2023-12-08 13:42:28
Time.news – Donkeys blindfolded, tied, and forced to wander for hours following furrows drawn on the floor. Slaves locked in a cramped environment without external views, with small windows with iron grates to let in some light. A prisoner’s condition, for umen and animals, forced to grind grain needed every day to produce bread.
An almost prison-like bakery emerges in Pompeii in Regio IX, insula 10, where excavations are underway as part of a broader project to secure and maintain the fronts that surround the still uninvestigated area of the most famous ancient city in the world .
The archaeologists’ investigations revealed a house undergoing renovation, divided as was frequent in the Roman world into a residential sector, decorated with refined 4th style frescoes, and commercial premises, in this case intended for baking.
In one of the rooms of the bakery, three victims had already emerged in recent months, confirming that despite the ongoing renovation, the house was inhabited. Yet another testimony of backbreaking work to which men, women and animals were subjected in the ancient mill-bakeries, also told by an exceptional source, the writer Apuleius, who lived in the 2nd century AD, who in Metamorphoses IX 11-13, tells how Lucius, the protagonist of one of his stories, is transformed into a donkey and sold to a miller.
The new discoveries also make it possible to better describe the functioning of the production plant which was disused at the time of the eruption in 79 AD. The production sector highlighted is devoid of doors and communications with the outside, the only exit is onto the atrium, and not even the stable has road access as is frequent in other cases. “It is, in other words, about a space in which we must imagine the presence of people of servile status whose owner felt the need to limit freedom of movement – points out the director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii Gabriel Zuchtriegel, in a scientific article published by many in the E-Journal of the Pompeii excavations.
“It is the most shocking side of ancient slavery, the one devoid of relationships of trust and promises of tampering, where one was reduced to brute violence, an impression which is fully confirmed by the closing of the few windows with iron grates”, he adds. The millstone area, in the southern part of the central room, is adjacent to the stable, characterized by the presence of a long manger.
Around the millstones, a series of semicircular recesses can be identified in the volcanic basalt slabs. Given the strong resistance of the material, it is likely that what at first glance might appear to be footprints are actually notches made specifically to prevent draft animals from slipping on the pavement and at the same time to trace a path, thus forming the canalis curve described by Apuleius.
“The iconographic and literary sources, in particularand the reliefs from the tomb of Eurysaces in Rome, suggest that a millstone was normally moved by a couple made up of a donkey and a slave. The latter, in addition to pushing the grindstone, had the task of encouraging the animal and monitoring the grinding process, adding grain and removing flour”, explains the director of the Park.
The wear of the various notches can depend on the infinite number of turns, always the same, carried out according to the pattern established in the flooring. The resurfaced environment, with its testimony of harsh daily life, integrates the picture told in the exhibition “The other Pompeii: common lives in the shadow of Vesuvius“, which will inaugurate on 15 December at the Palestra grande degli scavi dedicated to that myriad of individuals often forgotten by historical chronicles, such as the slaves, who constituted the majority of the population and whose work contributed significantly to the economy, but also to culture and social fabric of Roman civilization.
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