Plautus: Rudens — Storm, Sanctuary, and the Search for a True Refuge

A tempest wrecks a slave trader’s ship off the coast of Cyrene, and two trafficked young women wash ashore clinging to nothing but hope and a temple altar. Plautus wrote Rudens sometime between 211 and 191 BC, adapting a lost Greek comedy by Diphilus of Sinope for a Roman audience gripped by the anxieties of the Second Punic War. The play opens with the constellation Arcturus announcing that Jupiter has sent the storm on purpose, to punish the wicked pimp Labrax and to reunite the exiled Athenian Daemones with his long-lost daughter Palaestra. Beneath its comic surface, Rudens asks a question every human heart asks: does anyone actually watch over the vulnerable, or are the trafficked, the shipwrecked, and the forgotten simply left to chance? Scripture answers that question with far greater clarity, power, and grace than Plautus ever imagined, and reading his play against the full canon of God’s Word sharpens our gratitude for the God who not only observes suffering but enters it to save.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek and Ancient Connections

Plautus builds his plot on patterns his audience already recognized from the wider Greek literary world. Palaestra, stripped of home and status by a violent sea, arrives on a foreign shore and depends entirely on the mercy of strangers, echoing Odysseus washing up on the beach of Scheria in Homer’s Odyssey. The scene at Venus’s altar, where the frightened women cling to sacred stone while Labrax tries to drag them away by force, draws directly on the suppliant tradition of Greek tragedy found in Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women and Euripides’s Children of Heracles. Even the play’s cosmic opening has a literary ancestor: Hesiod’s Works and Days describes thousands of unseen spirits roaming the earth to report human wrongdoing to Zeus, and Arcturus performs exactly this function for Jupiter. Plautus takes these serious, even tragic, conventions and folds them into comedy, all while threading in the legal language of Rome’s own Twelve Tables regarding formal summons and property claims. The result is a play stitched together from Greek myth, Greek tragedy, and Roman law, united by one persistent longing: that some higher power notices when the weak are crushed by the strong.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis

Plautus gives that longing a name, but not the right one. Arcturus tells the audience that Jupiter keeps a running ledger of human conduct and dispatches storms as payment for wickedness, a transactional universe in which divine favor is earned or forfeited through deeds. Daemones embodies the Roman virtues of pietas and fides, and his willingness to risk his own household to defend two strangers at an altar genuinely reflects something true and good, a fragment of the moral order God stamped on every conscience at creation. Yet the entire drama assumes chattel slavery as an unquestioned fact of life; Palaestra escapes bondage only because she happens to be freeborn, proven by trinkets pulled from the sea in a fisherman’s net, while her companion Ampelisca remains enslaved to the very end. Scripture will not allow this arbitrary distinction to stand. Every human being, not merely the fortunate few with the right birth tokens, bears the image of God and possesses a dignity that no shipwreck, no pirate, and no market price can erase.

Old Testament Analysis and Critique

The Old Testament shares Plautus’s conviction that the sea itself answers to a higher authority, but it grounds that authority in a very different character. When Jonah flees toward Tarshish, Yahweh hurls a violent wind upon the water not out of mechanical retribution but to pursue his own disobedient prophet with relentless covenant love, and the pagan sailors who once prayed to lifeless gods end up fearing the living Lord and offering him sacrifices (Jonah 1:4–16). The law given at Sinai goes further than any altar of Venus ever could. Exodus 22 forbids the exploitation of the resident alien, גֵּר, the widow, אַלְמָנָה, and the fatherless child, יָתוֹם, warning that if these defenseless people cry out, Yahweh will surely hear them, because he is compassionate by nature rather than compassionate by mood (Exodus 22:21–24, 27). Where Plautus offers sanctuary only to those who reach a particular altar in time, the God of Israel commands his own people to build cities of refuge and to remember that they themselves were once strangers in Egypt, making protection of the vulnerable a matter of covenant identity rather than lucky proximity to sacred stone.

