The last major poet of classical Rome, the Egyptian sycophant known as Claudian, arrived from Alexandria at around the same time as the suicidal Saxons. He had a more vicious verbal wit than the senator whose pagan cause and windbag reputation he shared. The name of Spartacus appears just once in his works—in his abuse of one of Symmachus’ contacts at the Eastern court, a Christian fanatic who deploys ‘racks and whips, chains and windowless cells, before putting his opponents to the sword: cruciatus, vincla, tenebras Dilato mucrone parat’. This cruel Rufinus, claims Claudian, kills wives and children, tortures small boys in front of their fathers and ‘labours to exterminate the very race and name of Rome: exscindere cives Funditus et nomen gentis delere laborat’. Compared with this monster, screams the poet, ‘even you, Spartacus, will be seen as a do-nothing: iam Spartace segnis Rufino collatus eris’.
There would have been some clever Greek slave to whom Symmachus dictated his letters. A trained secretary would probably have known of Spartacus—either as a problematic question like Augustine’s, perhaps as a noble hero or a biographical model, or very likely as another bit of human trash.
Those who still enjoyed the poetry of Horace, that genius son of a freed slave in the time of the first Emperor, Augustus, might also remember the slave general. Horace used the name only twice—the first with the boldness of youth in possibly his earliest poem, written thirty years after the revolt, in which ‘fierce Spartacus: Spartacus acer’ is high on the list of fresh horrors for Rome. In a much later poem Horace wonders with a weary hauteur (or is that a mock-weary hauteur?) whether there is any decent wine left in the cellar from the years before Spartacus and his bands passed by. That question was posed about fifty years after the event. The wit even then still held a chill.
Four centuries later, Symmachus had a good knowledge of what had happened in all the slave wars against Rome, in the Spartacus scandal and in two earlier revolts that had raged through Sicily. He knew of their colourful leaders and chaotic ends. There had once been another mass suicide, not unlike his own disaster, when a bunch of defeated Sicilian slaves, thirty years before Spartacus, had been brought to Rome as lion-kill and had preferred to kill each other. On that occasion, as he recalled, the last slave left standing had succeeded also in killing himself. Perhaps that was what had happened to his Saxons. It was hard to say.
Symmachus had read studiously in the Histories of Livy, that master of Roman morality in the age of the first Emperor. His library held all the other books by writers who had told of the Spartacus War, as well as poems dedicated to himself by his friends. The Riddle of the Number Three was not perhaps the finest work by the imperial tutor, Ausonius of Bordeaux: ‘Three the Graces, Three the Fates, Three the corners of Sicily …’, a wearying list of Threes including ‘Three the pairs of Thracians at Rome’s first gladiatorial games’. But the poem was his and his alone. There was true magic in the number three. Or perhaps there was. Anyway, how else would any books survive if rich men did not inspire and keep them?
The Christians, of course, had made their own Trinity an obsession. They fought bitterly between themselves over how their Father, Son and Holy Spirit could fit together to make a single object of worship. These were absurd disputes. But why did any man’s belief in the unknowable have to stop the public practice of what Romans had always known? Bishop Ambrose, the local strongman whom Symmachus hated with a passion, was a master bully in the battles to show that three could be equally one. Ambrose had a peculiar policy too of persuading women to remain virgins. None of Symmachus’ fellow priests of Vesta, at any time in a thousand years, had ever suggested that what was right for Vestal virgins was necessary for everyone else. The Bishop was both brutal and absurd.
Romans were inexorably losing the battle for their own minds. There had been many self-styled historians since the first century BC but not much history in Latin worth the name since the death of Tacitus three hundred years before. The real Roman historians had always written to praise Rome, to prove that Rome was just as smart as any foreigner as well as infinitely mightier. All their Roman wars had been just wars. In recent years there had been ever less to praise and to rival. The diplomat and politician who mourned his lost gladiators that morning in AD 393 was a proud scholar—with not quite enough to be proud about.
He made no claims himself to be historian or poet. There had never been any Roman poets of real account, none born here in this city. The Romans made other peoples’ poets their subjects—and then gave them their subjects. That was the mission—to turn Neapolitans, Greeks, Spaniards and Gauls into artists of Rome. Symmachus himself was more a man of rhetoric, of words that led to actions, a man well known in his time as a physical protector of Roman values, most gloriously and dangerously against Christians who a few years before had torn the goddess Victory out of his Senate chamber. A mob had smashed her statue to pieces. That was one of his finest rhetorical hours.
He had, however, edited some of the texts of Livy, the books that began with the myths of Troy and Romulus and went on to tell of the great Republican days before the generals began fighting among themselves, before the common people got above themselves and everything went wrong. ‘One history’ was to be preferred to any ‘one god’. He could relate the history of Rome from before there were emperors, from before there was an empire, from before his society, as he saw it, had been suffused by the peculiar imaginations of Greeks and Jews, gladiators and other slaves from everywhere on earth. He had read many fine words—as well as speaking and writing some of the weariest words to have survived for us from the whole of the ancient world.
How exactly did his Saxons die? Where? Was it under this street, where the sun rises every day over the Colosseum to form sickle-shaped shadows on holding pens and cells? Was it in the larger of the semi-excavated rooms, the one where the sewer smell also rises? Take away the pink drinking-straws and Red Bull cans. Imagine the place as it once was, dark, piled with corpses, cloacal then as now.
Via Sacra, Rome
These are the first days on my Spartacus Road. This is where an English newspaperman, after four decades of interrupted love for the language of ancient Rome, tries to understand what he has sometimes glimpsed. I could have chosen the roads of many different men, Hannibal or a Caesar, Horace or a Symmachus. But Spartacus has got the call. He has form. He has worked for me before, in pictures and in words, not always when or how I was expecting him, but reliably enough over the years for this to be his journey as well as mine.
First there was the film. In the 1960s Spartacus was there for everyone, even on the wall of our Essex school science room where the light of only improving films was shone. Through toxic whiffs of sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide and whatever our sixth-form manufacturers of hallucinogens were cooking up that week there emerged the words ‘SPARTACUS, the most spectacular movie ever made’, Kirk Douglas, pathfinder for the liberating power of Christ, his face projected over equations of organic chemistry, the famous dimple on his chin dipping up and down like a lightpen over the formulae for oxides on the wall.
The second engagement was in the shabbier classics classrooms, with a smaller scholastic band. Spartacus was then a reduced figure in the massive sweep of Roman history, a rebel nuisance in others’ careers. The third time was just before I became a student at Oxford—through the enthusiasm of an eccentric Italian milk-salesman, pursuing the ghosts of classical heroes on the shores of Lake Como. These Como months were the high point of my life as a Latinist. For years texts had poured into my seventeen-year-old brain and stayed there, a help not just in passing exams but in promoting a peculiar innocence that I might be with Rome’s writers and fighters myself, a witness to what I was reading. Like many gifts, I barely knew I had it till it was gone. Neither the naivety nor the receptive memory for Roman detail survived much beyond my eighteenth birthday.
The last and least expected