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
Philemon dines with Marius at the ninth-day feast in honor of Pater, hosted by the Fellowship of the Crossroads Temple. Philemon reluctantly reveals he has become a Christian. He discovers that Marius has been appointed governor of Asia and has imprisoned Philemon’s religious mentor, Paul. Onesimus serves at the feast, recording the receipt of Fellowship dues.
Half an hour before dawn, a house slave shook Onesimus awake. He sat up in his cot, confused at first by his surroundings—the slaves’ quarters in the domus. The day before, a messenger had told the villa slaves that Philemon required most of them at the river for a ritual early Sunday morning. Afterward, they’d meet back at the domus. The messenger had also said that all but a few slaves would be required at meetings every Sunday morning from then on. Onesimus wasn’t sure about the ritual, but he suspected the meeting was a gathering of Christians. Most Sundays, his shepherds would head to Colossae for such meetings. He understood they mostly met outside, in the marketplace, sometimes in the agora at the top of the city, which made meeting at the domus seem puzzling. Had his brother converted? Onesimus couldn’t see what else the meeting would be.
The prospect of the gathering chafed him like a rough loincloth. The new religion intruded on Greek traditions. Even the Romans embraced the Olympian gods, albeit with Latin names and a few minor adaptations. Why couldn’t the Christians do the same? They seemed to hate tradition of all kinds. According to the shepherds, the faith was about a Jewish man called Jesus, but, confusingly, they also embraced non-Jews without requiring Jewish conversion—unlike the proper Jewish faith. Jesus couldn’t even follow his own tradition. They called him “Lord” and “Christ,” and they worshiped him as if he were a god but, from all Onesimus had heard, he was just a man. After all, he’d died a slave’s death, crucifixion—a fact they made much of. A sign of the creator-god’s forgiveness, they said. But what kind of god forgives? A weak one, thought Onesimus. Did Artemis forgive Actaeon when he stumbled on her naked, bathing in the forest? The virgin huntress turned him into a stag and set his own dogs on him, tearing him to pieces. This was the act of a true god, he thought. Vengeance. Judgment. A god of forgiveness was a pretender, no god at all.
Onesimus tugged at his left boot in the half-light, but his foot wouldn’t slide in. He reached into the boot and felt his money purse, put there for safekeeping, and realized he hadn’t banked the earnings from his accounting work the night before. He opened the purse and fingered the big brass sestertius. With his thumb he felt the emperor’s profile on one side—still Claudius—and ran his fingers over the image of Artemis on the reverse, flanked as always by a stag and a hunting dog. He imagined himself in a crowded marketplace with a purse full of coins, buying whatever he wanted: fried wheat bread, wool toga, a signet ring. Well-dressed, clean-shaven, people nodding respectfully to him.
The sound of slaves scurrying from the sleeping quarters broke his musing. He re-tightened the drawstring of his purse, looped it over his shoulder, slung his wineskin over the other shoulder, finished dressing, and joined the traffic in the hallway. Before heading to breakfast, he turned aside to the steward’s office. The door was ajar, so he pushed in. The steward was inside, examining a scroll. He glanced up at Onesimus with a look of annoyance. “Lost?”
“My earnings,” said Onesimus, sheepish.
“How much?” asked the steward, indifferent.
Onesimus showed him the coin. “One sestertius.”
The steward waved him toward the peculium coffer, which sat on a table in the corner, and went back to his scroll. Onesimus edged over to the coffer. The coin made a muffled jingle as it dropped through the slot and hit the other coins below. The peculium was a slave’s independent earnings, which, at least in theory, at least in part, a paterfamilias considered the slave’s property, held in trust till there was enough to buy freedom. And slaves sometimes managed to do it. But in practice, the master rarely spelled out a slave’s entitlement or the price of freedom in any clear way. And, strictly speaking, Roman law still recognized any money gained by a slave as property of the paterfamilias. So whether the peculium would buy a slave’s freedom depended, in the end, on the master’s whim. If the slave worked hard and behaved well, perhaps it would. Onesimus was skeptical. He saw it for what it was: a vague source of hope meant to keep slaves in line. But he still tried to earn what he could.
Once, when he was younger, he’d tried to keep his earnings, stowing a coin in the locker under his bed, but Pater had found him out; Onesimus hadn’t known about the ledger, and the missing entry was obvious. Pater didn’t beat him—his violence rarely made that much sense. In fact, he laughed, but he also required the coin back. Years later, when Onesimus was better with accounting, forging the ledger had crossed his mind, but in the end, it had felt too risky, so he’d continued dropping his money through the slot.
“I’ll do the ledger.” The steward wasn’t listening. Onesimus found the right scroll and added one sestertius to the tally. Thirty denarii—roughly a month’s wages. Not bad, he thought.
Just after dawn, he arrived at a clearing on the riverbank with a group of Philemon’s house slaves and others from town. The place smelled of mud. Slaves from the villa were already there, shivering in the breeze that whipped up the valley and whistled through the black alders. The twins and a few other slaves were absent, watching over the villa.
