Darkness and Dawn; Or, Scenes in the Days of Nero. An Historic Tale

by F. W. Farrar

  CHAPTER XXXI

  _THE INTERIOR OF A SLAVE-PRISON_

  ‘Magnam rem sine dubio fecerimus si servulum infelicem in ergastulum miserimus.’--SENECA, _De Ira_, iii. 32.

  We left Onesimus in a prison cell among the substructions of thePalatine, his back sore with scourging, his soul torn with shame andindignation. He cursed his folly, without repenting of his faults.Once more he had thrown away every element of prosperity; and hismanner of looking on life was so entirely selfish that the source ofhis self-reproach was rather the shipwreck of his chances than themoral instability which had led to it. No news reached him in hisprison. It was not till his liberation that he learnt the fate ofBritannicus--a fate which, if he had continued steadfast in duty,he might have averted or delayed.

  He knew that he could not be restored to his trusted position as the_servus a purpura_ of the Empress. He would lose that, and with itlose all the flattery and gain which accrued so easily to the higherslaves of Cæsar’s household. He doubted whether even Acte’s influencecould screen him from the consequences of an offense so deadly asmisconduct in the august presence of the imperial divinity. But hefelt a desperate pride and a morbid shame which made him determineto conceal all traces of himself and his misdemeanour from Acte’sknowledge.

  His behaviour in prison was refractory, for the jailer had taken astrong dislike to him, and delighted to humiliate this bird of finerfeather than those who usually came under his charge. He was quitesafe in doing so. There was little compassion in the breast of thesteward who managed the slaves, and rarely, if ever, did he takethe trouble to inquire how a prisoner was getting on, or whetherhe was alive or dead. Amid blows and insults the heavy days draggedon, and seemed interminable to the poor Phrygian youth. In thedesperation of idleness he tried to find some amusement fromscribbling with a nail on the plaster wall of his dungeon, and oneday, thinking of the drunken bout which had reduced him to thislevel, he defiantly scrawled ‘When I am set free, I will drain everywine-jar in the house.’[68]

  ‘Will you?’ said the jailer, who had entered unobserved as hefinished his scrawl. ‘You won’t have a chance just yet, my finefriend.’

  He gave Onesimus a blow with his whip, which made him writhe withanguish, and said, ‘Thank Anubis, I shall be rid of you to-day. Youare sent to the slave-prison (_ergastulum_).’

  ‘Who sends me?’ asked Onesimus shuddering.

  ‘What’s that to you, _crucisalus_?’ said the slave, dealing himanother blow. ‘Oh you writhe, do you, my fine bird? What will youdo when the bulls’ hides rattle the _cottabus_ on your shoulders?’

  What he said was true. That evening Onesimus was loaded with fettersand taken into the country.

  The sight of slaves in chains being hurried off to punishment was fartoo familiar to excite much notice in the streets of Rome, but it wastorture to Onesimus to be thus exposed to the gaze and jeers of idlepassers-by. He felt a painful dread lest any of his friends--aboveall, lest Acte, or Pudens, or Titus, or Junia--should see him in thiswretched and disgraceful guise. No one, however, saw him, and thatevening he was safely lodged in the slave-jail attached to Nero’svilla at Antium.

  The slave-jail was a perfect hell on earth. It presented thespectacle of human beings in their worst aspect, entirely dehumanisedby despair and misery. The slaves who were imprisoned there weretreated like wild beasts, and became no better than wild beasts,with less of rage but more of malice and foulness. They worked inchains, and were driven to work with scourges. Torture and starvationwere the sole methods of government. They were a herd of wretchesclothed in rags, ill-fed, untended, unpitied, passing their daysand nights under filthy conditions and in pestilential air, hatefuland hating one another. Some of them were men half mad and whollyuntameable, who could not be depended upon except so far as they werecoerced by violence. Others were pure barbarians, only speaking a fewwords of any intelligible language, and therefore useless in a town_familia_. Others were criminals only exempted from death because ofthe value of their labour. Some of them knew that there was littlechance of their being taken thence, unless it were to be crucified,and that when death released them, their bodies would be carelesslyflung to rot amid the seething abominations of the corpse-pits(_puticuli_) like that which Onesimus had once seen in Rome nearthe Esquiline hill.

