The doctor’s daughter. The role she inhabited for the first half of her life. A cocoon as warm as her parents’ love, shielding her from the world. “He died,” Amara says. She knows the others will respect her silence if she leaves it here, but now she’s opened the door to the past, she doesn’t want to close it. “My mother struggled on alone for a few years, helped out by family. Then her cousin, our main protector, died too. We sold everything we owned.” She thinks of her home, of each beloved object being stripped away. The valuable glass statue of Athene was the first to go. By the end, they only had one plate left, not even beds to sleep on. “It was too late to marry me off. There had been no dowry to start with, and by then, we were destitute.” Amara doesn’t want to recount the end of the story, but now it’s impossible to stop. They are all looking at her, waiting for her to finish. “So she sold me.”

Dido is upset. Amara already knows she finds this impossible to imagine, but for Beronice and Victoria who were born into slavery, it is less shocking. “Who did she sell you to?” Victoria asks.

“A local man called Chremes. One of my father’s former patients. My mother thought he would be more respectful because he had known my father. Chremes promised her I would be a protected house slave, that eventually I could regain my freedom.” Even then, as a girl with no experience of men, Amara had suspected that this was a lie. She had seen the sly way Chremes had looked at her as a child, complimenting her father on such a fine daughter. His eyes made her uncomfortable although she could not name the reason. “My mother asked Chremes to buy her too. He refused.” Amara cannot bear to think of her mother any longer. “So, it’s not just Felix,” she says. “He’s not the only man I hate.”

“These fish are so salty.” Beronice stands up. “I’m going to the water fountain for a drink.”

The others barely notice her leave; they are too caught up in Amara’s story. “Chremes obviously had you as a concubine,” Victoria says, her understanding of the world a thousand times sharper than Amara’s mother’s. “I just don’t understand why he sold you. You’re young; you’re beautiful. He can’t possibly have got bored that quickly.”

“His wife Niobe was jealous. She insisted.” Amara prefers not to remember that Chremes never even said goodbye, or the moment she understood Niobe had sold her not as a house slave, but as a whore.