On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey through Ancient Italy. Peter Stothard
already as doomed in AD 393 as its combatants had mostly been. The public fight-to-the-death was by then a peculiar old custom, ready to begin its journey into the history books of a different age, a ‘dark age’ to a classical scholar, an age of light to a lover of the gospels.
Modern historians know Symmachus’ personal future after his year of the dead Saxons—that he would live for about another decade, still indulging his guilty morbum fabricatoris, his passion for building houses; that he would still be importing crocodiles, leopards, men and bears, for one last pagan extravaganza in 401, before one last and fatal ambassadorial trip, to a besieged and snowbound Milan, in 402. What Symmachus could claim to know was only his own and his city’s past.
This was a Rome which had struggled from the muddy banks of the Tiber river at a time when Greeks already had their Olympic Games. There were thick-packed oak forests on the Caelian when Greek city statesmen were inventing modern politics. Rome’s leaders, however, had prospered quickly, creating their own young state by sharing a little power with their people, first conquering their near neighbours, Latins, Sabines and Samnites, and soon afterwards their far neighbours, dark Sicilians and Italian Greeks. Romans had next defeated their Mediterranean rivals, Hannibal’s Carthage and Greece itself, then the Syrians (a name for every servile eastern type) and finally, after nine hundred years, almost the whole of the known world.
Roman rulers had built their own extraordinary structures of stone, not just killing grounds and temples but stages for history and horror stories, tragedy and laughter. Even now, one of the prides of the capital was the theatre of Pompey the Great, soaring tiers of red and grey arcades, stage-sets with secret doors into painted forests, seats for 10,000 living spectators and hundreds of the bronze and marble dead. So how come that Rome was now beset by Goths and by other human garbage it had imported once to shift its scenery, clean its water closets and do all its most menial tasks?
This was a common question then. It is always a common question for civilisations of a certain age. Some spectators looked up at Pompey’s theatre, saw the statues of bisexuals, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, sex pets, sex pests, mothers of thirty children, mothers of elephant men, and wondered. Had these been their ancestors? Had Roman lives been less pious and pure than their teachers told? Had foreign decadence and magic been Roman from the beginning? Much old Roman practice was now seen by Christians as evil mysticism, unacceptable adultery, unnatural crudity, the kind of behaviour that got senators killed by the state. Was there justification for such a view?
When did the rot really set in? Some remembered Pompey’s war with Caesar, one of those many civil wars between ambitious warlords that ended the Roman Republic. Afterwards had come other civil wars and the Empire—with just one warlord who ruled for life—until that system too had broken into West and East under its own colossal weight. There were now Roman citizens so remote that they had never known a Roman, neither past nor present. Their masters might just as well have been a mythical hero as a modern thug, a Theodosius or an Aeneas, a Caesar or an Agamemnon, mere names spread indiscriminately through a space as vast as time.
On this dirty Roman sidestreet south of the Colosseum, with 1,900-year-old prison cells down below and a shopfront of books and statues behind, there is a wide range of spurs to the modern imagination of what went right and wrong. There are stone slabs here, 2,500 years old, antiquities in Symmachus’ time and kept to mourn the best of the ancient past; there are others, designed by Mussolini’s Fascists some seventy years ago, to keep alive that same past. Often an ancient mourning stone has been used for a second time or a third. It has become a modern monument, losing most of its original force but maintaining a little momentum still; most monuments here keep something of their mourning origins.
It is not so hard, in the grey start of a city day, to imagine these men of ancient Rome who saw their own past so clearly. There is no need ourselves to mourn their lost grandeur as Symmachus did. We are more likely to mourn those desperate Saxons, driven to suicide by an impending fate in an arena so repugnant to us now. But we can imagine old Symmachus mourning without sharing his anxieties. He has left enough monuments in stones and words to let us do that.
He seems a modern politician in many ways, someone we can identify, for better or worse, with our own. He was practical. He preached tolerance. He cited Socrates more enthusiastically than he attempted to understand him. He wheeled and dealed. He played his bad hands of cards as best he could. He took his wife away to the seaside when times were too hard. He talked about more wars than he fought, seeing action only in a skirmish against the Germans, an unusually one-sided show that had been staged for visiting dignitaries almost as in an arena. He was pleased that there was no rape of sleeping tribeswomen on that occasion—not while he, the man of sensibility, was watching the show. He wrote carefully about how pleased he was.
He was conscious of his image. He was famed during his short time as city prefect for rejecting the new foreign extravagance of a silver-panelled carriage paid for by the state. Like a British prime minister pointedly refusing a private jet, he chose the drabbest and most traditional means for his transport, running into trouble only when the Emperor wanted back the money for the silver panels. He told his story in letters, always keeping a copy so that he might have history’s last word. If we can imagine Symmachus—not a well-known figure and from a time that most of us do not know well—we can picture other builders and writers, and through them those who did not build or write but who, like the Saxons, still inspire our feelings. We can see both the terrorisers from ancient Rome and those who were terrorised and how sometimes, very often, they were the same people.
Spartacus and his armies had been a special part of that terror. Civil wars were always catastrophic. But when a slave army was rampaging through Italy, no one could trust the very men or women on whom they depended for everything, the foreigners whom they had brought into their houses and fields and who might suddenly, despite every threat to their own lives, slaughter the masters in their beds.
A slave war placed doubts over so much. Pessimism about decline was a necessary part of Symmachus’ old Roman way of seeing the world. It was one of his and his kind’s great legacies to later minds. Pessimism had been at the root of Rome even in the good times. There had always been an earlier and better golden age, even when this had been a city of success, when barbarians were routinely routed in battle rather than regularly victorious. There was much now to be properly and justifiably pessimistic about. Where had it started? That was the common and weary question, spat out from angry mouths, a wholly understandable reason, in ad 393, to abuse a pile of Saxons ‘worse than Spartacus’.
The tour-guides are arriving now with their Evianpowered flocks, tiny children from China, towering women from the Caribbean, Americans, Africans. Coffee prices are advancing with the clock. Two linen-clad English tourists, with a BlackBerry and an 1890 Baedeker and little enthusiasm for using either, ask the way to the ‘Ludus Magnus, the school where the gladiators were trained’. The husband, in beige from brow to shoelace, begins the question and his wife, grey from head to sock, completes it, making ‘school’ sound ‘preparatory’ and ‘trained’ as though it means the same as ‘taught their manners’. The Ludus that they are looking for is a small semi-excavated arena with a surround of prisoner pens, standing now a dirty yard of pavement from where they ask their question. In one sense this was both a ‘prep school’ and a ‘finishing school’; doubtless there were bad pupils who were ‘worse than Spartacus’ and better ones who were not.
When Symmachus used those words he was himself being a bit of an old buffer, a fish-out-of-water and proud of it, boldly but self-consciously conservative, loose-lipped in the aristocratic tradition, like Prince Philip speaking of the ‘slittyeyed’ or George V saying ‘Bugger Bognor.’ It was a spit-away, throw-away line. But let us imagine Symmachus without company outside his house that morning as he first formed the syllables in his mind.
How did others see Spartacus in the crumbling years of the Western Empire? Traditional Romans had tried to forget him—and had mostly succeeded. Christians might have been sympathetic in their own rebel days but to the new masters of the world a rebel was the worst of creatures. Symmachus’ wayward protégé