  It was the cores (midolli) of the bookrolls, containing the final parts of texts, that were opened using the ingenious mechanism invented by Piaggio yielding long portions of mostly continuous text, albeit interrupted by gaps of varying size. Such textual continuity is found usually only in the final portions of Philodemus’ books, some of which contain something like a peroration, others attacks on rival positions, especially those of other Epicureans, or a kind of mopping-up and delimitation of the book’s subject-matter. In a few, fortunate, cases, such as PHerc. 1004 from On Rhetoric, this final portion may cover a large percentage of the original roll’s length; usually, however, they represent (much) less than a third. The unrolling process was so painfully slow that in the first phase of the history of the ‘Workshop (Officina) of the Papyri’ (1754–98), only 18 papyri were successfully unrolled. Political unrest closed the workshop between 1798 and 1801, and in 1802 a new phase of unrolling began under the direction of an English cleric, John Hayter, whose work was financed by the Prince of Wales, the later George IV. During the next five years, over 200 rolls were unrolled, but little was published, due in part to the slowness of the Neapolitan academics entrusted with the task.