The Spartacus Road

by Peter Stothard

  Statius’ wife Claudia was with him – even more reluctantly. In a rare poem about his own life he writes to her glowing words about Naples, its theatres and steaming beaches. It is not, he says, as though he were taking her off to some home town in the wild lands of Thrace. He describes their long marriage with gratitude and joy. She was always the first to hear his poems, to judge his rehearsals. She had nursed him through a near-fatal illness. They had shared the joy of his Alban prize and the frustration when the prizes stopped.

  Claudia, even more than he, was unhappy to go south for ever. She was worried for the future in Rome of her unmarried daughter, a beautiful and gifted musician. The capital was the only place for the ambitious, but success did not come easily there to a young woman on her own. At the end of that journey Statius wrote what became his most famous poem, much translated over succeeding centuries, and its subject is insomnia.

  This is a plea to the god of sleep, the young and gentle god who, while allowing peace to all of nature, denies his blessings to Statius. ‘Crimine quo merui?’ the poet begins. ‘By what crime have I deserved to lack what is given to herds and birds and wild beasts?’ No reason is given by the poet for this wakefulness. There is quiet all around. He is not composing, not kept sleepless by inner noise. He is not in love or in mourning. He seems both bold and terrified. He does not request the deepest sleep: only the happier multitude can pray for that. A tiny touch from the airborne spirit will suffice: ‘extremo me tange cacumine virgae’.

  This is the only thought from Statius that I knew when I first knew of Spartacus. A version of the poem was in one of the books my father had at home, a leather-like album with mostly blank pages that was used for scoring cricket. The translator was the seventeenth-century Scottish Royalist William Drummond, who had taken the Latin words and made a popular sonnet of his own, ‘Sleep, Silence’ child, sweet father of soft rest’. This became the version of the Victorian teachers, the anthology poem in which modern readers have found Statius if they have found him at all. It ends: ‘Or if, deaf god, thou do deny that grace, Come as thou wilt and what thou wilt bequeath, I long to kiss the image of my death’.

  What was this ‘image of my death’, nestling there for a young boy between the run-outs and the catches? Death’s closest earthly image is sleep. Death is the half-brother of sleep. Greek painters often showed the two together in their mother’s arms. Homer had them work together, clearing the battlefield at Troy. The popular Victorian painter, John William Waterhouse, showed them in bed together. Sleep is the closest equivalent of death in life. A kiss from this image, the lightest embrace, is an act of exquisite thrill.

  Drummond, like Statius, wrote of absolute monarchs and ubiquitous mortality. His models were in Latin and Italian. He plundered them all with pleasure and abandon and, for the most part, without attribution. He wrote sometimes in Latin himself. He judiciously supported his master, Charles I, a king who, while no Domitian, was one before whom cautious criticism, wreathed in the most courtierly excess, could still be a perilous course. The two poets would have understood each other. Drummond opposed all rebellion against the established orders, watching miserably the approach of civil wars in England, Ireland and his Scottish home.

  Death was his great cause. He wanted to show the folly of fearing it. His first published work was in 1613 on the death of Charles’s elder brother, Henry Prince of Wales. In the same year he published Mausoleum, an anthology of epitaphs. In 1615 he lost the woman he was about to marry on the day before he was to marry her. His work was ‘amorous’ and ‘funerall’ and its most lasting expression was a philosophical essay called The Cypresse Grove. His conclusion? That humanity was hurt by excessive sense of its own importance. ‘This globe of the earth,’ he writes, ‘seemeth huge to us in respect of the universe and compared with that wide pavilion of heaven, is less than little, of no sensible quantity, and but as a point.’ Death should be nothing to us. ‘For while wee are, it commeth not, and it being come, wee are no more.’ There was no need or reason to fear death. ‘Feare maketh us to meete with that which wee should shunne, and banishing the Comfortes of present Contentmentes bringeth death more neare unto us.’ Drummond is summarising the best-known doctrines of Epicurus, as fashionable in his own day as when Spartacus was fighting in the arena.

