that as my preference, I should have been content.
Even Aristotle believed in the natural condition where one man could be owned by another. “For he is a slave by nature who is capable of belonging to another – which is also why he belongs to another.” If you are one, you deserve to be one. However, if you have the ability to reason, he argued, as someone might if he were, say, a student captured in the destruction of Athens, then the victorious society should hold out freedom as a reward. I wonder how Aristotle might have revised his philosophy had he himself been taken as a trophy of war. You see, I did not question the system so much as rail that I had fallen victim to it.
You, reader, live in a world where power and wealth are controlled by a tiny, fractional elite, men who claim to use their wealth and armies to serve and protect you. Your government is controlled by these same men who allow your senators to live unfettered by the rules they themselves legislate. You receive only so much grain for your bread and oil for your lamps. Your sweat and toil builds great homes and palaces; those who live within tell you how proud you should be of your glorious, gleaming accomplishment. But you are barred from setting foot inside. You may rise only so high as your rulers allow, for there is only so much wealth, and it has long ago been claimed by others. These few men let slip a coin here, an entertainment there, and this they know will feed the inertia that keeps you from making the effort to claim a larger share. This is what you call freedom, but are you certain of your claim upon it?
Crassus knew what I had at first failed to recognize; his error lay in not understanding that after four years in his service, I could at last see it as clearly as he. I was a slave. Yes, I could say the word at last. Do not tax your eyesight scanning back through these scrolls, I promise you it isn’t worth the effort – nowhere in this manuscript until this very moment have I myself used it.
My owner was right: whatever place I had hoped to earn in the world, this is where fate had delivered me. I was a slave, but even slaves are given a single, awful choice: rebel, or rise as high as nature may permit within this unnatural state. My frail nature, even in my prime, was hardly rebellious. I was no Spartacus.
And so, the further freedom slipped from my grasp, the stronger my determination to become a paragon of slaves, a slave with money and power, as fine as any Rome had ever seen.
It was of significant help, I admit, that I belonged to the richest man in the city.
Chapter XV
76 BCE - Spring, Rome
Year of the consulship of
Gnaeus Octavius and Gaius Scribonius Curio
I should mention that in the spring of this very year, Melyaket, my brave-hearted companion and steadfast friend (I shall claim senility should he ever lay eyes upon these words), was born in a ravine at the base of the Sinjar mountains, a lonely range at the northwestern border of the Parthian Empire. To hear him tell it, on that day nothing less than the intervention of the gods saved him from a very short life span, not to mention a grisly and horrific death. Well, if the immortals did truly take such singular interest in him, then let them tell his tale. I do not have the time.
***
In matters of the heart, I have observed that it is difficult to learn from our mistakes. On the contrary, we seem quite adept in making the same blunders over and over again. So when Sabina told me soon after we became friends, that she had had her fill of men and wanted nothing more to do with them, I had my doubts. Seeing my eyebrows elevate, she attempted to convince me by claiming the fault lay not with men, but in her own character. It was flawed, cracked, she said. How could she make such a monumental blunder in her choice of husband and trust herself to choose wisely ever again? Her logic made me falter in my skepticism, till I realized logic had very little to do with the mystical chemistry of the heart.
When it comes to love, we are the great architects of