1967 Mass market paperback edition with Boris Vallegio cover art, 287 pages

Thanks to Electric Dan for the gift of this fine book

Britannicus Caligulae Servus, the personal Breton slave of “Little Boots,” one of the most degenerate of a degenerate race of slave masters, is the fictional character that Burroughs uses to tell the tale of palace intrigue and slavery in Rome. The story begins in A.D. 16 when the son of a Breton chieftain, living in exile among the German Chatti tribe, is acquired by the “brat” who was the son of the cruelest woman in Rome, Agrippa, and her husband Germanicus. The hero was the great-grandson of the Kentish King Cingetorix.

Burroughs deals fluidly in the most common modern sentimentalities and, to my knowledge, never wrote straight adventure, with the key to his success largely dependent on always having a female love interest for the hero. Tarzan only ever made the silver screen because he had Jane.

Despite the fact that the postmodern idiot mind of America believes that slavery has only ever been a race-based condition, the author makes it clear, through realistically illustrated characters of various enslaved European races, that slavery is our most elder evil tradition and that it tends to bring out the least in the slave and the worst in the master.

As was the case throughout Plantation America, the worst fate was to be owned by a jealous woman or a cruel man, well-illustrated in the life of Britannicus. The other aspect of slavery that has remained relatively constant from antiquity to the present day, is that the unfree person is constantly in danger of being separated from his family, friends and loved ones—often forever—by his master. As with the Gauls, Bretons, Germans and Greeks that were sold by the thousands and the millions by the pragmatic Roman master class, the slave of modern times once again descends into a situation spiritually worse than the Dark Age serf, who at east lived with his kin, owned as he was, in Christian theory, by the land itself.

In Plantation America, it was generally policy [with the exception of breeding African populations being built to displaced freed European slaves] to separate families. This was law among the Anglicans and the Quakers. Most slaves were boys and male youths who were forever taken from—or sold by—their family. In 1868, with the 14th Amendment, America enshrined the ancient institution so beloved by the Romans of punishing a man by enslaving him and keeping him in a celibate and alienated state away from his family as the core state of slavery, enhancing the constriction of bondage with the loneliness of alienation to craft an exquisitely painful state of being.

This chattel shell game is still in place, for instance in Portland, where most men of pallid hue arrested for non-violent crimes are kept in bondage and virtually all violent criminals of color are released within a day of arrest. So, perhaps, in the midnight of Western Civilization, we return to that separation of a rebel form his kin. Of course, this gross aspect is only one means the System has of denying companionship to rebel-minded men. For I know numerous men who have lost contact with loved ones simply for voting for a taboo leader.

In Burroughs narrative, this personal calamity, of losing loved ones to a slave matrix, is regarded as the cruelest stroke of fate and serves to justify Britannicus’ final act, an act that although ultimate in the personal sense, yet failed to so much as mar the burnished armor of the System of Control. The hero remains a barbarian only within, sliding back behind the curtains of the stage of life in the guise of a Roman, leaving only a memoir to his Latinized son informing him that his father was a barbarian.