On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey through Ancient Italy. Peter Stothard

incident could not have seemed a catastrophe—more a minor schedulers’ issue for those planning the next weeks’ entertainments.

      If any of the missing men had been promised to the great games shows of the capital the predicament would have been more pressing. The promoters of Rome sometimes paid the Capuans in advance, watching their property grow fit and oiled like absentee racehorse owners until their time was ripe. If they had noticed Spartacus, they might object that he was no longer there. More probably they had not.

      Lentulus Batiatus’ remaining fighters would just have to be spread more thinly through the running order and the order book. There was always a market for something a bit different; it was a matter of imaginative showmanship. Some men might have to fight twice, switching costumes and weapons, short shields for long, round for rectangular, scimitars for spears, anything to make the second half of the afternoon look different from the first. That was almost routine.

      Some of the plotters left behind would have been doubly unlucky. The guards needed to put a plausible number to the rack and rod. Even if the school-owner might resent the separation of good fighting arms from their sockets, the waste of flesh which might never heal, he needed to explain himself to the public officials.

      What did the escapers do next? The torturers would have asked that same question. What was the plan? Who was in charge? Where did the rats intend to go? However cruelly the questions were posed, Lentulus Batiatus is unlikely to have put much store by the answers. The Romans were neither credulous nor subtle appliers of pain. They believed in the power of fear and example. They did not believe that the tortured told the truth.

      This ‘where next?’ question is the same one that the scholastic Koreans are asking of the Capuan gamblers now. In which direction did the killers go? Which direction does the Spartacus Road take? Most travellers to the Capua Vetere amphitheatre are easier for the locals to satisfy. Most are like those in Rome, Carlo’s customers, the ones who come with Kirk Douglas and Russell Crowe in their minds—or even a faint image of Louis-Philippe’s Foyatier from the Louvre. The books and postcards on sale in the ticket booth suggest a regular clientele keen to pay brief homage to film stars forced to kill each other for fat emperors.

      The entry-ticket for the Capua stadium allows entry also to a grunting ‘Silenzio! Silenzio!’ son-et-lumiere in the fiftyyear-old Museo dei Gladiatori. A waxwork lion stands before a sturdy netman. The sand is scattered with simulations of blood and weaponry. After the scratchy pleas for silence come roars from beasts and crowd, the most decorous whimpers of death and a pervasive appeal for sympathy to all concerned. Only a few visitors see even this display, mostly while they make mobile-phone calls in the shade.

      For the Korean couple, arguing softly now into their individual copies of the Guida della Città, the appeal of this fairground fodder seems particularly low. Would I like to join them, asks the woman, thin lipped as she moulds the words, sharply dressed in coral red, exuding a manic energy that these sands can hardly have felt since the games ended. Are we even sure that this is Spartacus’ school? Might all the guides be wrong? The husband, dampening down the fringe over his forehead, looks on with a cooler welcome. He is wondering perhaps whether an English addition to their day might allow them to concentrate on something else, gauze-eyed lizards, sub-tropical insects, insanitary housing, water closets ancient and modern, all subjects on which there is ample evidence all around.

      Examination of the gladiators’ options is what his wife most wants. This is the only site here that looks like a school for the arena. This has to be the right place. So where were the escape routes? Where were the battles waged? She has already been to the sites of 218–216 BC where Hannibal fought. She is fresh from the killing fields of Cannae, contesting the precise numbers of Roman dead as though their bodies were still warm. She is single-minded, carefully carving the letters on to her pages, and not easily to be stopped.

      The stones are hot. A scent of crushed mint rises from every footstep. The bushes bulge with tiny birds taking shelter from the sun. Shiny pigeons, brown moths and ragged butterflies are the only creatures brave enough to be visible. All that, if nothing else, is little different, we agree, from what it looked and sounded like 2,000 years before.

      The amphitheatre is like a broken bowl. It is not Batiatus’ but five circles of walls built by the Emperors Augustus and Hadrian on the same site and pillaged for bricks by everyone who lived after the fall of Rome. Just two of its eighty arches are upright. The water tanks can no longer turn the sands into a lake. There are no more lifts to haul men, animals and mountain scenery from the underground store, only the holes where Mussolini’s men found bones of antelope, elephant and tiger. Even when this Colosseum was first opened for business (with or without a triumphant poem by a Spaniard or a Greek) its jagged evening shadows would have looked like a ruin. Inside it now, we can try, as far as we can, to mix present and past, see what slips away and what stays, find what we might know.

      There is an age of time this afternoon. There is always an age of time among the card-players by the amphitheatre kiosk. Carlo in Rome had been anxious I might find the wrong place, the newer Capua of designer wine-bars, big business and Catholic churches, the other Capua in the river bend that was the safer refuge from the Saracens in the early Middle Ages. But this is absolutely the place he called home, the town which lost its glory well before its people, a place from which an ambitious guide, even an ambitious Spartacus guide, might reasonably flee. This is like a seaside resort where even the sea has fled. It is hard to count the passing of the hours at all.

       Corso Aldo Moro, Santa Maria Capua Vetere

      We all three of us have maps by which to walk. Theirs are Korean atlases of Italy—with lines of oriental letters crosshatching an already complex web of paths. Mine, less useful except for exercises in imagination, is the appropriate page of the Barrington Classical Atlas—an American work which shows only what its editors know was there in ancient times. Their maps from Seoul are palimpsests of motorway upon battle site, spidery nets, perfect for tour planning. My map is a mass of pink-and-green open space.