  The only slaves who retained any vestige of decency and self-respectin these seething masses of human misery and degradation, were thosewho found themselves denizens of an _ergastulum_ for a short period,at the caprice of a master or mistress. The experience was soterrible that it cowed the most contumacious into trembling servility.A few came there for no real fault, who were far less guilty ofany misdoing than the owners who subjected them to this dreadedpunishment. Sometimes a page or favourite who had been tempted tospeak pertly in consequence of too much petting, or a youth who hadbeen goaded into rebellion by the intolerable tyranny of a freedman,or a slave whose blood had been turned into flame by some atrociouswrong, learnt forever the hopelessness of his condition, and theabjectness of his servitude, by being sent there for a week or evenfor a month. Emerging from that den of despair, a human being feltthe conviction enter like iron into his soul, that slaves were notmen, and had none of the rights of men; and that, unless they wishedto throw away their lives altogether, no complaisance to an ownercould be too abject, and nothing must be considered criminal whichan owner required of his human chattel.

  Oaths, and curses, and the lowest abysses of vileness in humanconduct, and that blackness of darkness which follows the extinctionof the last spark of humanity in the soul of man, and the clankingof fetters all day long, and the shrieks of the tortured, and theyelling of the scourged, and jests more horrible than weeping, andthe manifold leprosies of all moral and physical disease--all thisOnesimus had to witness, and had to endure, in the slave-jail atAntium. We have read what prisons were before the days of Howard;what penal settlements and convict ships were forty years ago; butmen trained in the most rudimentary principles of Christianity couldnot, under the worst circumstances, sink quite so low, or be sowholly beyond the sphere of pity, as the offscourings of paganslavery, the scum of the misery of all nations, huddled into theseabodes of death.

  It was soon whispered among the wretches there that the handsomePhrygian youth had been high in place among the attendants ofOctavia, and had been favoured and promoted by Acte. In theirbaseness they exulted at his humiliation, and the extent to whichhis soul revolted from their malice happily helped to preservehim from the contamination which would have been involved in theirfriendliness. He lived from day to day in the sullen silence of anindomitable purpose. He did not know how long he would be kept there.He waited a month, sustained by fierce resolve, and then determinedthat, at the cost of life itself--even if it should end in feedingthe crows upon a cross--he would attempt his escape. He knew that hehad many foes among the struggling envies of Cæsar’s palace, and hesuspected that Nero’s _dispensator_ purposely intended to forget him,and to leave him there to rot.

  After a few days he was left comparatively unmolested by hiscompanions in misfortune, for there was no amusement to be got outof his savage taciturnity. Once, when one of the ruder denizens hadtried to molest him, Onesimus struck him so furious a blow with hisfettered hands that he was looked upon as dangerous. As he glancedround at the degraded ugliness of the majority of the prisoners,whose faces only varied in degrees of villany, he had less than nodesire to join their society. He saw but one on whom he could lookwith any pleasure, or from whom he could hope for any sympathy. Thiswas a young man of honest and pleasant countenance, whose name, helearnt, was Hermas, and who bore himself under his misfortunes withsweetness and dignity. Like Onesimus, he seemed to find his onlyrelief in the strenuous performance of the tasks allotted to him bythe _ergastularius_, and as Onesimus watched him he felt convincedthat he was there for no crime, and also that he was a Christian.

