Later, in the marketplaces and harbours of the ancient world, in temples and sacred groves, in Athens and Sicily, in Megara and Italy, they would whisper the stories to each other.
He was the son of a stonemason and a midwife.
Neither rich nor poor, neither aristocratic nor a peasant … every year, thousands of boys like him were born to thousands of parents in Athens, and every single one of them would live their ordinary lives and die their ordinary deaths,