I, a
slave and ostensibly a Greek, am fifteen-sixteenths Roman noble, by
ancestry, according to my reckoning. No wonder my descent shows in my
bearing, manner and conversation."
This answer was, actually, not so far from the facts, my mother,
grandmother and great-grandmother had, certainly, been Roman noblewomen,
daughters indeed, each of one of the oldest and longest-lineaged houses of
our nobility; and, like my father, grandfather and great-grandfather, my
great-great-grandfather had been a Roman nobleman. But his father, my
great-great-great-grandfather, had been a freed-man, manumitted in the
days of Nero, acquiring great wealth, attaining equestrian rank during the
last years of Nero's reign, and vastly enriched during the confusion of
the civil wars, marrying a young and wealthy widow after Vespasian was
firmly established at Rome by the crushing of the insurrection of Claudius
Civilis.
Probably the general consonance of my answer with the facts made my
utterance of it more convincing. Certainly it appealed to Falco.
"Just about what I conjectured," he said, smiling. "And will you tell me
in what part of Italy and on what estate you were born and how you came by
your air of aristocratic culture and by your marvellous dilettantism?"
"I know what I know and am what I am," I replied, "because I was, from
childhood, treated just as if a son instead of a slave; pampered, indulged
and made much of.
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