This post is a chapter of Neither Slave nor Free, a serial novel that tells a literary-fictional, historically-plausible backstory to the New Testament letter, Philemon. New chapter every Sunday. Listen to it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Risking crucifixion, Onesimus, an enslaved shepherd, flees his bitter half-brother and master, Philemon, only to find that freedom requires more than mere escape.
“. . . a masterful grasp of the cultural, political and spiritual context of the time . . . The heart of the novel beats for hope, and asks one essential question: what does it mean to truly be free?” —Claire Gibson, author of Beyond the Point: A Novel
“. . . one of the best historical novels I’ve ever read on a New Testament figure . . . Mead’s novel utilizes cutting edge scholarship as he weaves a beautiful and inspiring story of hope and faith.” —Demetrius K. Williams, Professor of Comparative Literature and Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukie; Editor of Onesimus Our Brother: Reading Religion, Race and Slavery in Philemon
“Through characters that are vividly complex, defying any easy, moralizing categorization, Mead delivers a thrilling piece of historical fiction that sheds needed light on a tiny letter whose controversial impact has been, and remains, gargantuan.” —Tommy Givens, Associate Professor of New Testament Studies, Fuller Theological Seminary
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Story Recap
At Pater’s funeral feast, Philemon reveals that his father’s will is missing. As the sole heir to Pater’s estate, Philemon uses his discretion to free Onesimus’s mother, Apphia, from slavery but fails to free his half-brother, Onesimus, contrary to Onesimus’s expectations.
Philemon stood in his father’s old room, in front of a wooden chest, wearing only an under-tunic. As a house slave rummaged in the chest, Philemon glanced again at the floor mosaic with four frames. Each frame had a stylized picture—a temple with three pillars, a wine goblet, a cavalryman atop a horse, and a flock of three sheep—the things his father professed to care most about: worship, wine, war, and wool. Conspicuously absent was an image of family, which had never quite fit his father’s picture, thought Philemon. A wine goblet in every frame might have been truer.
Murals covered the walls with similar images, punctured by nooks cradling oil lamps that lit the room. Sheets of purple wool, dull with age, billowed downward from the ceiling between cedar beams, and a narrow sleeping couch stood at the far end of the room under a window with closed shutters. The fire sizzled and snapped on the hearth, warming Philemon’s shins.
The slave finally stood up again, extending a cream-colored toga in front of his new master, a hopeful look on his face. “Dingy,” said Philemon. His father had dealt in wool, so he’d expected a chest of immaculate togas, too white to look at. Instead, its contents were graying and frayed. His father’s standards had dropped more than he’d imagined, and there was clearly work to do with the laundry slaves. New master, new rules. The slave replaced the rejected toga, retrieved another from the chest, and held it up, but Philemon just frowned and shook his head.
He smiled at Apphia as she entered the room. She wore a dark tunic with a linen belt, and her hair up. Still all business, he thought. A lesser slave might have shirked after yesterday’s promise of freedom, but here she stood, proving his choice: there was none more deserving. She looked thin and tired, drained of the woman who’d raised him—then, she’d been radiant and lush, his wet nurse, stand-in for his dead mother, and the same to half the slaves on the estate. Despite her sixty years and increasing frailty, she retained a matriarchal elegance, an almost regal poise, he thought. A grace. And her eyes still sparkled. Yes, the same eyes, he thought, smiling at her. She was one of the rare good choices his father had made.
“Morning, sir,” she said.
“Sir?”
“Expecting ‘master’?” she said.
“Hardly,” said Philemon, unsure what to make of her mood.
“Well, I’m not free yet.”
“True enough,” he said. “After Saturnalia, perhaps.”
She nodded, glancing around. “Taken your father’s room already.”
She’s sensitive, he thought. He’d effectively taken her husband’s room, which was sometimes hers too. He hadn’t considered that, but, hard as it might be, she’d need to accept it: he was the paterfamilias, now. “No need to wait,” he said, his voice gentle. “It’s the ninth day. We’ve performed the rites.”
Apphia said nothing, but her body tensed, then relaxed again.
The house slave held up the whitest toga yet, to which Philemon finally assented. The slave closed the chest, laid the toga on top, dabbed his forehead with his cuff, and left the room. Philemon settled onto the couch, head on one of the upholstered arms, feather-stuffed pillows under his neck and back, heat from the fire now diffusing over the length of his body. Apphia draped a towel across his chest and then a smaller one on top of the first. Her hands slurped as she warmed olive oil between them and then massaged it into Philemon’s mourning beard, causing his neck and round cheeks to glow chartreuse. He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and released a slow, audible breath, absorbing Apphia’s motherly touch. After wiping her hands on the small towel, she began passing a bronze razor back and forth over a whetstone. “How are the accounts?”
