The amazing Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum’s most famous building, finally opened this week, some 2000 years after it was enveloped in mud in the eruption that buried Pompeii. The “largest Roman villa ever found, it was the magnificent seafront retreat for Lucius Calpurnius Piso, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Piso, a literate man who patronized poets and philosophers, built there one of the finest libraries of its time. Many believe that the mud filled lower terraces could hide the fabled second library, which probably contains lost plays by Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, lost dialogues of Aristotle, and Livy’s History of Rome, of which more than 100 of the original 142 books are missing.”