Lucian’s afternoon seems the more diverting occasion. While Martial’s pair slug it out for survival, Lucian’s hero, Sisennes, aims for stardom. With his eye fixed on the 10,000-drachma prize, he jumps out of the crowd, takes the wager, declines his safety helmet, suffers a setback with an undercut to the back of his thighs and triumphs with a straight stroke through the gladiator’s chest. Whether this gallant blade or the plodding Old and Reliable were the normal fare, no one knows. Some men fought by the dictata, the numbered rules of the training school. Others aimed for stardom. There was probably a broad variety of death on offer. Few in Rome ever cared if public slogging and killing interfered with politics or trade. The gladiatorial contest was bigger than both, a burial ritual that became an entertainment, an entertainment that became a vote-buyer and a vote-buyer that became big business, a business which eventually summed up so much of what was Rome and what Rome would be remembered for.
There is a buzz of hip-hop from Carlo’s belt. He finds his mobile phone and frowns. Cristina has a problem. Or rather Cristina’s co-worker, Carlo’s second street artist, so far unmentioned, has a problem. This man is a Tutankhamun, a task of imitation that is easier, it seems, than being a Vergine. This new King Tut, despite relying on a fixed face mask and needing no powers of mime or movement, has been doing well—too well. Euros have been showering on this ill-sited symbol of pre-Roman Egypt. The official gladiators’ shopsteward has been getting nasty. The Mummy was getting nervous. What was Carlo going to do about it?
First, he was going to get rid of his new client. There was no time for Pompey’s theatre or an explanation of why precisely we should go there. You should get down the Appian Way to Capua Vetere (he stressed the ‘Vetere’ even more strongly than the ‘Capua’), the place from which Spartacus escaped, the place from which the road can truly begin.
Via Appia, Ariccia
I am trying to stop the car as little as possible before Capua. The old Appian Way sets off like a stone arrow and makes the ancient route as easy as an autostrada. One by one the sites drop away in the rear-view mirror. Pine trees and monuments flash by. The Scipios’ tombs, rock-cut reminders of glories from before Spartacus was born, are a smudge of mural rouge. The memorial to Paezusa, beautician to the court of Nero, is the merest blur. The tower of Caecilia Metella, daughter-in-law of the richest man of the Republic, is a shadow. Far back in the distance is the Quo Vadis church and its marble footprints where St Peter saw his disembodied Christ. Just as ignored are the niches of brick where statues once contemplated the embalming of Priscilla, a former slave whose ‘modesty remained constant as her fortunes rose’. Priscilla and her mourning husband had a good friend in their poet Statius.
The bridge here at Ariccia is a traditional first resting place for travellers hurrying out of Rome. There is a domed church modelled on the Pantheon. There is a palace packed with the blackest paintings from the blood-and-suffering age of the Roman baroque. The surrounding monuments are of Julius Caesar’s family. For a traveller on the Spartacus Road the main attractions are memorials to the Horatii and Curatii brothers, Roman boys and plucky locals who fought a famous triple duel, three-on-three, in the mystic era of the Roman kings.
That ‘Horatii vs Curatii’ affair is the first spectacular of this route, a tiny spark from 250 years before the building of the Appian Way, one of the earliest Italian contests that became more than just a street brawl, a match with some significance and rules, one that meant more than other fights because so many people kept talking about it. No one knows the names of anyone who was there.
Even Livy, Symmachus’ favourite traditionalist, was not certain which side had been Roman and which for the opposition. There were no written records. The Romans later pretended that invading Gauls had burnt the sources of their history; but the words had probably never existed. No one knows if King Tullus of Rome was there or whether he ever was Rome’s king. But for centuries afterwards there were tourists at competing sites who felt that they had seen the fight between the three brothers Horatius and the three brothers Curatius. Their lives were somehow linked to its outcome.
What, more exactly, is a spectacular? From the Latin, spectaculum, say the dictionaries, a show, usually a public show, an attraction for the ‘carnal mind’, an object of public curiosity, contempt or admiration, often of blood but also of song and dance. Or a means of seeing, an opportunity, a front-row seat, a window, a mirror. Or a standard, an example to watchers of an event. Or an example to be passed on to those who have not seen it for themselves, a means of teaching, to angels or to men. Or a sport, a wonder, one of the world’s seven wonders, and then, descending blearily down columns of tiny type, something about phonographs and railway engines, a transparent shield over the eyes of certain snakes.
Spectacular is to spectacle as oracular is to oracle—lavish, amazing, strikingly large, addicted, addicted to spectacle. It is a figure in painted marble up high somewhere, the higher the better, in the oculatissimo, the place with specularity, the place most eyed. It is a play with actors in boots and ballooning togas, declaiming to the sound of flutes, disappearing down trapdoors, rope-walking between columns of red stone while scented water-streams cool and decorate the aisles. Roman politicians long distrusted the theatre; the first building in stone had been dismantled under pressure from the pious while it was still under construction; an edict was passed that one should never be built; but permanent theatre eventually came to Rome.
Castel Gandolfo, Ariccia
Or, to choose another version of the spectacular, the performing poet’s version: semi-naked women who knew nothing of the sword condemned to fight one another in the arena, Amazons playing the parts of men, pregnant dancers from the kingdom of Croesus, fist-fighting dwarfs, local girls for sale, corpse-eating cranes, dough-balls raining down on to the crowd. These sights are the first on the Spartacus Road to come from the pen of Statius. One of his own showiest triumphs took place a few hundred yards from here up the hill towards the summer house of the Pope.
The poet was writing about the Kalends of December, spectacular, bizarre games given by the homicidal god-emperor Domitian, successor and brother to the Emperor Titus who inaugurated the Colosseum. Killer freaks, killer birds, food to die for: ‘amid noise and novelties a spectator’s pleasure flies lightly by: hos inter fremitus novosque luxus Spectandi levis effugit voluptas’. There were Roman spectaculars for all tastes and times. The Alban literary games, celebrated here 1,900 years ago beside the mountain lake where the Pope has his holiday palace, included a poetry competition, an opportunity for highbrow performance art. On a games day the competitors would vie to impress the Emperor with carefully prepared improvisations while the statesmen of Rome would picnic on the steep banks of the crater, each with one eye on the poet and the other (their better eye if they were wise) on their master.
The less literary spectaculars were always the more popular. Statius was one of the grateful winners of that Alban poetry prize but gives us a vivid version of a people’s stadium show, a lower-brow occasion for birds to eat small but expensive men, for men to eat small but expensive cakes, and for slave-women of the Black Sea to take up gladiatorial