The Spartacus Road

by Peter Stothard

  The Roman armour spent the nights in clumsy piles, with copper helmets slumped on their cheek-guards, painted shields propped against walls and boulders, short swords and javelins where they ought most easily to have been found but where somehow they were not. Imagine their tents as the locker-room of a veterans’ rugby team. The game was going to be fine. It was the party afterwards for which they had come.

  Only the lesser weapons of the gladiators were ready for use, high above on the black rock walls, ready to be dropped down to the ground after the fighters had roped their own way down with twisted lengths of vine. Their heaviest shields, their leg-guards, the helmets with monster ornaments designed for the exotic thrill of the crowd, all these could be carefully cushioned in the grass with no more noise than that of a few wild boars awakening.

  The rest was Roman slaughter – not slaughter by the Romans but of the Romans, not what the legionaries’ training, education and even entertainment had prepared them for but the opposite. Hercules had been a god for gladiators too. It was said that the freed fighters had rejected their arena costumes, seeing them as symbols of past slavery. It is still hard to resist the image of a Thracian gladiator with scenes from the sack of Troy on his wide-brimmed helmet, with full plumes and smirking stage visor, smashing the eyes of a would-be spectator while he slept.

  Via Pioppaino, Pompeii

  How could fewer than a hundred gladiators have defeated a Roman army? This was a problem to which Sextus Julius Frontinus had at least one answer: they succeeded by tricks. Frontinus was a great man of answers. He was an engineer, a bureaucrat, a governor, a public servant, an organiser, a manager. He filled all the functions of a man whom future classicists would not take to their hearts, their minds or their armchairs. He was something of a writer too. But like Symmachus, mourning briefly for his lost Saxons, he was much read once and is not much read now.

  This sweating bar-room is a place where his modern successors have gathered for a modest conference. This is the Pompeii where Pompeians live, the place without the plaster casts of dead bodies, without the ancient brothels offering sex on short narrow shelves, without the bravado boasts of gladiators chalked on the walls. Here the streets outside are not quite so rutted and the kerbs not so thick. There are no retailers of mini-frescos or sexual-position price lists or papyrus maps.

  This is Pompeii as it used to be even before the eruption, a place of common commerce, not for the hugely rich but for those with a living to make. How much to the local government, how much to the local governors, how much now to the local church which owns so many of the streets, how much to the local Boss without whom nothing happens? Whatever is left after satisfying il Commune, la Chiesa della Maria Rosaria and ‘Don Pasquale’ is left to the men gathered now around the shiny-panelled bar. There are wholesalers and factory-owners whose suits match the walnut of the walls, silk inside and out with the sheen of a cruise-ship cocktail cabinet. There are agro-business representatives, trussed in grey with colour-matched ties and handkerchiefs, here to sell each other industrial measures of beer and breads, bottled-sand souvenirs by the tonne and fire-from-the-mountain plates by the truck-load. Two plain-clothed priests watch the door.

  Tonight, maybe every night here, is for those Pompeiians who grow fat on the past if they can, Christian businessmen parasitic on pagan predecessors, everyone exploiting the obsession of visitors with a part of their town that they themselves dislike, a part that died 1,900 years ago. None is young. None is female. None is a tourist. The only book in view is 100 Ways to Succeed in Sales, the sort of publication which may not add much to most people’s cultural history of Pompeii but is important for ensuring that its history continues. 100 Ways to Succeed in Sales, subtly translated to suit southern Italian rules, may be the most important book of all for understanding these constantly re-examined, reinterpreted and rebuilt streets of Pompeii. It is Frontinus’ sort of book too.

  Darkness has arrived early between the garages and the garden vineyards, between the vegetables under polythene and the newspaper shops. There are bulging black mountain clouds and raindrops the size of soft lead shot, each one kicking up dust by the windows as each individually falls. This is slow-motion weather. In a film we would be an organised-crime colloquium. The barman enforces discipline on the journeymen. They all look uncomfortable in their suits. They know that they are uncomfortable. But they wear what they have to wear, just as toga-wearers did.

