In accordance with his high esteem for Caesar's masterpiece he had possessed himself of a beautiful copy of it, written by the celebrated calligrapher Praxitelides, upon papyrus of the finest quality. It was in seven rolls, each book of Caesar's text occupying two rolls, the index a fifth, and the commentaries of grammarians two more. The rollers inside the rolls were of Nubian ivory, their ends carved into pine cones, each of the fourteen representing the cone of a different variety of pine. Each roll was enclosed in a copper cylinder made accurately to be both watertight and airtight. The seven cylinders were housed in an ebony case, inlaid with mother of pearl. I have never seen any literary work more beautifully enshrined. When Agathemer and I were in the library he shut and locked the door at the top of my uncle's private stair, as he had the door at the bottom of it. The two keys he hid far apart, where neither was at all likely to be found easily or soon. He had laid the knives, tinder-boxes and bag of food on a table. He went to the case containing my uncle's most highly prized treasures. From it he took the ebony box, opened it and took out two of the cylinders. From these he removed the rolls embodying the grammarians' comments. These rolls he put back in the box, shut it, returned it to the case and closed the case. The two cylinders he had laid on the table by the things which he had brought up stairs. Inside each cylinder he placed a knife, a tinder-box, and a selection of the food. The bag, with what remained of the food, he tied up again. He handed me one cylinder. "Now," he said, "we are prepared to escape. My idea is to leave no trace of how we leave this villa, to have no one see us leave, to have nothing with us which could identify us after we have left. We are to go down the secret stair, crawl out through the big lower drain pipe, hide in the bushes till dark, take to the woods, hide by day, creep northward by night, and, if we succeed in reaching a district where no one would recognize us, press on northward boldly, passing ourselves off as runaway slaves if anyone encounters us." "We'd be locked up as runaway slaves," I said, "advertised, sold to the highest bidder if unclaimed and henceforth kept in slavery." "I'm in slavery now," said Agathemer. "You, if kept in slavery, would at least be alive and in no danger of being recognized." "Let us go," said I. We looked at each other and burst out laughing. We made a sufficiently absurd spectacle, each stark naked, each holding a copper cylinder, as we stood in that elegant and luxurious room. According to the fashion of the time, which aped the ways of the young Emperor, we wore our hair moderately long and as both had hair naturally curly, were perfectly in style as to hair. Our beards, also, we wore clipped but not shaved, and long enough to show a tendency to curl, as the Emperor wore his.