This book brings back from oblivion a literary treasure - a collection of Roman erotic novels, well-known, but doomed to long oblivion for moral, aesthetic or educational reasons. This is the "Thousand and One Nights" of Roman society during the dictatorship of Caesar and the beginning of the empire. The life of Gaius Albutius Silus - the great and most original novelist of that era - serves as a mirror of the life of ancient Rome. Fifty-three plots. These cruel, bloody, sexual intrigues, containing fictitious (but based on the laws of Roman jurisprudence) legal battles, were the subject of public readings - recitations; they are very close in spirit to the immortal dialogues of Pierre Corneille, to the “black” novels of Donatien de Sade or to the objectivist poetry of Charles Reznikoff.