CHAPTER XXXI THE INTERIOR OF A SLAVE-PRISON

‘Magnam rem sine dubio fecerimus si servulum infelicem in ergastulum miserimus.’—Seneca, De Ira, iii. 32.

We left Onesimus in a prison cell among the substructions of the Palatine, his back sore with scourging, his soul torn with shame and indignation. He cursed his folly, without repenting of his faults. Once more he had thrown away every element of prosperity; and his manner of looking on life was so entirely selfish that the source of his self-reproach was rather the shipwreck of his chances than the moral instability which had led to it. No news reached him in his prison. It was not till his liberation that he learnt the fate of Britannicus—a fate which, if he had continued steadfast in duty, he might have averted or delayed.

He knew that he could not be restored to his trusted position as the servus a purpura of the Empress. He would lose that, and with it lose all the flattery and gain which accrued so easily to the higher slaves of Cæsar’s household. He doubted whether even Acte’s influence could screen him from the consequences of an offense so deadly as misconduct in the august presence of the imperial divinity. But he felt a desperate pride and a morbid shame which made him determine to conceal all traces of himself and his misdemeanour from Acte’s knowledge.

His behaviour in prison was refractory, for the jailer had taken a strong dislike to him, and delighted to humiliate this bird of finer feather than those who usually came under his charge. He was quite safe in doing so. There was little compassion in the breast of the steward who managed the slaves, and rarely, if ever, did he take the trouble to inquire how a prisoner was getting on, or whether he was alive or dead. Amid blows and insults the heavy days dragged on, and seemed interminable to the poor Phrygian youth. In the desperation of idleness he tried to find some amusement from scribbling with a nail on the plaster wall of his dungeon, and one day, thinking of the drunken bout which had reduced him to this level, he defiantly scrawled ‘When I am set free, I will drain every wine-jar in the house.’68

‘Will you?’ said the jailer, who had entered unobserved as he finished his scrawl. ‘You won’t have a chance just yet, my fine friend.’

He gave Onesimus a blow with his whip, which made him writhe with anguish, and said, ‘Thank Anubis, I shall be rid of you to-day. You are sent to the slave-prison (ergastulum).’

‘Who sends me?’ asked Onesimus shuddering.

‘What’s that to you, crucisalus?’ said the slave, dealing him another blow. ‘Oh you writhe, do you, my fine bird? What will you do when the bulls’ hides rattle the cottabus on your shoulders?’

What he said was true. That evening Onesimus was loaded with fetters and taken into the country.

The sight of slaves in chains being hurried off to punishment was far too familiar to excite much notice in the streets of Rome, but it was torture to Onesimus to be thus exposed to the gaze and jeers of idle passers-by. He felt a painful dread lest any of his friends—above all, lest Acte, or Pudens, or Titus, or Junia—should see him in this wretched and disgraceful guise. No one, however, saw him, and that evening he was safely lodged in the slave-jail attached to Nero’s villa at Antium.

The slave-jail was a perfect hell on earth. It presented the spectacle of human beings in their worst aspect, entirely dehumanised by despair and misery. The slaves who were imprisoned there were treated like wild beasts, and became no better than wild beasts, with less of rage but more of malice and foulness. They worked in chains, and were driven to work with scourges. Torture and starvation were the sole methods of government. They were a herd of wretches clothed in rags, ill-fed, untended, unpitied, passing their days and nights under filthy conditions and in pestilential air, hateful and hating one another. Some of them were men half mad and wholly untameable, who could not be depended upon except so far as they were coerced by violence. Others were pure barbarians, only speaking a few words of any intelligible language, and therefore useless in a town familia. Others were criminals only exempted from death because of the value of their labour. Some of them knew that there was little chance of their being taken thence, unless it were to be crucified, and that when death released them, their bodies would be carelessly flung to rot amid the seething abominations of the corpse-pits (puticuli) like that which Onesimus had once seen in Rome near the Esquiline hill.

The only slaves who retained any vestige of decency and self-respect in these seething masses of human misery and degradation, were those who found themselves denizens of an ergastulum for a short period, at the caprice of a master or mistress. The experience was so terrible that it cowed the most contumacious into trembling servility. A few came there for no real fault, who were far less guilty of any misdoing than the owners who subjected them to this dreaded punishment. Sometimes a page or favourite who had been tempted to speak pertly in consequence of too much petting, or a youth who had been goaded into rebellion by the intolerable tyranny of a freedman, or a slave whose blood had been turned into flame by some atrocious wrong, learnt forever the hopelessness of his condition, and the abjectness of his servitude, by being sent there for a week or even for a month. Emerging from that den of despair, a human being felt the conviction enter like iron into his soul, that slaves were not men, and had none of the rights of men; and that, unless they wished to throw away their lives altogether, no complaisance to an owner could be too abject, and nothing must be considered criminal which an owner required of his human chattel.

