Part 1. The Oppressive Life of a Roman Slave Boy - Dignity Stripped

I am Simeon, reduced to a mere shadow of a human, an object stripped of dignity and thrown into the bottomless pit of Roman slavery.

While some slaves wore a thin mask of respectability, I was condemned from the start to be a spectacle of degradation, scorn, and savage torment. I was broken, battered, and ultimately slaughtered, not as a man, but as a disposable plaything for brutal amusement.

My peaceful youth in a Lebanese village was shattered by the barbarous thunder of Roman soldiers. The brave men who tried to resist were slaughtered like animals, their blood soaking the ground beneath my horrified gaze. I had been working on the fields and was too late to help my kinsmen fight the Romans.

Women and children were seized, their helpless screams swallowed by smoke and the crackle of burning homes.

At eighteen, thrust between boyhood and manhood, I was not spared death, I was selected for a fate worse than death: chains, darkness, and a ruined existence stripped of all pride.

Herded like cattle into a dank barn, my body and spirit shackled, I was paraded as property, displayed and degraded. The soldiers ripped my garments with mocking laughter as I stood exposed, a fragile youth, trembling not out of cold but humiliation.

Their cruel jests were a blade against my soul: “He’ll break faster.” And break I did.

The arrival of a master colder than stone sealed my doom.

He sought a slave - a young, strong man for his personal service.

Four or five men were paraded before him, exuding power forged in years. But he rejected them all. His finger, sharp and final, pointed, but not at the strongest. It landed on me - fragile and unready.

He chose me not for strength, but for my helplessness - my youth made me a toy for his merciless abuse. My body was laid bare, my very flesh claimed, my autonomy obliterated by a pronouncement as cold as iron: “You belong to me.”

They whispered poison into my ears. “Hope you like crucifixion”, as if my anguish was entertainment. I did not know what that meant, but guessed it wasn’t meant to be nice.

Dragged away under tight ties, I dared to question the soldiers about my captor. Their smiles twisted with unspoken meaning. “He will be nice to you,” they lied darkly - but their eyes betrayed only menace.

Dragged through opulent corridors I could never afford to dream of, I was soaked in shame, shackled not just by rope, but by the knowledge I was utterly powerless.

The housekeeper’s honeyed lies did nothing to mask the oppressive air of cruelty behind the mansion walls.

I met my master, a man whose commanding gaze never once rested on me as a person. He demanded silence, obedience, a complete surrender of my will.

Even eating, drinking, the most private bodily functions were subject to his permission.

I stood, numb and silent, as those words settled like chains across my spirit.

I was eighteen, caught in the cruel cusp of early manhood: blond hair, deep blue eyes, skin bronzed by labor.

My body, once proud under the sun, now weighed down with shame and fear.

We wore our clothing with dignity then - long cloaks, turbans, veils. Nudity was a secret shared only at streams, a fragile liminal space before adulthood demanded modesty.

At that time, my body was transforming in ways I barely understood. My skin breaking with new growth, a tender awakening that was as confusing as my fate.

My mother had never taught me the rites of manhood, like sex, like pulling back my foreskin - and I found myself lonely in these new sensations. Often I felt the growing sensitivity of my boyhood, unsure, frightened, yet curiously drawn to the trembling promise of feeling.

But none of it mattered here. Not in this house, ruled by a merciless shadow of power.

Here, I was no longer a boy on the verge of manhood.

I was property.

This was no longer my existence. I was nearly naked not just in body but in spirit, reduced to property in the worst possible humiliation.