A few weeks ago, I read something that haunted me for days. It was a passage from this book:
I found it in one of those takeaway libraries you see in residential streets, in supermarkets or train stations, where people leave books they don’t want anymore. I love to be surprised by a book by a writer I never heard of. This book I picked up because I like historical novels and I am interested in ancient Rome.
The passage in question illustrates how a novel can make the past alive for us, and conjure it up in the most visceral way. Of course, we will never know how accurate this depiction of life on a Roman galley is, without any doubt the author had to make up many details to fill in the large gaps in our knowledge about those faraway times. I imagine the life of a galley slave wasn’t a favorite subject of Roman authors.
The book is a whodunnit, and Gordianus, a.k.a. the Finder, is sailing on a galley. He decides to take a look below-decks, where he encounters the harrowing spectacle of slaves being worked to death.
“I stepped through the portal down the steps. Instantly a wave of heat struck my face, warm and stifling like rising steam. I heard the dull, throbbing boom of the drum and the shuffling of many men. I smelled them before I saw them. All the odours that the human body can produce were concentrated in that airless space, rising up like the breath of demons from a sulphurous pit. I took another step downward into a world of living corpses, thinking that the Jaws of Hades could hardly lead to a more terrible netherworld than this.
The place was like a long, narrow cavern. Here and there lamps suspended cast a lurid glow across the pale naked bodies of the oarsmen. At first, in the dimness, I saw only an impression of rippling movements everywhere around me, like the writhing of maggots. As my eyes adjusted I slowly made out the details.
Down the centre ran a narrow aisle, like a suspended bridge. On each side slaves were stationed in tiers, three-deep. Those against the hull were able to sit at their stations, expending the least effort to power their shorter oars. Those in the middle were seated higher and had to brace themselves against a footrest with each backward pull, then rise from their seats to push the oars forward. Those on the aisle were the unlucky ones. They ran the catwalk, shuffling back and forth to push their oars in a great circle, stretching onto their toes at full extension, then kneeling and lurching forward to lift the oars out of the water. Each slave was manacled to his oar by a rusted link of chain around one wrist.
There were hundreds of them packed tightly together, rubbing against one another as they pushed and pulled and strained. I thought of cattle or goats pressed together in a pen, but animals move without purpose. Here each man was like a tiny wheel in a vast, constantly moving machine. The drumbeat drove them.
I turned and saw the drummer at the stern, on a low bench that must have been just below my bed. His legs were spread wide apart. His knees grasped the rim of a low, broad drum. (...) He sat with his eyes closed and a faint smile on his face as if he were dreaming, but the rhythm never faltered.
Beside him stood another man, dressed like a soldier and holding a long whip in his right hand. He glowered when he saw me, then snapped his whip in the air as if to impress me. The slaves nearest him shuddered and some of them groaned, as if a wave of pain passed over them.
I pressed the blanket over my mouth and nose to filter the stench. Where the lamplight penetrated through the maze of catwalks and manacled feet, I saw that the bilge was awash with a mixture of faeces and urine and vomit and bits of rotting food.
How could they bear it? Did they grow used to it over time, the way men grow accustomed to the clasp of manacles? Or did it never cease to nauseate them, just as it sickened me?
There are religious sects in the East which postulate abodes of eternal punishment for the shades of the wicked. Their gods are not content to see a man suffer in this world, but will pursue him with fire and torment into the next. Of this I know nothing, but I do know that if a place of damnation exists here on earth, it is surely within the bowels of a Roman galley, where men are forced to work their bodies to ruination amid the stench of their own sweat and vomit and excreta, playing out their anguish against the maniacal, never-ending pulse of the drum. To become mere fuel, to be consumed, drained and discarded with hardly a thought, is surely as horrible a damnation as any god could contrive.
They say most men die after three or four years in the galleys; the lucky ones die before that. A captive or a slave guilty of theft, if given the choice will go the mines or become a gladiator before he will serve in the galleys. Of all the cruel sentences of death that can be meted out to man, slavery in the galley is considered by all to be the cruelest. Death comes, but not before the last measure of strength has been squeezed from a man's body and the last of his dignity has been annihilated by suffering and despair.
Men become monsters in the galleys. Some ship captains never rotate the positions of the slaves;
A man who rows for day after day, month after month on the same side, especially if he runs the catwalk develops great muscles on one side of his body out of all proportion to the other. At the same time his flesh grows pale as a fish from lack of sunlight. If such a man escapes, he is easily detected by his deformity. Once in the Subura I saw a troop of private guards dragging such a man from a brothel, naked and screaming. Eco, then only a boy, had been horrified by the slave's appearance, and then, after I had explained it, had begun to weep.
(…)
Suddenly I had seen enough; I hurried towards the exit. Ahead of me, illuminated by lamplight, as if on a stage, I saw the whipmaster look towards me and nod knowingly. Even at a distance I could see the disdain on his face. This was his domain; I was an intruder, a curiosity seeker. too soft and too pampered for such a place. He cracked his whip over his head for my benefit and smiled at the wave of groans that passed through the slaves at his feet.
I put one foot on the stair and would have followed with the other, but a face in the lamplight stopped me. The boy must have reminded me of Eco, and that was why I noticed his face among all the others. His place was in the highest tier among the aisle. When he turned to look at me a beam of moonlight fell upon one cheek, casting his face half in moonlight, half in lamplight, split between pale blue and orange. Despite his massive shoulders and chest, he was hardly more than a child. Along with the filth that smudged his cheeks and the suffering in his eyes, there was a strange look of innocence about him. His dark features were strikingly handsome, his prominent nose and mouth and wide dark eyes suggestive of the East. As I studied him in the moonlight, he dared to look back at me and then actually smiled - a sad, pathetic smile, tentative and fearful. I looked back at the slave boy. I tried to smile in return, but could not.”
It is hard for us to understand the Roman way of thinking because we are steeped in Christianity, even as atheists. We believe that every human being has an intrinsic value. Not so the Romans.
For the ancient Romans, Christianity was absurd, even reprehensible: the idea that a criminal, nailed to a cross, the ultimate punishment for slaves, would be elevated to become a god was incomprehensible. It flew in the face of everything they deemed natural and just.
The ethos of the Romans was power. The powerful had intrinsic value and rights and were deserving of all good things. Slaves were devoid of rights and deserving of nothing. They didn’t own anything, not even their own body. For the Romans, extreme inequality was natural and just.
A master had absolute authority over his slaves. He could use his them in any way that pleased him. In this book, Crassus, the richest man in Rome, has decided to kill all ninety-nine slaves of one of his villas because a family member has been killed there. Indeed, according to an ancient Roman law all slaves in a household were put to death if one of their masters was killed, but even without this law, Crassus would have been within his rights to kill any or all of his slaves.
Like the slave master, a father had absolute authority over the other members of his family. For example, a baby had to be recognized by the father before it was allowed to live. If not, the infant was laid down in the wilderness to die.
Likewise, a general had absolute authority over his soldiers. The same Crassus had a group of his own soldiers decimated because they fled in the face of the enemy. From every group of ten soldiers, one was drawn by lot to be clubbed to death by his fellow soldiers—pretty brutal stuff.
We tend to think of our 21st-century way of being as the right and natural one, and therefore all right-minded people in other cultures and other centuries essentially thought like we do. This isn’t the case, as Roman history shows us. If you find fault with our Western societies, you are right. Still, if you compare us to the Romans or Babylonians, or any other culture present or past, Western culture does a pretty good job.