High in the Samnium Mountains of southern Italy, Chloé, daughter of a Roman patrician and his Greek wife, lives as a slave. The mysterious and tragic story of Chloé's birth is told and retold to her by her fellow-slave Melissa, who served her mother and now cares for the young Chloé. But hatred for the father who abandoned her festers in Chloé's heart as she and Melissa weave for long hours each day in the tiny mountain hut above her father's neglected villa—which he has not visited since before Chloé's birth. As she grows older, Chloé's spirit is kept alive by the poetry of Greece, stolen moments in the lovely woodland, and her covert watching of the family of the neighboring villa, whose life seems as far removed from her own as the gods and heroes of the old songs. Aulus, son of that household, wholly immersed in the exciting sports and politics of his Roman world, knows and would care nothing of the lonely watcher on the mountain—until the foundations of his own life crumble beneath his feet. This Newbery Honor book, set in the dramatic time of the Gracchi, brings the wild flavor of ancient Greece together with the iron stamina of conquering Rome in a story of two young people whose very different lives are destined to intersect. Italy, 133 B.C. RL4.4 Of read-aloud interest ages 11-up Caroline Dale Snedeker (1871-1956),   great-granddaughter of Utopian Socialist Robert Owen, was born Cara Dale Parke in New Harmony, Indiana. The Parkes were a musical family, frequently giving impromptu performances for family and friends, and young Cara assumed that she would become a full-fledged musician. It was after her marriage in 1903 to Charles H. Snedeker, dean of the Cathedral in Cincinnati, that she began the serious study leading to the writing of her first book. Though Mrs. Snedeker wrote a number of books that dealt with American history, including three in which figured the New Harmony utopian experiment, her love and preference for the ancient world is clear. Between her first three books about Ancient Greece ( The Spartan , The Perilous Seat [1923], Theras and His Town [1924]) and her last two ( A Triumph for Flavius , Lysis Goes to the Play [1962]), the author wrote one about a Greek slave in Rome ( The Forgotten Daughter [1933]), a book about St. Luke ( Luke’s Quest [1947]) and another about early Christianity in Britain ( The White Isle [1940]). Caroline Dale Snedeker died in 1956, leaving a legacy of literature still as fresh and accessible for young people of the twenty-first century as it was for those of the century past. BEAUTY lies upon the land like a visible light, for the land is Italy. But it is an Italy we seldom see—a place of northern aspect. Monstrous mountainsides heave upward, clothed with fir forests, upward to where the bare cliffs soar against the sky. The valleys are narrow clefts, purple or black in their depth. In the wider vales sheep paths go winding along the hillsides, tiny parallel paths too narrow for human foot, cut deep by the knife-like hoofs of goat and ewe. They are the only sign of human habitation. In later centuries these hills will be crowned with monastery, abbey, castle, and the lower hill with its town, like a nest of turrets within the circling wall, giving the whole scene a meaning, an aspect of thought, of human effort and romance. But now the vista is utterly alone, menacing. The mountains are withdrawn into themselves and have no commerce with the littleness of man. The air comes sharply chill, breathing that almost arctic fragrance of fir trees basked in the sun. Yet strangely over this northern coldness arches the brilliance of an Italian sky. “Oh, our sky—but that is always bright,” say the loving Latins. So now in this ancient Samnium the fir forests take on purples unbelievable, the high cliffs are glorified with golden light, and the far distances melt into amethyst and violet, like dream places of the gods. Light is light and is in itself almost a divinity. Halfway up a wooded mountain, a hut leaned against a cliff, viewing to the full this passionate loveliness. It was, even for that ancient day when it stood there, a hut of antique form. Woven of wattles and daubed with mud, roofed with the same—such huts the earliest inhabitants of Europe had made for themselves before the Romans came, and even now in remote places far from Rome this manner of building lingered. Inside the hut all the hill beauty was quenched like a candle—windowless, dim, and the space of it almost filled with two upright looms. It was close, smelling of sheep wool piled high in baskets, and of the heated bodies of the workers. A woman and a child we would call them, but to the Romans they were two women. The younger, twelve years old, was of the marriageable age in Roman law. The older woman worked steadily, pacing, pacing before her loom. She might be called beautiful, with her faint reminder of the grave reliefs on the Sacred Way at Athens. But she was no rounded, we