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poisoners felt at ease drinking toasts with idle young noblemen come for a night’s adventure. Each dawn illumined fresh corpses in the street.
    In the dank gloom of a Subura fuller’s shop, one of the poorer establishments where human urine was used to lift the grime from the clothes, a boy called Endymion was offered for sale by his master, a fuller named Lucius Grannus, who had decided this was a boy no reasonable man could restrain. He was fathered by a mad dog, Grannus maintained, and nursed by Nemesis herself in one of her foulest moods. Grannus meant to pass the boy on to someone who would work him to death as he deserved. It was Grannus who had given him the name Endymion—this was what the fuller called every boy he set to the task of hauling the cleaned clothes in from the vats.
    This was the third time in as many years that Endymion had been sold. Each time his lot became more miserable. His back was crisscrossed with scars and welts from Grannus’ beatings; at night he wrapped his feet in rags because Grannus would not buy shoes. As he stood before the buyer, his wrists bound tightly with cord, he formed a resolution that terrified him, but he knew the time had come.
    He had always known that when he judged himself grown tall enough and sturdy enough in body to survive the life of a fugitive, he would run for freedom. Now he was nearly as tall as Grannus, and the muscles of his arms were supple and hard from lifting loads too great for a boy. When this new master led him into the streets he would break and run: the swarms of idlers, beggars and tenement dwellers crowding the vendors’ stalls would flow about him and make pursuit difficult. He would not be given a better chance. It must be so. He felt himself quickly dying, and he was not yet fourteen years old.
    Wretched as this life was, it was not this that finally drove him to risk the hazards of escape. It was the knowledge that all about him behind high walls were storehouses of books, forever beyond his reach.
    By a cruel trick of fortune Endymion knew of books and reading. In fact, this ragged boy knew as well as the most learned scholar in the city the writings of the Stoic philosopher Seneca. His fourth master, a bootmaker, on learning Endymion could write in a neat, clear hand, had hired him out to a scriptorium—a hall where slave scribes laboriously copied out the books bound for the bookstalls. Endymion did not remember who taught him to read; at times he caught a shadowed memory of a shimmering woman who emanated kindness, but always she dissolved in white mist; he supposed her to be a literate slave nurse who had charge of him for a time before he was sold away.
    It happened that this scriptorium produced chiefly the works of Seneca, whose steady stream of treatises, tragedies and works of poetry were more than enough to keep twenty slaves employed. The words of the great philosopher became as familiar to the boy as the beat of blood in the temple, the rhythm of breathing. They lived in his mind like the words of parents might have, had his parents kept him, or the commands of a priestess or priest at a child’s first visit to the temple of the family’s patron god. One day he would be comforted by some phrase of the philosopher’s, then the next he was not certain he knew what it meant. He had heard love described as a sort of sweet torment, and he decided philosophy was the same. That the other slaves of the scriptorium were not so affected made him wonder at times if he were mad.
    The master of the scriptorium rid himself of the boy when Endymion began to insert his own words into the manuscripts. Once after he obediently copied “… the wise man is not owned by what he owns, and so is happy. And the swiftest course to happiness is to possess little or nothing,” he added, “Then why are not slaves, who possess nothing, the happiest and wisest of men?”
    The master of the scriptorium had him soundly beaten. Shortly after, he was sold