  Drummond’s phrase ‘the image of my death’ is itself a quotation, but not from Statius. It was recycled through Italian, from an earlier writer, Cicero, the most famous collector of Greek thoughts. The Scotsman takes Statius’ poem reeking of morbid terror and caps it with a motto from Spartacus’ time. Mortality merits no worry: the ending of our lives is like sleep; and sleep is like the ending of our lives. ‘If, deaf god, thou do deny that grace, Come as thou wilt and what thou wilt bequeath, I long to kiss the image of my death.’

  Osservatorio, Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio

  In the late summer of 73 BC pursuit and punishment of the gladiators were finally on their way. The Senate had given its orders. Three thousand men led by Gaius Claudius Glaber, one of the senior magistrates for the year, had the task of removing the escapers from their mountain. The rebellion would soon be over. Everyone said so.

  The soldiers were not the finest that Rome had ever put into the field. The Roman citizen army was no longer the sole and necessary path to respectability it once had been. Some of the numbers had to be made up from retired men who lived along the road south. There were part-timers taken from their farms, shops and bath-houses, some playboy intellectuals in the team, men who, for small sums (since there would be neither pillage nor glory in putting down a riff-raff rebellion), could be pressed into a short bit of extra service. Anyone with military experience might be asked to make himself briefly available for the sake of honour, old comradeship and some stories of his own valour that could grow in the telling.

  Seen from Vesuvius, this first Roman force must have looked a little scrappier than the normal legions. But the gladiators would not have placed too much reliance on that. Roman military dress was rarely of a uniform kind. If a soldier wished to exchange a bit of enemy silver for a better cloak in Capua, the cloak-maker in his designer house would have been only too pleased to oblige him. Glaber’s soldiers will have displayed tunics, belts and brooches from many market places.

  Their leader was not the most tested of generals. He would have been happy with the quickest bit of action here before resuming his more comfortable city life. A few days in his mailed jacket on the Appian Way, a road he associated more with prostitutes and perfume prices, would have been fine. To be the man of the hour, a single hour, would have been enough. It was not clear at the beginning, not obvious at all, that he would become one of those one-shot figures of history, a man of whom we know very little and whom we would not know at all if he had not been the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong hour.

  Perhaps there had been frustration at Rome that the Capuans had failed to deal with the problem themselves. The Senate had considerably bigger concerns than the campers of Mount Vesuvius. They faced the remnants of a civil war in Spain, with slaves reputedly in the rebel army. They had forces fighting Rome’s most serious foe of the time, King Mithridates of Pontus, ambitious ruler of the Black Sea coasts and increasingly far beyond. They also had their own ambitious generals to fear.

  Yet, for all their distractions, the Romans would have had no doubt about the result. Glaber’s responsibilities as praetor ranked only just below those of consul. He marched with the silver standards and axes that symbolised Roman power on the move. Three thousand fully equipped legionaries, whatever their age, costumery or terms of conscription, would be more than enough to overcome a hundred or so gladiators and hangers-on. Everyone knew what happened at gladiatorial games, the stares on the dying faces, the blood on the sand, the deaths that happened to the losers. The Romans did not lose battles, not now that Hannibal was gone. Gladiators always lost. It was just a matter of waiting. There was nothing to be done but to blockade the mountain and wait for
hunger and thirst to do the rest.

  Vesuvio, Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio

  In their camp in the crater the gladiators knew too that gladiators always lost, that in the end there was only one outcome. Sporting prowess, it was said, might buy a man his freedom. Beautiful women might buy him for their beds. But evidence of this was as scarce for the fighters then as it is for those studying them now. Death was the end of their game. Life beyond the arena was only for their dreams, and for their admirers’ dreams.

  As a result of their escape they were no longer gladiators for the next days’ shows. They were on a mountain surrounded by arenas, places they could see rather than be seen in. They were high when they had been low. They were watchers when they had so long been watched. They were about to cross the line between sport and war. In war, perhaps, they need not always lose.

