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Dionysios didn't consider himself a rich man. Thick bands of callus lined his palms and fingers,

evidence of the cobbler's tools he used from morning until night in his workshop.

Sometimes the tools left other marks.

Droplets of blood soaked into the strip of cloth wrapped around his left hand.

He had shouted and cursed when he all slipped and punched into the meat of his palm, then cuffed

the new slave responsible, or so Dionysius was inclined to believe, for his master's lapse in concentration.

Half a dozen slaves worked in Dionysios' workshop. The oldest, a Thracian woman, Thrata, was her name. He had

inherited from his father,

a cobbler before him. Deonisios had never known a world without Thrata, who had more or less

raised him after his mother died. He had also never considered freeing her. She didn't want

freedom, Dionysius always told himself, and besides, he would pay for a fine, carved stone

memorial when she died.

What would Thrata do with freedom anyway?

Dionysios spared only a second's thought for Thrata before his attention returned to the pain in his hand.

A rich man wouldn't have to spend his days slicing himself with alls, or arguing with tanners over the

price of leather, or fighting with his neighbor Knaemon over that worthless slave whose services the cobbler had rented.

He wouldn't pay a single drachma for that lazy Illyrian.

Dionysios had slapped him around twice, the last time hard enough to draw blood from a split lip,

and it still wasn't enough to make the boy fetch and carry.

Knaemon could fall off the Acropolis, for all Dionysios cared.

...