In the spring of 65 AD, the citizens of Rome smelled blood. Less than a year after the Great Fire, the Emperor Nero was bankrupting the treasury building his Golden House. Prophesies heralding the end of Rome and the deeds of the ‘mother slayer’ abounded. The patricians of old families met at the midnight hour and conspired with Nero’s bodyguards. Daggers were sharpened. On the lowest rung of conspirators was Epicharis, a wealthy former slave, a widow. With nothing to gain, she joined the conspiracy on principle. The blue-bloods moved too slow and Epicharis grew frustrated with their timidity. Taking matters into her own hands, she found an ally in a ship’s captain who betrayed her. Nero needed names “…and assuming that female flesh and blood must be unequal to the agony, he ordered her to be torn on the rack.” On the morning of the second day of her interrogation, while en route to the torture chamber, Epicharis weaved in-and-out of consciousness.
Her skin was covered in mist. It stank of rot. It stank of fear. It was the damp, clammy mist of the afterlife but Epicharis was still here.
They will break me today.
Her eyes rolled back into her head and her body quaked as if Jove himself leaned down and pulled the strings that controlled her head, hands, and shoulders. Her legs didn’t tremble. The rack had dislocated her legs. The convulsion twisted her breast band askew so that one of her nipples could be seen through the thin, soiled tunic.
The litter lurched and her hands gripped the makeshift chair they had strapped her to. Yesterday’s beatings made her own weight unbearable. She heard the front man curse as he dropped one of the poles supporting her transport.
She whimpered, surprised that her body could squeeze out any sound at all so bruised was the cage that held her breath.
The back man cursed, too, as he dropped his poles. Her chair crashed to the cobblestones and she would have tumbled over, chair and all, had the front man not dropped the other pole, to even out the spill. The pain poured down and she lost consciousness.
Names! Give us the names!
She heard the crack of the whip before the sting of her flesh.
Scaevinus, Proculus, Annaeus,…no! Not Annaeus!
Her eyes flew open. Why weren’t they moving? She listened to the men argue. It was dark under the canopy and the curtains of tanned animal hides were drawn so the people they passed along the way wouldn’t take pity and riot for her sake.
“Female flesh is weak,” the Prefect had said to his lackey the day before. “Weak in body, weak in mind, weak in spirit. Show them the rack and they’ll piss themselves.” He turned his head and squirted spit between his front teeth on the straw several paces away.
The lackey grinned and Epicharis noticed gaps where teeth should be. She pressed her lips tight just as she flexed the muscles that sealed her woman’s privy part because the Prefect’s words rang true.
She didn’t piss herself, though she did cry out, often and loud. She begged for mercy but gave no names. When at last they tired of fetching buckets of water to wake her, the Prefect said, “Enough for today. She’ll break on the morrow.”
He planted his legs like battering rams, fists on hips and stared hard as if she was the maze that housed the Minotaur and he, Theseus, looking for a way out. But the lackey wouldn’t meet her eyes. She had bested them and the shame of it scorched his face.
But that was yesterday.
Today I will break.
She heard the front man count three and they lifted her chair. Epicharis slumped as the litter tipped forward. Her breast band slid down around her ribs; the sweat of her tunic allowed no modesty.
It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.
She contemplated the teaching and rebutted: not when the mind is shattered by torture.
They will break me.
The winding cobblestones of Clivus Lautumiarum straightened as the jailers stepped onto the Forum. Though the curtains blinded her, they did not make her deaf. Shouts filled the air, vendors, gossips, gypsies from all over the Empire. Only a javelin’s throw from the Tullianum where they would break her body to loosen her tongue.
Accept the moment as it presents itself. Don’t let fear control you. Use your mind to do your part in nature’s plan.
The words drifted to her from outside the litter. Her weakened spine rose like a tower to make her equal to the sound. She imagined the philosopher high on the Rostra so his voice would carry. Epicharis closed her eyes and let the old man’s voice touch her heart and sharpen her mind.
“Think your way through difficulties: soften what is hard, widen what is narrow, bear your burdens skillfully…”
She lost his voice to the distance and the din.
Gird yourself, girl!
Epicharis inhaled deeply and felt the chafe of her breast band press against her ribs. That tightness, that rub, sparked the last of her strength. She squeezed her bony elbows into her trunk. With one hand she pulled the band up and over her elbow and arm till it rested on her shoulder and then did the same with the other side. Barely able to lift her hand, she cinched the band from behind her neck and hooked it on to the back of the chair.
Droplets of steam dripped down her face or was it the impatient mist come to find her and take her to the Elysian Plain.
To be brave is to be free.
With those words, Epicharis leaned hard into her makeshift noose and sent her final breath up through the canopy, past the philosopher, the gypsies, the slaves, as well as the freeborn. This great empire that made her a slave then set her free was worth dying for.
Commentary
The ancients blame Epicharis for ruining the conspiracy. They scorn her for ‘womanly impatience.’ How dare she take matters into her own hands as though she was a man and free-born. Historians betrayed her as much as the guards who tortured her.
Epicharis was intelligent. She understood the value of momentum and that the biggest threat to the conspiracy was time. The longer the plan idled, the more likely it was to be exposed. She was brave beyond comprehension. They burned her, racked her, and whipped her yet she did not yield. She was also principled. A wealthy, former slave, she profited nothing from the conspiracy. She believed, as did many Romans, that the Empire would fall under Nero.
Time lost Epicharis in its footnotes. She was unable to inspire future generations of little girls as a role model for courage, strength, and integrity. Not only was she equal to the agony bestowed, she surpassed it.
Sources
Dio, C. Roman History. Book 62: 27.3.
Polyaenus. Stratagems. Book 8: 62.
Tacitus Annals, Book 15: 51 and 57.