  Sextus Julius Frontinus offered answers to technical and tactical questions that other senior servants of the emperors merely asked. He wrote about water pipes, fountains, aqueducts and baths, how they fitted together, the rules of the network, who could take what from where. He wrote on land surveying, the law and practice of farmland, access, security and finance. Even the best executives, he recognised, do not learn automatically from their predecessors’ mistakes. He wrote about military stratagems, a successor to a larger work, now lost, on Greek and Roman strategy. Strategy was long term. Stratagems were short term. A general could be good at one and not the other. His book set out past disasters not for the purpose of moral improvement, as historians did, but to make certain that they did not happen again.

  His style was the bullet-point, a bang, bang, bang of facts that the ambitious and the prudent should bear in mind. He begins his Stratagems with a little light clearing of the throat: ‘Cum ad instruendam rei militaris scientiam unus ex numero studiosorum eius accesserim eique destinato: Since I alone of those versed in military science have troubled to reduce its rules to a system, and since I appear to have achieved that purpose, so far as effort on my part could do so, I feel still obliged, in order to finish the task, to sum up in a few brief words the cunning deeds of generals to which the Greeks give the single name “stratagemata”.’

  The looming conference of the Pompeii tradesmen looks set for a similar opening speech. Here too we have a ‘unus ex numero studiosorum’, a self-styled single self-sacrificing educator of his fellow men. Throughout the world there are thousands of such management speeches made in the same manner every moment of the day. They will display pride (possibly deserved) followed by modesty (certainly false) and a promise to stress the positive (when avoiding the negative is the prime purpose). Nervousness and boredom vie for dominance in the damp air. No one today from any business anywhere can have survived a career without suffering such a ‘scene-setter presentation’ and probably giving one.

  Frontinus has to flatter his audience: ‘I ought, I think, out of regard for busy men, to show the virtue of brevity.’ Only then can he flatter himself: ‘others who have made selections of important deeds have overwhelmed their readers by the very mass of their research’. Our speaker here too promises to be as brief as he can, to speak ‘as if in answer to questions’, reassuring the red-faced-and-shirted man beside me that the small Chivas Regal he has purchased from the barman’s half-gallon bottle ought to be enough.

  The chairman for our Pompeii evening continues his address. The rain is hammering ever harder on the roof. The television screen still shows a Napoli football match below its display of plaster saints and silk coasters for the Madonna of the Rosary. Boom-box music bounces through the door whenever a late arrival appears. The barman calls for quiet. The words are soon lost to me in money and measurements and a mass of numbers.

  Sextus Julius Frontinus was born about a hundred years after Spartacus occupied Vesuvius. His home was in southern Gaul from where many of the gladiators came. Gauls were among the worst of enemies but good with other animals if they were properly motivated and trained. During a long life in difficult times he proved himself the consummate servant of the great. If, during Domitian’s reign, he ever felt Tacitean anger or the sleepless anxieties of Statius, he did not show it in his work. In the safer, more prosperous times that followed, in the good years that Statius died too soon to see, Frontinus came into his own.

  Before making his mark in the national aqueduct business, he was military governor in Britain and a
n influential broker of power in Rome. At one point, it was said, he might even have become emperor himself. If this was ever anything more than a rumour, it was a rare folly of thought, rapidly snuffed out in the realisation of other ambitions that were safer, more rewarding and more appropriate.

  Once the throat clearing is over and Frontinus has begged ‘that no one will charge me with negligence if I have missed out some illustrations’, the master presents his first book of ‘stratagems’ divided into twelve sections. ‘This work, like my earlier ones, has been undertaken for the benefit of others rather than for any fame of my own,’ he reminds any last doubters. The ancient flip-chart show begins.

