The Spartacus Road by Peter Stothard

Author:Peter Stothard [STOTHARD, PETER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781468301588
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2012-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

He wrote on other subjects which scholars have reconstructed from the first discoveries at this palatial seaside villa. Much effort has been devoted to explaining his charred thoughts on sound and meaning in language, most of it proving Philodemus’s mediocrity more than his magic. But there might yet be much more still in this library, if it were to be excavated fully from above – with appropriate compensation, of course, to the tomato-growers and dog-breeders, the carnation-sellers and car-washers, the fortunate apartment dwellers who enjoy the view enjoyed once by Caesar and Horace.

There could be the lost Spartacus books of Livy, of Sallust, of Caecilius from Calacte, whose history of slave wars was known in antiquity but is not known even in fragments to us. There could be lost history plays by Naevius about the myth of Rome’s foundation; or tragi-comedies by Andronicus, a Greek who took the Roman name Livius and wrote so many of the city’s dramatic spectacles, not ones respectable enough to survive, in which riotous sex and nudity were forever at the service of carefully selected plots.

There might be unknown works by Nero’s ‘arbiter of taste’, Petronius, who set near here his Trimalchio’s Feast, a literary masterpiece of exotic sexuality, cookery and cemetery architecture. This is a place of many philosophies, many philosophers and much teaching. Petronius wrote that it was human fear which created the gods: ‘Primos in orbe deos fecit timor.’ Statius of Naples borrowed the same line and gave it to his giant boxer of the Thebaid, Capaneus. Giambattista Vico of Naples, summarising human knowledge 1,700 years later, borrowed it again. In the pigeonholes of the Villa dei Papiri there could be thousands of clues to lost corners of antiquity, from stratagems for invading Thrace to the prettiest pantomimes of subversion.

There might even be more Statius. The poet of Naples was thirty-four years old when ‘Vesuvius rolled out its fires’. Sixteen years on, back home beneath the ‘broken anger’ of the mountain, he pondered whether future generations would ever believe that whole cities, an ancestral landscape, lay dead beneath its recovered fields. He was expressing, with all the particular power of this place, that most common fear of those obsessed by decline and fall, the fear of being obliterated even in others’ minds.

In the library there could be more examples of the poetry that, in Statius’ case, albeit from only two tattered manuscripts, disproved his prophetic gloom. There could be unknown early works by the writer who pioneered our most spectacular poetry of doomsday and the designer swimming pool. Or, as opponents of the excavation counter, there could be just more music criticism from Philodemus.

Archaeologists will not know unless they are allowed to look. The case for delay is that the techniques needed for safely reclaiming and reading the fragile rolls improve every year. The case for excavating soon is that Vesuvius is set to erupt again and that, while the businesses above may be insured against their losses, the unclaimed library of Piso would be lost without any hope of recompense.

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