“Still sorting them. But so far, not good. Coffers seem low, records scrambled. He lost his grip toward the end.”
Apphia continued to sharpen the razor. “Will you be home more?”
“I think so,” he said. “I’ll need to train someone. For the traveling.”
Apphia shifted to a strop, running the blade back and forth along the thick leather band anchored to the head of the couch. “Monica will like that,” she said, still swiping the blade. “What about Onesimus?” she said, eyes fixed on her work.
Always Onesimus, he thought, opening his eyes again, scanning her face for meaning. “What about him?” A fly landed on his arm. He slapped it with his other hand, then swept the crushed insect onto the floor.
“For the traveling.”
“A shepherd?” When Pater returned from war twenty years ago, he assigned Philemon the traveling part of the wool business: collecting payments, establishing new clients, checking on deliveries, attending guild meetings, seeing to relationships with local governments and Roman officials. At first, Philemon found it exciting, a privilege to visit the chief cities of western Asia—Laodicea, Hierapolis, Apamea, Antiochia, Ephesus. But eventually he realized the job was really to keep him away; a steward had done the work for years when Pater was off at war, so it wasn’t that the job needed filling. It was that his father could barely stand a holiday feast with his son, let alone side-by-side work on the family business. In any case, thought Philemon, such travel was hardly work for a twenty-year-old shepherd slave.
“Why not?” she said. “Voskos used to help with it. He was head shepherd. Onesimus is bright. Good with numbers. He knows the wool.”
“Wool and numbers, maybe,” said Philemon. “Buyers, dealers, officials. They’re another matter. The job is people. He still struggles with his little crew of boys.”
She tensed again, took a shallow inhale and parted her lips, as if to respond, but stopped short.
“Yes?” said Philemon.
Apphia shook her head. “Nothing.”
For a few moments, Philemon studied her face, which had refocused on the moving blade, then closed his eyes again, now less relaxed. It was understandable she’d advocate for Onesimus; he was her son. But her judgment was skewed. Admittedly, he was bright, but he was still a boy, and mostly a brat. Philemon found the attitude of most vernae—slaves born on the estate—far too lax, but Onesimus took his privilege to an extreme: leaving chores undone, covering the failings of his boy-shepherd crew, filling his skins with wine so fine no other slave would dare to drink it, expecting special treatment from Pater. Which he got.
Apphia stopped stropping. She placed the fingers of her left hand below Philemon’s temple, above his graying sideburn, and gently pulled the skin up toward his scalp. She then scraped downward with the angled blade, edging across his cheek. After a few deft strokes, she wiped the blade on the small towel, leaving a streak of yellow oil and severed whiskers.
“How’s Paul?” she asked, returning to the strop.
Philemon had met Paul while on business in Ephesus, a diminutive Jewish man preaching in the market, dark hair and chest-length beard sweeping about his face, spraying spit toward the crowd and jabbing the air with gnarled brown fingers. Philemon stopped and listened for a while, judging him a crank. He’d heard of the faith Paul preached—an eastern cult centered on a man named Jesus. It’d even come to his household in Colossae: his wife, Monica, and Apphia took it on, gathering to worship on Sundays, listening to a man named Epaphras preach the “way,” as they called it. Pater had hated the upstart faith, endlessly badgering Apphia for her credulity and counting it another strike against Monica, alongside her barrenness. Pater’s opposition had made Philemon curious—if his father hated it, there was probably something in it—but he’d concluded it was a religion of women and slaves, not that of a paterfamilias-in-waiting.
So he’d listened a while, for entertainment. He couldn’t deny the man had zeal and a way with words, but he seemed to spout nonsense. Philemon had made to move on when a man from the crowd charged at Paul, calling him an affront to Artemis, goddess of Ephesus, aiming to knock him over. The preacher raised his hands and shouted, “Stop!” The assailant sprawled backwards. Paul had done it without touching him, deflecting him as if by an invisible barrier. Twice more the man charged, and twice more Paul repelled him with only words and raised hands. As the man lay on the ground for the third time, Paul ordered a spirit to leave him, which made him howl and writhe, then, all at once, sit still, looking confused, saliva dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “The Lord has set you free,” Paul said. He led the dazed man to a spigot at the butcher’s stall and cleaned his wounds, the crowd migrating with them, magnetized. Philemon followed. Paul then explained the episode to the crowd: the Jewish God’s kingdom—God’s rule renewed—has come in power through Jesus, the Messiah, Jew from Galilee, risen from the dead. “The gospel,” he called his message. The good news. Jesus had knocked him over, Paul said, and shown him his Jewish God was, in fact, God of all, Jew and Greek alike.
