The most famous legacy of the age of Domitian is his invitation to terrified senators for a dinner party in total darkness, with coffins for tables, charcoaled slaves in naked attendance and silence except from the host. In the mid-twentieth century it became fashionable to offer Domitian a little rehabilitation, to see him as a Roman King John, a decent administrator who had ‘his little ways’ but was forced to wait too long for the deaths of Vespasian and Titus, his Colosseum-building father and brother. One of his remembered good deeds was to ban the castration of boy slaves; he was exemplary in his modest intake of food and drink. He collected statues of subjects other than himself: a violent mythological blinding and a vicious female monster survive from his gardens. He wrote poetry of his own and a textbook on hair care. ‘Able and intelligent’ was the mischievous verdict of an Oxford admirer in the 1920s. Statius’ vision takes us, cautiously, to the more traditional view, to the first of Rome’s self-styled gods on earth, to an erratic tyrant who filled every corner of the screen and was never quite satisfied with his exposure.
Domitian plays the divinely generous host on the Kalends of December. When his spectator guests grow bored with the female swordfights, there are other attractions, the parade of the pregnant Lydians, musicians and match-sellers, and those pot-bellied dwarf cohorts, so very keen to stop themselves becoming bird-food or kebabs. Even if these men and women of stunted growth did not have swords, they could throw a few good punches before the net-carriers scooped them up like forest pigs.
There are the most delicious items of food, some of it cooked and some of it, the pheasants and guinea fowl, still alive and flapping, available, like home-run baseballs, to be taken home by the lucky ones in the crowd who caught them. Domitian delivers everything—from the women-for-hire to the free figs from Ibiza. Popularity-seeking politicians once staged games to get the highest Republican offices. By this point in the imperial era only an emperor could produce anything as spectacular as this. He asks nothing in return. His sole intervention is to stop the crowd hailing him as their lord—while at the same time wanting them to do so.
Statius was a subtle man of this literary theatre, flexible and imaginative in projecting his images. Domitian’s beautiful boy favourite, Earinus, has his picture fixed shut in Cupid’s mirror (‘et speculum seclusit imagine rapta’), the first camera lens in literature. A statue of Hercules is small but a giant in its appearance: ‘parvusque videri, sentirique ingens’. A statue of Domitian on horseback exceeds the wooden horse of Troy in every way. Domitian was notoriously fussy about the weight of the statues of himself in gold. The poet knew that. He knew his emperor personally. The elder Statius had tutored them both. They had villas close by in these Alban hillsides that Pompey once owned. They even shared a water-supply connection, not a small matter when one of the heights of civilisation was the hottest bath. For his prize-winning Alban poem Statius stuck to the safest of all subjects, the glories of grinding down the Germans.
This town of Ariccia, scene of that triumph, is only a first and very short stop on this Spartacus Road. There are some massive ivy-covered remains here of the Via Appia, the first great Roman highway, the one that slave-wagons, armies and fleeing poets all once took. There are no signposts to it now. Only the irregular limestone blocks, with the marks of thousands of chisels still on them, place it at the beginning of the age of roads. By climbing over fences into tomato fields, by vaulting over a rusted tractor and pushing down the barbed wire over the Valvoline grease guns in the grass, the traveller can get some small sense of how solidly and menacingly it once stood.
The father of anthropology, James Frazer, began and ended The Golden Bough near here at Lake Nemi, Diana’s mirror as it was known, her speculum. In his twelve volumes of comparative myth he likened the local worship of the goddess to ceremonies of South Sea islanders, camel-herders and Aztecs. Long before Spartacus and long after Statius there was a killer priest here who lived a sleepless life in fear of the successor who had to fight and kill him in turn.
At the bottom of Diana’s mirror-lake two large ancient ships were found by Mussolini’s archaeologists in the 1920s, to the excitement of scholars who had doubted whether Rome’s naval architecture had ever quite matched its road-building. These were true floating palaces and well proved their makers’ prowess with lead and timber. No local tribes had sunk them in a naval battle. These imperial vantage places—for blood-in-the-water sports and other pleasures—would have been a worthwhile destination in themselves had not German soldiers on 1 June 1944, exacting who knows what kind of Saxon revenge, burnt them to black ash.
Via Appia, Foro Appio
Ariccia long ago rose above its low origins. Domitian set a tone for his childhood and imperial home which lasted into the era of Symmachus, his Christian foes and beyond. The townscape in the rear-view mirror is papal, grand, palatial, baroque—with almost nothing left but the tomato-plantation bridge and a chalk grotto in its Chigi Palace to bring back the days when travellers, fresh out of dying Republican Rome, found only a single modest inn. Ask where that inn originally was, and the answer now is either a traffic island or the Flavio factory producing porchetta, the local pig delicacy. The porchetta option appears to have the greater support.
This next stop, the gateway town into what for 1,500 years after the fall of Rome were the vast and open Pomptine Marshes, is less changed by time. Bernini and his seventeenth-century designer friends did none of their business here in Foro Appio—which was wild in Roman times and is still wild today. A single bizarre ‘boutique hotel’ sits within a reclaimed swamp of agri-businesses, surrounded by telegraph poles, lead-blue sky and yelping birds. Only a few of the ancient watery paths remain: Mussolini removed most of the region’s stagnant mud when the creation of new Italian land became easier than conquering bits of Africa. But this small part can speak loudly and clearly enough for what has gone.
The sludge beside the restaurant here passes under another bridge of the old Via Appia, smaller than that in Ariccia, equally unappreciated, noticed or cared for but clearly there. On the surface of the bright-green chemical slime squat frogs and turtles. There are comatose catfish in the watercress below, which the local boys catch as easily as from a tank of pets. Dragonflies dart above them. In the sky are crop-sprayers and herons; an owl flutters over the metal barn.
On the other side of the road there is a granite-grey monument, a ring of prisoners in stone, a man with hands and a heavy weight behind his neck, a woman with a curved and crippled child whose head is not quite where a head should be. It is dedicated to victims of terrorism and cowers appropriately behind a garden hedge of bamboo, crowded by beer bottles, condoms and red-and-yellow vouchers for shoes.The Via Appia encourages long looks forward and back while distracting sideways or downwards glances. Behind is Rome. Ahead is Campania. That is all it needs to say. The man who built it was called Appius Claudius Caecus, one of the pioneering aristocrats who empowered Rome by giving power to its people, the first Roman with a firm place where myth without history merges into history with myths. He is a genuine founder and father of the city, the earliest individual of whom some sort of picture can plausibly be made: he promoted sons of freed slaves to the Senate and made the demigod Hercules the public hero of this Spartacus Road. In his later years he lost his sight. Today his most solid legacy still straddles the ancient waters here, rising barely perceptibly and barrelling on—past signs for mozzarella, palm trees and spruce, murdered innocents and size-three sandals, as though none of these newcomers were there, or would be there for long.
Statius passed through Foro Appio on his trips between Naples and Rome without, as far as anyone knows, writing a word here. Perhaps there was no one to pay him or he was always in too much of a hurry. The conceit of his Silvae, as he called them, his ‘little bits of wood’, his ‘uncultivated forest’, was that they were rapid sketches, first drafts, and did not require an epic stay. The reality, as so often, was of longer, harder work.