"Not By Force But By Good Will" reads the inscription over the gate of a market farm in Puteoli, Roman Campania. Quintus the master lives by these words. Lucan his slave defies them. Both are nearly destroyed by them.

Seeking asylum, the fugitive Lucan crashes the farm gate of Good Will and Quintus rescues him. “Slaves, serve your master as you would your Lord”, Lucan is told. How can he possibly do that?

Trouble starts when Quintus chooses Lucan over his sixteen slaves as a companion. Trouble deepens when the slave girl Letitia, though betrothed to another, eyes Lucan. An insidious bet regarding Lucan convulses the farm and Lucan runs to the safety of the church. But the church will not let him live a lie.

Momentous military and civil edicts of Constantine the Great tax the life out of small farmers. Lucan has the potential to save the farm, if the estranged fugitive can be reconciled to himself, his master, and his place in the world where there is not even a whisper of hope for freedom.

In her historical novel Not By Force But By Good Will: The Odyssey of a Runaway Slave At the Time of Constantine the Great, novelist Hannah Bonsey Suthers resurrects the fourth-century Roman Empire where two-thirds of the populace were slaves and three-fourths of the free population were rustics. Through memorable grass-roots characters, the author explores the struggle of the human spirit, and the process whereby slaves may have transcended slavery and accomplished the scriptural mandate to serve the master as the Lord.