Though space does not permit a detailed account of the fascinating things Herculaneum has to tell us, the subject of suburban villas cannot be left without mentioning a famous one there, still not fully explored, where in 1752 were found, in a narrow room with cupboards, a vast number of what were at first taken for charred billets of wood. Later, traces of writing were found on them: they turned out to be papyri, a whole library of 1800 rolls. A machine invented to unroll them ruined more scrolls than it unwound, but finally, by 1806, ninety-six were deciphered. They proved to be works of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus, to whose patron Lucius Calpurnius Piso (father of Caesar’s wife Calpurnia) and his descendants the villa may have belonged. It had a gracious peristyle, gardens, fishponds, and a belvedere overlooking the sea at the end of a long graveled walk. In the garden was found a whole gallery of sculpture in bronze and marble, now included among the most famous pieces in the National Museum in Naples. Here a cultured Roman patrician could combine in the ideal Epicurean way the calm contemplation of the beauties of nature and of art with the philosophic study of the atomic structure of the universe. [Illustration: FIG. 8.10 Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries. Wine-press, reconstructed. (Maiuri, _op. cit._, p. 101)] A more rustic villa, between Pompeii and Boscoreale to the north, shows what the establishment of a capital farmer of the first century A.D. was like. The owner’s quarters were modest. Business came first: most of the ground floor is taken up with stable, wine and oil presses, threshing floor, and slaves’ quarters. Slaves were a problem: one rustic villa has quarters for thirty and stocks for fourteen. The Boscoreale wine store had a 23,000 gallon capacity, and enough stone jars were found to hold 1,300 gallons of olive oil. The proprietor of this villa, however, was not without his fondness for aesthetic ostentation. In a wine vat here was found in 1895 a treasure of 108 embossed silver vessels and 1000 gold coins. They were bought by the banker Count Edward de Rothschild, much to Italian disgust, and presented to the Louvre. One pair of cups represents a series of skeletons, one garlanded, another with a heavy bag of money, a third with a roll of papyrus, a fourth with a lyre; the whole bears the legend, the tragic irony of which the proprietor of the villa was to discover: “Seize hold on life; tomorrow is uncertain.” Another treasure in silver, of 118 pieces, all now securely in the Naples museum, was discovered in 1930 in a nail-studded chest in the strong room under a town house (I.x.4) called the “House of the Menander” after a fresco of the dramatist on the walls. * * * * *