Spartacus was one of many. He was never marked out by the Romans for anything very special. Capuan gladiator shows in 73 BC were mere scraps in dustbowls when compared to the spectaculars that were commoner later and the more remembered ever since. There might already have been ‘rare wild beasts’ on the play-bill that Spartacus would miss by his escape. There might not. Many in the audience would hardly have expected or seen much difference between Spartacus and a beast.
There was also a ‘sophisticated set’ in the city of Capua, some of whom watched the gladiators in training and looked forward to the chance of being there for the kill, for the moment when a dying man’s eyes became a dead man’s. This was not mere sadism but a kind of therapy. The Romans cared deeply how they died, how they might look to others when they looked out themselves for the last time. But could anyone ever properly imagine himself when dying turned to death? It was very hard. The more one thought about it the harder it became. To watch others die was a training for the imagination, important training because a Roman man’s whole life depended on others seeing his death well.
It is becoming darker now in the Formia museum. The ropes are gradually falling in front of the galleries so that only one of these ancient party rooms is now open, the place of the minor tradesmen, the lesser men and women of the old town of Mamurra, the types with the most to lose in a slave revolt, the almost prosperous, the always vulnerable. Time is nearly up. The curators of these antiquities, chatting softly beside their predatory sea-snake, cluck-cluck as though the very chastity of their marble Roman matrons might be at risk before the English intruder. It is as well he has a priest to keep an eye on him.
We are guessing further and faster now—whether Spartacus had the square face and red hair of the Celtic upper class in Thrace or the longer facial features of the lesser locals, lupine and slow. Did that matter? However smoothly his image has emerged in the minds of a modern priest, sympathetic ancient Greeks and a mildly liberal Frenchman of the 1820s, Spartacus himself would have been the most dangerous of animals in this room beside the Appian Way.
The gladiator had once had, and maybe in 73 BC possessed still—his Dionysiac priestess wife who had seen snakes twisted around his head, a sure sign of something mysterious to any Roman eyes who cared to see such things. Spartacus carried all manner of alien marks from the east. Whether these were marks of very good or very ill fortune, even the best Greek texts are unclear. It depended on who was copying them down.
The ropes close the last room. Outside in the street, there is a choice of tours to two local tombs. The first, in a bright-green taxi, is to that of Munatius Plancus, a military adventurer who backed almost every side in the Republican civil wars but won his immortality in a drinking poem by Horace. The second, in a minibus, is to that attributed to one of many politicians betrayed by Plancus, Marcus Tullius Cicero, a man who won his enduring reputation from literary works of his own.
Cicero had the boldness once to compare his enemy Mark Antony to Spartacus, a fatal enmity as it proved. But neither Cicero’s tomb nor that of Plancus is a necessary diversion on this road. There is instead a golden choice of wine in the bars here, both for the off-duty churchman and for his dinner companion who, following the reporter’s discipline he long ago set for himself, has first to write down these notes on the day.
Piazza Orazio Flacco, Benevento
The priest said that he could meet me again in this next town along the Appian Way. Benevento’s Leproso Bridge is the most visible relic here of Spartacus’ time, lizard-like arches of low-lying stone and long grass. The only living things in the Piazza Orazio are feral cats, prowling through the polythene sheets of long-absent archaeologists. When Horace came to Beneventum on his journey to Brundisium he complained of getting nothing to eat but burnt thrushes from a burning kitchen. This abandoned piazza of deep empty pits, corrugated iron barricades and peeling dance-school posters is the town’s appropriate revenge.
My new friend is comfortable talking about Spartacus, a man whom he has somehow accepted into his own faith. There are certain pagans whom followers of Jesus Christ have long seen as honorary Christians. Spartacus finally won his place thanks to Kirk Douglas and the Hollywood money men. There was big box-office appeal in a saintly rebel who had lived just too early to be a saint. Statius had won the accolade somewhat earlier and was thus available to lead his Renaissance admirer Dante along paths through Paradise.
Horace has not been so blessed by the Church, being no sort of freedom fighter and a religious sceptic too. But before the black-eyed priest begins his explanation of all this he wants to know more about the traveller he is talking to. He does not care about newspapers or politics, about Britain or the possibilities of my notebook becoming a more permanent book. He believes in origins. Very precisely he wants to know who my father was, where I come from. He is most specific. He pauses aggressively for my reply. He throws a lump of wood at the cats and taps a long white finger on the wall while they scatter into the ditches.
Most of what we know about Horace, he begins again, comes from the poet’s tribute to his father, the good-hearted, hard-working, sometime enslaved businessman from Venusia. Eduard Fraenkel used to say the same, more severely, with the threat that any student who could not be bothered to read Horace’s sixth satire (shame on the distracted children of the 1960s) should not bother with Horace at all.
Much of our knowledge of Statius comes in the same way, an obituary poem to the man who had taught him all the Greek tricks he knew, whom he begged to come back to him in his dreams. Was my own father dead? When was he born? What was his religion? What did his obituaries say? The thirsty questioner senses another imminent pause and snaps, as though taking hurried confessions in a disaster zone, that I will be happier when I have answered.
So I do. W. M. Stothard was born in 1925 in the flat lands where Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire meet. When he died of cancer in 1997 there was no obituary in the newspapers. He was not quite good enough at cricket or cards, although he played both well when he was young. He was baptised as a Methodist and named after the Yorkshire cricketing hero Wilfred Rhodes; but he quickly lost both the Christianity and the name. For seventy years, from his mining-village birthplace to the bars of Royal Marines and ministries of defence, he answered to the name Max. A man of his age might reasonably have booked his space on the obituaries page during the war. My father set out for war when he was supposed to have been setting out as a student. He joined the Royal Navy despite all his family’s efforts to keep him at home. But he sailed away to West Africa on a ship called HMS Aberdeen. He bought red-leather knife cases and postcards of Dakar’s six-domed cathedral and never fired a hostile shot except at a basking shark. He was lucky, he said.
When he was not shooting fish or trading cans for trinkets, he studied the young science of radar, watching the many curious ways that waves behave in the air above the sea, turning solid things into numbers. He was not a radar pioneer in the sense that obituary writers would require. He was one of thousands who fiddled with diodes, quartz and wire to make radar work. That was how he spent most of the rest of his life.
He returned to England when the war was won and took a place at Nottingham University. He batted and bowled and played bridge and studied physics. He had a striped bluegreen-yellow blazer which he cheerfully bequeathed to me and which made it easier for my friends to recognise me at Oxford in the 1970s in the dark. He had a brain that other engineers described as Rolls-Royce. It was powerful but he did not like to test it beyond a purr. In 1950, the year before I was born, he joined the Marconi Company at its research laboratory in Great Baddow, Essex, on a salary of £340 per year. He worked on many and various half-forgotten, half-successful, mostly never needed air-defence systems that protected British skies during the Cold War. He reasoned