  Their training was in entertainment, education and inspiration. The approaching battle was something different, a fight in which they needed to kill the men who liked to watch them kill each other. The minds of the slaves on Vesuvius are a mystery to us. There is no way of knowing how they saw the change, whether they fired each other’s spirits with stories of the arena or whether they saw the world from these heights as wholly new. Did they see themselves as more likely to die now than in their daily routine of duel and death, or less likely? Was their training an inspiration to them? Or did its truths keep them sleepless while the besieging Romans slept?

  How we envisage our ends and how we envisage others doing the same are heightened by every near meeting with death – in war, in sport, in sickness, in the accidents of every moment. The Romans had more such meetings than most have today. Statius was not a military man, neither a fighter nor a showman of fighters. But while his personal spectaculars were different, he too had noted the vast varieties of dying, the every distortion of minds from fear. When he placed boxing dwarfs beside female gladiators on the Kalends of December he was marking points on the line between battles and entertainment, between killing and clapping, between war and all its baby sporting brothers. Fine distinctions are important for those who see death ahead. Everything stands on this line, from the most famous gladiator of all time to the untrained sex, ignorant of the steel, shameless in the fighting moves of men. ‘Stat sexus rudis insciusque ferri: Et pugnas capit improbus viriles.’

  Statius enjoyed sharp distinctions, shadow lines between objects, ideas, geometrical planes. There are different places to draw such lines. Sometimes we like to see war as sport. Newspaper correspondents often used to do so. When Symmachus followed one of his emperors on a German campaign, he was shown a ‘battle’ in which the natives quickly fled, the Romans behaved like gentlemen and ‘not a single dawn rapist dragged the barbarian mothers from their beds: nec indormitantes lectulis feras matres antelucanus raptor extraxit’. In better times in Europe writers have been able to do the opposite, to write as though sport is war.

  In most sport, ancient and modern, the kind that the viriles citizens practised in training ground and gym, the combatants do not die. Old warriors, veterans of wars, can in sport recreate their combat pasts in comfort and safety. Young men can show off their sporting masculinity for future military use. There is pretence, illusion, a referee, a time at which the game will end. Even in Homer’s Iliad, that ancient hymn to war and central text for Statius, there is a sporting fight that is designed only to wound, and a specialist sportsman, a boxer called Epeius, who says that he is no good at any other kind of fighting.

  Epeius, Homer’s sporting ‘hero’, is no wimp. He promises that he will ‘smash his adversary’s flesh and crush his bones’. This is no idle boast: his opponent is returned to the ranks with his mouth spitting blood clots and his head lolling from side to side like that of a brain-damaged child. But the boxer is still not a warrior. When the bout is over he picks up his defeated rival just as a footballer does after a ‘professional foul’. The result? No one dead, not in the sporting arena.

  On the Spartacus Road, as in Homer’s Troy, sport is the anomaly. Death – ‘how to avoid and approach it’ – is the permanent accompaniment to this journey. It was death not sport that brought Statius his critical applause. Alongside his Silvae, his glittering impressions, Statius wrote his own epic poem, a retelling of the Oedipus legends loaded with the most spectacular death. This was the work that he regularly read to the admiring and encouraging Claudia at night, with an impact on their shared sleeplessness and that of all its readers since. This was the poem that a thoughtful schoolmaster once read to his Essex pupils in the 1960s – to show that Roman literature was not all love and honour.

  The Thebaid is in twelve books, took twelve years to write, and tells of the gore-strewn struggle between Oedipus’ sons, Eteocles and Polynices, to claim their father’s throne. They cannot share power; so they kill for it. Polynices assembles the notorious Seven against Thebes, Greek monsters from Argos against his own Greek Theban home.

  Like the Iliad, the Thebaid has a boxing match among its games, one between two of the invaders, a brutish boastful animal, Capaneus – ‘massive to see, massively to be feared’ – against a lighter man, Alcidamas, the ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ style of fighter. Capaneus, contemptuous of gods and men alike, says that he would have preferred an opponent from the enemy, someone whom he could batter to death, someone who would make his bout seem more like war. But he gets one of his own side instead, a beautiful man kissed by one of Jupiter’s most beautiful sons: ‘whom none wants to see bloodied or beaten and all fear the spectacle: Quem vinci haud quisquam saevo neque sanguine tingi Malit, et erecto timeat spectacula voto’.

