poetry and poets, literature and authors, paintings and
painters, statuary and sculptors, architecture and architects, gems,
ivories, embroideries, textiles, furniture, pottery and even autographs
and autograph collecting. He seemed to appraise me an expert on all such
lines and to be well pleased with his purchase.

Certainly I was as well clothed, fed, lodged and attended as if I had been
his twin-brother.

Before he had owned me many days Falco said to me:

"Phorbas, I've been puzzling about you. You are a slave and you were sold
to poor Libo and by Rufius to me as a Greek. Yet you have none of the
appearance nor behavior of a Greek nor yet of a slave. You look and act
and talk like a freeman born and a full-blooded Roman, and a noble at
that. Please explain."

Now, of course, in imagining all the forms in which I might be assaulted
by the perils which beset me, I had foreseen just such a query as this
utterance of Falco's involved and I had pondered and rehearsed my answer.
I realized that I must be ready with a reply wholly plausible because
entirely consonant with the facts of our social life, as they existed, so
that no one could take any exception to it. I thought I had framed such a
reply.

"You know how it is," I answered easily. "A Roman master buys a young and
comely Greek handmaid. In due course she has a daughter, legally also a
slave and nominally a Greek, yet half Roman. When she is grown, if she
happens to be comely and the property of a master like most masters, she
has a daughter, a slave and spoken of as a Greek, yet only a quarter
Greek. If she has a similar daughter, that daughter, a slave and called a
Greek, is only one-eighth Greek. I conceive, from all I know, that my
great grandmother, grandmother and mother were such slave women. I, a
slave and ostensibly a Greek, am fifteen-sixteenths Roman noble, by
ancestry, according to my reckoning. No wonder my descent shows in my
bearing, manner and conversation."

This answer was, actually, not so far from the facts, my mother,
grandmother and great-grandmother had, certainly, been Roman noblewomen,
daughters indeed, each of one of the oldest and longest-lineaged houses of
our nobility; and, like my father, grandfather and great-grandfather, my
great-great-grandfather had been a Roman nobleman. But his father, my
great-great-great-grandfather, had been a freed-man, manumitted in the
days of Nero, acquiring great wealth, attaining equestrian rank