December AD 31: what the register says about the three children of Apicata, and a conversation in a corridor with a man called Eucaerus. Aglaus counts the private leaves by month and does not raise what he finds. April AD 32: a letter in which the wording matters, and Caenis, at sixty-five, gives the verb and stands by it. A Kalends list with a name added at the foot, and four drafts of one afternoon in AD 33, with Agrippina the Elder on the other side of the table.

Chapters Three and Four of the letter-book. The novel is free to read at pbmills.com/books/erase-the-tablet

A work of fiction. The letter-book of Antonia Caenis does not exist.

The first surviving leaf of the letter-book: Antonia Minor, sixty-seven, to Tiberius Caesar, about eleven letters between her daughter and the man who commands his guard. Four drafts, a courier called Pallas, and the instruction that gives the book its name. Forty-two years later, in a small upper room on the Quirinal, Caenis begins to dictate, and is told to begin with the letter and not with herself. Then the eleven weeks after the fall, a daughter in a locked room, and what the kitchen returns of the house record about how long she was fed.

Chapters One and Two of the letter-book. The novel is free to read at pbmills.com/books/erase-the-tablet

A work of fiction. The letter-book of Antonia Caenis does not exist.

There is a piece of stone in Rome with a mistake on it: six lines for Antonia Caenis, freedwoman of Antonia Augusta, best of patrons, put up by her freedman Aglaus with his children. The translator sets out the four things that are actually known about her, the legal oddity that follows from the third of them, the three layers the book is made of, and why a technical detail about ink is the only place this book and the other one touch.

Front matter of the letter-book. The novel is free to read at pbmills.com/books/erase-the-tablet

A work of fiction. The letter-book of Antonia Caenis does not exist.

Spring AD 34: Caenis is sent to a yard to buy someone, and records what a person costs. The strongroom of the house until it is too dark to read, and the first leaf of a second, private book, ten lines in one ink. Then AD 37, three weeks after the accession: Antonia Minor, seventy-two, receives her grandson Gaius in the small reception room, and five of the fourteen letters that followed are given in the order they stand. Aglaus on a gap of sixty-one days in a run of twenty-eight years.

Chapters Five and Six of the letter-book. The novel is free to read at pbmills.com/books/erase-the-tablet

A work of fiction. The letter-book of Antonia Caenis does not exist.