Inexplicably, Paul’s message began to make sense, as if the deed of power, the exorcism, taught Philemon a foreign tongue all at once. He finally understood the strange little man. Despite completing his business in Ephesus, Philemon lingered for the next week, spending from the fifth hour to the tenth—the midday rest—in the hall of a man named Tyrannus, a patron of Greek philosophy whom Paul’s message had persuaded. Philemon ate the midday meal with the Christians, the “church,” as Paul called them, and absorbed Paul’s teaching on Jesus and the way. The following Sunday, Paul baptized him in the Marnas River, among the lilies and wild celery, and at their worship gathering, Philemon gave ten aurei to the church coffer—a year’s wages for a laborer—making sure everyone saw. The gift was met with the wide eyes and gaping mouths he’d hoped for. Afterward, he ate bread and drank wine with Paul and Epaphras, the Colossian preacher who told him about the gatherings in the Lycus Valley. In Hieropolis and Laodicea, the church met in homes of wealthy brothers and sisters, but in Colossae, said Epaphras, they met outdoors, in the agora or by the river. Paul asked Philemon if he owned land, a domus. “Son of a landowner,” he said, embarrassed to identify with his father. When Paul suggested he might host the Colossian church, Philemon’s cheeks flushed with deeper shame as he related Pater’s hostility to the faith. “I doubt he’d agree,” he confessed. Nonetheless, he committed to discussing it with his father. When he finally did, Pater spurned the idea, mocking his new faith.
“Paul?” said Philemon, opening his eyes and remembering Apphia’s question. “It’s been weeks since I was in Ephesus. But last time he seemed well. Business was good. Still preaching.” Philemon paused as Apphia returned to the shaving.
“Good,” said Apphia, lifting the blade from his cheek, her face earnest.
“And now Pater’s passed, we can host the church.” Philemon stared at the ceiling, rubbing the pads of his thumb and forefinger together.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Apphia, reflective. She’d finished the right side of his face and was now working on the delicate skin of his throat.
“Archippus and I have planned our first meeting for tomorrow, in fact. At the domus. In the atrium. I’ll have the rest of the slaves baptized beforehand.”
Apphia jerked, nicking his Adam’s apple.
Philemon cried out.
“Sorry!” she said, contrite.
He pushed away her shaving hand and sat up. “What’s wrong with you, today?” He gave her a stern look as blood trickled from the wound.
Her eyes flashed. “Don’t be childish,” she said, laying him back down. “It’s a tiny cut.” She dipped a corner of the small towel in a bowl of vinegar on the table beside them and pressed it into the wound. “I am sorry,” she said again. “It’s just . . . ” Her statement trailed off.
“What?”
“Well. Do you think they’re all ready? The slaves?”
Again Onesimus. The boy had been as resistant to the new faith as Pater had. “Don’t you want them to convert?” he said, playing along with her vagueness.
“Of course,” she said. “But will they? Really? If you force them?”
“Sometimes,” said Philemon, his patience tested, “slaves must be made to do right.”
She looked him in the eye, jaw clenched, but said nothing. She lifted the towel, placed it back on his chest, and returned to stropping, her strokes quicker and firmer.
“Onesimus will be fine,” he said. “The boy just needs guidance.”
She stopped stropping, stared at the leather for a moment, then looked Philemon in the eye again, her cheeks flushed pink. “You should have freed him.”
Philemon’s eyes widened. He hadn’t expected this. He examined her face. “I think you greatly overestimate him,” he said, maintaining his calm. “His competence. More important, his faithfulness.”
Apphia went back to stropping, her strokes aggressive. “He was the man’s son,” she said without looking up, her tone sharp.
“That doesn’t guarantee privilege,” he said, trying to hide his irritation. It certainly hadn’t in his own case.
“Why do you hate him?” said Apphia. “It blinds you.” She stopped stropping and set down the blade. “You’re to love,” she said, her face stern. “And forgive. If there’s anything to forgive.” She picked up the blade and attacked the strop with new vigor. “We bear with your flaws every day.”
“All the boy’s had is forgiveness,” he said, his eyes rolling upward. “He’s never punished.” Philemon softened. “I’ll consider training the boy. But he doesn’t deserve freedom.”
“Pater would have thought differently,” said Apphia, her voice catching in her throat.
Maybe, thought Philemon. But he would have been wrong. And in the end, it didn’t matter: the fool didn’t leave a will.
I’m loving this so much. The way you set each scene with all the careful details is captivating.