Mirrors Read Free Page A

both, from slaves and from domestic animals alike. The intention of nature therefore is to make the bodies of freemen and of slaves different.

WATCH OUT FOR THE BACCHANALIA

    In Rome, too, slaves were the sunshine of every day and the nightmare of every night. Slavery stoked the empire’s life and its dread.
    Even the festivals of Bacchus posed a threat to stability, for in those nighttime rituals the walls between slaves and freemen crumbled, and wine allowed what the law forbade.
    Subversion of hierarchies by lust: those wild parties, people suspected, people knew, had a lot to do with the slave rebellions breaking out in the south.
    Rome did not stand put. A couple of centuries before Christ, the Senate accused the followers of Bacchus of conspiracy and gave two consuls, Marcius and Postumius, the mission to extinguish all trace of bacchanalia throughout the empire.
    Blood flowed.
    The bacchanalia continued. The rebellions as well.

ANTIOCHUS, KING

    His owner used him as a jester at banquets.
    The slave Eunus would fall into a trance and blow smoke and fire and prophecies from his mouth, sending the guests into fits of laughter.
    At one of these big feasts, after the flames and delight died down, Eunus announced solemnly that he would be king of this island. Sicily will be my kingdom, he said, and he said he was told as much by the goddess Demeter.
    The guests laughed so hard they rolled on the floor.
    A few days later, the slave was king. Breathing fire from his mouth, he slit his owner’s throat and unleashed a slave revolt that engulfed towns and cities and crowned Eunus king of Sicily.
    The island was ablaze. The new monarch ordered all prisoners killed, save those who knew how to make weapons, and he issued coins stamped with his new name, Antiochus, beside the likeness of the goddess Demeter.
    The reign of Antiochus lasted four years, until he was betrayed, deposed, jailed, and devoured by fleas.
    Half a century later, Spartacus arrived.

SPARTACUS

    He was a shepherd in Thrace, a soldier in Rome, a gladiator in Capua.
    He was a runaway slave who fled armed with a kitchen knife. At the foot of Mount Vesuvius he formed a legion of free men that gathered strength as it roamed and soon became an army.
    One morning, seventy-two years before Christ, Rome trembled. The Romans saw that Spartacus’s men saw them. At dawn, the crests of the hills bristled with lances. From there, the slaves contemplated the temples and palaces of the queen of cities, the one that had the world at her beck and call: within reach, touched by their eyes, was the place that had torn from them their names and their memories, and had turned them into things to be lashed, sold, or given away.
    The attack did not occur. It was never known if Spartacus and his troops had really been that close, or if they were specters conjured up by fear. For at the time, the slaves were humiliating the legions on the battlefield.
    A guerrilla war kept the empire on edge for two years.
    Then the rebels, surrounded in the mountains of Lucania, were at last annihilated by soldiers recruited in Rome under a young officer named Julius Caesar.
    When Spartacus saw he was beaten, he leaned against his horse, head to head, his forehead pressed to the forelock of his companion in every battle. He thrust in the long blade and sliced open the horse’s heart.
    Crucifixions lined the entire Via Appia from Capua all the way to Rome.

ROME TOUR

    Manual labor was for slaves.
    Thought not enslaved, day laborers and artisans practiced “vile occupations.” Cicero, who practiced the noble occupation of usury, defined the labor hierarchy:
    “The least honorable are all that serve gluttony, like sausage-makers, chicken and fishmongers, cooks . . . ”
    The most respectable Romans were warlords, who rarely went into battle, and landowners, who rarely set foot on their land.
    To be poor was an unpardonable crime. To dissemble their disgrace, the formerly wealthy went into debt