The career of Spartacus, an ambiguous and shadowy one, is used throughout the book as a mirror held up both to Stothard’s experience of cancer, and to the patterns that constitute, or so he suggests, not only Roman civilisation, but the very fabric of human society itself. ‘We can see both the terrorisers from ancient Rome,’ he writes, ‘and those who were terrorised and how sometimes, very often, they were the same people.’ The question of who Spartacus might truly have been, whether an idealist or a warlord, a liberator or a thug, is never, in Stothard’s book, a merely antiquarian issue.
Not that he ever provides a definitive answer. As befits the Oxford classics scholar that he once was, Stothard is all too well aware just how light an imprint Spartacus has left behind. A recurrent companion on his trips is a Korean teacher, forever poring over her maps or poking around obscure huddles of ancient brickwork, and coming to the stern conclusion that gazeteers which claim to detail how the war might have been fought are not always to be trusted.
Neither, of course, are the historians and poets whose writings provide us with what outline of Spartacus’s career we do have, and who, in Stothard’s book, are sometimes no less companionable, and often infinitely better sketched, than the flesh-and-blood Italians hawking for business outside the Colosseum, or sat watching Juventus in their bars.
Horace, Plutarch and Pliny all join Stothard on the road, but his real affection, and the full reserves of his talent for characterisation, are lavished on dimmer figures from the classical pantheon: Symmachus and Statius, Florus and Frontinus. It’s a rare travel book that makes the pages of a Silver Age Latin poet seem a more attractive destination than Pompeii.
‘Like the best newspaper stories,’ Stothard acknowledges, ‘the gladiator is always a “story” ’. He speaks with the insight into how journalism functions that comes naturally to an erstwhile editor of The Times — nor, it seems, has Stothard’s more recent stewardship of the TLS served to atrophy his newspaperman’s instincts.
The life that he gives us of Spartacus is indeed, on one level, a ‘story’: one complete with breakouts, battles, and the pecking of eyeballs by hungry crows. Yet it is also, proudly and defiantly, the very opposite of journalism: a fusion of memoir, history and travelogue that is unlike any other book ever written about Spartacus, and all the more precious for being quite so unexpected.
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