  I. On Disguising One’s Plans

  II. On Discovering the Enemy’s Plans

  III. On Deciding the Nature of the War

  IV. On Leading an Army through Places Infested with the Enemy

  V. On Escapes from Difficult Places

  VI. On Ambushes on the March

  VII. How to Conceal or Substitute for Deficiencies.

  VIII. On Distracting the Enemy

  IX. On Quelling Sedition

  X. How to Inhibit Demand for Battle at the Wrong Time

  XI. How to Rouse an Army’s Enthusiasm for Battle

  XII. On Dissolving Fears Inspired by Bad Omens

  Today’s chairman has his own flip-chart and a red felt pen. If the Pompeii Rotarians are getting as good a workout as Frontinus’ first readers, their commercial rivals will not stand a chance. It is a pity that the Korean doctor is not here. This is a part of the Spartacus Road where he would feel at home.

  I. When concealing plans from the enemy it can be useful to dress your top spies as slaves. Do not forget to punish such men in public with your cane so that the enemy does not guess their true identity.

  II. If the crushing of savage Gauls requires the presence of the Emperor Domitian himself, make sure that he appears to leave Rome for some other purpose, to make a census of the living rather than a body count of the dead. Otherwise, the enemy will make greater preparations.

  III. To discover the enemy’s whereabouts, always watch for flocks of birds rising startled from field or forest. If you have experienced troops against raw recruits, choose the most open ground for any battle. If the enemy is by the coast, consider using swimmers, warmed with oil and wine, to reach behind their lines: the Athenians successfully did this once against the Spartans.

  References to Spartacus come under heading V. Escapes from Difficult Places:

  When besieged on Vesuvius, at the point where the mountain-side was most difficult and thus unguarded, Spartacus wove together ropes of pliant vegetation. Clambering down by these, he not only escaped but, by appearing from the flank, struck such terror into Claudius that whole cohorts gave way before only seventy-four gladiators.

  With this one paragraph, Frontinus gives both his advice, that willow and vine ladders are a trick worth trying in extremity, and his warning, that in ‘asymmetric warfare’ against the weak the stronger force, which was always the Roman, had to remain on constant guard. The weak, it should be noted, could arm themselves from the terrain. Spartacus’ men made shields with wicker wood and the hide of cattle. The Boii – a tribe of savages and excellent source of German slaves – had once cut through the trunks of hundreds of trees, leaving only a slim core behind, so that, at a single push, a whole forest might fall on a Roman army.

  Frontinus had his own experience of quelling revolts. He knew what he was talking about, and he made sure that his readers knew. One of his greatest successes was against the miscreant Julius Civilis, self-styled Emperor of the Gauls, the one whom Rembrandt painted in his smoky rendering of romantic rebel leaders from ad 69, the year that Nero died. The artist selected the scene to portray the hopes of ancient men of Holland who wanted freedom from Rome, hoping that he might buy favour with Amsterdam burghers who equally hated any authority but their own. Rembrandt failed just as Julius Civilis had. The picture was unsold and barely survived. There was only one victor in any version of this incident, Frontinus himself, who crushed the revolt and enslaved 70,000 prisoners in reprisal – the sort of success that would sustain the spirit of Symmachus when even his own emperor dressed to impress in a German tribal uniform.

  A decade or so later Frontinus became governor of Britain and an early hammer of the Welsh, leaving behind a Via Julia where hikers still walk, some massive walls and an amphitheatre near Newport. Since the Spartacus Road rarely comes anywhere near Britain, we might grab this single thought while we can: whatever the Romans did for us we did very little for them. Our ancestors offered a constant supply of dogs but only constant hopes for gold, a convenient place for a quick victory or two and a very inconvenient place to live. Symmachus got his wolfhounds. Mamurra and Julius Caesar’s men stole what was easiest to steal. Our druids were too exotic even for the arena.

