It is not a huge leap of the imagination to suggest the desire to form lasting, loving relationships must have taken on particular urgency in such a precarious life. The darker side of the pride freed people expressed on their tombs at liberating children, spouses and siblings must have been the terror they once felt that this might not be possible—not to mention the pain of knowing that relationships that were sacred to you meant nothing in the eyes of society. The fatherless state of freedmen was a common subject of Roman mockery. Rufus disparages Ampliatus in my story because he refers to his patron as his “father”; yet as a former slave, everyone would know Ampliatus had no father. An enslaved person’s only recognized relationship was with their owner.

Epitaphs contain other small traces of defiance against the expectation that slaves only existed for an owner’s use. There are the enslaved litter-bearers who remember their dead fellow as a “true man,” the devoted friends who recall first meeting—like Amara and Dido—at the slave market, and the freedman from Gaul who honors the name given to him by his birth father. We can also sense this quiet defiance through the unease of the slave-owning class. It is there in the commonplace remark a man has as many enemies as he has slaves, and in the poet Martial’s complaint about “the way slaves talk.” It is there too in Juvenal’s monstrous caricatures of women who subvert male authority, not only through sexual excess, but by daring to hold opinions on politics or literature. Above all what Juvenal seems to fear is women whose hostile thoughts remained unknowable: “The woman I detest is the calculating one, in complete control, who betrays deep wickedness.” Some women and enslaved people may well have been psychologically as well as physically compliant, but not all. Whatever century you live in, it is impossible to control the private thoughts of another human being, to squash their resentment, or erase their desires, even if they hide all this from you.

The risks Amara and Philos take in my story are in the context of this specific environment. I did not see their relationship as purely romantic or sexual; it is also an attempt to form a lasting attachment in an unstable world, just as so many enslaved Romans appear to have prioritized personal relationships above all else. An affair between an enslaved man and freedwoman would certainly have been a subversion of social norms, but not an unthinkable one. Within the Roman’s gender hierarchy, the man was master of the woman, and a woman’s choice to submit herself to a man who belonged to someone else could be punished by the loss of her own freedom, or that of their children. But the fact that laws existed to govern intimacy suggests these forbidden relationships occurred, in spite of the taboo.