meanwhile, here's a poem your great work has led me to:
Vae Victis!
They made us fetch the rods.
Bare-legged we waded
out through the thigh-spattering mud
of Willow-Mere.
Gods! If we'd known –
with those sharp flints,
we should have sliced our wrist-veins.
But we obeyed,
brought our new masters
sallows, slim, springy,
supple to slice
our girlhood's softness.
Now it's my turn.
Sushnik, that tough little herd-kid -
she could snap saplings
with her bare fingers,
strip off the green bark
between her teeth,
to suck the sap -
they've made her screech.
I didn't watch, but had to hear
her angry shouts turn, stroke by stroke,
to squeals, then screams,
then shrieks of wild despair,
skirl of a mountain-pipe's lament
growing faint in the smoky air.
And now I see her,
grasping and biting at the unyielding oak,
winding well-muscled thighs
round its rough hide,
while they unbind
her tight-torqued wrists.
They let her body drop,
tumble, tormented, twitching
on the charred earth.
There she rolls over,
clutches her bleeding breast.
Me and my little sisters,
bare as me, huddling, terrified,
hauled by tough man-hulks,
we're made to march uphill,
to where the cross of cruelty stands,
and two more, smaller ones,
they're lifting up beside.
I'm shoved to step
over the sturdy shanks
of shuddering Sushnik,
hear her soft sob,
my bare feet splash in her blood.
We're tied, wrists and ankles,
knotted till we squeal,
tight to our crosses -
not like she was, breasts to the wood,
but facing out
to where my parents kneel half-naked,
shackled, before a high-seat,
where sits a togaed Roman,
Eyeing us
with the look my father used to give
the small black heifers
when the hill-men came,
to trade them for our grain.
A soldier speaks to him,
I hear my name,
Rukhsna. He nods,
speaks a few words,
the legionary gives command,
"It is the Tribune's will
that these brats never shall
birth, breed or feed,
whelps of the wolf's brood.
So flagellators, do your work fully -
beat them so your canes break,
flay them down to raw flesh,
flog them till their bitch-paps
and festering birth-parts
bolter and burst with blood!"
Note for non-Latininists: vae victis =
"woe to the conquered!"
It's a phrase that sums up the Roman attitude, on the battlefield, in the arena,
or in a newly conquered village.
It's from Livy, though he put it in the mouth of a Gaul, Brennus, when they had the upper hand in the early days of Rome.
