A few years ago, I spent the summer in the Bay of Naples again. It feels somehow strange to go on a holiday there and to think that 2,000 years ago, many extremely rich VIPs did the exact same thing. The Bay of Naples was the Roman equivalent of the Côte d'Azur, and the notorious town of Baiae, a portion of which has since been submerged by water, the St Tropez of the day. As if to remind everyone how fickle and fragile life was, the jolly good fun was interrupted by the occasional earthquake and, of course, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD that led to the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the middle of Rome's Golden Age.

I think what drew me, a university professor of Classics, to the region time and time again were those mind-boggling accounts of the hedonistic lifestyle of rich and famous Romans which have survived through the ages in the form of classical literature and art. Moreover, I have made a few acquaintances ever since I started coming here, and seeing them and getting the inside scoop on the progress of the excavations made the long flight from the United States to Naples worthwhile.

On this particular visit to the Bay of Naples I heard a very strange story from one of people I had grown close to. Francesco Greco was not only a fellow scholar of Classics who worked on the Herculaneum archaeological site, but also a rather vivacious character who was as fascinated with our American culture as I was with that of the Roman Empire. Therefore, it didn't surprise me that he suggested that we should meet at McDonald's in the modern town of Pompeii. I know it sounds pretty weird to say this, but I've actually eaten a burger and French fries at the McDonald's restaurant in Pompeii, which looked like every other McDonald's I've been to in Europe. But I shouldn't digress from the story I want to tell and cut straight to it.

I had known for some time that Francesco was working with an international team on the recovery of those papyrus rolls from Herculaneum which had survived the volcanic eruption, but had essentially become unreadable heaps of charcoal. His work interested me immensely from an academic point of view because there were probably texts among these papyri that modern scholarship had considered lost for a long time. As a matter of fact, I was more than a tad jealous that he had access to these papyri and was trying to decipher them whereas I spent most of my time teaching Latin grammar and discussing books from the canon of ancient literature with my students.

"How is your work going?" I thus asked Francesco as soon as we were comfortably settled in a booth and unwrapping our burgers.

"It's fascinating," Francesco said, mimicking "Mr Spock" from Star Trek. He knew that would crack me up. "No, seriously. We are working in this small villa which must have belonged to a small official who happened to have a lot of money. We don't know his name yet, but he had a very strange hiding place for the papyri he owned: He hid them at the bottom of the latrines, as if he had known beforehand that he would never return to his house."

Although I knew many people who liked to read books while they were sitting on the toilet, I chuckled at the thought of anyone hiding books in their actual toilet. "What kind of books was he into?" I asked.

"That's the thing. Of the 21 books we found, 20 are in such a poor condition that we haven't been able to figure out what they are about." Francesco made a dramatic pause before he continued, "We could only reconstruct a few sentences from the 21st book. I guess you are familiar with Phlegon of Tralles and his Book of Marvels?"

I nodded. "But Phlegon lived in Caria in the early 2nd century AD."

"I didn't want to suggest that the book we found was written by him. What I meant to say is that it seems to be book of marvels quite similar to Phlegon's," Francesco said and started to eat his burger.

"I guess that's possible. The 1st century AD was a crazy century, and a lot of people back then probably liked to read a pseudo-scientific book like that."

"Anyway, once I knew what we were dealing with, I wanted to compare the book to similar writings from the 1st century AD. Or to be more precise, I had a hunch that it was an alternative version of a text I had once come across in a codex at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli." Francesco was quite familiar with this library, which was the third-largest in Italy, because he had worked there as a student. Apart from the fact that he had really needed the money at the time, he had also described it as a dream job to me because he had had access to books that no one else knew, books that had never even been printed and had last been copied by hand during the Middle Ages. More often than not, the monks who had copied these texts had included a lot of texts into one codex, and these texts were not necessarily related with each other. Thus, opening a codex felt a bit like opening one of these chocolate eggs that European kids love so much because they contain a tiny toy of some sort: You never knew what you would get. Francesco happened to be one of those contemporaries who were blessed with a photographic memory, which is why he had immediately detected similarities between the text they had found in the latrines of the villa and one he had come across in a codex.

