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Updated: May 21, 2025
About a score of men at arms and several leudes ran with their arms in the direction of the ergastula; one of them was heard to say: "A part of these dogs of slaves are profiting by the fire in order to revolt; I heard them say that they were going to set the chief of the Vagres and the rest of the prisoners free. Quick, quick, let us put them all to death we shall afterwards see to the slaves.
Similarly at Milan, they had emptied two ergastula and ignored the rest; as at Placentia, where they had expended all their time and energy on the first ergastulum they happened on inside the Milan Gate and on ours, and then had ignored or forgotten the four or five others, equally large and equally well filled. On our progress to Rome I saw similar inconsistencies in their behavior.
The ergastula, where slaves were habitually chained and treated like beasts, were sowing the seeds of permanent moral contamination in Italy.
At a little distance from the yard and far removed from the main building, but still within the fortified space, stands an ergastula, built, like all Roman structures, of imperishable bricks. The ergastula is a sort of deep cave, intended during the Roman conquest as a lock-up for the slaves who were employed in field labor and in the building of roads.
We have in the ergastula, loaded with chains, first of all, Ronan the Vagre and the hermit-laborer; they are now both nearly healed of their wounds; then we have the little blonde slave, she is not yet well, she still seems to be at death's door; besides that, we have the handsome bishopess she is not wounded but is possessed of the devil ".
Although in Etruria, where the plantation-system seems to have first emerged in Italy, and where it existed most extensively at least forty years afterwards, it is extremely probable that even now -ergastula- were not wanting; yet Italian agriculture at this epoch was still chiefly carried on by free persons or at any rate by non-fettered slaves, while the greater tasks were frequently let out to contractors.
Drawn without respect of rank, as well as of sex and age, from every nation under heaven by an organized slave-trade, to which our late African one was but a tiny streamlet compared with a mighty river; a slave-trade which once bought 10,000 human beings in Delos in a single day; the 'servorum nationes' were the only tillers of the soil, of those 'latifundia' or great estates, 'quae perdidere Romam. Denied the rights of marriage, the very name of humanity; protected by no law, save the interest or caprice of their masters; subjected, for slight offences, to cruel torments, they were butchered by thousands in the amphitheatres to make a Roman holiday, or wore out their lives in 'ergastula' or barracks, which were dens of darkness and horror.
"Give me your torch," said the lover of the bishopess, "and take me straight to the hay lofts, or I stab you to death." The two slaves obeyed; the Vagres parted company; one ran towards the hay lofts and barns, the other to the ergastula, both guided by their conductors. The prisoners in the ergastula had drawn as close as possible to the iron railing.
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