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
Before the journey down the mountain to Colossae with his fellow shepherds, Neos reveals that he discussed marriage with Felicitas, a slave in Marius’s household. Unbeknown to Neos, Marius has taken Felicitas as his concubine and plans to move her permanently to Ephesus. Felicitas is distraught and angry, and has avoided Neos since his return to Colossae.
Felicitas looked in the bronze mirror. She tightened her hair bun, wrinkled her nose, and eased the eye patch over her head and around her neck. As she stepped closer to the mirror and leaned in, her face finger-lengths from the metal, she scrutinized the wayward eye that bent toward her nose. Crooked? Drifting? At the baptism days before, Neos had begged to talk with her, at the river or in the meeting afterward. She’d refused—neither was the right time—but she couldn’t put him off forever. “Saturnalia,” she’d said, hoping the festival would never come. But now it was here, and her dread mixed with shame. And guilt. For shirking her duties in the kitchen? She’d made herself think so. Marius was hosting the feast that evening, and, despite the ideals of the festival, it remained slaves’ work to prepare it. And there was much yet to be done. But was that it? Or was it what she’d done to Neos, would do to Neos? Had she done it? Marius had done it, but had she done it too? She pushed away the snarl of questions, unable to untangle it. Think about something else. She stepped back and lifted the eye patch into place, then washed her dry, cracked hands again.
She forced herself out of the slave’s entrance, into the stream of revelers flowing through the alley toward the agora. The sun neared the horizon, but the sky lacked the warm color of evening. Instead, the cloud-filtered light washed the city in fading sickly yellow, like diluted urine in a fuller’s basin. Revelers spilled into the plaza. She felt the dropping temperature and wrapped in her cloak more tightly. Two male jugglers in women’s clothing, who reeked of wine, stopped juggling and leered at her. “Tasty,” said one of them. They both cackled. She dipped her eyes and picked up her pace.
The stench of bloody flesh filled her nostrils as she passed slaves continuing to hack meat from carcasses in front of the massive temple, where they’d agreed to meet. She stopped and watched the priests filtering in and out. Not yet, she thought. She felt an impulse to pray, to find a lonely place, to listen for the whisper. She turned across the agora, heading for the theater, and made her way through an archway, swimming against the tide of revelers streaming out of the portico. Once inside, she dodged between people, heading for the top corner, the last row of seats. As she sat down and closed her eyes, she took a deep breath, trying to imagine she sat on a mountain, in a deserted place, alone.
Voices rose as a fight started between two drunk slaves nearby. She opened her eyes. What did Neos want? At the river, he’d said he wanted to talk privately, just the two of them. To exchange Saturnalia gifts? They usually did this. But even before the festival he’d wanted to talk, so a mere gift exchange seemed unlikely. Maybe he just missed her, wanted to see her after his long absence, to hold her, to kiss her. She shuddered. If this was it, could she let him? Despite her hands, scoured and split, she felt soiled, like her soul had a stain. Could others see it? Did God see it? Archippus had read from the scroll of Psalms at their meeting on Sunday: Against you, you alone, have I sinned. The words had lodged in her mind like an arrow. She wanted to hide. She made to pray again—closing her eyes, inhaling deeply, exhaling slowly—but she couldn’t. So many words, too many to voice. Harsh words, she realized, as though if she opened her mouth, out would gush a flood of anger. She took another deep breath, purposing to listen instead, but heard only her speeding heart, loud in her ears.
She got up, left the theater, and headed back across the agora to the temple. As she rounded the corner to the north side, the crowd thinned, and she could see Neos waiting up ahead, in the building’s vast shadow. He’d brushed his hair and shaved. When he noticed her, his face brightened. Her body conducted a shiver of fear, heart still thrashing. She stopped instinctively—like prey confronting a predator—continuing only by commanding her legs forward. When she reached him, Neos moved to embrace her, but she drew back. “Don’t,” she said.
“What’s . . .” Neos fumbled for words. “Is there something . . . ?”
“I just . . . don’t want to be touched.” Her mind raced, her head began to ache, and her vision moved in and out of focus. What could she tell him? The conversation ahead seemed strewn with traps she couldn’t disarm. Say as little as possible.
To change the subject, she reached into her bag and pulled out a small wax figurine, a sigillarium—the traditional Saturnalia gift, especially among slaves. It was to be tossed in the fire on the last day of the festival, a symbol from older, darker festivals, when Saturn received human sacrifices to satisfy his consort, Lua, mother of destruction. Felicitas offered the figure to Neos with a weak smile.
His face lightened as he received the gift.
“I don’t have long,” she said. “What’d you need?”
Neos seemed surprised she’d jumped right to business. “Well, I,” he said. “I wondered if . . .”
“What?” she said, impatient.
“. . . if you’re . . . are you okay?”
“Fine,” she said, though she could see he wasn’t convinced.
