To Bribe the Centurion
Fortis and Fidela and the Scribe
This happens shortly after “John the Baptist’s Advice to Soldiers.1” See the notes at the beginning of that story to understand the marital status of Fortis and Fidela.
Fidela stopped by the scribe’s stall at the market in Capernaum the next day. She had the baby with her. One of the boys from the soldiers’ household was carrying their market purchases for her, which were much less than usual. In fact, normally she bought papyrus and ink here, and from time to time, new quills. Not today.
Matthias greeted her. The Roman soldiers had spent coin when they’d been parading about the other day, instead of stealing, and business was good.
“I’m not buying today, Matthias,” she sighed. “We’re short of coin.”
“I’m sorry, lady,” he said. “Did your house miss the bounty?”
She smiled wanly. “We paid it. That’s where my market dress went.”
Matthias had noticed she was dressed differently than usual. But now, he looked more closely. Instead of her usual overgarment, pinned at the shoulders, with ties around her waist and under her bosom, it looked like she was wearing a different shorter, plain tunic over an even shorter tunic beneath. And her ankles were showing – the long outer tunic didn’t reach down far enough. She didn’t look salacious – the effect was rather of someone wearing clothes that had been outgrown. The ties were there as before, but they didn’t seem to sit quite right, as if they weren’t meant for that garment. And the pins were gone altogether.
“Paid it?” asked Matthias. “Is someone in trouble?”
Fidela shook her head. “You know Illeus? He’s optis to our centurion at the garrison. He paid the soldier bonus out of his own purse. That was the rest of his inheritance, so he had none left to pay the centurion’s bonus.”
“You sold your market dress?”
She nodded. “We all gave what we had. But we’re still spinning and weaving. We’ll make it up. We just don’t have any extra right now.”
Later that day, Mathias sat with Jairus and some of the other leading men of Capernaum outside the synagogue. The building was holding up, but clearly needed maintenance.
“Maybe we can get the centurion to contribute?” said one of them. “The new man seems decent. You know what happened on the last training march around the lake.”
Roman soldiers on the march were never a good thing. At best, they stole. At worst…. Well, that hadn’t happened this time. Instead of taking, they had actually spent coin. The mood in Capernaum was almost holiday-like. And likely, also in Magdala, Gennesaret, and Tiberius.
“It wasn’t the centurion,” said Matthias. “It was his second, his optis.”
“Illeus?” asked one of the men, who was rumored to be sympathetic to the Zealots. “He lives in the married soldiers’ household, doesn’t he?”
Procerus’s household was on the edge of the Roman quarter of Capernaum. No one liked to go near it. The only contact most people had with the residents were their women and children, sometimes with their men, at the market.
“Well, then thank the Lord for optis Illeus.”
“One of their ladies told me he spent the rest of his inheritance to pay the bonus on that march,” continued Matthias. “And it wasn’t enough. They had to sell other things to pay off the centurion. She’s the lady who teaches their children – she sold her market dress to help pay. That’s why she couldn’t afford the ink and papyrus she normally buys.”
Just then, a couple of soldiers from the garrison walked by, on their usual rounds, on patrol duty. Normally, the townsfolk all lowered their heads when the Romans passed by, avoiding eye contact, and so did most of the men sitting on the steps outside the synagogue. But Matthias, for once, didn’t. He looked at the soldiers as they passed by.
Fortis and Saevus had patrol duty in that part of town on that day. But as they passed the men outside the Jewish holy place, one didn’t look down, but instead looked at them.
Saevus stopped. “What are you looking at, Jew?” he asked, belligerently.
Matthias was startled, not realizing that he had stared. But then, he recognized Fortis, who occasionally accompanied his wife at the market.
“Your lady wife,” he said, pulling something from his bag, “told me what your optis did. Please take this, in appreciation.” He handed over some blank scrolls.
Fortis stood a little taller. The Jews were the only people, besides the people from his own household, that he could count on always respecting Fidela. They unfailingly referred to the soldiers’ women as “wife” or even “lady.” But “lady wife” was new. And no Roman, even in their own household, referred to Fidela as a “lady,” although everyone called her “uxor,” for wife, which was still not really correct.
It had pained him when she had contributed her stola to provide Illeus with the money to bribe the centurion. And then again, when he saw her go out to market, wearing an old stained and mended tunic under her household tunic, trying to make it look a little more modest than the tunic alone.
“Thank you,” said Fortis. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Matthias,” he said. “A student at the synagogue.”
When the two soldiers had passed by, Jairus said, “Why did you do that? Now he knows your name.”
Matthias shrugged. “He only needed to ask his wife to find that out.”
As Fortis and Saevus kept walking, Saevus said, “She’s not a lady.”
“I know that,” said Fortis, tersely.
“Still,” Saevus continued, “your woman is above the Jewish women here, so it was well-said by the Jew.”
Fortis cringed. The word Saevus had used for Fidela was the correct one: contubernalis. It was not a slur, but it was not the one they used in Procerus’s household: uxor.
Fortis had no grounds for anger, and yet he felt both shamed by and angry at his patrol-mate. Saevus had actually raised Fidela up in status by running down the status of the women of the conquered people of Capernaum. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like the Jews had the right of it. By raising up Fidela, they had raised up all women, Jewish and Roman. And Saevus, by demeaning all Jewish women, had lowered not just Fidela, but all Roman womanhood as well.
He shook his head. That made no sense. They continued on their patrol.
Contubernalis means something like tent-mate (or in modern terms, room-mate). It has both a sexual sense (in the case where at least one of the pair is a slave) and a non-sexual sense (the soldiers in a contubernium are all contubernales). In the sexual sense, it is never a marriage, because a slave, being a "res" or "thing", is incapable of legal marriage.
From: Treggiari, Susan. “‘Contubernales’ in ‘Cil’ 6.” Phoenix, vol. 35, no. 1, 1981, pp. 42–69. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1087137. Accessed 22 Apr. 2023.
“Contubernium existed by permission of the slave-owner and was not protected by the law, for it was sanctioned by custom only.”
I'd like to add to this. If I understand the position of the Roman soldiers correctly, they were actually in a similar position to a lot of people getting married today, especially men. The rank and file Roman soldier outside of Rome / Italy was denied the form of marriage that allowed them the most legal protection for their wife and children.