A Story of Ancient Rome

Duro lived during the very apex of Roman power and global influence. Having been born in the second year of the second century CE, (that is, 102CE), Duro was the only one of the five children born to his father, to have survived childhood. Duro’s lineage was far from illustrious, in the eyes of Romans, as his grandfather had been a Dacian officer, serving the defiant King Decebalus, in what is now called Domitian’s Dacian War. The war took place in modern-day Romania, and while it was one of the proudest moments in the history Romania, it did not rate so highly in the annals of Rome’s celebrated military history--since the Romans lost. 

In that short but savage war, Duro’s grandfather had been captured by a brave Roman officer, and subsequently sent into a life of slavery on a Roman plantation, which happened to be owned by a wealthy Roman senator, (of an unfortunately malignant temperament). Duro’s grandfather soon died on that plantation, from exhaustion and abuse. But before he died, he fathered a son with a fellow female slave he encountered there, during a rare night of tranquility. And though he did not love her, the night they spent together in that hopeless place gave them both a brief reminder of the human intimacy and compassion they had known in their native lands, (prior to Roman enslavement). 

And the son that was born to that proud Dacian warrior, later enslaved, was Duro’s father, who, in turn, was sold as a boy to a wealthy Roman freedman innkeeper and tavern owner, where Duro’s father, fortunately, grew up knowing none of the physical abuse his brave father had suffered on the Roman plantation, but was nonetheless a legal slave under Roman law. Due to his loyalty and usefulness, Duro’s father was awarded his freedom on the day of his Master’s death - never one blessed with good health, luckily for Duro’s father, this day came sooner rather than later. 

Duro’s father, having learned something of the hospitality business during decades of serving his former master, put his meager, hard-won life savings into a small tavern in one of the neighborhoods of the Aventine, of less illustrious repute. As a freedman, Duro’s father took a legal wife, (a poor, but free woman of Iberian origin), and in time she bore him five children, all of whom, by law, were born Roman citizens. And all of whom died before the age of ten, save Duro, who found himself, in his teens, getting bored with his father’s sleepy tavern business, and drifting into the more alluring, though fairly lethal, Roman criminal underworld. 

And it is here, in the year 119 CE, in the second year of the famous Emperor Hadrian’s reign, that we find young Duro, now 17 years old, and a full Roman citizen, running for his life..