  His conjecture was turned into a certainty by an accident. One day,as Hermas was digging the stubb
orn soil, something dropped out of thefold of his dress. He snatched it up hastily and in confusion, andseemed relieved when he noticed that no one but Onesimus had seenhim. But the quick eyes of the Phrygian had observed that what hedropped was a tiny fish rudely fashioned in glass, on which hadbeen painted the one word C?C?C, ‘May’st thou save!’ They were notuncommon among Christians, and some of them have been found in thecatacombs.

  The fettered slaves were taken out in gangs every morning under theguardianship of armed drivers, whose whips enforced diligence, andwhose swords protected them from assault. The refractory were soonreduced to discipline, but those who worked diligently were not oftentormented. In the various works of tillage, Onesimus, hampered thoughhe was by his intolerable manacles, found some outlet for his pent-upanguish and hard remorse. But no one can live without some humanintercourse, and one day, when Hermas was working beside him, andnone of the rest were near, Onesimus glanced up at him and said theone word ?????, ‘Fish.’

  Quick as lightning came the whispered answer ????????, ‘a littlefish,’ by which Hermas meant to imply that he was a weak and humbleChristian.

  ‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Are you one of us?’

  Onesimus sadly shook his head. ‘Perhaps I was, or might have been, aChristian once.’

  ‘Have you been illuminated and fallen away, unhappy one?’

  ‘Ask me no more,’ said Onesimus. ‘I am a lost wretch.’

  ‘The Good Shepherd,’ said Hermas, ‘came to seek and save the lost.’

  ‘It[*9] is vain to talk to me,’ said Onesimus. ‘Tell me of yourself.You are not a criminal, or a madman, or a barbarian, like these.’

  ‘Talk not of them with scorn,’ said Hermas. ‘Are they worse than theharlots and sinners whose friend Christ was?’

  Onesimus would not talk of Christ. ‘I never saw you,’ he said, ‘inCæsar’s household.’

  ‘No,’ said Hermas; ‘I was the slave of Pedanius Secundus, the cityPræfect. He has no rustic prison, and, being a friend of Nero, heasked his freedman to get leave to send me here.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘He bade me do what I could not do. Seeing that I was strongand vigorous, he wanted me to marry one of his slave-girls. Theworshippers of the gods know nothing of what marriage means. Iloved a Christian maiden; I refused the union with a girl of evilcharacter, who, being beautiful, had been the victim of Pedaniusalready. He scourged me; he tortured me; he threatened to fling meinto his fish-ponds; and, when I still held out, he sent me here.’

  ‘Is there no escape from this horrible place?’

  ‘When you go in again, look round you, and see how hopeless is theattempt. The ergastulum is half subterranean. Its windows are narrow,and high above our heads. If we attempted to escape, the least noisewould wake the jailers, and some of these around us would be thefirst to curry favour by helping to defeat our plan.’

  ‘Is bribery useless?’

  ‘Even if I could get the money, I do not think it right to bribe.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I think that Christ means us to endure all He sends. Itrust in Him. If He sends me hunger, I bear it. If He casts me down,I believe that in due time He will lift me up. If He suffers me to besent to prison, I try to turn the prison into His Temple. But I feelsure that He will deliver me--and that soon.’

  Hermas was not wrong. His incarceration was short, because he wasone of the few slaves in the family of Pedanius whom the Præfectcould trust. Pedanius was a man whose cruel indifference andimperious temper made him more than usually obnoxious to his slaves.He lived in terror of them, and tried to avert danger by inspiringterror into them. He could not do without Hermas. He did not knowthat he was a Christian; but he knew that in other houses besideshis own there had recently sprung up a class of slaves honest andfaithful, and that Hermas was one of them. He married his slave-girlto another youth, and Hermas was set free.

  And then Onesimus, seeing that every other method of escape wasimpossible, tried the effects of bribery. He had managed, thoughwith infinite difficulty, to conceal the gold piece which Octaviahad given him, and he had noted that one of the underlings of theprison-keeper seemed to be not unkindly disposed to him. He was a mannamed Croto, chosen for the office because his stalwart proportionsand herculean strength would make him formidable to any unruly slave;but there was a certain rough honesty and kindliness in his facewhich made Onesimus think that he might move his compassion.

