On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey through Ancient Italy. Peter Stothard
and Rocky IV. Here too it was wise for spectators to watch the Emperor as closely as they watched the slave-dwarfs and duellistes. Were pregnant Lydians funny or not? Only one man at that time could safely say.
Statius was born around AD 45 near Capua in a Greek ghetto of Naples, one of the tiny parts of Italy where the pure Greek language survived. The Romans had mixed their Latin into most of the colonies that Athens, Corinth and Sparta had centuries before sent to Italy. Greek thought was deeply dyed into Rome from the earliest times, whatever Symmachus and his friends might have later tried to pretend. But a few neighbourhoods of the Italian south remained exclusively and resolutely Greek.
Poplios Papinios Statios, in the native version of his name, was a child poet star, son of a poet scholar who ran a Greek school for Roman grandees. Statius’ literacy and learning were not the classroom-acquired kind of his father’s pupils. The poetry of Homer and the philosophy of Plato were in his first language. Statius was married to a fellow performer’s widow, a woman who looked after her daughter and the literary interests of both her husbands. He was a professional’s professional who personified the spectacular idea in art.
His main rival, the Spaniard Martial, is the poet of this time who is the more often read today. Martial wrote short, sharp sex scenes as well as paeans to the great, some pithy abuse of his enemies, and his turgid match commentary to open the Colosseum. He gives a dutiful account in his De spectaculis of how the greatest beasts of the natural world must kneel and fall before the Emperor. But his treatment of spectator sport was happiest when he moaned that his mistress liked to be watched while they were making love: ‘a spectator pleases you more than a lover since joys unseen are no joys at all: et plus spectator quam te delectat adulter; Nec sunt grata tibi gaudia si qua latent’.
Statius preferred the longer style. The extra words gave him more opportunities and surfaces to shine, and more cover for his back. He was a writer who polished every possible superficiality in an age when it was dangerous to dig too deep. A few hours with Statius is like a mind-sharpening shot of chemical in the skull. His subjects shine out from sharply lit edges. His golden crown for poetry, given to him in Ariccia by his emperor, was his perfect reward. The smallest jewels, fragments of marble, mosaic, metal, flash as though on giant screens.
Reliable about what happened in the Colosseum? Not wholly. He would not have quite understood what we meant had we asked him that. The knotted dwarfs and semi-naked swordswomen are there in his poem on the Kalends of December show, and then they are gone. They may have existed ‘in the flesh’. They may not. Women did fight as gladiators. Laws were passed to stop them, then ignored and passed again. No one knows how often they fought.
Sexual exhibitionism, random couplings in the street, beatings as an alternative or preliminary to sex: all were part of the earliest Roman games, however much anxious Romans tried to deny it. When the licence became too political, too radical, too encouraging to the disorderly, it was curbed, sometimes stopped, but never wholly lost. How amusing were those pregnant Lydians? It was perilous to predict. Domitian was not the first politician to want both to recall the past and to control it.
In the theatre there were favoured subjects for history plays: the ‘rape of the Sabine women’ was always popular, a foundation myth that was itself set at an early Roman gladiator show. Favourites for mythological dramas were the stories of beautiful Andromeda tied to her rock and other tales of naked nymphs pursued by gods and monsters. When did the rot set in? With Greeks and Celts and other alien imports or was it there at the start? Symmachus’ historians and their successors have every opportunity to argue among themselves on this Spartacus Road. Library disciplines need not always apply.
Statius would have had his own answers while being careful to whom he gave them. He was the great performer and the great spectator, ever on the lookout for new ways of describing the present and the past, a new show or statue, a new road or swimming pool, a pet eunuch or pet parrot. His listeners loved him. He had the crooner’s sweet voice. He toured like a rock star, competed like a sports star and, in reward for his skills, was stared at like all stars are stared at. His appearances were sell-outs. As soon as he had fixed a date, the tickets were gone. He sold his poems as party pieces to the Emperor’s favourite actors. He never made as much money as he had expected. But he was a success in his career and in his art.
Later readers looking for grand Roman ideals have never much liked Statius. He was a ‘silver age’ artist, an imitator and flatterer. He wrote quickly like a journalist, and was proud of his speed as a journalist is. He sometimes took longer in writing than he pretended to take, again like a journalist. For Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante and countless lesser writers he was a mine to be plundered. For travellers today who appreciate an artist’s eye on how their ancient road was built, on the statues in the roadside tombs, on what the gardens might have looked like, on what we might have seen when entertainers were killing each other, he is still a literary star.
‘See those untrained swordswomen, standing their ground, holding their lines, shameless in the battle roles of men: Stat sexus rudis insciusque ferri: Et pugnas capit improbus viriles.’ Statius was an especially self-conscious expert in the literature of fighting and killing, in death and in sport. His literary hero, Homer, had been first to put words to the world of war, Greek words. Statius knew about fist-fights, track-sweat and the butcher’s knife. He knew the jargon and used it. He had learnt at his father’s knee.
Killing was absolutely an art. It was a subject for argument and expert appreciation, for commentary and verbal conflict. At the Kalends we can imagine problems with those women fighters. Might they be a bit ‘amateur-night’ with their blades? Were they totally untrained or only half trained? As deadly as the male? Maybe. Their odds were harder to call. There was not the usual form book. It was all mere holiday-betting.
Death-dealing women were mythical monsters: ‘Like Amazons at war by rivers faraway: Credas ad Tanain ferumque Phasin Thermodontiacas calere turmas’. At games like this the fighters were not on show to be inspirational. A man could hardly look into a female face for spurs to his own courage. A dying Amazon or dwarf was something different from the standard fare, an alternative type of spectacular pleasure, a reminder of what would never happen to Romans, only to other people. ‘Other people’ were always needed to be looked down on and laughed at. When women fought in the stadium every man could be a know-all as well as a see-all. The feeblest fellow in the stands could puff up some critique of how the blonde from the Don blocked and parried, how the face of the River Rion missed her best chance to kill in the opening moments of the bout. Amazon style? Black Sea bravado? Enough to keep the men on the benches bantering for hours.
Those same male spectators could have argued too about the technique of the retiarius, the net-wielding fighter who battled without a helmet and whose eyes were always satisfyingly on show. He was one of the more traditional games characters. His art was to entwine sword and shield with yards of enveloping rope, to neutralise the gladiator in the same way that a fisherman netted carp or a hunter neutered the claws of a bear. But, in a few words about the warrior women, Statius projects more vivid possibilities than from any ordinary blood-on-the-sand bout. There was no point in the ordinary in the best of art or the best of death. A skilled pikeman was formidable but commonplace. Women with swords, some of them hardly knowing which end to hold, were different, much easier on male egos, not spectacular in the purest sense but potent.
When gladiatorial games began in Rome, most of the spectators had their own experience in wielding sword and shield: these first spectaculars were mere added education for the army. Then came the theatre of naval battles, fought by gladiator marines, designed to show to land-loving Roman citizens the new techniques of war at sea. The Romans used to flood stadia to make artificial lakes or use natural ones like those in the hills around here. Thousands of prisoners died in these demonstrations, and there are reports of at least one who killed himself, like Symmachus’ Saxons, to avoid his death by drowning.