Later he became a manager and a salesman whom, in my own too simple student days, I would call an arms salesman. I accused him of complicity in the death industry and he was characteristically patient about that. He travelled many roads. He came to know thousands of fellows in the science of spotting fast-moving objects in the sky. He had space in his purring life for hundreds to be his friend. But he long did not seek the advancement that an obituary demands; and latterly, when he sought it, he did not find it.
He sometimes misunderstood people. He liked to see them as electro-machinery, as fundamentally capable of simple, selfless working. He was closed to the communications of religion or art. His favourite picture, his own spectacular, was a photograph of an oil-production platform being towed through a fiord. He listened to no music. He was especially offended by the violin and the soprano voice. His passions were for moving parts, moving balls, jet-streams in the skies over air shows. Other minds were not his pasture.
He was a pleasure-seeking materialist whose pleasures were not taken in excess and whose materialism was only a means of science. If his cancer pains brought him pictures of any past, he never mentioned them. I doubt that they did. He claimed that he had never had a dream until the diamorphine nights that kindly killed him. He had no fear of anything unknown.
Thirty years ago, when I was setting off for Oxford to study Latin and Greek, he gave me his own father’s copy of the second half of Virgil’s Aeneid. The name B. Stothard, in a firm, now faded, script, still sits inside the flyleaf. Max had no idea why that Virgil had been bought or why it had survived. It was one of only five books in our house on Great Baddow’s Rothmans estate, a freshly concreted field where all the radar engineers lived in a Marconi community of algebra and graph-paper. My father did not much care for Latin or for my studying it. But he never tried to stop me. He never closed a gate. He could easily have stopped me being here now. Without a mind full of antiquity I would not have been in Horace Square with a frowning, olive-eyed priest who continues to ask questions, more satisfied now with some small sense of my paternity, before giving his farewell guidance for the true beginning of the Spartacus Road.
Via Domenico Russo, Santa Maria Capua Vetere
‘Spartacus went that way,’ says the older man at the wax-papered card-table, pointing from the ticket-kiosk into town, away from the ancient amphitheatre towards the unlit neon signs for church-approved lingerie, twenty-four-hour diesel and a play-site. He gesticulates in a timeless animation, as though the famed escape from Capua has only just occurred—and as if the police and a sole reporter had only just arrived on the scene, late (what could one expect?) but not too late.
His younger colleague disagrees, waving a thin finger in the opposite direction, back through the arches of the ruined arena and up to the hill he calls Tifata. From the way that he speaks, mechanically with a passionless level tone, it seems that he always disagrees; and that these two men, whether their subject is the latest game in town or the oldest one, will always see their hands a different way.
From the rest of the card-players in Scuba Club caps and soft workmen’s shirts, flipping aces beside the ticket-booth, there is no response at all to the question that has been asked by two studious Koreans, one man, one woman, the man with a large logo for his national airline on his shiny black plastic briefcase, the woman with a paper bag full of papers in her hands. How had some seventy gladiators, led by Spartacus and two others, broken away from the training school of Lentulus Batiatus?
Today this is a place of discount stores and graffiti. It has been repopulated many times since it was abandoned in the early Middle Ages. But it still feels like a temporary camp, lightly ruled by legitimate authorities, heavily controlled by the Camorra and other criminal gangs. The name of Spartacus is most commonly used—and with no affection at all—as police code for a seven-year investigation into a Capuan gang of contract killers, protection racketeers and buriers of illegal toxic waste. In 73 BC this was the second city of the superpower of the West. It takes some energetic imagination to begin the task of understanding that—more energy than the sun allows.
How had the escape happened? Laxity? Treachery? Leadership? Probably a bit of all three: tired guards, tipseeking food-sellers, high fences with gaps of decay, not so different from the view this afternoon. The surviving bits of exposed wall from the first century BC, like all Roman walls, look strong enough to hold an army of gladiators. Little economy was used in this construction. The sections beside the card-players are thick enough to have held men and beasts and a naval lake. But there will always be human error.
The couple from Seoul, each with the same bifocal spectacles, are dissatisfied with their guides and guidebooks. The man has short brown hair, straight cut across his forehead, and a face more metallic bronze than brown. He is a doctor. While touring the site I have heard him talking about bone disease and broken toes as though he had asked to see some fallen arches and been surprised to see so much marble. This is not the kind of study he likes; it lacks certainty, even plausibility; and, to judge from his dark-eyed yawns, it lacks interest too. The woman has high cheeks and lighter hair cut close to her scalp. She is a teacher. She is the one who admits to the reasons they are here, her plans for illustrated lessons in ‘great sites of history’ for her students back home. Her notebook questions are as neat as the inscription on a gravestone.
Surely the gladiators would have been chained at night, locked down in the tiny cells that she could see underneath the massive circular arena? Were they allowed to sleep with their weapons? She thought not. The moment that a trained killer was given his sword, just before he set foot on the sand, would have been the most dangerous of all. A gladiator might wake at night, fighting from his sleep, screaming from his dreams. But in his dormitory cell he would have nothing with which to end a real life—either a guard’s or his own.
So how had it all begun? There was no public inquiry at the time of the escape. There were private inquiries down in the underground pits, place of the rack and the whip. But no notes survive of those. All the big questions would be asked later. Among the Vespas and electric wheelchairs, parked above the place where it all is said to have happened, those questions are still occasionally asked—and unreliably answered.
The break-out began with kitchen knives and skewers. There was a plan, a betrayal, a bit of luck and, before the guards could regroup to stop the insurrection, it was too late. Some two hundred gladiators had planned to take part. About seventy succeeded in absconding beyond the gates. Outside in the narrow streets the escapers found a wagon of the very same theatrical weapons that they had been trained to use in the arena. With these they beat back the assault of the better-armed local militia. With new armour, stripped from the bodies of this Capuan Home Guard, they moved out towards the countryside. They had exchanged their butchers’ blades for soldiers’ swords in three rapid moves. Then they needed a decision about what was to happen next. What to do? Where to go? Who was in command?
At the first official consideration of these events, at first light next morning in the summer of 73 BC, it was merely the Capuan gladiator school which had the questions to answer. Like Symmachus’ show 466 years later, it had lost some of its stars. But the questions were hardly huge. The shows would go on, and could go on. Even when the full scale of the escape was clear, the problem for the games promoter would not seem as great as that confronting his sometime