war. There were many battles waged on our march toward the center of the Western world, and Sulla’s senatorial antagonists, especially Marius the younger and consul Gnaeus Papirius Carbo knew that after what they had done to any friend of Sulla they could catch, they were fighting for their lives. There would be no quarter. And there was not. Carbo was eventually cornered, but managed to escape to Africa. Then, three day’s march southeast of the city, Sulla gave Marius a furious thrashing and sent him and what was left of his army running back to Praeneste.
Sulla pursued him and laid siege to the town. Since we were to rest there for some weeks, we were brought to the baths and given fresh tunics. A medic came and applied some greasy salve to the sores on my ankles, but my chains were left in place. I was given the first piece of goat’s cheese I had had in a month. Then, as a special gift to the company of legionaries behind whom we were dragged, my cart-mates and I were each assigned to an eight-man contubernium, or squad, one of us per tent.
I don’t know what happened to the others, but my new life depended upon a single and all-consuming duty: to service the needs and whims of these sweaty, filthy and exhausted men. When stripped to their tunics, you could hardly tell us apart. Yet if I was not quick enough with water, if I did not scrape the mud from the soles of their caligae to their liking, if I was not pliant or willing enough in the dark, I was beaten senseless. It was then I wished that death would come, but I had neither the will nor the courage to take my own life. On those few nights when my rest was brief but uninterrupted, I dreamed of Athens and the Academy. Each dawn I returned to Hades. The days passed like this, one after another, for over a year.
My life was taken from me, and often were the times when I pondered the irony of taking it back by ending it. Suicides among new captives could reach as high as twenty of every hundred. Were these men and women the brave ones, and we the cowards? I would not presume to judge them, but I chose a different path. To live - not to thrive or protect family or leave something of value for the next generation - but simply to take the next breath and the one after that, I submitted to abuse of any kind, allowed my spirit to crumble to dust, knowing all the while I was crippling my soul for eternity. Yet I was unable to bring an end to it. I clung to a life which was no life. I rose each morning in a stupor, with barely the strength to wish that this day would be my last. Is it cowardice to choose life? Any life at all?
I slept outside my legionaries’ tent, a thin, tattered blanket my only shield against the chill. One morning, well before the cornicines had sounded the call to awaken the camp, I was disturbed by a noise and rose shivering to one elbow, hoary rime clinging to my hair and blanket. Two soldiers were dragging a body by its heels. It was just light enough for me to see the slashed wrists from the man’s upturned hands, his arms trailing above his head in a jostled pose of surrender. Blood still leaked from the wounds, leaving slug-like trails, black in the pre-dawn light. As they passed close by, I recognized the suicide: he was one of the six other men in the first cart that had taken us from Greece. The two Romans, whispering happily about the end of their watch, would take him outside the gate and dump him into one of the defensive ditches surrounding the camp. I strained to see the dead man’s expression, hoping foolishly to find the trace of a smile, or at least the hint of a look of peace. There was nothing. There was no expression at all. It was just a corpse.
It was in that moment that I decided to choose life. I set my heart and mind on living with an act of determined will. And to justify that choice, to suffer all the degradations that lay ahead and the sorrow of remembering the life left behind, I chose to believe that those of