ANCIENT SLAVERY: A STRENUOUS LIFE OF CHAINS, SHACKLES, SINGLETAILS, SWEETING BODIES AND SEVERE PUNISHMENT!
The scene is extremely powerful and of unprecedented intimidating intensity. Dozens of muscular male slaves below deck in the depths of the hold of the galley, three next to each other, but each with his own oar, for long periods chained with one of their ankles to their rowing bench, dressed only in a grubby loincloth. Their naked torsos thus will be completely exposed to the soon-to-be merciless whip of the slave overseers on their back, the latter already supervising them from the raised central path, with the feared flogger in their hand. Apart from them, also several armed soldiers are present to immediately put down any real rebellion by some unruly slaves.
Then the hortator, on his platform in front of all the galley slaves deep down, with the first blow of his heavy hammer on the drum gives the starting signal, and they start rowing, very rhythmically rowing. With each stroke of the oars they bend far forward, then lean far back, all at the same time in the same wave movement, so that the oars do not touch each other outside the board.
Already at this low, steady pace, each new stroke is already very heavy and tiring, requiring the slaves to exert the utmost effort and physical strength. With each stroke of the oar they must use their entire body, throwing themselves every time completely forwards and backwards alternately. It is very strenuous and very monotonous labor, perhaps the most strenuous and monotonous slave labor ever existing, always making the same movements, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, only interrupted by a few rest breaks.
The slave overseers meanwhile are walking slowly back and forth, carefully watching if every slave slaves indeed as hard as he should, with their short whips ready for use, but still not used. The tension is slowly built up, rhythmically supported by the driving force of the still quiet, but at the same time compelling music, which underlines the endless successive equal strokes of the hortator. The slow rhythm, with the constant repetition of the same pounding notes, already creates the desired mechanical feeling of hard, monotonous labour and soon exhaustion.
Only the sound of the lapping of the water being stirred by the oars comes above it. Together with the slaves pulling the oars with each new stroke, and the beats being repeated over and over, the spectator gets tired as well and falls into an irresistible trance.
But the quietness of the start is soon over. After a few minutes, the first significant acceleration of the rowing speed is forced: from normal to 'battle speed'. The music soon becomes a lot more compelling, so to say stirring up the rowers even more. The galleyslaves now have to pull even harder on the heavy oars to keep up with the accelerated pace of the hammer blows. They start to sweat even more, it is now really flowing over their skin. You see how their tormented bodies have to make great efforts to comply.
But it doesn't stop there. A little later the tempo is accelerated again, the drama once again reinforced by further inciting music, and it is as if the slaves hear it too and are further encouraged by it. In an even shorter time the slaves have to make the same enormous stroke, from front to back and back again, in an even shorter time they have to throw their body forward, and then fall back just as quickly, and all this in a semi-standing position: 'attack speed'. The first slaves begin to show signs of exhaustion, they can barely hold on, they begin to shake and stagger and lose control of themselves and their oar. Soon the first lashes inevitably will fall, because the slave overseers are relentless and will show no mercy to failing slaves.
But it's still not fast enough - the rowing in total is accelerated three times. The music thus also went into higher gear three times, took on three times a still more driving character, with each acceleration again pushing harder. So now, finally, with 'ramming speed', the music instruments have become even more compelling, even more exciting. The slaves have to toil still harder, arch their backs even still more, to pull more vehemently on the oars, at an unprecedentedly brutal pace and thus with a truly inhumanly superhuman effort, to keep up with the killing pace enforced by the hortator's hammer.
Inevitably the first lashes crack to enforce this. Now the first slaves are really breaking down, staggering and falling against other slaves or disappearing into the depths next to the central path. The whips of the slave overseers crack even louder, almost to the point of bleeding on some defenseless backs. Its crack when it hits a naked slave's body is, apart from that of the hammer of the hortator and of the splashing water outside, sometimes the first sound to drown out the music, and this also applies to the scream of excruciating pain from the victim that immediately follows.
Only when, despite all the lashes, too many slaves threaten to literally fall out of the oars due to total exhaustion, the liberating signal is given: strike oars.
Slave on the galleys - one of the harshest slave existences imaginable.
