Amatus was a good fellow. You could find sages and masters in Carthage then to crew a fleet of ships—though they’d all sink—but while you might without difficulty seek and receive tuition in art, literature, rhetoric (above all else, rhetoric), music, medicine and physical science, indeed you could walk a hundred miles around the city and still not find a fellow to teach you how to become a merely decent human being until you found Amatus. He had been some species of war hero for a while, and then tired of it. He lived, he gave of his love, and from time to time he unwisely exploded his rooms, but never very dangerously and never without some hopeful, fascinating reason. To expose him to the disdain of Carthage would have been monstrous. And by then, anyway, there were rice bowls aplenty which would have been broken by the revelation. I’m not sure I could have declared the truth and been believed, even if I’d been minded to do so.