, the most decorous whimpers of death and a pervasive appeal for sympathy to all concerned. Only a few visitors see even this display, mostly while they make mobile-phone calls in the shade.

For the Korean couple, arguing softly now into their individual copies of the Guida della Città, the appeal of this fairground fodder seems particularly low. Would I like to join them, asks the woman, thin lipped as she moulds the words, sharply dressed in coral red, exuding a manic energy that these sands can hardly have felt since the games ended. Are we even sure that this is Spartacus’ school? Might all the guides be wrong? The husband, dampening down the fringe over his forehead, looks on with a cooler welcome. He is wondering perhaps whether an English addition to their day might allow them to concentrate on something else, gauze-eyed lizards, sub-tropical insects, insanitary housing, water closets ancient and modern, all subjects on which there is ample evidence all around.

Examination of the gladiators’ options is what his wife most wants. This is the only site here that looks like a school for the arena. This has to be the right place. So where were the escape routes? Where were the battles waged? She has already been to the sites of 218–216 BC where Hannibal fought. She is fresh from the killing fields of Cannae, contesting the precise numbers of Roman dead as though their bodies were still warm. She is single-minded, carefully carving the letters on to her pages, and not easily to be stopped.

The stones are hot. A scent of crushed mint rises from every footstep. The bushes bulge with tiny birds taking shelter from the sun. Shiny pigeons, brown moths and ragged butterflies are the only creatures brave enough to be visible. All that, if nothing else, is little different, we agree, from what it looked and sounded like 2,000 years before.

The amphitheatre is like a broken bowl. It is not Batiatus’ but five circles of walls built by the Emperors Augustus and Hadrian on the same site and pillaged for bricks by everyone who lived after the fall of Rome. Just two of its eighty arches are upright. The water tanks can no longer turn the sands into a lake. There are no more lifts to haul men, animals and mountain scenery from the underground store, only the holes where Mussolini’s men found bones of antelope, elephant and tiger. Even when this Colosseum was first opened for business (with or without a triumphant poem by a Spaniard or a Greek) its jagged evening shadows would have looked like a ruin. Inside it now, we can try, as far as we can, to mix present and past, see what slips away and what stays, find what we might know.

There is an age of time this afternoon. There is always an age of time among the card-players by the amphitheatre kiosk. Carlo in Rome had been anxious I might find the wrong place, the newer Capua of designer wine-bars, big business and Catholic churches, the other Capua in the river bend that was the safer refuge from the Saracens in the early Middle Ages. But this is absolutely the place he called home, the town which lost its glory well before its people, a place from which an ambitious guide, even an ambitious Spartacus guide, might reasonably flee. This is like a seaside resort where even the sea has fled. It is hard to count the passing of the hours at all.