On the road

The spoilsport did not spread as much grief as he had hoped. Il Laureato had not been my own choice but that of the magazine editor (not this magazine) who had commissioned the trip. The time spent while the policeman decided what to do next was time for what turned out to be useful thought. All sorts of sense and nonsense mashed itself together, the present problems of a journalist, the past stories of a classicist. Via Appia, Quo Vadis? Alfa Romeo, Cicero? St Peter, Garibaldi, Mussolini? Spartacus, the gladiator who fought the might of Rome, the man in the Kirk Douglas movie? Hadn’t his slave army ended up on the longest recorded line of crosses here? By the time that a new car had arrived, anonymous, unattractive to romantics and wholly conforming to European law, I was already on what I came to call the Spartacus Road.

Thus, a year later, I was back in Italy, 130 miles further south in the town once called Capua, now Santa Maria Capua Vetere, the place where the line of crucifixions and the story of Spartacus had begun. I had a new writing commission for a book about Roman history, the first attempt of a former newspaper editor and student of Latin to discover how those two lives fitted together. The aim was to write each night what had happened along the routes followed by Spartacus and his army – and if I did not know, or no one knew, to write the best version that I could.

This ambition took me some distance from any conventional history book. In the 1st century BC, Capua was the second city of the greatest power on earth. In the summer of 2008 a dustbowl of discount stores and graffiti became an early reminder of the difficulty of recreating the past by visiting it. In front of its ancient amphitheatre were tourists in T-shirts watching dormant dogs and old men in Scuba Club caps playing cards on waxy tablecloths. This was where Spartacus and his gladiators were supposed to have escaped in 73BC, beginning what became two years of a peculiar terror for the people of Italy. Never before had Rome been threatened from the lowest places that its citizens could imagine, from inside its own entertainment factories, kitchens, laundries and fields. The slaves’ purpose was incomprehensible. Their success in defeating so many Roman armies was something no one had ever known. So, how had it all begun? We were obviously not the first visitors to ask.

“Spartacus went that way,” said the older of two men flipping aces closest to the ticket kiosk, gesticulating into town with the conviction of an actor in a long-running play, seriously, as though the gladiator’s notorious escape had only just occurred – and as if the police and a sole newspaper reporter had only just arrived on the scene, late (what could one expect?) but not too late. His younger colleague vehemently disagreed, directing a thin finger in the opposite direction, back through the arches of the ruined arena where the Romans once watched gladiators die. From the way that the two men spoke, mechanically with a scripted tone, it seemed that they always disagreed; and that, whether their subject was the latest game in town or the oldest one, they would always see their hands a different way. From the rest of the card players, there was no response at all.

Dispute and silence, even with the help of other writers’ books, remained the most constant companions over the rest of a road that stretches through 2,000 miles of Italian countryside into 2,000 years of world history. We do not know much of who Spartacus was or what he did, only that, from Sicily to the Alps and from Paris to Hollywood, he has never wholly left the modern mind. I sometimes wondered why I was following so elusive a target. I could have chosen other subjects, the poet Horace whose story I had been pursuing in the Alfa Romeo, the dictator Julius Caesar, the Emperor Augustus, the type of great men that classicists often keep in their minds whether they are editing newspapers, running businesses or being politicians themselves.

Was Spartacus himself a great man? Many have argued so. Karl Marx considered him one of his favourite heroes. Garibaldi made him his model for liberating Italy. For Voltaire, the Spartacus war was the only “just war” in history. Kirk Douglas and other film-makers and novelists later agreed, attributing to him their own passions, seeing seeds of the future that may or may not have been there, creating myths on an epic scale. For the Romans of the time he was wholly different: Spartacus and his men would have seemed to many like Muslim market traders turning suddenly into terrorists on the streets of Manchester.

Spartacus had a peculiar place in my own mind, neither as a good man or a bad – first from when I was at school learning Latin, afterwards from when I was an 18-year-old newcomer in Italy, from Oxford days, from newspaper offices, from suddenly having to deal with a fatal cancer and its then only faintly plausible cure. As a character he had 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 a journey of memories as well as discoveries.

The film was there in both 1968 and 2008. Spartacus had been on a wall in our science labs. Through toxic whiffs of sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide and whatever our sixth- form manufacturers of hallucinogens were cooking up that week, there had emerged the word SPARTACUS, the most spectacular movie ever made, with Kirk Douglas, his face projected over equations of organic chemistry, the famous dimple on his chin dipping up and down over formulae for oxides. Forty years later, in the Ferrari-and-balsamic town of Modena near the scene of one of Spartacus’s mostly unrecorded victories, I watched it again with a DVD-seller from Cracow.

My second meeting was in book-lined classics classrooms. 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 around Lake Como. These Como months were the high point of my life as a Latinist. For years texts had poured into my 17-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. Like many gifts, I barely knew I had it until it was gone.

The last and least expected sight of Spartacus was three decades of journalism later, when I had for some years been the editor of this newspaper, suddenly suffering occasional vicious pain, suddenly discovering that I was as good as dead from a cancer, then looking to see if somehow that sentence might not be true. There are moments of horror when a mind does not choose its subject, when the subject chooses its mind. Spartacus had not just a faded childhood claim on this trip but a vivid adult one.

