Career Day

An antique book was discovered recently in Italy. It turns out to be a literate slave's journal written in 200BC. It gives us a rare window to look at slave's life in ancient Rome. Here is one typical entry.

5:00am: I had to get up. It was still dark and cold outside. But I couldn't be late for picking grape again. Yesterday I was late and the team leader gave me the look that he was going to kill me if I were not the slave owner's property.

8:00am: Worked two hours non-stop already. Status meeting. I pulled out my bread to have a piece for breakfast. We weighed the grapes. This year we picked 15% more than last year. The owner is happy, but not THAT happy. Hey, he shouted at the end of meeting, our goal is number one in Rome!

9:00am: Meeting again. We were so glad to see the nice lady from Slave Supply Department. She told us over and over how much our owner loved us; he wanted us all to be strong and healthy, and even my family and kids, which, naturally, are his property too.

9:15am The lady's main topic today was how to best spend a life in slavery. Basically we should aspire to be a leader, who can decide what fruit the others pick, and take the bread away if someone is lazy.

10:00am Saw those young slaves under a big tree. They were apprentices from school to learn orchid management here. They were debating which work had bigger potential: fruit-picking or fish-cleaning. But obviously they all wanted to work in Quantity, which counts the gold coin for owners. If you can count over a hundred, the owner could give you some extra bread; if over a thousand, you might even get a gold coin at year-end!

10:15am I was telling young apprentice slaves what I saw yesterday in Lukuani, the central market. A farmer tried to sell a lot of apples for a cow. Pompey, the greatest general and the richest man in Rome brought in his quantity team, after busy counting and computing, they told the farmer that he actually didn't have a lot of apples, instead he had many apples, for which he could only get a goat. Seeing the farmer leading his goat away, Pompey the greatest murmured: we are just doing God's work...

11:00 am Those young apprentices from slavery school swarmed around me after I told the story. They asked me for advices on how to sell themselves for a good price on market. There are very obvious ones, like wear your best tunic, bare your muscle or breast (depends on you are male or female) as much as you can. There are tricky ones too. For example when a buyer asks how much you eat. If you reply with too little, they would think you are weak; with too much, you are expensive.

2:00pm Pulled out my bread for lunch. The best farm to work for is General Pompey's: his slaves got four breads a day, we only got three!

6:00pm Listening to Senator Cicero's inspirational speech "From slave to slave owner: working harder for your masters" Knowing that we have the chance to be a slave owner made everyone so excited that we all agreed that Spartacus and his men were just out of their mind.