Gaius Julius Mygdonius: the Parthian enslaved as a boy who wrote his story on his tombstone

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One of the many millions of people captured by the Romans and sold into slavery was a man who died in Ravenna in the 1st century BC. He wrote his own story, on his own tombstone, so that everyone who saw it would know what he endured and what he survived.

Gaius Julius Mygdonius, Parthian in origin. Born a free man and captured as a boy, given away to Roman territory. When helpful fate made me a Roman citizen, I began to save for when I became 50 years old. Ever since my youth I have wanted to reach my old age. Now, stone, receive me willingly; with you I shall be released from my worries.

Gaius Julius Mygdonius wasn’t the name he was given by his father, and it wasn’t the name he bore when the Romans captured him, nor was it the name he was called on his travels to Italy or during his life in slavery. At some point he became merely Mygdonius to his captors and his enslavers, which simply denotes him as a person from Mygdonia (Bulgaria and northern Greece). Mygdonius describes himself as a Parthian, which means he was from ancient Persia.

We know that he was captured as a child after experiencing the Roman war, and possibly a Roman siege. Eyewitness accounts of the Roman war terrify even across a few thousand years of distance. When the Romans breached the walls of a city, they killed, indiscriminately, everyone they came across, following their orders to “kill all they came across, sparing none, and to not start pillaging until the signal was given.” Bodies filled the streets. Not just of humans, but of dogs and horses cut in half, says the Greek historian Polybius, who was himself taken captive in a Roman assault. The soldiers raped and killed until they were exhausted.

We have two eyewitness accounts of the process of being taken as a captive by the Romans. Neither is by someone who was himself enslaved, because both were too noble for slavery. They are non-Roman witnesses to Roman war. The first comes from the works of Polybius, a Greek statesman from the fantastically named city of Megalopolis who ended up first a captive in Rome following the Third Macedonian War in 168 BC, and then a tutor to Scipio Aemilianus. When Scipio grew up and became the leading general in the third war against Carthage, he took Polybius along with him — rather against Polybius’ will — and Polybius eventually wrote an account of what he saw during this time. The second account comes from Josephus, a Jewish scholar and leader born Yosef ben Matittyahu in Galilee who fought against the Romans in the Jewish War and was taken captive after the brutal siege of Yodfat in 67 AD. He accompanied the emperors Vespasian and Titus for the rest of the war until the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. Titus then took him back to Rome, where he developed a nice line in explaining Jewish history to the Romans and Roman history to the Jews.

Both Polybius and Josephus wrote accounts of the Roman process of taking and organizing their captives following a battle or siege and, although they were written 200 years apart, they are remarkably consistent. For a start, the life stories of both men provide useful examples that show that it was not local elites who were being enslaved by the Romans. Status protected people in captivity as it did in life, and no Macedonian or Bithynian leader ever ended up chained in a field in Sicily. The people who the Romans took captive and enslaved were the poor, the workers, and the already enslaved.

Mygdonius was one of these non-elites who survived the Roman onslaught. Still breathing when the signal came to stop the slaughter and start the pillage, Mygdonius became booty. Rounded up from his hiding place by a towering, battle-scarred soldier of Rome, he then waited to find out his fate. After hours, maybe days, of waiting the commander appeared to divide his captives; a tedious administrative job for a Roman general, but for Mygdonius and his fellow captives, perhaps the most important day of their lives. Would they be executed or enslaved? Would the general allow them to be ransomed, and was there anyone to ransom them?

Mygdonius was too lowly to be ransomed or taken into a relatively luxurious prison as a hostage, a fate open only to those blessed with noble blood. The choices facing him were death or slavery, and he was granted slavery. The Roman lawyers believed that slaves were called servi because generals saved ( servare ) them from death and so it was with Mygdonius. He was not given to the soldiers as a prize, or sent into public slavery, or kept as a treat by the general; he was simply sold there and then to the slave traders who followed the Roman army on even the smallest missions to take their booty and turn it into profit.

Both Polybius and Josephus offer detailed breakdowns of individual sieges and the aftermath in which the huddled, terrified inhabitants of cities were divided up into categories and sent off to new lives. Polybius describes the short and (relatively) uneventful siege of New Carthage (Cartagena, Spain) in 209 BC. Scipio took the city in a matter of days and without much struggle but still “as is the Roman custom” sent his troops to slaughter the population without mercy, dismembering not just the people but also their animals and burning their homes until they had the New Carthaginian general in custody. This worked pretty fast because, well, it would. Start cutting a person’s children and dogs in half in front of them and they do tend to despair.

