It is, in part, a journalist's notebook because I have been a journalist . . . for most of my life. It is a classicist's notebook, written with half-remembered classical books for company, because while reporting politics in our own time I have so often felt the beat of ancient feet. It is also the notebook of a grateful survivor: ten years ago I was given no chance of living to make this trip and, on the Spartacus Road, the memory of a fatal cancer and its fortuitous cure shone stronger, and stranger, than I ever thought it could.
It is indeed "a classicist's notebook," and it is this, more than anything, that makes it so extraordinary. Time, for Stothard, is less a linear continuum than a palimpsest.
In Capua, the town where Spartacus and his cohorts escaped from their gladiatorial school, he meets a Korean couple traveling the Spartacus Road for reasons of their own. The maps they have are Korean atlases of Italy. Stothard's is a page out of the Barrington Classical Atlas, "which shows only what its editors know was there in ancient times." We shortly learn that Orkney was known to the ancients only from reports by a fellow named Pytheas, who hailed from what is now Marseilles. Paris, we discover, didn't exist. It was just a place called Lutetia, which later became a favorite home of the Emperor Julian, who tried to turn the clock back and make Rome pagan again. Within a page we have touched base with Martial, author of saucy epigrams, and are traveling with Horace along the Appian Way to Brindisi.
None of this is digressive. Every detail is integrated into an elaborate counterpoint that reminds one of nothing so much as a well-made fugue, with voices entering and leaving, mixing and matching.
