In 2009, I revisited Pompeii, a place I had visited previously on a number of occasions. Pompeii fascinates me and I never tire of walking her streets, exploring the forum, public baths etc. In doing this, you get a sense of the glory and grandeur of Ancient Rome. And, at the same time, you realise how similar the Pompeiians were to us. So much of what you see and experience there is replicated in our modern day Western society.
One house I always visit is the "House of the Faun" so called after the statue of a faun that stands in the centre of the impluvium. Refer to photo) Originally, the statue stood on the edge of impluvium but for some reason it is now placed in the centre of the pool.
This house is extraordinary in that it was built in the second century BC and destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79. Even by Roman standards it is large - it completely covers one insula or city block of 3,000 square metres - and was probably the largest and most luxurious home in Pompeii.
Archaeological evidence suggests it belonged to members of the Satria and Cassii gens; although that is not conclusive.
The House of the Faun contained many priceless pieces of art attesting to its owners enormous wealth and fortunately these are now preserved.
However, as I walked through the remains of this house, I was overwhelmed by its size and the number of rooms it contained. I immediately thought of the army of slaves that would be required to serve their Roman masters and mistresses and the lives they lived.
Certainly the slave-quarters were cramped, dark spaces devoid of much furniture assuring the slaves lived lives devoid of any luxury. Another feature which impressed itself on me was the series of dark passageways that allowed the slaves to move from one part of this vast house to another without being seen by the owners thus ensuring their privacy.
The statue of the faun also attracted my attention and I wondered about its worth. Was it more valuable - in monetary terms - than the purchase price of a slave? Did the owners of the house regarded it more highly than one of their slaves? My feeling is that they did.
I was suddenly inspired to write a story to commemorate my visit. I had never written a story previously but for some reason I now felt the urge to do so. On returning home I wrote that story _ "An Object of Desire". It was my first, clumsy attempt at writing. Once finished, I didn't know what to with it and then I discovered "SlaveNow" on Yahoo. Nervously, I submitted it and asked if it was suitable for publishing in their group.
I received a gracious reply from Peter Brown who I feel is known to all of us with an interest in slavery. Not only Did Pete publish it; he also encouraged me to write more. I hadn't considered writing any more stories but eventually I followed up "An Object of Desire" with a longer sequel "The Aftermath".
Why am I writing this? With the imminent elimination of my stories by Yahoo, I am currently working through my stories and looking to archive them. After ten years of writing, I am reluctant to just see them disappear.
Chris
Thank you, Chris, for this priceless post that shows not only your uncommon historical culture and your natural feeling fir Art and beauty, but that also gives us the privilege of knowing of how you started to write erotic S&M stories, becoming soon the “Prince” of this genre of literature.
ReplyDeleteThree quick additional comments about some points in your learned and very correct historical discussion about this extraordinary Roman house in Pompeii:
• I’m not aware (unfortunately) of any archeologist of modern historian who has tried to quantify the number of slaves that served the rich Owner(s) of the "House of the Faun". However your deduction that they must have been a very numerous herd is certainly fully right.
Just to mention two similar cases in which it is possible to quantify the number of servile manpower exploited in Roman house and villas of wealthy Romans, let me e.g. recall that:
- According to Tacitus, in the urban villa of Pedanius Secundus (so in a house inside the city of Rome) there were more than 400 SLAVES for serving just ONE MAN ! All of them were crucified by order of the Senate, in 61 AD, because their Master had been killed by one rebellious lave.
- In the Country Villa excavated in Piazza Armerina (Sicily) by the size of the slave-quartes, archeologists have calculated that there were at least 800 SLAVES, for serving the Master and his family.
The area of this country villa is about 3,500 square metres, so just a bit larger than the house in Pompeii.
It’s true that a country villa, inside a vast estate, might have had a herd of slaves a bit more numerous than a city-villa.
However I would find reasonable to estimate that the House of the Faun was probably having a herd of slaves between 500 and 600 individuals.
• Very rightly you noticed “ANOTHER FEATURE WHICH IMPRESSED ITSELF ON ME WAS THE SERIES OF DARK PASSAGEWAYS THAT ALLOWED THE SLAVES TO MOVE FROM ONE PART OF THIS VAST HOUSE TO ANOTHER WITHOUT BEING SEEN BY THE OWNERS THUS ENSURING THEIR PRIVACY.” This was very frequent in ancient Rome and meaningful of the scorn and almost “irritation” by which many haughty Roman Masters looked at their slaves ……. of course apart from the cases when they were specifically commanded to serve directly their owners.
This snootiness and disdain is even more dramatically visible in visiting the colossal ruins of the enormous Imperial Villa of Hadrian in Tivoli: under the Villa, underground, there was a true enormous “SUBTERRANEAN SLAVE-CITY” , even vaster than Hadrian’s villa itself, where thousands and thousands slaves lived, some of them emerging only when they were called to serve the Royal family and the courtiers. Endless galleries and caves were used to move from one part to the other of this Underground Slave-City, without “disturbing” with the sight of their filthy slaves the “delicate eyes” of the Roman Lords and Ladies.
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• We don’t know which was the cost (certainly very high !) of a piece of Art like the statue of the Faun. ……. but we know which was the price of slaves in ancient Rome.
ReplyDeleteThere were cases …… and e.g. Pliny the Elder in his “Natural History” dedicates a full Chapter to these unusual cases ……. where some “special” slaves (“special” for whatever reasons) were paid astronomically high prices. E.g. he mentions a slave who was a famous cook, who was sold for 100,000 sesterces (i.e. 25,000 denarii or silver coins), and of Mark Antony who bought two gorgeous teenage German twins (to be used as sex-toys) for a price equivalent to the one of a small farm ! But these were exceptions; and such crazy expenses were blamed as useless wastes of money by all Romans. (the fact itself that Pliny recalls these cases, says how unusual and crazy they were considered).
Common slaves, like muscular male “animals” for hard-labours, had a much lower price.
Of course the price of slaves in Rome, followed the law of Offer and Demand; and especially after victorious battles and wars, the price of captured prisoners of war was often strikingly low, much lower than one could imagine.
Often the prisoners were so many that the victorious Legions were unable to manage for long all this immense herd of captured enemy warriors; and they were in a frenetic haste of selling as soon as possible all of them to the numerous agents of rich Roman landlords, of galley or mine owners and to the crowd of slave-traders who always followed the Roman Armies and who were greedy of inspecting and buying wholesale, large groups of those muscular burden-beasts.
The historian Appian, in his History of the Mithridatic Wars (88 – 63 BC), narrates that after the battle of Artaxata (68 BC) where 120,000 warriors of Mithridates, were disastrously defeated by 13,500 Romans, a young and robust Greek warrior, prisoner of war, was sold for no more than TWO DRACHMAS, equivalent, more or less, to about 20 TO 25 MODERN US DOLLARS, or FROM 18 TO 22 EUROS !
Karel