The Faun, Pompeii
Where my writing began:
As stated previously, I was born with a slave's nature and over the course of many years, my imagination conjured up many erotic "adventures'' which always featured me as a slave. Therefore, it isn't surprising that my early inclinations lead me into this wonderful, fanciful world that we inhabit either as Masters or slaves.
I have been fortunate to travel to many parts of the world and always I was looking for connections to slavery. Those travels took me to many places in the "ancient world" - places like Athens, Rome, Ephesus, (with its ghosts of Mark Antony and Cleopatra and which also had one of the biggest slave markets in the Roman world), Glanum and Arles (in France) and many other places and countries too numerous to mention here. And needless to say I visited Pompeii not once but on a number of occasions. Pompeii remains my favorite archaeological site.
In 2009, I visited Pompeii and spent several days exploring it in depth. One villa I visited was the "House of the Faun" where I saw the statue shown in the picture standing in the impluvium. The statue is a replica of the original which is in a museum in Naples.
For some reason I can't really explain, this statue and the villa it belonged to affected me. I guess it was the sheer size of the villa and the knowledge that it would have been staffed by many hapless slaves who moved silently around the perimeter of the building in dark, windowless passageways so that they were unseen by their Roman owners. I found myself imagining how they lived their lives as slaves under such circumstances.
Anyway, because of that visit and the statue of the faun, I felt the need to write a story about slavery and so I penned my very first one based around a master's need for a statue and the selling of some of his slaves to finance its purchase. The story was called "An Object of Desire" and I followed it up with "The Aftermath".
And that is how I began to write my stories!
Chris
Chris,
ReplyDeletevery beautiful post and very wise and opportune comments about the wonderful Pompeii.
Let me in particular focus on the detail of the "many hapless slaves who moved silently around the perimeter of the building in dark, windowless passageways so that they were unseen by their Roman owners."
This is a detail, in the life of many Roman slaves, that I found always very sadistic: i.e. the fact that they were obliged to be always and immediately present when their Masters neeeded their services and their bodies ...... but then they were most often obliged to become almost "invisible" -when they were not needed- so that their vision would not "bother" their haughty Roman owners.
Let me recall that also under the immense ruing of the Imperial Villa of Emperor Hadrian in Tivoli, there is practically an euqally immense
"subterranean town" (still partially unexplored and normally not visible to tourists) made of countless caves and underground corridors, were the thousands slaves, serving in the Imparial Villa, normally lived and worked ..... apart from the few moments when some of them were specifically ordered to serve in the daily needs of the Imperial Court, from banquets to entertainments, from services as personal slaves of some noble Roman to litter-bearers etc.etc.
For the rest of time, most of them were locked inside that awful underground "town" so that their vision could not "bother" the haughty Roman noblemen and women.
So sadistic !
Karel