The impressive (indelibly imprinting) first book shuffles twelve compositions into a decisively disputatious, analytical mode. Referential moments are shockingly rare, as names, locales, dates, and events are either repressed or repeatedly, emphatically, anonymized. As we shall find, in fact this flight of letters will terminate with its most graphic episode: a charmingly self-satirizing ‘at home’ with a rueful Seneca. A dose of chagrin d'amour propre, our first stopover, the shady uilla of Epp. 12, will model the moral topos in which manors make manners make Man. Mimetic writing takes us inside the owner to own up.

By contrast, the rest of those textual apostles will by then have loaded the book in favour of principles, away from principals. Dicta, not data; eleven to one. Disorientation of the reader is the first objective of the correction programme. Scrubbing the interrogation clean of external coordinates is part of a sensory-deprivation therapy which aims to reconfigure and redirect the new recruit, inside, inside the mind, wherever morals live.

In the first twelve-session course, we shall find, just one vignette is recounted, apart from a[n unlocalized] confrontation between tyrant and philosopher, which supplies extra ammunition in the real battle of wills, between philosophers (Demetrius Poliorcetes and Stilbon, 9.18: Stilbon besieged by Epicurus).

The solitary geographical referent of any sort named in the book features in the sarcastic anecdote told on its last page, the first to involve a Roman – a dead Roman, in fact, and one who played a dead unRoman while he still lived (12.8).