  Seizing his opportunity one day, as Croto passed him in the field, heboldly whispered,

  ‘Croto, if I gave you an _aureus_, would you swear to let me have achance to escape?’

  Croto looked long and hard at his beautiful face, and walked onwithout a word. But as he returned from his rounds he touched him,and said,

  ‘Yes; I pity you. You are not like the rest of this herd of swine.Such things as an escape have happened ere now, and no one is thewiser. Masters don’t care to ask many questions.’

  ‘I will trust you,’ said Onesimus; and tearing the _aureus_ from thehem of his dark serge dress, he slipped it into Croto’s hand.

  ‘Keep awake to-night. The two who guard the door shall be drunk.Get up a disturbance after midnight; be near the door, and when itopens-- The plan may fail, but it is the only chance I can give you.’

  Onesimus pointed in despair to the fetters on his feet.

  ‘When a slave has shown himself quiet and reasonable, they aresometimes removed; and yours shall be. But the manacles on yourwrists must remain; they are never removed at night.’

  Onesimus made his plans. At the dead of night, when the prisonwas plunged in darkness--for oil was much too dear to be wastedon chained slaves--he raised a great outcry, as though he had beensuddenly attacked. The slaves sprang up from their pallets, heavyand confused with sleep. But Onesimus had all his senses on the alert,and by violently pushing one, jostling against another, and strikinga third, he soon had the whole place in a tumultuous uproar of rageand panic, during which he quietly crouched down beside the door. Itwas opened by the sleepy and drunken guardians, to find the cause ofthe disturbance, and, before they could be reinforced by their moresober colleagues, Onesimus dashed the lamp out of the hand of oneof them, tripped up the other, and ran to hide himself in the darkcorner of an adjacent street, behind the Temple of Fortune. Hesucceeded, though with great pain, in forcing one hand free fromthe chain; and hiding the other, with the manacle which dangled fromit, under his sleeve, he determined, at the first gleam of light, totry and find some assembly of Christians. He knew that it was theircustom to meet at earliest dawn in secret places--generally, ifpossible, the secluded entrance to some sand-pit--to sing hymns toChrist as God, before the slumbering pagan population began to stir.He was fortunate, for soon, with senses preternaturally quickenedby peril, he heard at no great distance the faint sound of a hymn.He made his way towards the spot, and concealed himself till thecongregation should break up. He knew that the last to leave wasgenerally the Presbyter; and, waiting for him, he called him as hepassed.

  The Presbyter started, and said, ‘Who goes there?’

  Onesimus stepped out of his hiding-place, and said, ‘Oh, for the loveof Christ, help me to get free from this chain!’

  ‘Thou usest the language of a Christian,’ said the Presbyter, ‘butthy chain would prove thee a fugitive or a criminal.’

  ‘I have erred,’ said Onesimus; ‘but I am not a criminal.’

  The Presbyter fixed on him a long and troubled look.

  ‘Thou hast adjured me,’ he said, ‘in the name of Christ: I dare notrefuse. But neither must I, for thy sake, imperil the brethren. Hidethyself again. I will send my son, Stephanus, to file thy chain, andthen thou must depart. If thou hast erred, may Christ forgive thee!’

  It was not many minutes before the young man came, and, without aword, filed the thinnest part of the manacle till Onesimus was free.

  ‘Peace be with thee, brother!’ said Stephanus. ‘Men begin to stir.Thou wilt be in danger. We dare no
t shelter thee. It were best tohide here till nightfall. Food shall be brought thee.’

  Onesimus saw that the advice was good. Search might be made forhim; but Antium was a large place, and the sand-pit might escapeobservation. It was so; bread and water were left near hishiding-place, and at night he made his way to Gaieta, which wastwenty miles away from Antium.