The Ancient Ocean Blues

by Jack Mitchell

  “You’ll have to help me sew this thing on tonight,” she said, adjusting her wig. “I’ve been terrified the whole time it will fall off!”

  “Why did you pretend you don’t know Greek?” I asked.

  “Because no one notices a barbarian. Barbo indeed!” she scoffed. “I’d like to teach that Chief Overseer what it means to insult the clan of the Aemilii!”

  “Didn’t you run away from the clan of the Aemilii?” I asked. “Anyway, now that you’ve pretended not to understand anything, you’ll have to ignore everything he says. Don’t react. Don’t say anything if you can help it.”

  “I’ll try, Marcus,” she said gloomily.

  From there the days ground on. Every day was like the one before. We had nothing to look forward to. We slept in stalls hardly better than the stables. It was the same straw, stinking of people and not of mules. Homer buried his oilskin deep inside it. After the first night, we weren’t shackled while we slept or while we ate our small meal of bread and cabbage in the evening, talking with our fellow slaves in the guarded stall building. Paulla would usually slip off by herself then. Generally she had a hard time of it, since she was naturally so talkative, but she kept silent, except when we were alone. She was right about being ignored, though the other slaves were generally uninterested in us. There was a glassy look in their eyes. Many of them spoke no Greek, and none spoke Latin. They were about evenly divided between those who had been born in slavery – these were the more talkative ones – and those who had been captured in the wars. These last were mostly Thracians and Dacians, but some were from farther east, from Bithynia and Galatia.

  “Sure, I’ll tell you, boy,” one of them finally said one evening: he was a tall man, awfully thin, with a scar down his cheek. “If you’re so curious. I’m with my dad on the farm, see, and they put us in the army. King Mithridates, that was his name, but they never gave us a weapon. We walk up and down, up and down, and then my dad was killed in the big fight. And they take me, see, and put me on the ship, and then I get off that and the next thing you know I’m here. Ten years, I’ve been here. Ten years of this awful stuff.”

  “Did you ever try to get away?” I asked.

  “Get away?” he sneered. “Ah, sure, there was the time I grew wings, wasn’t there, when I flew over the mountains! When I grew scales and I swam the sea! That’s right, boy, I’m only here by choice. I want to help, you see. Help the master with his barley and his olive trees.”

  “Shut up,” said another slave. “None of that or we’ll all be punished.”

  “You shut up, you pig,” muttered the thin man, but he would say no more after that.

  Such were our companions on the plantation. In their view, there could be no escape – the very idea barely registered. They were too busy, and they were always tired. We grew like them. The weeks flowed past, and I began to think that life in Reate hadn’t been so bad. We got the planting done, toiling through the spring rain with the overseers bawling for us to hurry. Then there were the olive groves to tend, and for six days we quarried stone for an extension to Brasidas’ villa. For ourselves, we concentrated on survival. My muscles grew thick, and even Paulla began to look more like the barbarian she claimed to be. We gave up all effort at keeping clean. The Captain’s beard, which he refused to cut, even though the Chief Overseer screamed at him, grew long and incredibly bushy. He kept his faith that he would see Carthage again like a secret cache of gold in his mind. When we were alone he would talk of nothing but the sea.

  For myself, I was the hardest worker in our file. The overseers seemed to have orders to single me out – they never forgot my absurd claim to be a Roman citizen – and the only way I could escape punishment was by never giving them an excuse. My friends followed my example, and we escaped the worst of it. But they flogged some of the Galatians. One of them had a hundred lashes for stealing food, and died soon after.

  Brasidas himself we rarely saw. Occasionally he would ride through his fields, scowling, but mostly he kept to his villa. This, we learned, was down by the shore, but we never saw it, for we never left the highland or the stockade. They said he spent long evenings there, dictating to a horde of scribes and copyists. The universal opinion was that the house slaves at the villa had it easy. “Send him to the house” was the usual joke if one of us said something clever.

