The barest facts about Spartacus, like the road itself, are often hard to find. They disappear and reappear—in the landscape and in the memory of succeeding centuries. They have been twisted in the service of cinema, politics and art. There is Spartacus the romantic gladiator from Thrace, the fighter for freedom, the man who lives on in the memory of emulators; and there is Spartacus the terrorist and threat to life, the one who survives in others’ fears. There is the hidden man and the man of the Spectacular, the word which appeared on the first page of my first notes and is left still in the subtitle of this book, the Romans’ own name for the theatrical games and aesthetic of death that so powerfully defined both their lives and our memories of them.
Via di S. Stefano Rotondo, Rome
This Spartacus Road begins high on Rome’s most southeasterly hill, the Caelian, with questions that were asked here first some five hundred years after the great slave revolt. How could twenty-nine gladiators have strangled themselves in their underground pens? How did they dare to do it? How had they succeeded in doing it? There was no rope, no cloth, nothing to make a noose. The games had barely begun and twenty-nine men had suddenly been their own stranglers. Somehow it had happened. How?
These were not the questions which Quintus Aurelius Symmachus most wanted to ask. A power-broker of an age when his city had lost so much power liked to think of better things. Life was too short, its needs too great, for anyone, let alone him, to agonise over some ingeniously suicidal Saxons.
He had his duties as ambassador between the old Rome and the new, the pagan and the Christian. Rome’s rulers in Constantinople and Milan were militant leaders of the new ruling faith. Many of their subjects, his own people here among the empty barracks and neglected temples, were more relaxed in their religious commitments. Symmachus needed all his old Roman’s diplomatic skills to mediate between the two.
He had serious private interests as a writer and intellectual, a word he would happily have used of himself had he known it. He was self-important, self-reliant, subtle in his own cause, fond of focusing on himself in every way. Now one of the least read writers of ancient Rome, his nine hundred surviving letters and forty-nine reports to the rulers of his world are reminders of a time when he could demand to be read.
In the year AD 393, he was just over fifty years old. He had already held the thousand-year-old office of city prefect, a title whose antiquity was of some importance to him. True, he had not held the city prefecture very long: but brief tenures in office were nothing now of which to be ashamed. Holding on to any job, or even any consistent line of thought, was difficult when commands and signals came from two imperial courts, in east and west, so very far away and apart.
At least he had added a prefect’s distinction to his family line. Symmachus was still a Roman senator, a senior priest whose sway extended from Vestal virgins to omens of war, a man of wealth in gold and land to protect against what sometimes seemed the end of his world. On this troubled Roman morning, four centuries after the death of the first Caesar, he had greater anxieties to express in his letter to his brother than a mass immolation of twenty-nine men from the cold, dank north.
How much did he or anyone really care how the gladiators had died? They were captives condemned to appear in the Colosseum arena. He could see down to their last killing place from up here at his Caelian home. Their miserable heads had been unable to save their miserable necks. Those same heads had decided to break those necks. How had they done it? Who could tell?
He could see silvery streaks in the southern Roman sky, the first morning lights on the high arches built by great warrior emperors of old. This was only the second day of his games, only the start of his latest personal offering for the entertainment of the Roman people. Yesterday had been disastrous but there was much more still to come. Above the soaring marble was the fading array of stars at dawn. Symmachus, like many in uncertain times, found much contemplative comfort in the stars.
His first thought? No one had directly killed himself. Not even the toughest gladiator is tough enough to be his own strangler. All human grip fails before the body is dead. Second thought. Maybe the Saxons had a leader, an elected executioner or one chosen by lot, who stood behind each prisoner in line, choking the breath of one, then another, breaking the bones, stopping the blood. That was possible but not likely. Leadership of such an enterprising kind would surely have been detected—and corrected—before they arrived.
Third thought. Maybe the twenty-nine formed themselves up in pairs, as they should have done in the arena on this second day of his spectacular. Fourteen against fourteen. Or rather fourteen for fourteen, since they seemed to have agreed on their suicide, with one of them just watching from the wooden beams or wet brick walls. Then fifteen left in the cells, seven on seven, with a different one watching. Seven against seven, the most mythical numbers. Strangling a strong man is hard work, even if the strong man wants to die. It could have taken thirty seconds before each death came.
Then four on four, with no one sitting out the show. It was strange how odd numbers eventually divided into even. The chance of a three-on-three fight, once one of the most prized gifts for the Emperor and people of Rome, was gone for ever. In the cramped, low-ceilinged darkness, the blue-fleshed faces would by now have had hardly a place to fall. Then two on two. Another great spectacle he had paid for. The finest moment of a double duel in the arena brought two simultaneous sets of dying eyes, one to remind the spectator that he was still alive, the second to tell him that one day he too had death to face. But this time the eyes had been seen by no one.
Till one on one, the final, but a pathetic parody of what he had hoped to offer to the puppet-man on the imperial balcony. A gladiator who died in the dark need never have lived. Symmachus was this week celebrating the latest promotion of his son, a boy who one day might follow his father to the rank of consul. It was important to remind everyone that, while Christianity had its place in this new Rome, there were old Roman traditions which needed patronage and protection too.
And after that? Surely at least one of the men would be left at the end. That was the troubling question, though none of his household slaves had mentioned a survivor. Had the Saxons cast lots for who that survivor would be? Had they decided for themselves who would be the one to fall, feeling the other’s thumbs at his throat, and who would be left alive as the last gladiator in this shameful night’s work? Symmachus was someone who liked a long, tendentious, apparently logical, mildly melodramatic question like that. He was famed throughout the city as a man of many words. Had one of the bastards fixed to cheat his fellows? Had the last man held some last hope of escape, of fighting in the games, of pretending to die, of avoiding the hooks of the body-clearers, of hiding in the wagon that, every hour or so during a week like this, hauled the corpses outside the walls? Who could tell?
Perhaps the two last determined men, knowledgeable in all the ways to kill and be killed, could have arranged that each died almost simultaneously. Possible again. But only in the old story books. Symmachus was beginning to be impatient with the whole bloody business. Words piled upon words until even the man who could demand that listeners hear him was doubtful whether he wanted an audience.
It was a brutal truth that the awakening