Carlo is not even working as a tourist attraction here this afternoon. His costume is in a bundle by his side. Instead, he is ‘managing’ Cristina. He points her out on the other side of the metal-packed roundabout. She is not a Roman matron or slave girl or gladiator’s moll. She ‘does La Vergine’, he says proudly. She does, indeed, ‘do La Vergine’ —as though it were her profession from birth. It is impossible to describe Cristina precisely. Her skin colour is hidden. It may be close to that of Carlo or closer to mine. She is a human statue, her face made up in gold, with a golden halo of hair and a casino-gold dress which falls in folds past the platform on which she stands, mute, still, moving only as often as her most determined photographers and her own comfort require.
It is apparently more difficult to play the part of a marble mother of Christ than that of a walking, posing, preening gladiator. Virgin Marys bring in more money. It takes more skill, he says, to keep silent, to make only the smallest and sharpest moves, to signal some special dissent when a trussed-and-belted Dane has all his daughters photographed with La Vergine and leaves behind one of those half-breed silver-bronze coins that are less than your advertised euro-tariff.
Carlo says that Cristina is the mistress of her art. Or I think that is what he says. His language cocktail of Neapolitan and New Yorker, a verbal Negroni of bitters and gin, gets cloudier as he moves from being glum to being angry. It seems that he ought rightly, at this very moment, to be a professional gladiator here in Rome, slapping his sword and shield for the Colosseum trade at the same time as Cristina is keeping the pilgrims content. But he is prevented by the trades union, or some unofficial form of it.
There is, it seems, a tighter ‘syndicalist’ grip on Thracianswordsmen jobs than there is on Virgin Marys or Mary Magdalenes or mute mimics of St Francis. A few weeks before, when he had tried to adopt a regular place in a busy sidestreet, the broadswords had become raw swords, the fake weapons all too realistically deployed. He had needed some sort of document that he did not have. Somehow the immigrant Poles and Roms could disregard this requirement. It was a disgrace. Many Italians agreed with him. There had been a nasty rape and murder of a respectable woman by Romanians—and talk of sending every one of them back home. But it had not seemed to make any difference on the ground where Carlo stood.
The night on which he found himself clashing with a legionary, blunt blade to blunt blade, was when he felt all too much like the gladiators of his home town 2,000 years before. The better he understood the part the more irritating it was to be banned from playing it. He takes off his helmet and offers his unofficial ‘Spartacus tour’. From Vestal virgins to Pompey’s theatre, from the slave markets to the Appian Way, he will explain it all.
We agree terms. He points my head up towards the Colosseum’s high arches with an air of proprietorship, like an estate agent selling a historic house. ‘This is where Spartacus would have fought and died if he had not escaped from Capua first.’ Every time one of his sentences contains the word ‘Capua’, the stress falls on that word. ‘Spartacus was a Thracian, a tough northern Greek, trained as a Roman soldier, punished for crimes that no one knows and retrained as a gladiator. In the lifetime of Julius Caesar and Cicero, he led the first slave armies to threaten Rome itself.’ Carlo stops and places a leather-bound thumb next to his forefinger. ‘He came this close to walking down this road as a conquering hero. From Capua he could have changed the world.’
Two Americans who have heard the last part of this peroration applaud. They want to know whether this is the place for paying respects to the latest gladiator movie, the one starring the Australian actor Russell Crowe. Carlo nods. The great stone bowl of the Roman Colosseum, one of the best-known monuments in the world, was not open for business until 150 years after Spartacus’ death. But it is perfect for imagining the arena of the second century AD, with Crowe the hero in single combat against a deranged Emperor Commodus.
The stones in front of us were dragged into place by thousands of men enslaved after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. They heralded the high days of gladiator displays, not their low BC beginning. The underground cells of the Ludus Magnus, which the Gladiatori guests can see from their expensive balconies, were built even later than that. They are not at all useful for pitting Kirk Douglas against Laurence Olivier in their battles of the first century BC. But that does not matter to Carlo. On the Spartacus Road I should stop worrying. ‘Time here is nothing.’
So where do I want to go? This guide has not been here for long enough to get dogmatic. We trudge up to the far end of the Republican Forum, a half a mile or so away, past the house of the Vergine of ancient Rome, the Vestals, with a quick glance at the flowers that are still left every week or so on the supposed site of Julius Caesar’s cremation. That had been a ‘good death’ for him, for anyone, stabbed on the nearby theatre steps, sudden, almost painless, spectacularly public.
At the furthest point, a Chicago tour group with its professorial guide is looking up to the hall where the Senate met, up to the Rostra platform where politicians fought for votes, up to the temple treasuries where the profits of victory were dedicated and kept safe. But we two, Carlo proudly points out, have our own agenda, looking down through the metal grilles which break up the slabs of the Forum floor.
There were twelve shafts down to this old Roman underworld. We can still see the edges of the stones which, in every sense, were the manhole covers. Some of the shafts descend more than ten feet below and archaeologists a hundred years ago found remains of wooden lifts which once brought men or animals, like hot food on a dumb waiter, to the waiting sands. Underneath the grey leaves and trees, beneath a layer of smashed mirrors which bizarrely has replaced the grass in patches, perhaps for some stunt of art, there is a chamber with ceilings high enough for men to swing a sword in practice play and for beasts to be stacked one above the other as in a giant pet-shop. All the performers could be kept there secure and ready until the winch was ready to hoist them into the arena above. Under here, says Carlo, is the short tunnel to Rome’s first prison, the torture chambers (he says the words with a dark flourish), the places of secret execution. There is a church of the saintly Joseph, the Vergine’s husband, on top of it now. Somewhere near by, Spartacus was sold as a slave in the Roman markets. His wife is said to have remembered miraculous snakes curling round his head as he slept. This was also where Spartacus ‘might have died in combat’—if he had been good enough to be worth bringing back here from Capua and if he had not escaped first.
There are many ‘ifs’ in this history, not all of them made clear by the guides or their books. Only one major structure in the Forum has been standing since the time that Spartacus ‘might have died’ here—Rome’s public record office, the Tabularium, which lowers above its visitors like luxury caves in a rock face. Nothing at all has survived above ground of the first arenas in Rome where gladiators fought. The seats for the spectators were not even meant to survive. They were set up and taken down for every separate display. To have a permanent place might have offended some of the gods and ancestors whose spirits, like everything else, became heavily concentrated here in the centre of the centre of the world.
Once merely a swamp between the hills of Rome, the Forum was drained early in the City’s history so that it could be a place of trade, worship, politics, sacrifice. It was built and rebuilt by Roman emperors, foreign emperors and triumphant popes. Its ground is still drained by the same Cloaca Maxima, the primal sewer that made it habitable 2,500 years ago. This was the site of gladiatorial fights in the city for at least two centuries: a modern equivalent in London, a very tepid approximation, would be to have heavyweight boxing, Victorian-style without Queensberry Rules, between Westminster Abbey and Whitehall.
What exactly