On the night of March 15, 44 BCE, Mark Antony obtained from Calpurnia documents that had belonged to her slain husband.1 Modern scholars have tended to refer to these vaguely and anachronistically as Caesar's ``papers,'' but their inestimable importance to our present investigation requires us to peer at them more closely. Fortunately, the ancient sources and subsequent events reveal fairly clearly that the bulk or entirety of what Antony carried away consisted of the papyrus rolls of the dead dictator's commentarii.2 Any magistrate might keep commentarii, ``notebooks'' containing a continuous record of the activities of his of®ce; in the last chapter, we encountered Cicero's own consular commentarii, and earlier we noted Cicero's claim to have consulted a commentarius from Verres' term as governor of Sicily.3

Indeed, the closest model for Caesar's record was probably the commentarius of a provincial governor,4 whose power ± like Caesar's in Rome ± was both miscellaneous and, for many or most practical purposes, absolute. In effect, Calpurnia handed over to Antony the minutes of Caesar's tyranny. These rolls, safely spirited away to Antony's house long before Caesar was eulogized and burned, would soon plunge Rome into a documentary crisis of unprecedented magnitude.