The Surprising Sexual Reason Pompeii's Lead is a Slave

I was deep into writing my young adult novel set in Pompeii, Curses and Smoke(Scholastic, May 2014), when my editor sent me a message that would've made any writer's blood turn to ice.

"Turns out there's a movie being made about Pompeii," she wrote. "And it too features a male slave as the love interest."

After dropping several f-bombs that nearly made my dog's ears bleed, I wondered if I should change my story. "No, no!" my editor said. "Yours is different enough." Which was true.

But it got me thinking. Why did the writer of the Pompeii movie make the same character choice I made for my novel? Why have a male slave as the focus of the "forbidden" love story? Why not the inverse -- a guy in love with a female slave? 

The answer has to do with the reality of ancient Rome's sexual "rules." ...

Read the rest on Huffington Post.

The Pallor of Ancient Slaves

When we Americans think of slavery, we think of the heinous history of abuse perpetrated onto the peoples of West Africa during the 16th through 19th centuries

But in the ancient world, the majority of slaves were not African, but European.Few came from Africa at all. Why? Because slaves came from the regions Rome conquered and Rome never ventured further into Africa than Egypt and areas in today’s Algiers and Morocco.

As a result, most Roman slaves came from Greece, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Britain, Bulgaria, Romania, and even some of the outlying areas of Italy itself.

Why is the racial composition of ancient slaves useful to remember when talking to kids about history? Because, especially in the US, the default “picture” of slavery is of the people taken from West Africa.

Does it help to know it wasn’t always that way? That Rome never conquered (or even attempted to conquer) the powerful kingdom of Nubia, and that, therefore, there were relatively few ancient Nubian slaves?

The relevance to today’s understanding of slavery is important, I believe, because it addresses the specific (though often unconscious) American misperception—that all slaves were black and that this was true throughout history.

It’s like when I talked to my kids about the Holocaust. Being Jewish, I saw the panic in their eyes when they first learned about it—“Will they do this to us? Why do people hate us so? Are we vulnerable?”

I told them that attempted genocide was not a unique experience to the Jews but that sadly, it’s the story of mankind. From indigenous people to specific groups in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and, currently, Darfur, attempted genocide is not a Jewish problem but a human one.

Similarly, my hope would be that children studying history would learn that slavery was not only the victimization of a single people during a specific period of time, but a terrible reality throughout all of history. A reality that still continues today in pockets of the world. A reality that we are all obligated to help destroy once and for all.

For more info on modern slavery, go to: www.freetheslaves.net/