Oaths, and curses, and the lowest abysses of vileness in human conduct, and that blackness of darkness which follows the extinction of the last spark of humanity in the soul of man, and the clanking of fetters all day long, and the shrieks of the tortured, and the yelling of the scourged, and jests more horrible than weeping, and the manifold leprosies of all moral and physical disease—all this Onesimus had to witness, and had to endure, in the slave-jail at Antium. We have read what prisons were before the days of Howard; what penal settlements and convict ships were forty years ago; but men trained in the most rudimentary principles of Christianity could not, under the worst circumstances, sink quite so low, or be so wholly beyond the sphere of pity, as the offscourings of pagan slavery, the scum of the misery of all nations, huddled into these abodes of death.

It was soon whispered among the wretches there that the handsome Phrygian youth had been high in place among the attendants of Octavia, and had been favoured and promoted by Acte. In their baseness they exulted at his humiliation, and the extent to which his soul revolted from their malice happily helped to preserve him from the contamination which would have been involved in their friendliness. He lived from day to day in the sullen silence of an indomitable purpose. He did not know how long he would be kept there. He waited a month, sustained by fierce resolve, and then determined that, at the cost of life itself—even if it should end in feeding the crows upon a cross—he would attempt his escape. He knew that he had many foes among the struggling envies of Cæsar’s palace, and he suspected that Nero’s dispensator purposely intended to forget him, and to leave him there to rot.

After a few days he was left comparatively unmolested by his companions in misfortune, for there was no amusement to be got out of his savage taciturnity. Once, when one of the ruder denizens had tried to molest him, Onesimus struck him so furious a blow with his fettered hands that he was looked upon as dangerous. As he glanced round at the degraded ugliness of the majority of the prisoners, whose faces only varied in degrees of villany, he had less than no desire to join their society. He saw but one on whom he could look with any pleasure, or from whom he could hope for any sympathy. This was a young man of honest and pleasant countenance, whose name, he learnt, was Hermas, and who bore himself under his misfortunes with sweetness and dignity. Like Onesimus, he seemed to find his only relief in the strenuous performance of the tasks allotted to him by the ergastularius, and as Onesimus watched him he felt convinced that he was there for no crime, and also that he was a Christian.

His conjecture was turned into a certainty by an accident. One day, as Hermas was digging the stubborn soil, something dropped out of the fold of his dress. He snatched it up hastily and in confusion, and seemed relieved when he noticed that no one but Onesimus had seen him. But the quick eyes of the Phrygian had observed that what he dropped was a tiny fish rudely fashioned in glass, on which had been painted the one word CΩCΙC, ‘May’st thou save!’ They were not uncommon among Christians, and some of them have been found in the catacombs.

The fettered slaves were taken out in gangs every morning under the guardianship of armed drivers, whose whips enforced diligence, and whose swords protected them from assault. The refractory were soon reduced to discipline, but those who worked diligently were not often tormented. In the various works of tillage, Onesimus, hampered though he was by his intolerable manacles, found some outlet for his pent-up anguish and hard remorse. But no one can live without some human intercourse, and one day, when Hermas was working beside him, and none of the rest were near, Onesimus glanced up at him and said the one word Ἰχθὺς, ‘Fish.’

Quick as lightning came the whispered answer Ἰχθύδιον, ‘a little fish,’ by which Hermas meant to imply that he was a weak and humble Christian.

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Are you one of us?’

Onesimus sadly shook his head. ‘Perhaps I was, or might have been, a Christian once.’

‘Have you been illuminated and fallen away, unhappy one?’

‘Ask me no more,’ said Onesimus. ‘I am a lost wretch.’

‘The Good Shepherd,’ said Hermas, ‘came to seek and save the lost.’

‘ItT9 is vain to talk to me,’ said Onesimus. ‘Tell me of yourself. You are not a criminal, or a madman, or a barbarian, like these.’

‘Talk not of them with scorn,’ said Hermas. ‘Are they worse than the harlots and sinners whose friend Christ was?’

Onesimus would not talk of Christ. ‘I never saw you,’ he said, ‘in Cæsar’s household.’

‘No,’ said Hermas; ‘I was the slave of Pedanius Secundus, the city Præfect. He has no rustic prison, and, being a friend of Nero, he asked his freedman to get leave to send me here.’

‘But why?’

‘He bade me do what I could not do. Seeing that I was strong and vigorous, he wanted me to marry one of his slave-girls. The worshippers of the gods know nothing of what marriage means. I loved a Christian maiden; I refused the union with a girl of evil character, who, being beautiful, had been the victim of Pedanius already. He scourged me; he tortured me; he threatened to fling me into his fish-ponds; and, when I still held out, he sent me here.’

‘Is there no escape from this horrible place?’

‘When you go in again, look round you, and see how hopeless is the attempt. The ergastulum is half subterranean. Its windows are narrow, and high above our heads. If we attempted to escape, the least noise would wake the jailers, and some of these around us would be the first to curry favour by helping to defeat our plan.’