Plautus: Pseudolus — When Rome’s Cleverest Liar Meets the Only Truth-Teller

In April of 191 BC, at the newly dedicated Temple of Magna Mater on the Palatine Hill, Roman audiences roared with laughter at a slave who bragged that he would out-scheme his own master. Plautus named his hero Pseudolus, “the Liar” or “Lie-man,” and the playwright built an entire comedy around the premise that deception, cunning, and fraud are not merely permissible but praiseworthy when performed with enough style. Calidorus needs twenty minae to buy his beloved Phoenicium from the pimp Ballio before a Macedonian officer claims her first. Pseudolus, the household slave, vows to supply both the money and the girl through pure trickery, and the play crowns him for succeeding. Scripture gives believers an entirely different vantage point from which to read this comedy. The God of Israel and the church is a God who “cannot lie” (Titus 1:2), and He calls His people to a life of truthful speech that mirrors His own character. Reading Pseudolus as a Christian, then, is not an exercise in nostalgia for a distant world of Roman festival theater. It is an opportunity to see, in sharp relief, exactly what the gospel rescues humanity from.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek and Roman Connections

Pseudolus belongs to the fabula palliata, the distinctly Roman genre that adapted Greek New Comedy—chiefly the work of Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus—into Latin dress for Roman civic festivals. Plautus inherited the stock cast of Greek domestic comedy: the clever slave, the lovesick young man, the greedy pimp, the anxious father, the boastful soldier. Yet he Romanized these figures thoroughly, embedding them in Roman legal and social categories such as patria potestas, the stipulatio contract, and the institution of the leno. The play’s most striking literary achievement is its constant reach for epic grandeur. Pseudolus compares his scheme against Ballio to the Greek sack of Troy, casting himself as a new Ulysses storming the gates of an enemy city. He even describes himself, in his own Act One monologue, as a poet who takes up blank tablets and calls into being what did not exist before. Plautus is having his slave-hero claim the authority of Homer’s warrior-kings and the creative power of the poet himself, all in service of a scheme to steal a prostitute and swindle a pimp. The comedy works precisely because the gap between epic pretension and squalid content is so enormous.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis

Beneath the laughter lies a worldview worth examining soberly. Pseudolus does not present deceit as a regrettable necessity; it presents deceit as the highest form of human excellence. The slave’s lies are not merely tolerated by the plot, they are celebrated as artistry, and the play’s final act rewards Pseudolus with wealth, freedom of movement, and even authority over his own master. Human beings fare no better than the truth does. Phoenicium is a commodity throughout, purchased, deposited upon, and fought over by men who never once ask what she herself desires. The early church recognized this danger in Roman theater with remarkable clarity. Tertullian warned believers away from the spectacula precisely because such entertainments trained the soul to delight in what God condemns, and Augustine confessed in his own retrospective grief that as a young man he wept at fictional sorrows on the Carthaginian stage while remaining hard toward his own sins. Clement of Alexandria likewise cautioned that the theater shapes the imagination toward vice even when no literal crime is committed by the viewer. Christians reading Pseudolus today can appreciate its craftsmanship while refusing, with the fathers, to let its inverted values reorder the conscience.

Old Testament Analysis and Critique

The contrast between Pseudolus and the Old Testament could hardly be sharper. Israel’s covenant God is defined by אֱמֶת, emet, unshakable truthfulness, and Proverbs 12:22 states plainly that lying lips are a תּוֹעֵבָה, a to’evah, an abomination to the LORD, while those who deal in truth are His delight. Proverbs 12:17 sets the righteous witness who speaks truth directly against the false witness who speaks שֶׁקֶר, sheker, deceit, and the wisdom tradition treats truthful speech as the very foundation of a functioning community. Plautus builds his comedy on exactly the value Proverbs condemns. The Law is equally direct about the human trafficking that structures Ballio’s entire household. Exodus 21:16 prescribes death for anyone who kidnaps and sells a person, and Leviticus 25:39-43 forbids an Israelite master from ruling over a servant with be-pharech, harshness, because every Israelite ultimately belongs to the LORD who redeemed them from Egypt. Phoenicium’s fate as an object of sale and rental is precisely the abuse the Torah moved to restrain. Where Pseudolus rewards the schemer and commodifies the vulnerable, the Old Testament binds truthful speech and human dignity together as reflections of the character of God Himself.