Within a few hours Scipio had accepted the unconditional surrender of his New Carthaginian counterpart. The next day, he set to dividing up the booty, including the 10,000 prisoners. First, says Polybius, Scipio removed the political men with their wives and children and, asking them to look kindly on the Romans, he let them go free. This act of clemency was extended only to the city’s political elite.

The next group to be identified were the craftsmen or artisans, people like stonemasons and carpenters. These 2,000 men he made slaves of the Roman Republic, publicly owned to ply their trade for the good of their enemy. Then, Scipio picked out the strongest young men and condemned them to serve in the Roman navy as oarsmen. He also promised these men that if they helped him win the war and didn’t, y’know, die in hideous ancient naval battle or drown in the Mediterranean, he would free them when it was all over. All the rest of the prisoners, he handed over to the proper officials to be sold to the dealers who followed the armies. Polybius recorded these details because he believed Scipio to be uniquely merciful and moderate and to have generally demonstrated that the Romans were a great bunch of lads. The fates of the men, women, and children who were stripped, eyeballed, and sold on the auction block were of no more interest to him than the fates of the individual silver coins taken from the city’s treasury. They were merchandise now to be dealt with as property, not people.

As Cicero finished a minor campaign in Cilicia, he wrote a long letter to his bestie Atticus describing his adventures and finished up by saying that the only plunder he had kept for himself were the captives being sold at that moment. “As I write, I have 120,000 sesterces on the block,” he said, reducing all those poor people to cold cash and naked bodies.

The fates of the men, women, and children who were stripped, eyeballed, and sold on the auction block were of no more interest to [Scipio] than the fates of the individual silver coins taken from the city’s treasury.

Josephus describes pretty much the exact same process happening in Judea in 69 AD. There, the Roman generals were less interested in winning the goodwill of the population they had defeated and so Josephus claims that, in total, the Roman army took 97,000 people into slavery in the Jewish War, which is more people than can fit in Wembley Stadium. He describes Vespasian dividing up the captives at Tarichaea in Galilee, executing 1,200 of the elites, sending 6,000 of the strongest young men to dig Nero’s folly of a canal in Greece, and selling 30,400 people on the auction block.

These numbers blur. They are simply too big to conceptualize as individuals: 30,400 Mygdoniuses; 30,400 of your child, your mum, your brother; 30,400 human beings.

A year later, after the sack of Jerusalem, the Roman general decided to divide the captives up by age and looks: “He selected the tallest and most handsome of the youth and reserved them for the triumph; of the rest, those over 17 years of age he sent in chains to the works in Egypt, while multitudes were presented by Titus to the various provinces to be destroyed in the theaters by the sword or by wild beasts; those under seventeen were sold.” Very few of these would ever know freedom again; most would die hideously. Every one of them would be chained by the neck and ankle and wrist and led on nightmare journeys across deadly seas to foreign places. Every one of them would be beaten, at least as part of the process of making a free person realize that they were no longer a person, of turning a human into a slave.

Thus, with thousands of others, Mygdonius was chained at the neck and the leg, the cold metal resting heavily on his collarbone, chafing at his ankle, rubbing his skin raw and red. We see how enslaved people moved across the empire in the tombstone of Aulos Kapreilios Thimotheos, a dealer in slaves who had a line of eight chained men carved into his 2-meter-high memorial. This was the first step in Mygdonius’ transformation from a person into a slave, a life which hung between life and death. Maybe he thought about escaping, maybe he thought about suicide as he walked from the city to the sea, and then endured the Mediterranean crossing. Many, many men and women killed themselves on the boats to escape the violence and humiliation they knew lay ahead of them.

But Mygdonius always had hope. He says so himself. “Ever since I was young, I have wanted to reach my old age.” Captured as a child, Mygdonius clung to the dream of survival. Through his sale into imperial slavery, through the erasure of his old self and the creation of a new person: Mygdonius, the slave known only by his place of origin. Through his grinding years of enslavement, and his tireless work that finally led to his being freed. Through his third renaming, taking on Gaius Julius, the names of the people who enslaved him. Through it all, he remained a free Parthian in his heart. He saved and saved and worked and saved so that when he died, in his old age, his ashes could be interred in a huge sarcophagus of marble and the important facts of who he really was — free, freed, rejecting the slavery that sought to erase him — could be proclaimed forever to all who passed by.

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