When I noticed that Francesco had not just begun to his burger, but was in fact making a dramatic pause to heighten the suspense, I asked him, "What happened next? Did you find another version of your text at the library?"

"Unfortunately, no. It turned out that I was wrong. There was no connection between the two texts," Francesco said and still sounded disappointed about the incident. I wanted to ask him why he had bothered to tell me this story which apparently led nowhere when he revealed all of a sudden, "But I found an intriguing story in the codex when I was about to close it and put it back. It was so short that I thought at first it must be an epitome of an unknown ancient novel. On the other hand, I could be mistaken."

Now he had my full attention and was certainly aware of it. He knew that I had written my PhD about ancient novels. "And you probably want me to go to the Biblioteca Nazionale and take a look at it?"

"You don't have to go there. I was able to take pictures of the entire story and can e-mail them to you," Francesco said with a cocky smile. I could very well imagine that he was the type who would take pictures in a library even if this was explicitly forbidden, so perhaps he was smiling like that because he had done something illegal. "I'd really like to hear your opinion on this story and whether you think this story could be based on true events or have been made up by a writer in antiquity. Apart from that, there is always the possibility that a medieval monk could have written it because he had nothing better to do and was bored," he continued.

"Sure, I'd like to take a look," I said and put a single French fry into my mouth. Although the opportunity he had just offered me wasn't one I got every day, I tried not to sound too giddy.

Later that day, when I checked my e-mails on my phone, I realized why Francesco had been intrigued by the text. I found it fascinating as well even though I had no difficulty in determining that it was probably a biography because it lacked the central theme of love which was usually at the center of an ancient novel.

Nonetheless, I quickly forgot about Francesco's little discovery in the days that followed because I visited so many sights, met so many acquaintances and still managed to take some time off and relax at the beach. There were a lot of other things to do when I returned to the United States later that summer, too. I only came across Francesco's pictures again last year when I had so little to do during the pandemic that I decided to go through my e-mail account and delete all the old e-mails that I no longer needed. By that time, I had even forgotten I had ever received the e-mail.

When I read the old text again to refresh my memory what it had been about, I realized what a great potential the story had. I had always wanted to write a novel, but I had never really been able to focus on my writing because I had always been busy with other things that were usually work-related. Francesco's discovery, on the other hand, would provide me with the raw material and starting point that I needed since I am not the most creative person when it comes to making up storylines. All I would have to do if I decided to turn the text into a novel or novella would be to "modernize" the material so that modern readers would understand it. Moreover, I needed to add a few characters and details here and there so that everything would make as much sense as a story like that can possibly make.

It sounded like such a great plan that I opened up a new document on my computer and began to write at once. Strangely enough, I couldn't stop once I had begun to do it. I just went on and on and typed my own version of an ancient novel into my computer. Of course, the fact that I was a scholar and had taught Classics for years came in handy now because I didn't have to look so many things up about the time in which my story was set. When I finally felt the urge to go to the toilet after a couple of hours and noticed that it was not only dark outside, but also 11 p.m. according to the clock in the bathroom, I was shocked. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I was confident that this was going to be the first story I would ever finish, which is why I was so incredibly proud of myself that I added the following boisterous foreword to the story:

"The following story is allegedly a true story, but I am unable to verify whether that is really the case due to the fact that the persons whose lives are described in it lived almost 2,000 years ago. Therefore, if this story should turn out to be a lie that someone has made up, I, the author, should feel very sorry indeed for misleading my readers into believing that is story was based on actual events. In that case, I hope that my readers found the story intriguing and don't think that they wasted their time on a spurious tale made up by an anonymous Roman author in the first or second century AD."