The clip shows one of the best scenes from the 1959-version of the movie Ben Hur, based on the famous novel of Lewis Wallace, dating from 1880. The book has since been adapted into films several times, in 1907 and 1925 in black and white, and after the most popular version of 1959 again in 2010 and 2016, the version of 2010 broadcasted in two episodes on television. The pic inserted here is from that of 1925.
In each version of the film of course a hot rowing scene is included, as it depicts a dramatic climax in the story of a Jewish patrician's son who ends up on the Roman galleys through an attack-like accident in the days of Emperor Tiberius. But this one of 1959, because of the overwhelming view of all those galley slaves toiling unimaginably hard at the oars, row after row after row, for several hours without interruption, all the time shining with sweat, and the really unprecedented - and never repeated - dramatic build-up of the tension, is by far the hottest of all.
In the 1959-film Ben Hur, in another hot scene interrogated by the new commander of the fleet, the consul Quintus Arrius, has already served for three years in other ships, before he was chained to this one just a month before Arrius' arrival, who only a couple of minutes earlier had entered this galley for the first time. Not all galley slaves made it that long - but some even much longer, depending on their strength and physical endurance to sustain such a hard life, regular lashes included.
In the scene in question we see Arrius slowly walking along the center path of the rowing deck from right to left, inspecting the slaves one by one with a sharp eye. They all look straight ahead when he walks along, most of them with slightly bowed heads and downcast eyes, careful not to look the fleet commander in the face uninvited - quickly considered an act of haughty brutality for a slave.
With his general's staff Arrius occasionally pushes up a slave's head roughly from under the chin, which he thinks has something to be said about it - no way that he as a free man of high rank would ever touch any galley slave with his bare hand! He soon encounters a coughing specimen, who must be replaced.
While Arrius then inspects the next one - a slave whose back is covered all over in bloody welts because of his extremely unruly and rebellious nature - the sick slave, with his head humbly bent forward and looking as much as possible at the ground, crawls along the center walk behind the commander. He is careful not to stand upright, which would put him at eye level with Arrius, which is unheard of for a slave too.
A little further on, one of the supervisors has just opened a heavily barred hatch, through which the discarded slave disappears into the underbelly of the ship, where the spare rowers are locked up. One of them then comes up from the hatch, and while Arrius and the subordinate commander walk further, this new rower, initially leaning even further forward if possible, with his nose almost pressed against the wooden floor, crawls past the feet of both Roman soldiers and meekly takes the vacated seat, while behind him the hatch to the slave hold is closed again.
Arrius meanwhile has arrived at Ben Hur, and after his short interrogation, the latter also suddenly receives a very fierce and thus painful stroke with the whip on his back from Arrius, which makes him jump - just in time he manages to control himself. At the same time, the slave, who is chained to his rowing bench directly behind Ben Hur, continues to carefully stare straight ahead with his head slightly bowed, constantly careful not to attract the commander's attention in any way whatsoever.
"You are all condemned men", the consul addresses the slaves while returning to the platform at the front from which he can overlook the entire lower deck hold of the ship, "We keep you alive to row this ship. So row well and live". Soon thereafter the hortator hots the drum with his hammer, and the torture of endless monotonously rowing starts again.
Also Ben Hur, left bewildered behind, with his back still tormented by the cutting pain of the sharp lash of Arrius' whip, is forced to take up the oar again, without the possibility of alleviating that pain in the slightest, and always in fear of another sharp lash from one of the slave overseers if he does not pull the oar forcefully enough.
In a later scene, Arrius' fleet, including the galley on which Ben Hur serves, ends up in a battle with pirates in the middle of the sea. Then comes the most feared and humiliating moment for the galley slaves below deck. Because almost the entire military crew is now needed to defend the ship, and to prevent the galley slaves from turning against their slave supervisors in the heat of battle or from attempting to flee, they are all thereupon one by one by the overseers chained to their rowing bench.
It’s an aspect of the plot that returns in every version of the movie, ass Ben Hur is spared this thanks to intervention from the side of Arrius, and thus, when the galley in the battle finally goes down, can escape.
