I thought of Petro Vacchi.
How well he handled a woman!
How well he had mastered me!
I remembered that on the road a "gentlewoman," one from Ar, had been mentioned.
She, as I understood it,
was to have been given to Aulus for the evening,
that he might help her learn what it was to be a female.
Aulus, as I well knew,
from when I had worn the rectangle of silk in his tent,
was a strong master.
I had little doubt but what the "gentlewoman,"
lying at his feet in the morning,
wide-eyed and sleepless, would recollect in chagrin
and horror her responses of the preceding night.
Could she believe what she had done, and said?
How she had begged and squirmed,
and acted not at all like a free woman,
but like a slave?
How she had behaved in his arms?
How could she, a free woman,
have acted like that?
But perhaps she had not truly,
ultimately, a free woman, as she had hitherto supposed but really, truly, like so many women,
those she had pretended not to really understand, and had held in such contempt,
until now, only a slave?
Could that be?
And could they teach her things, if she begged hard enough,
that she might be more pleasing to such men,
that they might find her of interest and deign again to notice her?
Regardless of such considerations how could she now, after what had been done to her,
and how she had acted, go back to being a free woman?
Could she pretend nothing had happened?
How could she hold her head up, again, now, among free women?
Would she not now cringe before them,
and be unable to meet their eyes,
like a runaway slave,
thence to be seized by them and remanded to a praetor?
Now that she had known the touch of a man, such a man,
how could she return, as though nothing had happened,
to her former self, with its haughty, barren pretenses of freedom?
What authority or right had she any longer,
given what she had learned about herself last night,
to claim that she was "free,"
except perhaps in virtue of the accident of an undeserved legal technicality?
(pg. 367) How could she ever again,
given what she now knew about herself,
consider herself free?
No longer had she a right to such a claim. She now knew, in her heart,
that she was not truly free, but, truly free,
but, truly, a slave. That was what she was, and right that she be.
No longer could she find it in her heart to pretend to be free,
to play again the role of a free woman,
to enact once again what, in her case, could now be only a hollow mockery, an empty farce of freedom.
Too, could she any longer even dare to do so?
Suppose others came to suspect, or even to know! What if they could read it somehow in her eyes, or body?
It is a great crime for a slave to pretend to be a free woman.
Would they not simply take off her clothes and punish her,
and then hand her over to a praetor,
for her proper disposition? Too, what could such a pretense gain her but the closing of doors on the truth of her being?
But even if these things were not true, she feared they were, she did not wish to perish of shame.
No longer now, knowing what she now knew about herself,
could she live as a free woman. She must beg Aulus,
when he awakened,
for she did not dare awaken him for fear she might be whipped,
for the brand and collar.
No longer could she be a free woman.
It was now right that she be kept as a slave,
and made a slave.
"Captive of Gor"