Chapter Twelve
My position too had become elevated beyond my imagination. Now I was the emperor’s concubine, the most important slave-girl in his palace. I resolved to be worthy of my new status. I found myself very busy, since Claudius now had the means to buy as many slaves as he wanted. As he got older, his taste was for younger and younger girls, as is often the case with men of his age; or more precisely, girls that were increasingly younger than he was. I do not mean that he desired children, but ideally he liked them on the cusp between teen and twenty. What this meant was that I was not so often summoned to service him personally. I knew this was how it was going to be; I was lucky that I still had a role, training his new girls in what was required of them sexually, arranging for
