Читать книгу On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey through Ancient Italy - Peter Stothard - Страница 9

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.

The second engagement was in the shabbier classics classrooms, with a smaller scholastic band. Spartacus was then a reduced figure in the massive sweep of Roman history, a rebel nuisance in others’ careers. The third time was just before I became a student at Oxford—through the enthusiasm of an eccentric Italian milk-salesman, pursuing the ghosts of classical heroes on the shores of Lake Como. These Como months were the high point of my life as a Latinist. For years texts had poured into my seventeen-year-old brain and stayed there, a help not just in passing exams but in promoting a peculiar innocence that I might be with Rome’s writers and fighters myself, a witness to what I was reading. Like many gifts, I barely knew I had it till it was gone. Neither the naivety nor the receptive memory for Roman detail survived much beyond my eighteenth birthday.

The last and least expected sight of Spartacus was thirty years of journalism later, when I had become a newspaper editor, suffering occasional but peculiarly vicious pain, then suddenly discovering that I was as good as dead from a cancer, then looking to see if somehow that sentence might not be true. In those days many characters from my past reappeared in different lights, the fictional and historical as well as the personal. There are moments of horror when a mind does not choose its subject, when the subject chooses its mind. Spartacus has not just a faded childhood claim on this trip but a vivid adult one.

Back at home there are hundreds of books that might be useful guides for the coming weeks. With me here beside the gift shop at the Roman Forum there are just a few. Most are soft-backed classroom texts with the name P. M. Stothard and an Essex address in tumbling Quink-blue italics on the inside cover. In 1964, the year of Harold Wilson’s first Labour government, Spartacus, the bit-part player of Roman history, was not only the easiest ancient to imagine but also, in our patch of brick-box houses, the closest thing to a socialist. A green-backed Brentwood School edition of Parallel Lives by the Greek biographer Plutarch is my reminder now of that time—with greasy-thumbed pages in the chapter where the great slave-leader rose and fell.

Other books in the road-bag date from the early 1970s, the handwriting of their ownership inscriptions deliberately disjointed in an attempt to throw off childhood. One of these, a book of Latin letters, is still smeared with the wine and butter of the milkman who sold his wares in the Italian hotel where I worked for a while. Others seem little read at all. I appeared to have stopped studying the classics at the very moment I was supposed to be studying them the most. At Oxford there was so much else—bad theatre and worse newspapers. Spartacus was one of many ancients who could no longer compete. Next to some Livy, here now with a Trinity Oxford dateline and wholly unsullied by any human hand, there is the poet known as Statius, a favourite of one of my schoolmasters, derided then in most textbooks as a ‘lackey’ and lickspittle to tyrants. Each of his pages, purchased dearly when money was short, came from my old undergraduate boxes fresh, stiff and never-been-read.

Now Statius is one of the writers who has set me on this present road. He was not a contemporary of Spartacus. He never wrote directly about him. He is not always easy to read at all. But, from a new beginning in the cancer days of about a decade ago, the strange metallic verse of Statius has done much to get me to this sewer-perfumed corner of the Forum with a plan to report on 2,000 miles of travel. Statius of Naples was a weirdly wonderful poet, a life-giver to dead things, a flatterer and inflater of the powerful, a prophet of the end of the world, a man who might lead us somehow to the end of this journey too.

But he has to share his place. There is also a brown file of extracts from Sallust, an Italian politician, historian and extortionist, probably the first to write about Spartacus in any systematic way. There are pages by Florus, a less remembered popularising hack from Africa; and some pieces by Frontinus, a military scourge of the Welsh and the literary master of his Emperor’s waterworks; photocopies too from Frontinus’ best-known protégé, the hero of the Como milk-salesman, the Pliny who is doomed always to be called ‘the Younger’. Then there are Greeks, in variously Roman garb with contrastingly Greek ambitions.

There are pictures by artists who tried to preserve their views of ancient Rome, by the eighteenth-century Venetian master Piranesi more than any other. There are disconnected words from many centuries in many styles, from Claudian, the forgotten Egyptian who hailed Spartacus as a torturer and child murderer, to Catullus of Verona, the ever popular poet who wrote on love as well as hate. Claudian wrote lengthily on warlords and briefly, bizarrely and more readably on the water inside crystal balls. Catullus wrote long poems on eastern cults and short ones on sodomy. In Symmachus’ time, as now, these and others, big and small, are the men whose minds we can summon to bring Spartacus to life.

Old books will not tell us everything. They will not even tell precisely either where or how Symmachus lost his gladiators. They do contain all sorts of other strange details—about a games promoter in the age of Nero, fifth Emperor of Rome. He too found one of his German fighters dead by his own hand before the games began, this time on the seat of the school latrine, dead from a sponge-on-a-stick that he had stuck down his throat. ‘What a brave man, well worth his chosen fate,’ remarked the philosopher who recorded the story, ‘and how boldly he would have used a sword.’

There was another suicidal gladiator from around the same time, one being drawn by cart for the morning spectacular, one who pretended to be asleep, who let his head fall low towards one of the wheels and pushed it through the spokes. Do we not see how ‘even the lowest of slaves, when pain is the spur, may rise to the moment?’ The teller of this story concludes that ‘he is a truly great man who not only orders his own death but also finds the death by which to die’.

Ways of dying were a Roman obsession which a traveller on this Spartacus Road struggles to understand but he cannot understand Rome without confronting them. Ways of dying are some of many aspects of ancient life that are a mystery to those who study only when young. My own fiercest confrontations—with Roman rituals, beliefs and much else besides—all came in that year a decade ago when I was forced away from my newspaper office, aged forty-nine, experiencing the twin peculiarities of a killing cancer and its then barely plausible cures.

Memories from that time have since then come and gone. While most have vanished and others have long ago faded, a few seem redefined now by distance, like the foundations of a destroyed house when seen from the air above a field. Pain, it seems, produces permanent pictures which pleasure cannot. Chemotherapy pulls different images from parts of life that the patient has long forgotten, from places he can scarcely remember and books he thought he had never opened. My mind in the days of cancer-cure would swing back and forward, forward and back, day after day, a slow-mo version of what happens fast when a man is about to hang, or lose his head or see a sword slit his stomach. How the Romans died became then a bigger part of their story for me than how they lived. The virtue of a ‘good death’, or so the Romans thought, gave greatness to any man. That thought had meant nothing in the classroom or the chemistry lab.

Was Spartacus a great man? Many have argued so. Karl Marx considered him one of his favourite heroes of all time. Garibaldi made him his model for uniting and freeing Italy. For Voltaire the Spartacus war was the only ‘just war’ in all history. Kirk Douglas and other film-makers and novelists agreed, attributing to him their own passions and ideas, seeing seeds of the future that may or may not have been there, creating myths and legends on an epic scale.

Others have either gently or violently disagreed. For Symmachus and his friends in the former capital of an empire, Spartacus was still an expletive. The only benefit in the Saxons strangling themselves was they did not do that much more dangerous thing, escape. Gladiators were there to be symbols and mirrors, symbols and mirrors of Rome itself, stage-stars, even sometimes celebrities, stage-extras if they could do nothing else. In the southern Italian city of Capua, in 73 BC, a group of them got out into the real world.