  Homer, meanwhile, missed the planting season altogether. From the first, he had set himself to learning the local dialect and its nasal accent. To this end, he insisted on engaging our overseers in conversation. At first they rewarded him with blows, but before long the Chief Overseer would begin his morning inspection with a chat with Homer, standing in his file. They liked the fact that he talked like them. Indeed, after a while it was impossible to get him to speak normally: even his Latin became rustic and nasal.

  “Homer,” I told him, “this is getting ridiculous. You’re not a yokel.”

  “No indeed, sir,” he replied with a slight smile.

  It was a month after our life on the plantation began, on an early April morning, when Brasidas happened to ride past us in the fields. Perhaps it was the sight of the first wildflowers in the fields, but he got off his horse close to where we working and turned to survey the rolling hills.

  “My domain,” he bellowed, holding his arms high. “The domain of a Spartan! When shall I return to you, Sparta? When shall I be restored to you?

  O men of Heracles’ unconquered race

  Take heart, for Zeus has not yet turned his face!”

  Terrific, I thought. Just what we need: a cruel landowner who thinks great thoughts.

  Then another voice spoke, no less nasal than our master’s:

  “Dread not the press of men, and do not fear:

  Let each his shield against the foeman steer

  With ruthless spirit; dying’s darksome fate

  As welcome as the sunshine estimate.”

  All of us – slaves, overseer, and landowner – spun round to look at the man who had finished Brasidas’s warlike quotation. It was, of course, Homer. For a moment we stood there frozen. It was unthinkable for a slave to address our master, and with precious little sign of deference at that. Then the overseer raised his whip.

  “No talking!” he shouted, striding toward Homer’s place in the file.

  “No! On your life, do not strike him!”

  Brasidas had grabbed the overseer’s wrist.

  “You’ll strike when you’re told to strike,” he spat out fiercely. Then he turned to Homer, disbelief in his eyes. “Where on earth did you learn those verses, slave? Are you from Laconia?”

  “Why, sir,” answered Homer brightly, dropping his shovel. “I have always enjoyed that poem – the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, is it not? Indeed yes,” he said with satisfaction. “Not quite as good as the true classic, however – how does it begin?

  “I’ll praise no man, nor his repute convey,

  Unless he’s brave amid the bloody fray.”

  Brasidas stood astonished for a moment. He seemed poised between laughter and deadly anger. At last he cleared his throat.

  “‘Nor his repute relay,’” he corrected. “But come now, answer my question. How is it that you know Tyrtaeus?”

  “I have had occasion,” said Homer judiciously, “to study that excellent poet, in my time. I have always regarded him as the Spartan Hesiod, if I may say so.”

  “Nonsense!” snorted Brasidas. “Tyrtaeus and Hesiod? Do you compare them? Tyrtaeus and that interminable old bore?” His anger welled once more.

  Keeping stock still as I was, I mentally lifted my hands to heaven in prayer. Please, Jupiter, I prayed, let Homer swallow the insult. Preserve him. Preserve us all.

  Homer stood for a moment considering. “You are right, sir,” he said finally. “The remark was ill chosen. I only meant that Hesiod has done for the other Greeks what Tyrtaeus has done for Sparta.”

  “Right!” cried Brasidas. “And look at them! That’s what happens,” he went on, “fro
m listening to those empty, blathering verses. Just what I’ve always thought. Come now,” he said, gesturing to the overseer to release Homer from the chain, “were you a poet? A rhapsode? A singer?”

  “Hardly that, sir,” said Homer with dignity. “I was, as indeed I still am, a publisher.”

  “A publisher!” cried the landowner. “Do you mean, with copyists and manuscripts and all that? Circulating books? In Athens?”

  “Certainly not, sir. In Rome.”

  “Rome!” Brasidas exclaimed. “But how did you come here?” His eyes strayed to the horizon. “In Rome, by Castor!” He bit his lip in thought. “Then you could do it, you, my slave, perhaps – perhaps…”

  “Do what exactly, sir?”

  But by that time they had passed beyond our hearing, strolling together back toward the stockade, the tall Spartan with his hands clasped behind his back and Homer gesturing amiably.

  Paulla was looking at me in disbelief, the shovel poised in her hand.

