Adams wrote that despite studying law, he didn’t really know much about local Massachusetts laws: “I know much less than I do of the Roman law.”77 He immersed himself in the works of Cicero and other ancient Romans—Horace, Ovid, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius. His library eventually would amount to over three thousand books, with the ancients looming much larger than did modern writers, of whom he appears only to have dipped into Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Addison, and Swift.78