Plautus: Persa — Freedom for Sale: What Plautus’ Persa Reveals About Deceit, Slavery, and the True Cost of Redemption

Titus Maccius Plautus wrote Persa for the Roman stage sometime between 197 and 186 BCE, and the play still startles readers today with its unapologetic comedy of deception. A slave named Toxilus loves a courtesan named Lemniselenis, and he wants to buy her freedom from the greedy pimp Dordalus. Toxilus lacks the money, so he recruits his fellow slave Sagaristio, who diverts funds his own master gave him for oxen, and the parasite Saturio, who dresses his freeborn daughter as a stolen Persian captive and sells her to Dordalus. The scheme succeeds, Dordalus loses both his money and his legal standing, and the play ends with a raucous banquet where former slaves mock the ruined pimp. Plautus asks his Roman audience to laugh at fraud, human trafficking, and family betrayal because the victim is a disreputable outsider. Reading Persa through Scripture exposes exactly what a culture untouched by divine revelation calls funny, and that exposure sharpens a Christian reader’s grasp of the gospel’s real alternative.

Literary Backgrounds

Persa belongs to the genre the Romans called fabula palliata, a comedy dressed in Greek costume but built for Roman sensibilities. Plautus breaks from the standard New Comedy pattern by removing the freeborn young lover entirely and installing the trickster slave Toxilus as the protagonist himself. Toxilus opens the play by comparing his romantic poverty to the labors of Hercules, declaring that no monster Hercules faced compares to love itself. The five acts move from financial desperation to resource-gathering, staged deception, legal entrapment, and finally a parody of a Roman military triumph, complete with prayers to Jupiter for victory over an enemy who happens to be a small-time pimp. Plautus constantly breaks the theatrical illusion, having characters reference the aediles who funded the costumes and the actors who rehearsed their lines, reminding the Roman audience that they are watching festival entertainment sanctioned by the state. The wordplay reaches its comic peak when Sagaristio, disguised as a Persian merchant, rattles off an absurd string of compound names built from Latin puns on lying and cheating. Every literary device in the play, from epic parody to legal jargon, serves one purpose: making an audience delight in cleverness regardless of what that cleverness costs its victims.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis

The moral architecture of Persa rests entirely on who deserves protection and who does not. Dordalus occupies the socially despised position of leno, so nothing done to him counts as wrong in the play’s moral universe; the audience is invited to cheer his ruin without reservation. Yet the scheme that ruins him requires selling a freeborn girl into apparent slavery, refusing to give the legal warranty of title called mancipium, and forging a letter describing a fictitious conquest to inflame Dordalus’ greed. Saturio explicitly reasons that if he can profit from his daughter and reclaim her afterward through legal privilege, no true harm occurs. Scripture will not accept that reasoning. Genesis 1:26–27 grounds human worth in the fact that God made humanity in His own image, ֶצֶלם ֱאֹלִהים, and that foundation does not bend for social status, whether the person exploited is a maiden or a pimp. Plautus’ comedy assumes a world where dignity is transactional, extended to the powerful and withheld from the disreputable; the biblical vision insists dignity belongs to every image-bearer because God assigned it, not because society approves of the recipient.

Old Testament Analysis and Critique

Israel’s law confronts the exact behavior Persa celebrates. Exodus 21:16 commands that a man who kidnaps another person and sells him shall surely be put to death, מֹות יּוָמת, and Deuteronomy 24:7 repeats the same penalty. The Torah treats human trafficking as a capital crime precisely because it strikes at the divine image, and no comic framing softens that judgment. Leviticus 19:35–36 and Deuteronomy 25:13–16 extend this concern into the marketplace, demanding honest weights and measures and calling fraudulent dealing an abomination, ּתֹוֲעַבת. Where Plautus makes Toxilus's forged letter and Sagaristio’s refusal of legal warranty into clever theater, the Torah calls that same behavior what it is: a direct offense against the God who identifies Himself as the one who brought Israel out of Egypt. Leviticus 19:29 also forbids a father from profaning his daughter for gain, which stands in stark judgment over Saturio’s willingness to expose his own child to a pimp’s interrogation for the sake of a free meal. The festival joy that Deuteronomy 16:11–15 commands stands worlds apart from the drunken revenge banquet that closes Persa; biblical celebration gathers the whole community, including servants and strangers, before the Lord, while Plautus's celebration exists to humiliate a defeated enemy.