  “We’re doomed,” I whispered.

  Thus Homer’s ascendancy began. He was moved to the villa the next morning, pausing only to reclaim the oilskin from his pile of straw. We saw no more of him that spring. Yet we heard news of him from those slaves whose duties took them to the villa every so often, such as the woman who tended the pigs and sometimes led one down to the shore for slaughter.

  “Your Greek friend’s quite the darling these days, boy,” she commented one afternoon. “He’s always in with the master and those scrolls of his. Reading to him, I hear.”

  But before long they were no longer calling him “your Greek friend” or even “that wretched Athenian.”

  “New secretary’s a smooth man,” I overheard the Chief Overseer say to one of his men one day. “Promised to write me an overnight pass to the village if I sent him down some olive oil. Yes, write, like with a pen.”

  “But he was just in there with the gangs last month!” protested his companion.

  “Never you mind about that,” answered the Chief Overseer. “He’s not someone you want to cross. If he hears you talking like that, he’ll tell the master you killed his deer, or who knows what.”

  But soon even the Chief Overseer joined in the darker mutterings.

  “Our master’s bewitched,” he told the guard at the slaves’ quarters half a month later. “Who’s he to go choosing that Estate Manager as his new heir, when he’s got three sons already! And that fellow won’t remember us kindly,” he added. “Not when he was there in the fields with the rest of them.”

  As I reported all this to Paulla and the Captain, our hopes rose to ever greater heights. But somehow we never got the longed-for reassignment to the villa and its dreamed-of luxuries. We toiled on, and the moon waxed and waned, and summer was coming in, and the second month of toil was coming to an end, and still Homer sent no word. The overseers spared us the whip, for the most part, since it was known that Homer had been associated with us in the file, but even the Captain was getting worried.

  “I hope our friend is still our friend,” was his gloomy comment.

  A third month went by, mostly spent planting. By now I had given up hope of ever seeing Reate and my parents again, much less fulfilling my mission for Caesar. There was barley to seed, and then an endless field of turnips. The days grew longer and longer, and we worked from dawn to dusk.

  At last, one morning in late May, three months after the shipwreck, the guards were out in force for our dawn inspection, leaning on their spears. We stood in rows, as ever, but the command to start work never came; the overseer and the guards watched the sun rise higher.

  “He’s late!” he muttered. “Isn’t that what you’d expect?”

  Two hours later, a trumpet sounded and the door of the stockade swung in. Through the gate came four horsemen: a man in front, riding a white horse, and three scribes following.

  Homer! I shouted inwardly, for there he was on that white horse, dressed in a splendid purple shirt, his hair cut short and an eagle feather in his hand.

  “Chief Overseer!” he called as he dismounted. “I have come to take some of your slaves to the villa. I have detailed instructions,” he said, waving a scroll at the illiterate brute. “Are they ready for inspection?”

  “They are – sir,” said the Chief Overseer through clenched teeth.

  “Very good, very good. I see you are doing an excellent job overseeing,” commented Homer as he walked down the line. “Now then, to business. I require one man with a large beard.”

  “Look for yourself, Estate Manager,” replied the Chief Overseer. “The Carthaginian. As big a beard as you could ask. I didn’t let him cut it, sir.”

  “Didn’t you?” said Homer, with a severe look. “Yes, he’s exactly right. Now then, what else?” He consulted his scroll. “Hmm, I need two young men. Do you have any slaves with blond hair?”

  “Blond?”

  “Exactly so. I require one to play a barbarian slave.”

  “Well,” said the Chief Overseer with suspicion, “as you know, there’s Barbo. But he doesn’t talk.”

  “Which one is Barbo? It has been a while since I, er, since I visited the stockade.”

  Paulla stepped forward.

  “Yes. Indeed, yes,” said Homer. “A splendid fit. And that hair would make an excellent wig. Perhaps we can sell some of it afterwards. Now, lastly, we need someone for a Roman youth.”

