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.

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.