Back at home there were hundreds of books that could have been useful guides. With me in Capua there were just a few, mostly soft-backed classroom texts with the name P. M. Stothard and an Essex address in tumbling Quink-blue italics on the inside cover. In 1964, the year of Harold Wilson’s first Labour government, Spartacus, the bit-part player of Roman history, was not only the easiest ancient to imagine but also the closest thing to a socialist. A green-backed edition of Parallel Lives by the Greek biographer Plutarch is still my reminder of that time – with greasy-thumbed pages in the place where the slave leader rose and fell.

Other books in the road-bag dated from the early Seventies. One of these, a book of Latin letters, was smeared with the wine and butter of the milkman who sold his wares in the Italian hotel where I worked for a while. Others seem little-read. I appeared to have stopped studying the classics at the very moment I was supposed to be studying them the most. At Oxford there was so much else – bad theatre and worse newspapers. Spartacus was one of many ancients who could no longer compete. Returning to old books was like returning to old friends. They had changed, both the familiar and those less read. Lovers of Roman poetry gain different perspectives throughout their lives. The young may have the better facility in reading the language, the greater naivety of imagination; the older have the better experience of what the writers were writing about.

Next to some history books there were texts by the poet known as Statius, a favourite of one of my schoolmasters, long derided by the English as a toady to tyrants, too glossy, dangerously continental, but, in truth, a weirdly wonderful poet, a life-giver to dead things, a word-spinning prophet of the end of the world. Each of his pages, purchased dearly when money was short, had emerged from my old undergraduate boxes fresh, stiff and never-been-read. But Statius became a dominant character on the Spartacus Road. He was not a contemporary of Spartacus. He never wrote directly about him. He is not always easy to read at all. From a new beginning in the cancer days of a decade ago, his strange metallic verse did much to get me to Capua.

Ways of dying enter everyone’s mind at some point. But they were a Roman obsession which no traveller on this road could avoid confronting. Ways of dying are just some of the concerns that are a mystery to those who study only when young. Capua and its neighbouring towns contained not only most of Italy’s theatres of death but most of the philosophical schools which taught that death should not be feared. My own fiercest confrontations with Roman rituals, beliefs and much else besides came all in that year, a decade ago, when I was forced away from my newspaper office, aged 49, by a killing cancer.

Most of those memories afterwards vanished or faded. But a few seemed on this road to be redefined by distance, like the foundations of a destroyed house when seen from the air above a field. Pain, it seemed, produces permanent pictures which pleasure cannot. Chemotherapy pulls different images from parts of life that the patient has long forgotten, from places he can barely remember and books he thought he had never opened. My mind in the days of cancer-cure would swing back and forward, forward and back, day after day, a slow-mo version of what happens fast when a man is about to lose his head or see a sword slit his stomach. How the Romans died became then a bigger part of their story for me than how they lived. The virtue of a “good death”, or so the Romans thought, gave greatness to any man. That thought had meant nothing in the classroom or the chemistry lab.

Curiosity about dying in its most visible forms is curiously addictive. Most of us face death before we are ready to face it. A fatal disease is a gladiatorial experience of a kind, a final appointment with a certain end at a near but not quite specified time. Cancer patients learn of bodily organs that they never knew they had, body parts that will kill them nonetheless. We imagine those deadly pieces of ourselves. We sometimes call them names. Classicists are often cheerfully attracted to ancient villains. Both when I had a cancer and when it was destroyed, I called it Nero.

There was the simpler lure of the gladiator for this story too, not just the ghost of Spartacus but the men and women like him who made the spectaculars of Rome. Like all the best newspaper stories, the gladiator is always a “story”. The idea has been squeezed into so many clich?s, rung in, wrung out, alien to modern experiences, but somehow, once approached, perversely close.

Santa Maria Capua Vetere was a place where thousands of gladiators were given a good death and many more Romans contemplated their own. The stones felt hot and hostile for those first steps on that first afternoon, beneath the rising scent of crushed mint and cooking oil. Bushes bulged with tiny birds taking shelter from the sun – with shiny pigeons, brown moths and ragged butterflies. All that, if nothing else, was little different, even the card players agreed, from the sights of 2,000 years before.

Their amphitheatre, like a broken bowl, was not itself the one where Spartacus fought but a successor, five circles of walls built by emperors on the same site and pillaged for bricks by everyone who lived after the fall of Rome. Just 2 of its 80 arches were upright, protecting water tanks no longer able to turn the sands into a lake, with no more lifts to haul men, animals and mountain scenery from the underground store, only holes where in the Twenties Mussolini’s men found bones of antelope, elephant and tiger. There seemed to be an age of time that first afternoon by the amphitheatre kiosk. All the other tourists had fled from this place that was like a seaside resort where even the sea had fled. With so many miles still to be travelled, it was meaningless to count the passing of the hours at all.

On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey through Ancient Italy by Peter Stothard is published by HarperPress on January 21