One of the pleasures of studying the ancient world is that a large proportion of what one has to read is of good quality, since the better works have enjoyed a higher survival rate over the centuries than the rubbish. Scholars of ancient philosophy have been less than overjoyed, therefore, at the recovery of part of a large library of Epicurean philosophy in the ruins of Herculaneum, the city destroyed with Pompeii in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. The library is a small sample of the vast production in late antiquity of books about words. Among the least uninteresting of the papyri so
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