“Feels like . . . are you avoiding me?”
Her insides squirmed. “Of course not,” she said. “I’ve just been busy. Marius is in town, and we’re hosting the feast. That always makes it busy.” She gave him another weak smile, as if it somehow substantiated her claim. She hated herself for lying to him.
Neos nodded. “And how come . . . why the patch?”
“Is this why you needed to talk so urgently?” Her tone was again sharp and impatient, bordering on angry, and her headache intensified. “You know I hate my eye. I just don’t want to see it anymore. Isn’t that okay?”
“Of course,” said Neos, retracting the question with his tone. “The reason I . . . why I . . . I have something,” he said, fumbling to open his leather pouch.
She expected a sigillarium, but instead he pulled out a wooden ring. It looked hand-crafted. Her heart sank. No, no, no. She hadn’t foreseen this, but why hadn’t she? When he’d come down the mountain in August to resupply a second time, he’d arrived at the villa as the sun was setting, spent the next four hours gathering and packing supplies, then made the two-mile trek to Colossae in the dark, just to linger a few moments with her on the stone steps to the slave’s entrance. She thought he must have been tired, but he showed no sign of it. He bubbled over with heady ideas—about their future, their children even. He almost proposed right there, but she told him he had to ask Marius. No slave could marry without permission from the paterfamilias. But she also gave him hope: she reminded him Marius would return for Saturnalia. Perhaps then, she said, her smile warm. She let him hold her, absorbing the feel of him, his intoxicating smell of earth, and wool, and evergreen—enough to stock her memory and nourish her heart in the months of absence. Then she let him go. He’d reluctantly turned and walked the two miles back to the villa in the dark, before setting off up the mountain at dawn the next day.
He looked her in the eye and said, “We don’t have to ask Marius, and . . . we don’t . . . not soon. I just don’t want to . . . I just want to know . . .” He reached for her left hand and extended the ring.
Before he could touch her, she took a step back and lifted her palms. “Neos. I can’t.”
His face sank.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She really was sorry. Their plan was ruined. She was ruined. Her head throbbed.
“I don’t . . . why not?” asked Neos. “Didn’t we . . . we talked about this.”
She said nothing.
“You feel different?”
She considered what to say. Did she feel different? Her face flushed with anger. Did it not feel different to be pinned to a bed by a hulking stranger, watching with one eye as he arches and flops on top of you, his monstrous member inside you, every stroke piercing, puncturing, skewering, impaling your hopes, your dreams, your joys? It felt entirely different to have her life thrown from a cliff, dashed against the rocks below, reduced to uncountable pieces. And for what? To satisfy a whim. A triviality. A misguided instinct to breed. He’d seen her in the garden. She’d piqued his penchant for pleasure. So he’d taken her. For him, it was tending to an itch. Never mind the scratch tears open a life. Slaves, after all, have no lives. Yes. Yes. She felt very different. A tumult of rage, billowing clouds of fury and wrath, boiling inside, the seams of her skin straining to hold it in. She gritted her teeth. But did she feel for Neos? This was his question. Did she feel different about him? She had no idea. She softened. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Don’t know?” Neos sounded exasperated.
She sighed. “Marius is taking me to Ephesus. After the festival.”
“Well, I don’t see why . . . it’s still . . . nothing’s changed,” said Neos. “You’ll be back, and then . . .”
“Well, that’s just it,” she said. “He’s moving me to Ephesus. Permanently.”
Neos’s face lit with rare anger, and his voice clarified. “Permanently? Surely, he has other slaves!”
Felicitas stayed silent.
“What if you just take it anyway? Take the ring. I’ll buy our . . . I’ll wait for . . .”
She’d forgotten how naive he was. How impractical. Last winter, Apphia had nagged and nagged, so Felicitas had finally come to a meeting of the Christians. And she saw what Apphia and Monica had seen: a community of equals. Strange, but attractive. Free people friends with slaves. Men and women learning together, married or not. The divisions of ordinary society seemed to fade away when they met. Yes, there were leaders—Apphia was one of them—but they didn’t lord it over those they led: rather, they called them brothers and sisters, children of the one Father who loved them all. After she was baptized, Neos gained a sudden interest in the meetings. But, of Pater’s slaves, only Apphia had permission to attend. So one Sunday morning, when Neos had last watch, he left the sheepfold before the other shepherds were up, cut through the woods behind the gatehouse to avoid the villa overseer, and sat down next to her at the meeting wearing a stupid grin. When the other shepherds woke, they found the gate of the sheepfold ajar and Neos gone. He narrowly escaped a whipping. At the time, his willingness to flout the rules and suffer for her sake had seemed charming. But now it seemed reckless.
She looked him in the face. There he was, her beautiful boy. How could she say no? How could she leave him? “I need to think,” she said.
Neos looked at the ground. He slipped the ring back into his pouch, along with the sigillarium she’d given him.