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The tour-guides are arriving now with their Evianpowered flocks, tiny children from China, towering women from the Caribbean, Americans, Africans. Coffee prices are advancing with the clock. Two linen-clad English tourists, with a BlackBerry and an 1890 Baedeker and little enthusiasm for using either, ask the way to the ‘Ludus Magnus, the school where the gladiators were trained’. The husband, in beige from brow to shoelace, begins the question and his wife, grey from head to sock, completes it, making ‘school’ sound ‘preparatory’ and ‘trained’ as though it means the same as ‘taught their manners’. The Ludus that they are looking for is a small semi-excavated arena with a surround of prisoner pens, standing now a dirty yard of pavement from where they ask their question. In one sense this was both a ‘prep school’ and a ‘finishing school’; doubtless there were bad pupils who were ‘worse than Spartacus’ and better ones who were not.

When Symmachus used those words he was himself being a bit of an old buffer, a fish-out-of-water and proud of it, boldly but self-consciously conservative, loose-lipped in the aristocratic tradition, like Prince Philip speaking of the ‘slittyeyed’ or George V saying ‘Bugger Bognor.’ It was a spit-away, throw-away line. But let us imagine Symmachus without company outside his house that morning as he first formed the syllables in his mind.

How did others see Spartacus in the crumbling years of the Western Empire? Traditional Romans had tried to forget him—and had mostly succeeded. Christians might have been sympathetic in their own rebel days but to the new masters of the world a rebel was the worst of creatures. Symmachus’ wayward protégé St Augustine, sitting in Africa twenty years later contemplating the City of God and his own shift to faith from reason, wondered how so ‘very few’ gladiators had come to lead ‘such a very large number of fierce and cruel slaves’. Augustine’s Spanish disciple Orosius wrote of ‘the universal fear’ that Spartacus had spread among the civilised people of his time. Historians had found no satisfactory explanation for the defeats of Roman armies and the devastation of so many Italian cities. Neither had the new princes of the Church.

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 sight of Spartacus was thirty years of journalism later, when I had become a newspaper editor, suffering occasional but peculiarly vicious pain, then suddenly discovering that I was as good as dead from a cancer, then looking to see if somehow that sentence might not be true. In those days many characters from my past reappeared in different lights, the fictional and historical as well as the personal. There are moments of horror when a mind does not choose its subject, when the subject chooses its mind. Spartacus has not just a faded childhood claim on this trip but a vivid adult one.

Back at home there are hundreds of books that might be useful guides for the coming weeks. With me here beside the gift shop at the Roman Forum there are just a few. Most are 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, in our patch of brick-box houses, the closest thing to a socialist. A green-backed Brentwood School edition of Parallel Lives by the Greek biographer Plutarch is my reminder now of that time—with greasy-thumbed pages in the chapter where the great slave-leader rose and fell.

Other books in the road-bag date from the early 1970s, the handwriting of their ownership inscriptions deliberately disjointed in an attempt to throw off childhood. One of these, a book of Latin letters, is still 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 at all. 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. Next to some Livy, here now with a Trinity Oxford dateline and wholly unsullied by any human hand, there is the poet known as Statius, a favourite of one of my schoolmasters, derided then in most textbooks as a ‘lackey’ and lickspittle to tyrants. Each of his pages, purchased dearly when money was short, came from my old undergraduate boxes fresh, stiff and never-been-read.

Now Statius is one of the writers who has set me on this present road. He was not a contemporary of Spartacus. He never wrote directly about him. He is not always easy to read at all. But, from a new beginning in the cancer days of about a decade ago, the strange metallic verse of Statius has done much to get me to this sewer-perfumed corner of the Forum with a plan to report on 2,000 miles of travel. Statius of Naples was a weirdly wonderful poet, a life-giver to dead things, a flatterer and inflater of the powerful, a prophet of the end of the world, a man who might lead us somehow to the end of this journey too.

But he has to share his place. There is also a brown file of extracts from Sallust, an Italian politician, historian and extortionist, probably the first to write about Spartacus in any systematic way. There are pages by Florus, a less remembered popularising hack from Africa; and some pieces by Frontinus, a military scourge of the Welsh and the literary master of his Emperor’s waterworks; photocopies too from Frontinus’ best-known protégé, the hero of the Como milk-salesman, the Pliny who is doomed always to be called ‘the Younger’. Then there are Greeks, in variously Roman garb with contrastingly Greek ambitions.

There are pictures by artists who tried to preserve their views of ancient Rome, by the eighteenth-century Venetian master Piranesi more than any other. There are disconnected words from many centuries in many styles, from Claudian, the forgotten Egyptian who hailed Spartacus as a torturer and child murderer, to Catullus of Verona, the ever popular poet who wrote on love as well as hate. Claudian wrote lengthily on warlords and briefly, bizarrely and more readably on the water inside crystal balls. Catullus wrote long poems on eastern cults and short ones on sodomy. In Symmachus’ time, as now, these and others, big and small, are the men whose minds we can summon to bring Spartacus to life.