  ‘Remembrance will endure if the life shall have merited it’ was one of Frontinus’ phrases. His British fortifications, like most of what he achieved, live on without his name attached. The ruins at Caerleon became best known as a candidate for King Arthur’s Camelot. It was easier to find the finance for the excavations that way. The moody tourist posters of the site, all green-black grass and mossy stones, are meant to remember the Round Table (the world’s only gladiatorial arena with a second and more famous circular life) not the slaughter grounds of the man who wrote the Stratagems. When did the Roman tradition finally end here? When did the last public strangling and burning of a woman take place in a British amphitheatre? There is a record of one in 1706, and public hangings over the sands for sixty years after that. Fund-raisers found it better, wherever possible, to evoke the spirit of Queen Guinevere instead.

  The author who tells us of Spartacus’ first triumph is a recognisable kind of civil servant for all ages, a traditional disciplinarian, a stander of no nonsense, a planning regulator, a minister for small businesses. He is looking for obedience more than credit. And he wants that obedience to come from his listeners’ reasoning. He wants everyone to know that he makes sense. He paints his pictures by numbers so that others can paint the same pictures and think they are artists too. Responsibilities for the Roman aqueducts brought worries, attention from his bosses and little glamour. But someone had to do it. In the earlier years of the Empire the water supply had been managed by smart imperial slaves. Only gradually did the grander Romans begin to realise that management was respectable, powerful, essential.

  Frontinus’ technical treatise about waterworks was selfconsciously precise with its numbers, specifying the width and capacity of pipes, the angles of gradient, the heights of towers. The numbers did not always function as he had hoped. He did not understand how the speed of waterflow affected the amount of water. The Greeks had better mathematics. But a good flip-chart presenter can distract his hearers from little problems like that. The De aquis urbis Romae was highly practical at the time, essential still for anyone wanting to know how Romans filled their basins and bathtubs, how the rich filled their pools from the public pipes if they could, how the poor had a tap in the street if they were lucky.

  Frontinus notoriously despised literature and art. Artists and critics have tended to repay the compliment. He was a boaster who boasted about the wrong things; while Horace wrote how his words would outlive bronze and marble, Frontinus wrote how baths and taps would outlive any poem. He was like my father. He genuinely preferred lavatory pans to painting.

  Did Frontinus see art in his own writing? Very probably, even if the critics who came later did not. His chosen subjects, ‘water pipes and soldiers’ tricks’, were themselves Roman arts. Topics and styles were available for any who sought them. If Statius, who had only just died, could make poetry from villa designs and the marbles used in swimming pools, Frontinus could see his own work on water pipes as an achievement for all time, just like the pipes themselves.

  There are many like him, then and now. He chose his words with care, an important skill for ent
ering public life in unusually perilous years – when a bad Nero was exchanged for four rulers in fourteen months, a bad Domitian for a dull but better Nerva. He was consul three times, not the job it was in Republican times but still a job. Only emperors held the number of offices that Frontinus held, and Frontinus did not achieve such promotions by obvious or ill-placed claims on glory.

  Let someone higher get the praise. Let us down here have another drink and live to see as many other days as possible. It was a reasonable policy, recognisable in this rain-battered conference room and many such rooms. Frontinus was a man behind the stage, writing for those who could read between his lines. He was a man who most likely wrote as he ruled, brutally, carefully, and saw both acts as something of the same.

  Much of the business of writing is the business of imagining the lives of readers, their reactions and responses. Frontinus will have been the recipient of many an official report. He was writing for his emperor but also for people not so unlike the drinkers here – middle-managers of the municipal domains with ambitions to move up, or at least not to screw up. Civil servants can be fussier than poets about their commas. The obscurest mandarin will complain about the colon cut from his prose. Journalists rejoice, or at least pretend to take pleasure, in casting their words into an uncaring machine where nothing emerges on to the page in anything like the form that it arrived. The dullest describers of accountancy procedures cavil loudest if an adverb is displaced. Whether we call them literary artists makes little difference.