On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey through Ancient Italy. Peter Stothard
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.
Piazza della Vittoria, Formia
Seaside Formia, a few