The names of the emperor in charge of Rome changed at challenging speeds. Thugs and puppets of thugs followed one after the other. Six years before, Symmachus had made a dangerous mistake, publicly pouring one of his famous speeches of praise over a chancer who did not last very long. He hoped not to make that kind of error again.
The best emperor now would have been the very general who had captured those Saxons. His name was Arbogast. He had the military muscle but was not acceptable to traditionalists despite being a great traditionalist in spirit. So Arbogast had chosen someone else instead, a Christian schoolteacher called Eugenius who had a reputation for tolerance but little else to recommend his claim.
Why had so much of the world ended with the so-called Christ, with that bureaucratic incompetent Pontius Pilate and the gullible fools who felt guilt for a single crucifixion? A good ruler was now a Christian who tolerated the gods that had made Rome great, one who respected the pieties that had thrived before. A bad ruler was a Christian fanatic who did not tolerate even variants in his own religion.
Symmachus remembered the Eastern Emperor Theodosius from when he had been a lucky Spanish warlord, one of dozens: now the man sat on a throne at Constantinople as a single God’s sole representative on earth. To see him or to see any emperor ever in Rome itself was a rarity. Even the Western court was up north in Milan. The last time that Theodosius came to the one-time capital of the world was when he wanted support from the Senate for the succession plans of his son. That was how Symmachus had won his consulship, a victory showing either that his virtue and status were suddenly and inexplicably valued (he tried to be as optimistic as he could) or how unpredictable all life had become.
During his long career, Symmachus had spent millions on Colosseum shows. The family coffers had given up uncountable gold to gladiator-sellers, some of the greediest tradesmen he had ever known. He had imported bears and paid extortionate customs duty. He had paraded leopards, antelopes and lions, recalling those great occasions of the past when the Emperor himself might shoot arrows at the neck of an ostrich and when prisoners fought wild boars and wild witches as well as each other.
In his short time as city prefect he had written to his masters in rapture at the arrival in Rome of real prisoners-of-war for a real gladiatorial event. ‘No longer are we inferior to our ancient fathers. We have seen for ourselves the sights we used to read about with wonder: the lines of the conquered led in chains, those pallid faces that were once so savage, their hands, well used to barbarian arms, trembling at our gladiators’ weapons.’ The amphitheatre stars on that occasion were the descendants of exotic nomads from the eastern deserts, famed for a thousand years for deploying women among men as archers and cavalry. This week Symmachus had planned to be more modest. This present time was one when modesty was often best.
He had bought some splendid wolfhounds from Scotland: all Rome viewed them with wonder, he told his brother. But this present show was still indisputably inferior to the great examples of antiquity. A dog was still only a dog. ‘I did not want my display to be in any way gaudy,’ he wrote. He had an extravagant present ready for when Emperor Eugenius made his appearance before the crowd, a carved ivory panel in two hinged parts each framed in gold. But excessive theatrical extravagance might easily be frowned upon. Even tolerant Christians could be sensitive on the subject of the Colosseum, believing, quite wrongly, that thousands of their saintly predecessors had perished on its sands. It was probably only a few hundred, Syrians, Jews and other riff-raff, vicious, violent people for the most part, their agonies and their numbers absurdly exaggerated by religious propaganda.
The loss of twenty-nine Saxons, a few hours before their lives were meant to be lost, had depleted his cast. There was no denying that. The alien soldiers had broken every rule of their Roman school. Trained to kill in front of the country’s sharpest critics, in the open, on stage, they had chosen to die the unseen death of the untrained criminal. He could hardly fault his own behaviour. Even if he had paid the best of private guards, how could such reckless idiots have been stopped?
Who needed gladiators anyway? There was still time to add more African animals to his games. He would do it without a thought. He had spent too much effort already on this wretched gang of slaves who were, he told his brother with a flourish, ‘worse than Spartacus’. There was nothing for it but to use the experience to make himself a better person. The philosopher Socrates, one of the better Greeks, had taught that disappointment brought its own rewards, that failure to attain one’s cherished goals was a lesson in itself. Failure was so often better than success; there was so much more to be learnt from it.
Via San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome
The name of Spartacus sounds Roman enough to those who are tourists in the city today. But the distinguished senator of the elderly Roman Empire was using a word which his fellow countrymen had for centuries preferred not to use.
In many places, including here among the rats and recycling bins of the Via San Giovanni, Spartacus is among the most notable Romans of them all. In these streets around the Colosseum you can pay fifteen euros to a bulky Bulgarian in fancy dress and have your photograph taken with him. Behind the doorways of the bookshops where the tourist-trapping gladiators lurk, you can buy videos of Kirk Douglas in the role, DVDs of mini-series successors to what was once the most expensive film ever made, postcards of Spartacus from Pompeii, even the ‘worse than Spartacus’ letter of Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, though not translated into English.
To the ancient Romans who lived in 73 BC, and their successors for a long time after 73 BC, the rebel leader of the Third Servile War, as modern history books describe him, was an obscenity. To Marcus Tullius Cicero, greatest orator of the Republic, his name was a term of abuse to be used against the vilest of state enemies. To such as Symmachus he stood somewhere between gnawing vermin and rotting vegetables, to use the classification of the natural world that was then so fashionably a part of an intellectual gentleman’s life.
The events of that year in which a Thracian slave had escaped from his gladiator school, turned on his captors, summoned a rebellion and terrorised the country were a blot on the city record even though the battles had taken place almost half a millennium before. A very successful Socrates might be able to explain it away as a lesson for the future. But Symmachus and his fellow scholars were not easily philosophical about memories such as this. Socratic justifications were little comfort. Slave wars formed a nasty part of Rome’s narrative of decline—when greed overcame good sense, when the governable became ungovernable, when the rubbish rose to the top of the heap. Rome was rotten from the inside. There was always the nagging question of when the rot had set in. The Spartacus devastation (only the common herd called it a war) was one such moment.
This bit of the city is almost awake now. The actor gladiators are creeping out of their beds. The plastic gladiators are back on the tables where they will best attract trade. The light rises on Colosseum ivy, its ancestors as old as the Colosseum itself, and over a mass of Mexican daisies, more recent arrivals who love the same damp, dark places as the rats. A coffee outside the creperia costs fifty cents, the pre-tourist, beggars’ breakfast rate.
Why bother with the mind of Symmachus? Not because of his charm or his prose but because he was here close to the end. Within a few decades of the date of his letter to his brother the Western Roman Empire would be dead. The homes on the Caelian Hill would be razed by Visigoths from around the forests where Spartacus was born. Gladiatorial games would not just be difficult, they would be history. Symmachus does not know any of that. Characters from the past never know what is coming next. That is one of the less acknowledged reasons we like to think about them.
Today’s traveller