  “If I may ask, Estate Manager, what exactly is all this for? We have the vines to prune today and I doubt if I can spare –”

  “Quiet!” barked Homer. “That is, perhaps you might be more quiet, Chief Overseer. You are disturbing my concentration.”

  He strode down the files of slaves, giving the young men a good look. By Hercules, I thought, pick me and get this outrageous act over with!

  “What about this fellow?” he said, stopping in front of me. “He’s the one who claims he’s a Roman citizen, isn’t he? How absurd. Can you imagine such a person in a toga?”

  I ground my teeth.

  “I see you’ve put him to work,” he continued. “Well done. Can’t have the slaves getting delusions of grandeur, can we? Not with the planting season only just over! Dear me!”

  I nearly reached out and took him by the neck. Homer had been living in the lap of luxury through that planting season.

  “I suppose he’ll do,” he conceded at last, flicking me with his eagle feather regretfully. “But now, we must be off. The production is tonight, you know.”

  “The production? Production of what?” asked the Chief Overseer.

  “The theatrical production, my good man,” Homer replied with some condescension. “What exactly did you think I was talking about all this time? It is my latest improvement to the culture of this uncivil region. I myself will be starring in it. It is an adaptation, I am pleased to say, written by myself, of a famous historical account. The latest developments from Rome, dramatized for the tragic stage. It is called The Conspiracy at Rome. All the local people will be attending. There is considerable excitement, I may say, since even here” – he permitted himself a final sniff – “even in these remote and unwashed regions, they have heard of the exploits of Aulus Lucinus Spurinna.”

  The Tragic Stage

  he door of the stockade shut behind us. We were suddenly in the open, and there were no chains on our legs. Counting Homer’s horse and the three horses that the scribes were riding, we even had transportation. But Homer ordered the scribes to ride well behind us, out of earshot. Soon we had passed over a rise in the land and the dreadful plantation was lost to view.

  “Well done, Homer!” I cried. “We can take the horses and ride for it!”

  “Alas, sir, if only it were that simple,” he answered with a sigh, abandoning (as I was pleased to hear) the nasal dialect. “Brasidas has several huntsmen and a pack of murderous hunting dogs. We would certainly be caught in the mountains. All this peninsula is his territory, and the only way off is by sea.” He sounded sure of it. “But
don’t worry, sir, I have thought it through quite carefully.”

  “I’m sure you have,” I said grimly. “It took you long enough. You’ve been living in luxury at the villa while we’ve been out plowing and shoveling!”

  “I appreciate that, sir, but I assure you, I too have been laboring, and it has not been altogether pleasant.”

  “Oh, yes?” exclaimed Paulla. “And what exactly have you had to put up with, besides hot baths?”

  “That madman’s literary taste!” replied Homer vehemently. “Do you have any idea, madam, how horrible these Spartan poets are? By now I am familiar with every synonym for carnage and combat in Greek!” He began a long rant at this point, casting off three months of literary hypocrisy in one go.

  “In any case,” I interrupted, “it hasn’t done you much harm. I could hardly keep up with all your titles. Surely it wasn’t your charming personality?”

  “No, sir. Well, not entirely. Brasidas, you see, has been exiled from Sparta. By the time he met me, he had already begun a very long work – incredibly long, sir, twenty-one full scrolls – entitled The Vindication of Brasidas. I have been helping him polish it, working day and night, adding endless niceties and ever longer quotations from Tyrtaeus. He yearns for a publisher, you see, and wishes me to circulate the finished Vindication back in Rome.

  “My plan was working. I confess that I did have some part in extending his arguments; but I required more time and more influence if we were seriously to attempt to escape. All the while that bloodthirsty monster grew ever more dependent upon my literary taste. That is why he promoted me. I intended to use my new power to get the three of you into my boat when I eventually sailed for Rome. But a month ago Brasidas decided upon another round of revision and correction, and frankly, sir, I can stand it no longer. That is why you are about to take the stage.”

  The Captain remarked that he was not very theatrical.

  “I’m sorry,” said Homer impatiently, “and I know it is a desperate measure, but I could conceive of nothing else at such short notice. There is no other way to get our hands on a boat.”