Plautus: Mercator — When the Father Becomes the Thief: Plautus’s Mercator and the Gospel’s Answer to a Broken Home

Roman comedy rarely intends to preach, yet it cannot help but expose the human heart. Plautus wrote Mercator (“The Merchant”) around 206–190 BC for the festival crowds of Rome’s ludi, adapting the Greek playwright Philemon’s Emporos into a Latin farce about a father and son who fall for the same enslaved woman. On the surface, the play is slapstick: a panicked slave, a symbolic dream, a jealous wife, a mock legal decree. Underneath, it stages the exact wound that Scripture diagnoses in every human household—authority twisted into appetite, and a person reduced to property. Reading Mercator as Christians does not mean treating Plautus as a moral guide. It means letting his unintentional honesty about fallen Rome throw the beauty of the gospel into sharp relief.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek and Roman Connections

Mercator belongs to the genre the Romans called fabula palliata, a comedy performed in Greek dress but built for a Roman audience. Plautus keeps Philemon’s Athenian setting while layering in distinctly Roman anxieties about wealth, family, and legal authority. The play’s structure carries real theological weight. Demipho, the father, recounts an allegorical dream of a goat and an ape competing for the same prize, foreshadowing his own coming disgrace. Later, when the young lover Charinus believes he has lost Pasicompsa forever, he dons a traveler’s cloak and delivers a mock-tragic farewell to Athens, parodying the grand exile speeches of Euripidean tragedy. Plautus is a skilled craftsman. He knows exactly how to make an audience laugh at a father’s hypocrisy. What he does not know, and cannot supply, is how to heal it.

Theological and Ethical Analysis

The Roman legal institution behind this whole plot is patria potestas, the father’s absolute power over his son’s person and property. Demipho ought to embody the gravitas that Rome prized in its elders. Instead he becomes a senex amans, a lustful old man who hides his desire behind pretended financial prudence, claiming he only wants to sell Pasicompsa for profit while secretly scheming to keep her for himself. Notice, too, who never gets to speak for herself. Pasicompsa is discussed, priced, auctioned, and hidden throughout the play, yet she is given almost no voice of her own; she exists in the dialogue only as an object other people fight over. Tertullian later looked at spectacles exactly like this one and called the theater a school of lust, warning believers that laughing along with adultery and deception trains the conscience rather than merely entertaining it. Augustine, reflecting on stage plays in The City of God, made a similar point: fictional wickedness that moves an audience to enjoyment rather than sorrow reveals a diseased affection, not innocent amusement. Plautus shows Rome exactly as it was. He cannot show Rome anything better.

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Old Testament Analysis and Critique

Scripture treats a father and son competing for the same woman as no laughing matter. When Reuben slept with his father’s concubine, Genesis records it as a catastrophic violation of the family (Genesis 35:22). When Absalom publicly took David’s concubines on the palace roof, the text presents it as the fulfillment of divine judgment on David’s house, not comic relief (2 Samuel 16:20–22). Proverbs likewise warns that gray hair is a crown of glory only when it is “found in the way of righteousness” (Proverbs 16:31); age alone earns no honor. Where Plautus resolves Demipho’s folly with a mock statute and public embarrassment, the fifth commandment grounds paternal authority in something Demipho never considers: accountability before the Lord who gave that authority in the first place (Exodus 20:12). Roman law let a father do almost anything with his household. Torah never did.

New Testament Analysis and Critique

The New Testament answers Mercator’s broken household directly. Paul writes to fathers in the ongoing, habitual force of the present tense, οἱ πατέρες, μὴ παροργίζετε τὰ τέκνα ὑμῶν—do not keep provoking your children to anger—but instead ἐκτρέφετε, keep bringing them up, in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4). That single command overturns everything patria potestas assumed about a father’s rights. Paul goes further still in his letter about the runaway slave Onesimus, urging Philemon to receive him back “no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother” (Philemon 16), and declaring elsewhere that in Christ “there is neither slave nor free” (Galatians 3:28). Titus 2:2 calls older men to be sober-minded, dignified, and self-controlled—everything Demipho is not. Where Roman comedy resolves lust with a joke, the gospel resolves it with a cross, offering actual repentance rather than a punchline.

