Cicero to Atticus, written at Antium in April or May 56 BC. The famous library letter, and the most intimate glimpse in all the surviving correspondence of how a Roman gentleman’s library was actually put back on its feet. Cicero is at his seaside villa at Antium with the books that survived the Clodian sack of the previous year, and Tyrannio — the Greek grammarian Tyrannion of Amisus, brought to Rome by Lucullus after the Mithridatic war and now the leading scholar in the city — has been arranging the rolls. The reliquiae, Cicero discovers, are much better than he had thought.

The technical request that follows is what makes the letter unique. He asks Atticus to send two of his trained book-slaves: glutinatores, who paste the papyrus sheets into rolls and mend torn ones, and ad cetera administris, hands for the rest of the work. They are to bring strips of vellum (membranula) on which to write the title-labels — the [Greek: sittybai] that hung from the projecting end of a roll so a reader could find it on the shelf without unrolling each. The light teasing of Atticus’s Greek is part of the intimacy: “what you Greeks, I believe, call sittybai.” Behind this paragraph stands the whole machinery of the late-Republican private library.

The letter closes with two sharper notes from Roman public life: Atticus has bought a troop of gladiators, and Cicero (who hears they fight wonderfully) teases him that, had he hired them out for the two shows now in prospect, the purchase would have paid for itself. And the steady refrain of the letters of these months: come, and bring Pilia. Tullia wants it.