The score was composed by Sidney Jones with additional songs by Lionel Monckton and lyrics by Harry Greenbank and Adrian Ross.

The work's competition in London in 1898 included the long-running musicals A Runaway Girl and The Belle of New York.

The same themes and characterisations would resurface some 70 years later in the Broadway show A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by Stephen Sondheim.

[2][3] In 1899 Fred C. Whitney's Broadway production with Dorothy Morton as Maia, Richard Carle as Heliodorus and Herbert Sparling as Pomponius ran at the Herald Square Theatre for 29 performances.

Among their servants is one Archias, a talented sculptor, whose most recent achievement is a statue of Eros, God of Love, for which his fellow slave Diomed has acted as model.

He disapproves of his daughter's fancy for a slave, and when the seance is over and Maia has intended that Antonia should walk off with the statue, Heliodorus arranges that the real Diomed falls to the princess.