Plautus: The Captives — What a Roman Comedy Reveals About the Gospel’s Greater Ransom

Around 200 BC, the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus staged a comedy unlike any other in his repertoire. Captivi, or “The Captives,” contains no scheming courtesans, no boastful soldiers, no lecherous old men chasing after young lovers. Instead, Plautus builds his entire drama around a father’s grief, a slave’s loyalty, and a family’s restoration. Hegio, an Aetolian elder, has lost both of his sons—one stolen in childhood by a runaway slave, the other captured in war. To ransom his captive son Philopolemus, Hegio buys enemy prisoners, among them the nobleman Philocrates and his slave Tyndarus. What Hegio does not know is that Tyndarus is his own long-lost son. When Tyndarus and Philocrates swap identities so that Philocrates can escape and negotiate the exchange, Tyndarus willingly remains behind to suffer in his master’s place. Written centuries before Christ, this pagan comedy nevertheless stumbles into truths that only the gospel fully explains. Reading it as Christians, we watch a Roman audience laugh, weep, and long for a redemption they could not yet name.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek and Roman Connections

Captivi belongs to the genre of fabula palliata, Roman comedy dressed in Greek costume and adapted from a lost Greek New Comedy original. Plautus wrote during the aftermath of the Second Punic War and amid Rome’s wars in Aetolia, when Roman families knew firsthand the terror of sons captured, enslaved, and sold across the Mediterranean. The play’s emotional center, the willing exchange of Tyndarus for his master, echoes the heroic devotion of Orestes and Pylades in Greek tragedy, where one friend refuses to abandon the other even at the cost of his own life. Plautus takes that tragic ideal and plants it inside a comic slave, suggesting that noble character does not depend on noble birth. The play’s structure moves from prosperity to captivity to a startling recognition scene, the same arc that shapes far older stories of loss and restoration, stories that any thoughtful Christian reader will recognize as strikingly familiar.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis: Fides, Fortune, and the Limits of Pagan Virtue

The moral engine of Captivi is fides, the Roman ideal of loyalty and oath-keeping. Tyndarus offers his own body to torture rather than break faith with his master, declaring that his suffering will bring him lasting honor even if his sacrifice goes unrewarded. Plautus clearly admires this virtue, and Christians can admire it too, for it reflects something true about self-giving love planted in human beings made in God’s image. But the play’s ethics remain bound by pagan limits. Tyndarus and Philocrates achieve their goal through calculated deception, and Plautus treats that deception as praiseworthy simply because it serves a noble end. Scripture will not allow that shortcut. God’s people are called to speak truth and reject falsehood even when a lie might seem to serve a good purpose, because God himself cannot lie and his people are meant to reflect his character. Roman comedy could imagine heroic loyalty, but it could not imagine a loyalty untangled from strategic deceit.

Plautus: Asinaria — When the Slave Rides the Master: What Rome’s Favorite Farce Reveals About a World Without Grace

Titus Maccius Plautus wrote Asinaria, “The Comedy of Asses,” sometime between 207 and 201 BC, during the final years of Rome’s grinding war with Hannibal. Adapted from a lost Greek play called Onagos by Demophilus, the comedy was staged before Roman crowds hungry for laughter amid wartime strain. On its surface, Asinaria is farce: a young man named Argyrippus needs twenty minae to buy exclusive access to a courtesan named Philaenium, his father Demaenetus schemes with two clever slaves to steal that sum from his own wife’s estate, and the household descends into chaos before the wife, Artemona, catches her husband in the act and drags him home in humiliation. Beneath the laughter, though, lies a portrait of a world without God — a world where money buys love, fathers betray sons, and slaves briefly rule masters for sport. Reading this play as Christians is not an act of nostalgia for the classics. It is an exercise in seeing clearly what Scripture diagnoses as the human condition apart from grace, and in giving thanks for the gospel that transformed households like the one Plautus mocked.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek and ANE Connections
Asinaria belongs to the genre the Romans called fabula palliata — comedy dressed in Greek clothing, set safely in Athens so that Roman playwrights could stage outrageous inversions of social order without appearing to attack Roman virtue directly. Plautus openly credits his source in the prologue, joking that Demophilus wrote the play and “Maccus turned it into barbarian speech,” a wry nod to the cultural superiority the Romans still granted the Greeks even as Rome’s armies were winning the wider war. The play’s most memorable scene, in which the slave Libanus forces his young master to carry him across the stage like a pack animal before he will hand over the stolen silver, echoes an older Greek comic tradition of master-slave inversion reaching back to Aristophanes. The line “man is a wolf to man” (lupus est homo homini) likewise reflects a broader Ancient Near Eastern proverbial tradition, similar in spirit to the beast-fables of the Wisdom of Ahiqar, in which predatory animal imagery captures the mercenary distrust of urban commercial life. None of this suggests direct borrowing between Plautus and the biblical or ANE wisdom traditions. It suggests something more useful for the Christian reader: that fallen humanity, whether in Athens, Nineveh, or Rome, arrives at remarkably similar cynical conclusions about human nature when left to reason apart from divine revelation.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis
The moral center of Asinaria is its total collapse of household order. Demaenetus, the father, does not guide his son toward wisdom; he conspires with him, financing Argyrippus’s affair with a courtesan and then demanding a night with her himself as his price for helping. Artemona’s dowry, meanwhile, has stripped her husband of financial authority in the home, a dynamic the Roman statesman Cato the Elder himself lamented when he observed that a wealthy wife effectively reduces her husband to a subordinate in his own house. Plautus intends none of this as tragedy. He intends it as entertainment, and that is precisely the point for the discerning Christian reader. Where Scripture treats a father’s abdication of moral leadership, a wife’s usurped authority, and a slave’s inverted rule as symptoms of a world in rebellion against its Creator, Plautus’s Roman audience laughed at the same symptoms as harmless festival release. The play never asks whether these inversions are wrong. It simply enjoys them, and in that unreflective enjoyment we see how thoroughly sin can normalize disorder when no higher standard interrupts it.