Immediately after they were sentenced to the galleys as serious criminals and thus turned from free men into slaves, a heavy and narrow iron fetter already was riveted around the left ankle of all the rowers, to which a large ring was inseparably attached. More than anything else it marks them as slaves for the rest of their life. Ben Hur op course at that moment had gotten his own too. No way, that he or one of the others could ever free himself without the use of a hammer or chisel from that shackle. And it will never be removed by somebody else either, it will stay there till the end of their service on the galley - thus until they die.
At the sides of the center gangway of the galley there are chains lying on the wooden floor, which are now partly loosened, and pulled by the overseers with much lashing and rattling through the rings on the leg irons of all the slaves, and then fastened to the deck.
How the system exactly functions, isn’t clear in the 1959-film, in contrast to other versions; par example, if the three slaves that make up a row, each time – as one might presume – indeed ‘share’ the same chain. However, one thing is sure: if the ship goes down, the slaves will have nowhere to go and they will drown. That is why some panic and vehemently resist the installation of the chains by trying to resist the slave overseer when its their turn, of course in vain.
PHANTASY VERSUS REALITY: THE REAL SLAVE GALLEYS
However historically incorrect the whole scenery may be in this case - the Roman galleys were in reality rowed by well-trained and well-paid free sea soldiers - galley slaves indeed have existed for centuries. They were used in big amounts on the warships of the French, Spanish and Ottoman fleets and other countries in Early Modern Times. This fate befell both convicted criminals and prisoners of war, who then disappeared, often branded, for the rest of their life on the row deck of such a galley, chained to their seat and lashed to the oars.
This pic illustrates the harsh fate of John Fox, a ships gunner from Suffolk, who was captured with the rest of the crew of The Three Half Moons 1563 by Barbary pirates near to the Street of Gibraltar, to be sold into slavery. As the story runs, "their clothes were torn from their backs and they were hustled in chains to the oars of the pirate galleys, where they were made to row under the Mediterranean sun by being cruelly whipped".
Fox is depicted here at the oar, a low but sturdy collar riveted around his neck, by a chain connected to that of his neighbor, or to his seat. Wide manacles on both his writs are connected by such a chain too, and this time at least clearly also to those of the slave sitting next to him. As can be discovered by the slave at the far right on the other side of the gangway, heavy foot fetters, forged with a short chain to a ring somewhere underneath the seat of the wooden rowers' bench, weren't forgotten by the illustrator either.
"At the end of summer", the story continued, "the pirate fleet put in at Alexandria, where, for the purpose of the pirates, there was a large fortified complex containing a harbor for the galleys and a prison for the Christian slaves. Into the prison, loaded with chains, went the wretched crew of the Three Half Moons. And there, for the next 14 years, they worked as galley slaves, beaten and half starved until they longed only for the release of death". But in the end he managed to break his chains and escape.
This blog, as you will see, shall not only be dedicated to galley slaves - even if one of my oldest deep fantasies is to find myself in the position of Ben Hur or John Fox. In antiquity, galley slaves were absent, but chained forced labor, to be performed by criminals sentenced to slavery or prisoners of war who had been enslaved by the Romans in one of their countless wars, did exist.
This could be, par example, on the so-called latifundia, the enormous estates that formed the precursors of the later slave plantations in America. However, the heaviest slave work in the Roman Empire was carried out in the copper mines or stone quarries.
And of course there is the persistent tradition, reaching back to the Old Testament hero Simson (Book of Judges 13-16), of another no less mind-numbingly monotonous form of slave labor: turning that incredible heavy kind of millstone, indeed just driven by slave power. We see Samson - or one of his fellow sufferers - doing his duty here, his ankles riveted in heavy fetters and his hands chained to the beam the millstone itself, of course if necessary enforced by his severe overseer with the whip.
This new blog will offer information about facts and fiction, films and photos, historical and hypothetical illustrations, archeological research and authentic reports, real narratives and romantic novels regarding ancient labor slavery both - and of everything that is related to that, about the kind of that slave labor itself, about the special character of its material environment - indeed from galley to millstone – and about the instruments of discipline considered necessary in the past to turn self-thinking free-born men into useful and obedient slaves, from whips and branding-irons to chains, shackles, muzzles and the pillory.
Partly based on real historical facts, partly on romantic historicizing fiction I’ve recently started, under the authors pseudonym of Ben Hur, to translate my own fantasies and conceptions into a slave novel, a trilogy, the first part of which is available now as an e-read at Amazon.
