(Maybe the unexpected corridor instead of a face can stand for the paradoxes of economics?)
"'...the free man is often just free to starve. An owner keeps his slaves fed, at least. Some of us is right unhappy about that. We don't know how to go about finding work in a strange land. We don't know the talk or customs or anything. The older of us are all too plainly slaves...'" (p. 144)
The freed slaves want to become not free workers but pirates or, more grandiloquently:
"'Free companions of the Midworld Sea.'" (p. 145)
That might be a fine title for a company of mercenaries but not for a gang of cutthroats.
However, the spokesman, Quintus from Saguntum in Spain, has an elementary grasp of economics. How free is a man who starves because he has been made redundant, has been laid off during a recession or has had to flee to a country where he knows neither the language nor the local ways of earning a living?
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And piracy, in the chaos of those times, was a real and worsening danger in the Mediterranean. So much so that that Pompey the Great was granted special powers by the Roman Senate to stamp out the pirates not that many years later. Which he successfully managed to do.
What made the problems you listed esp. pressing was the low level of technology then available. Also, the near universal acceptance of slavery made labor so cheap that there simply wasn't much incentive for developing the possible uses of steam power that some experimenters in Alexandria were tying out there.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I forgot to add that in another of Anderson's historical novels, ROGUE SWORD, we do see a company of mercenaries, the Catalan Grand Company. And how, because they were treated treacherously by the Byzantines, the Catalans virtually tore apart the declining Eastern Roman Empire.
Ad astra! Sean
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