“I don’t think I can remember it,” Dido says, but Amara has already started strumming the strings with the plectrum. The first notes strike her as shockingly discordant. It’s an unfamiliar instrument, with seven strings, not ten, and it takes her a while to work out which chords will recreate the Campanian folk song. She is concentrating so hard on getting the music right that she forgets about the crowd, even about Menander. With every touch to the strings, her confidence grows a little, and the music sounds a little sweeter. She launches into the first verse. To her relief, Dido joins her.

The crowd clap and several sing along, prompting them to remember the words. She is conscious of Menander smiling, nodding encouragement, but it’s hard to keep sight of him with dancers swirling and stamping past her. Instead, she looks at Dido. The performance has lent her the confidence of a stranger. She is holding herself with a boldness she never manages walking the streets. Amara catches her eye, and they start to sing to one another. It becomes a conversation, the passing of a look, a gesture, a feeling, even as they sing the same words. They repeat the song, but this time Amara stays silent when Dido sings the role of the shepherd, and understanding her, Dido leaves the role of the woman to Amara. They tell the story as a duet, playing up the comic element, Dido ever more pleading, Amara increasingly absurd in her proud rejection. At the end, Dido feigns collapse of a broken heart, sending a ripple of laughter through the small crowd.

Amara laughs too, looking for Menander, hoping to find his approval. She cannot see him. His absence jolts her, but she is too caught up in the moment for sadness to swallow her. Two young men at the front are clapping and chanting, demanding another song. Others join in. Amara looks at the crowd, at the faces watching her. It is a power she has never felt before, this sense that she might shape the expectations of others, hold their desires in check, or release them. She bows.

“We are celebrating the goddess of love,” she says, her voice loud. “Perhaps you would allow us to sing a hymn to our mistress, Aphrodite?” She makes no effort to hide her foreign accent, deliberately calling Venus by her Greek title. The two men at the front yell their approval, and Amara turns to Dido, speaking quietly. “If I sang a verse to you in Greek, line by line, would you be able to sing it back to me?”

“I think so.”