Only occasionally do such ordinary people on the margins get even a small share of the limelight: the captain of a trading ship, Gaius Peticius, who kindly picked up a bedraggled Pompey from the Greek coast after the Battle of Pharsalus is one; Soterides, a eunuch priest who inscribed on stone his worries about his male ‘partner’, who had sailed off with a party of local volunteers and been taken prisoner, is another.
