from a work in progress.... The Sacrifices of Empire series
At the walls to the city, we came to a crossroads with the Via Fulvia. Facing the gate, a naked, blood covered man was suspended on a cross, his hands and feet roped fast to the instrument of torture, his body contorted in agony, his hair matted, his face ashen and still. The man was dead. As we watched, a group of ragged men undid the foot ropes, lifted the crosspiece and heaved the body, the cross piece still attached, into a waiting cart. Titus turned sickly pale, but, like the little man he thought himself to be, he did not turn away.
Once we entered the gate, protected by a cohort of ill-tempered and surly guards, we set foot on the cobble paved streets of the capital. Rome is a dirty city, with winding, narrow streets and crowds of people rushing and bustling about their business. We turned into a row of wooden houses, belonging to the tinsmiths. The workshops were out behind the houses, where water cascaded into troughs, fed by the adjacent aqueduct. We could make out the apprentices scurrying around and positioning tools for their masters. The shops occupied the roadside of the houses, where modest matrons offered pots, pans, bowls, spoons, and varied kitchen paraphernalia to hopeful shoppers. The streets were built up in the middle to form a gradual concave, with drainage ditches on each side, through which water was made to flow. In between customers, the matrons swept refuse from the houses into the ditches, while slaves emptied chamber pots, filled with bodily wastes, into the same drains. The water made its way down to the Tiber, turning that river into the world’s largest and most odorous sewer.
We followed our noses to the tanners’ row, where we found a similar commercial set-up. There were less affluent streets and quarters in our path, populated, it seemed, by parentless, ill-feed children and ragged vagrants in various stages of drunkenness and agonized recovery. One half naked little hoodlum of no more than ten years ran from around a corner, a prized loaf of stolen bread clutch under his arm. He was being pursued by members of the Cohortes Urbanae (city police), who were patrolling that area. He was all skin and bones, a living skeleton of a child, his eyes wide with terror, his heart beating like a sparrow, visible in his chest.
The young thief fell into the hands of the police. The men tied him to a post, stripped what little covering he had on his back, and took out a flagrum with which to administer a flogging. The whip was made of leather, with three extended thongs, each bearing two lead balls at the end.
They beat the boy until he was bloody and unconscious and rebuked him, as they took the blood-soaked loaf and left him dangling from the post. “That will teach you not to steal from honest merchants.”
This time, Titus looked away. “He was starving to death,” said the boy, through his tears. He made a move toward the beaten child, to tend his wounds, when I reached out my hand to restrain him.
“Your instincts are good, Titus, but remember, we go to the emperor today. You mustn’t get blood on your clean clothes. The wealthy do not wish to be reminded that this sort of thing happens. The imposition of order often brings with it a degree of unwarranted cruelty. There is a delicate balance between control and cruelty, and I don’t know if our society will ever achieve it.”
“Don’t the barbarians do...that?” asked a disconsolate Titus.
I thought it was an interesting point of comparison. “The barbarians would simply cut his hands off and let him starve to death trying to live like that.”
“He’ll probably starve anyway, if he is faced with stealing to eat.”
We concluded that the problem did not admit to an easy solution, so we moved on.
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