Old books will not tell us everything. They will not even tell precisely either where or how Symmachus lost his gladiators. They do contain all sorts of other strange details—about a games promoter in the age of Nero, fifth Emperor of Rome. He too found one of his German fighters dead by his own hand before the games began, this time on the seat of the school latrine, dead from a sponge-on-a-stick that he had stuck down his throat. ‘What a brave man, well worth his chosen fate,’ remarked the philosopher who recorded the story, ‘and how boldly he would have used a sword.’

There was another suicidal gladiator from around the same time, one being drawn by cart for the morning spectacular, one who pretended to be asleep, who let his head fall low towards one of the wheels and pushed it through the spokes. Do we not see how ‘even the lowest of slaves, when pain is the spur, may rise to the moment?’ The teller of this story concludes that ‘he is a truly great man who not only orders his own death but also finds the death by which to die’.

Ways of dying were a Roman obsession which a traveller on this Spartacus Road struggles to understand but he cannot understand Rome without confronting them. Ways of dying are some of many aspects of ancient life that are a mystery to those who study only when young. My own fiercest confrontations—with Roman rituals, beliefs and much else besides—all came in that year a decade ago when I was forced away from my newspaper office, aged forty-nine, experiencing the twin peculiarities of a killing cancer and its then barely plausible cures.

Memories from that time have since then come and gone. While most have vanished and others have long ago faded, a few seem redefined now by distance, like the foundations of a destroyed house when seen from the air above a field. Pain, it seems, produces permanent pictures which pleasure cannot. Chemotherapy pulls different images from parts of life that the patient has long forgotten, from places he can scarcely 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 hang, or 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.

Was Spartacus a great man? Many have argued so. Karl Marx considered him one of his favourite heroes of all time. Garibaldi made him his model for uniting and freeing Italy. For Voltaire the Spartacus war was the only ‘just war’ in all history. Kirk Douglas and other film-makers and novelists agreed, attributing to him their own passions and ideas, seeing seeds of the future that may or may not have been there, creating myths and legends on an epic scale.

Others have either gently or violently disagreed. For Symmachus and his friends in the former capital of an empire, Spartacus was still an expletive. The only benefit in the Saxons strangling themselves was they did not do that much more dangerous thing, escape. Gladiators were there to be symbols and mirrors, symbols and mirrors of Rome itself, stage-stars, even sometimes celebrities, stage-extras if they could do nothing else. In the southern Italian city of Capua, in 73 BC, a group of them got out into the real world.

Via Labicana, Rome

Some imitations of ancient Rome are easy to see in the modern city. Around the Colosseum and the Forum they are almost everywhere. Carlo is just one of them. He is from Capua. He is six feet tall, taller in his tinny helmet, taller still if he has tied on his red-feathered crest. He is tight-wired in his thighs, thick-shouldered, dark-skinned to an intensity more southern Greek than sub-Saharan and looks in every inch what a gladiator was supposed to be when Spartacus wore his own costume-armour.

Carlo speaks twenty-first-century AD Italian and English, not first-century BC Latin and Greek. But only the most pedantic hirer of ‘photo-me fighters’ would hold that against him. His plumes are dyed in a shimmering crimson that did not feature much in the training schools of Republican Rome, more cup-cake chemical than crushed shellfish. But that is hardly Carlo’s fault. Every other hired swordsman flashing his mirrored shield for the flashing cellphones has the same fancy dress.

Carlo would rather be in Capua than where he stands now, on the pavement outside Rome’s Hotel Gladiatori. He would rather be at home than looking up at the high-priced bedroom balconies, the ones that overlook the Ludus Magnus, the school for the Roman games. Instead he is stuck here breathing sunlit dust and smog with me. In Santa Maria Capua Vetere (to give his home town its full name today) there is another Colosseum, not as big as the one we are looking at this afternoon, but the one which covers ‘the real gladiator school from which Spartacus escaped’. There are tourists there too, always a few tourists, but not enough of the sort that pay fifteen euros to be photographed. He would still prefer to be at home.

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 was the fighting like? For all the attention that the sport of the gladiators has attracted since, no contemporary accounts from the arena come even close to a sports-writer’s version of what used to happen here. The Spanish poet Martial, the man chosen to mark the opening of the Colosseum, produced a single short scene in which a pair called Old and Reliable fight to a draw in which neither dies. Lucian, a Syrian writing in Greek a few decades later, describes a more diverting day: wild beasts let loose on men in chains followed by a ‘fight-the-gladiator-and-win-a-fortune’ competition for the audience.

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.