In 1416, as soon as the three Tuscan secretaries arrived, they found wonderful treasures. A complete copy of Quintilian’s Institutiones oratoriae, a treatise on the theory and practice of rhetoric—a book the Tuscans had hitherto known only in a very imperfect form. They also found Silius Italicus’s Punica, a seventeen-book, 12,000-line saga on the Second Punic War (which was fought from 218 to 201 B.C.)—the longest poem in Latin literature.
