  It is often assumed that Philodemus lived and worked, and perhaps even gathered an Epicurean circle of friends, in the luxurious villa on the edge of the Campanian seaside town of Herculaneum in the ruins of which the papyri of his works were found, dubbed ‘Villa of the Papyri’ (see Section 2.2.1). A nest of conjectures has been woven on the basis of the presence of the papyri in the Villa, especially of multiple copies of some of Philodemus’ and Epicurus’ works, as well as of an apparent draft copy of one work (the Index Academicorum, a manuscript that may be in the format of the ‘model book’ made to determine the length of further copies (On the Gods III), a few manuscripts that appear to bear stylistic corrections by Philodemus himself, if not in his own hand (see Essler 2017), and copies of the works of other Epicureans (Demetrius of Laconia, Colotes, Polystratus, Carneïscus, Metrodorus and Zeno of Sidon), along with (at least) two books by the Stoic Chrysippus. There is also a group of Latin papyri, apparently of non-philosophical character (a Latin poem on the battle of Actium in PHerc. 817 has long been known, and the historical work From the beginning of the Civil Wars by Seneca the Elder has recently been identified in PHerc. 1067), except perhaps for a manuscript of Lucretius. (On the contents of the library at Herculaneum, see Sider 2005 and Delattre 2006; on the identification by K. Kleve of a possible manuscript of Lucretius, see Delattre 2003.)