ANTHIA IN ROME

A young Greek girl gets kidnapped by Roman soldiers and sold into slavery in this novel set in the first century.

Anthia, the 10-year-old daughter of a successful winemaker, enjoys happy days on Corcyra, a Greek island. But her blessed life is shattered when she is abducted, along with her sister, Chia, by Roman soldiers and corralled onto a ship headed for Rome. She realizes she is to be sold into slavery, her life of privilege as a member of a family that owned enslaved people cruelly turned upside down. She has no idea what has become of the rest of her family, but she sees her house in flames as the ship departs. Anthia does have some advantages—a beautiful girl from a well-bred clan, she is likely to fetch a handsome price and will be well cared for and shielded from the harm others less fortunate endure. She’s sold to a good family—she is now the property of Julia Cassandra Cassia—but her mistress is in mourning for the loss of her daughter, Althea, and, out of bitter sadness, mistreats Anthia brutally. Fegte powerfully captures not only the young protagonist’s exhaustion in the face of the “newness of everything around me,” but also her stark realization that her liberty is gone forever: “I would never return home. Having had the last familiar shred taken from me—my chiton—I felt naked, unknown, unloved, and a slave. No longer was I free to control a single detail of my life.”

With historical rigor and a sense of cultural authenticity, the author captures the life of an enslaved girl in Rome at the time—for Anthia, one full of both privileges and hardships as well as dangers. The complex contours of Anthia’s emotional response are delicately depicted—she is by turns afraid and excited, homesick but grateful that her lot isn’t worse. Still, even after she finds herself in a new, much more tolerant household, she still pines not only to see her family, but also to taste yet again the freedoms she once took for granted so blithely that she hardly noticed them or the enslaved people who served her: “At home in my father’s house, I had been as strictly supervised as I was in these Roman households, but I was a free Greek girl of good family. In a modest way, I had held a similar social status to Lady Claudia, though I was not allowed to remain idle. Yes, I would have done most anything to rid myself of the collar that proclaimed to one and all that I was a slave!” The tale is told from the first-person perspective of Anthia, and so the prose is simple and unembellished by literary invention. Nevertheless, Anthia’s plight is astutely conveyed. This is a moving novel that avoids the obvious temptations of facile sentimentality—Fegte could have exploited the youthfulness of Anthia to manipulate readers’ heartstrings and score cheap emotional victories. Instead, the author tells a story that rings true, raw, and unvarnished by theatrical chicanery.

An engaging abduction tale, affecting and intelligent.