  The sporting star, Alcidamas, though tutored by a god, is a mere sparring partner for the massive Capaneus. Statius’ poetic boxing match begins as though it may go far beyond sport. It gains the best of its drama from that possibility. This was one of his show-pieces. But, because this particular match is genuinely sport, it ends with the umpire calling a halt; the giant has become too enraged for anything but death to be the outcome. The event ends at the bell. Like many a contest in the arena, like the one described by Martial in the opening matches of the Colosseum, there is no winner or loser that day.

  Statius has every kind of bloody brawl in the winding length of his epic, monstrous cruelty, high-coloured horror. Capaneus collects the head of a Theban so that his dying friend, Tydeus, winner of the wrestling match on sports day, can eat the skull, chew it, enjoy its warm, still-living blood and end his days happy. There is sharp, metallic killing, savagery without rules. Opponents rip each other’s cheeks and scratch each other’s eyes. The defeated will never again be spectators of this or any other spectacular.

  The climax of the Thebaid is the duel between the sons of Oedipus themselves, the claimant Polynices and Eteocles the defender who will not concede. Capaneus, the giant boxer and despiser of everything in existence bar himself, is dead by this time. So are the champions in the chariot race, the running race, the wrestling and the discus. Only the winner of the archery prize will return to his kingdom in Argos, his survival guaranteed by an arrow which leaves his bow, flies to its target and returns safely and prophetically to his quiver. Statius would have almost sung these lines, like an operatic tenor, pouring his song over his homeland’s lakes, fields and hills.

  This final duel is a swordfight like a gladiatorial combat, a pair, one on one, to the death: ‘Now a criminal pair begins a bout that Earth in all its miseries has never known: Nunc par infandum miserisque incognita terris Pugna subest.’ One brother at least has to die. The Theban land on which they fight is a field for slaughter, a place drained to nothing, an emptiness over which men, temporarily, cast the shadows of giants. The squeamish turn away, just as they did in the arenas of Roman times. Even Jupiter complains that the fighters are ‘raping the day’ and ‘staining the sun with spots’. Not even the gods should watch the climax of this show: ‘The fight begins: turn away your eyes!: Pugna subest: auferte oculos!’ This is the most
vicious of spectaculars. Both brothers die before it is over. The grim grey scenes are lit and choreographed by Statius at the height of his now mostly forgotten powers. ‘The wretched commoners stand high on their roofs and from every tower tears flow: Prominet excelsis volgus miserabile tectis Cuncta madent lacrimis et ab omni plangitur arce.’

  No Latin poem has left more inspiration for writers of the end of the world. There are no heroes among the Seven. Instead there is Tydeus, psychotic killer and gnawer of skulls: many gladiators were given that name. There is the single priestly prophet among the attackers, Amphiaraus, the one who knows that the war will shatter the world but goes along anyway. There is boundless horror and grief before an outsider imposes an impossible peace.

  This is a picture of the generation before the Trojan War, an image of the beginnings of civilisation that looked to Statius so very like its end. As well as brilliant bravura, the Thebaid showed its hearers a Greek poet grappling helplessly with the conflicts of his adopted Italian home. No Roman of the time could read it without seeing a glimpse of the Oedipal Emperor Vespasian and his bitter sons, Titus and deranged Domitian. None could read it without seeing back to almost two centuries of inner strife. No one wants war at home, fighting to the death between those who share the same streets, the same roof, the sort of horrors that happen inside one’s self.

  Osservatorio, Parco Nazionale, Vesuvio

  The first army to face Spartacus arrived in its siege position, set down its weapons, slept and ate and waited. There was only one known path down the mountain. Glaber did not fortify his camp, the nightly duty for every Roman legionary force everywhere in the world, as defining of the military mind as parade-ground drill. Perhaps it seemed unnecessary, even ridiculous, to raise ramparts, walls and towers against a band of slaves. This was Roman Italy now, where the soldiers’ hero Hercules had long ago conquered any alien giants, captured all man-eating bulls and founded his own town, Herculaneum, whose present temptations for a man like Glaber lay prominently below. This was lucky country.