Apphia had chatted with a freedman named Archippus the whole way to the river. He was rangy, with dark hair and a long patchy beard, now blown horizontal in the wind. His black tasseled robe cut a stark contrast with the cream-colored garments Apphia and several others wore, and his face looked strained, as if he were relieving himself with some difficulty. The twins had introduced Onesimus to him one Saturday when he was running errands in town. They’d just come from the synagogue. Chaleb had said he was a special butcher who served mostly Jewish people.
From the way Apphia fawned over him, peppering him with generous questions, responding to his answers with saccharine smiles and overdone laughter, Onesimus gathered he was some kind of leader among the Christians. Maybe rubbing shoulders with him made her feel important. She did have a thing for power, thought Onesimus. And status. Which he understood. She’d had neither as a young woman, having been plucked from the dump as an infant—the abandoned fruit of a lovers’ union—and sold to a madame in Perga, who raised her in the brothel. “Twelve mothers and no father,” she used to joke. She said the ladies treated her well enough, slipping her sweets or pocket money like kindly aunts. But at age twelve, as Apphia bloomed, patrons asked after her price, so Madame pressed her into service. When she became pregnant, Madame sold her on. At thirteen, she traveled with her new master to Laodicea, where he put her up for sale again, naked in the slave market, breasts swollen, belly bulging, due any day. And that’s when Pater bought her, intending she be a wet nurse for his firstborn, also due any day. Instead, when Atychia died in childbirth and Apphia’s own child was stillborn, Apphia had ended up as Philemon’s mother.
Apphia peeled herself away from Archippus and approached Onesimus. “Good morning,” she said, kissing both his cheeks. “How are you?”
“Fine,” he said, taking a step back. Last spring, before they made for the mountains, his mother had nagged him for weeks to join up with the Christians. “What’s all this about?”
“A ceremony. You’ll see.” She smiled, but he could tell she was uncomfortable. Then, as if selling something, she said, “Afterward, you’ll get new clothes.” She pulled at her tunic in demonstration, forcing another awkward smile.
Onesimus could see she wouldn’t describe the ceremony, so he nodded, humoring her, and said, “I’m going to find Neos.” He slipped behind some bushes and swallowed two mouthfuls of wine—he’d filled his skin with warm posca at the domus, a step up from the nasty lora—then found Neos among the villa slaves. His fellow shepherd also wore cream-colored garments, like Apphia’s. “Nice tunic,” said Onesimus.
Neos smiled and shook his head.
“Where’s Fela?”
“There,” said Neos, gesturing to a knot of female house slaves.
Onesimus looked over at her. He admired her skin, the color of dark desert sand. They’d always wondered if her parents were from the east, perhaps Syria or Judea. But they’d never know since she too had been abandoned as an infant, plucked from the dump in Laodicea by Marius’s steward. Marius had no lactating slaves at the time, so the steward commissioned Apphia to nurse and raise her. In the same year, Apphia found infant Neos in the Colossian dump and took him in, so the two of them grew up as younger siblings to Onesimus, nursing at Apphia’s breast, playing on the villa estate, working in the garden, unable to remember a time they didn’t love each other. When she was ten, Marius’s steward moved Felicitas back to his domus in Colossae where she served as a house slave.
She stood without talking, and her face looked unusually serious to Onesimus, as if she were bored or impatient with the women around her. It was more like her to chat and laugh, he thought. The eye patch was back, which he hadn’t seen in years. On the wrong eye. “Eye patch?” said Onesimus.
Neos shrugged. He looked at his feet.
When they were young, Onesimus had wondered how well she could see with her crossed eye. One day, when Pater was in a rare good mood, he took all the villa children to the creek to teach them to fish. He brought fishing line, hooks, and nets—Onesimus had caught a brown trout on a hook—but, Pater said, when you’re a soldier in the field, sometimes you have to catch them with your bare hands. He showed them how to step lightly into the shallows, track a fish as it winds in and out of the dappled sunlight, compensate for the distorting effect of the water, and strike at just the right moment. Pater hauled a fish from the water flapping and wriggling, and the kids stared in wonder. They all tried—some came close; Neos ended up falling in—but only Felicitas could repeat the trick. She pulled down her eye patch so it hung around her neck and stepped across the creek on rounded stones, as if she were walking on water, and before long she had a fish in her hands. When one of the boys had ridiculed Neos for his soaked clothing, she beaned him with a river rock from fifteen cubits away. Onesimus never doubted her vision again.
“You say hello to her?”
Neos nodded. “She’s avoiding me.”
“Why?”
Neos shrugged again.
Onesimus glanced around at the others wearing the cream clothes. He counted fifteen. “Where’re these from?” he said, tugging at Neos’s tunic.
“Philemon.” Neos gestured toward a stack of the garments piled on a handcart.
“Why?”
“Well, they’re part of the . . .”
“Part of what?”
“The baptism.”
Baptism. This was the rite of conversion his mother had urged on him in the spring. The wind bit, cutting through his threadbare clothes. Onesimus began to shiver, so he pulled his hood far over his head and jammed his hands under his cloak. His guts churned. He’d tolerate a ritual, but not if it meant conversion. This was not his religion, and this god did not deserve his worship—if indeed he was a god.