"Jupiter. Where do people buy disease-raddled flute girls nowadays?" I had reached the bitter, sarcastic stage. "How come there are no toothless grannies that according to you can dance naked on the table while weaving a side-weave tunic and grinding a modius of wheat?"

"Females tend to be snapped up, tribune…" The dealer winked. I was too careworn to respond. "I can do you a Christian, if you want to stretch a point."

"No thanks. They drink their god's blood while they maunder about love, don't they?" My late brother Festus had encountered these crazy men out in Judaea and sent home some lurid tales. "I'm looking for a children's nurse; I cannot have perverts."

"No, no; I believe they drink wine-'

"Forget it. I don't want a drunk. My darling heirs can pick up bad habits watching me."

"These Christians just pray and cry a lot, or try to convert the master and mistress of the house to their beliefs '

"You want to get me arrested because some arrogant slave says everyone should deny the sanctity of the Emperor? Vespasian may be a grouchy old barbarian-basher with a tight-arsed Sabine outlook- but I work for him sometimes. When he pays up, I'm happy to say he's a god."

"How about a bonny Briton, then?"

He proffered a thin, pale-haired girl of about fifteen, wilting under

Jher shame as the filthy trader poked her rags aside to reveal her figure. As tribal maidens go, she was far from buxom. He tried to make her show her teeth and I would have taken her if she had bitten him, but she just leaned away. Too meek to be trusted. Feed her and clothe her and the next we knew, she'd be stealing Helena's tunics and throwing the baby on its head. The man assured me she was healthy, a good breeder, and had no claims at law hanging onto her. "Very popular, Britons," he said, leering.

"Why's that?"

"Dirt cheap. Then your wife won't worry about you chasing this pitiful thing around the kitchen the way she would with some ogling Syrian who knows it all."