‘Is bribery useless?’

‘Even if I could get the money, I do not think it right to bribe.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I think that Christ means us to endure all He sends. I trust in Him. If He sends me hunger, I bear it. If He casts me down, I believe that in due time He will lift me up. If He suffers me to be sent to prison, I try to turn the prison into His Temple. But I feel sure that He will deliver me—and that soon.’

Hermas was not wrong. His incarceration was short, because he was one of the few slaves in the family of Pedanius whom the Præfect could trust. Pedanius was a man whose cruel indifference and imperious temper made him more than usually obnoxious to his slaves. He lived in terror of them, and tried to avert danger by inspiring terror into them. He could not do without Hermas. He did not know that he was a Christian; but he knew that in other houses besides his own there had recently sprung up a class of slaves honest and faithful, and that Hermas was one of them. He married his slave-girl to another youth, and Hermas was set free.

And then Onesimus, seeing that every other method of escape was impossible, tried the effects of bribery. He had managed, though with infinite difficulty, to conceal the gold piece which Octavia had given him, and he had noted that one of the underlings of the prison-keeper seemed to be not unkindly disposed to him. He was a man named Croto, chosen for the office because his stalwart proportions and herculean strength would make him formidable to any unruly slave; but there was a certain rough honesty and kindliness in his face which made Onesimus think that he might move his compassion.

Seizing his opportunity one day, as Croto passed him in the field, he boldly whispered,

‘Croto, if I gave you an aureus, would you swear to let me have a chance to escape?’

Croto looked long and hard at his beautiful face, and walked on without a word. But as he returned from his rounds he touched him, and said,

‘Yes; I pity you. You are not like the rest of this herd of swine. Such things as an escape have happened ere now, and no one is the wiser. Masters don’t care to ask many questions.’

‘I will trust you,’ said Onesimus; and tearing the aureus from the hem of his dark serge dress, he slipped it into Croto’s hand.

‘Keep awake to-night. The two who guard the door shall be drunk. Get up a disturbance after midnight; be near the door, and when it opens— The plan may fail, but it is the only chance I can give you.’

Onesimus pointed in despair to the fetters on his feet.

‘When a slave has shown himself quiet and reasonable, they are sometimes removed; and yours shall be. But the manacles on your wrists must remain; they are never removed at night.’

Onesimus made his plans. At the dead of night, when the prison was plunged in darkness—for oil was much too dear to be wasted on chained slaves—he raised a great outcry, as though he had been suddenly attacked. The slaves sprang up from their pallets, heavy and confused with sleep. But Onesimus had all his senses on the alert, and by violently pushing one, jostling against another, and striking a third, he soon had the whole place in a tumultuous uproar of rage and panic, during which he quietly crouched down beside the door. It was opened by the sleepy and drunken guardians, to find the cause of the disturbance, and, before they could be reinforced by their more sober colleagues, Onesimus dashed the lamp out of the hand of one of them, tripped up the other, and ran to hide himself in the dark corner of an adjacent street, behind the Temple of Fortune. He succeeded, though with great pain, in forcing one hand free from the chain; and hiding the other, with the manacle which dangled from it, under his sleeve, he determined, at the first gleam of light, to try and find some assembly of Christians. He knew that it was their custom to meet at earliest dawn in secret places—generally, if possible, the secluded entrance to some sand-pit—to sing hymns to Christ as God, before the slumbering pagan population began to stir. He was fortunate, for soon, with senses preternaturally quickened by peril, he heard at no great distance the faint sound of a hymn. He made his way towards the spot, and concealed himself till the congregation should break up. He knew that the last to leave was generally the Presbyter; and, waiting for him, he called him as he passed.

The Presbyter started, and said, ‘Who goes there?’

Onesimus stepped out of his hiding-place, and said, ‘Oh, for the love of Christ, help me to get free from this chain!’

‘Thou usest the language of a Christian,’ said the Presbyter, ‘but thy chain would prove thee a fugitive or a criminal.’

‘I have erred,’ said Onesimus; ‘but I am not a criminal.’

The Presbyter fixed on him a long and troubled look.

‘Thou hast adjured me,’ he said, ‘in the name of Christ: I dare not refuse. But neither must I, for thy sake, imperil the brethren. Hide thyself again. I will send my son, Stephanus, to file thy chain, and then thou must depart. If thou hast erred, may Christ forgive thee!’

It was not many minutes before the young man came, and, without a word, filed the thinnest part of the manacle till Onesimus was free.

‘Peace be with thee, brother!’ said Stephanus. ‘Men begin to stir. Thou wilt be in danger. We dare not shelter thee. It were best to hide here till nightfall. Food shall be brought thee.’

Onesimus saw that the advice was good. Search might be made for him; but Antium was a large place, and the sand-pit might escape observation. It was so; bread and water were left near his hiding-place, and at night he made his way to Gaieta, which was twenty miles away from Antium.