Amazing Grace

William Wilberforce is powerfully portrayed in the movie Amazing Grace. Wilberforce’s unrelenting attack on the slave trade is one of history’s greatest inspirations. The movie is expertly scripted, skillfully acted and perfectly edited to create a balanced, attention holding, inspiring story that you should see.

The story also touches upon Wilberforce’s Christian faith and the inspiration of his old pastor, John Newton. Newton was a slave ship owner who accepted Christ, gave up the slave trade, and became active in the abolitionist movement in England. After his conversion, he wrote one of the most familiar hymns in history, Amazing Grace. John Newton’s hymn, testimony and encouragement were instrumental in Wilberforce’s struggle to abolish slavery in England.

Wilberforce worked incessantly against slavery, until his health gave out after he was charged with sedition as war with France took center stage. Wilberforce retired to the country a defeated man and vowed never to speak against slavery again. However, he could not remain silent, and at the urging of his new wife and after reading his old pastor John Newton’s memoirs on the horrors of slave trade, Wilberforce returned to parliament and renewed the fight.

The courage, passion, and tenacity of Wilberforce inspired me. It is impossible to see Wilberforce’s dedication without evaluating your own. It also reminded me how important it is to keep on encouraging one another because it is impossible to keep fighting against evil without the support and encouragement of others. We all need someone to help us through the discouragement and failure, especially those who seem to not need it.

I highly recommend this movie. It has not been publicized as much as most other films; nevertheless, it is one of the best movies of the year so far. This is a “must see” movie.

Modern Slave Trade

“Twenty-seven million slaves exist in our world today. Girls and boys, women and men of all ages are forced to toil in the rug loom sheds of Nepal, sell their bodies in the brothels of Rome, break rocks in the quarries of Pakistan, and fight wars in the jungles of Africa. Go behind the façade in any major town or city in the world today and you are likely to find a thriving commerce in human beings. You may even find slavery in your own backyard.”

I was shocked to find out that:

• 800,000 are trafficked across international borders annually

• 17,500 new victims are trafficked across our borders each year

• 30,000 additional slaves are trans-ported through the U.S. on their way to other international destinations

• Of the 27 million people worldwide held captive and exploited for profit today, the Free the Slaves organization estimates that at least 15 million are bonded slaves in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal.

• The slave trade generates $9.5 billion in revenue each year


Kevin Bales, a pioneer in the fight against modern slavery, expresses well those commercial connections: "Slaves in Pakistan may have made the shoes you are wearing and the carpet you stand on. Slaves in the Caribbean may have put sugar in your kitchen and toys in the hands of your children. In India they may have sewn the shirt on your back and polished the ring on your finger."

Read the story of a modern day abolitionist, Kru Nam at http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0703&article=07031.