For when I open a medieval manuscript, and this is different from opening a printed book, I am conscious not only of the manu-script, the bodily handling of materials in production, writing, illumination, but also how in its subsequent reception, the parchment has been penetrated; how it has acquired grease stains, thumb-marks, erasures, drops of sweat; suffered places where images have been kissed away by devout lips or holes from various eating animals.1If Freud's Shoe was never merely a shoe,2 and Marx's Table was never merely a table,3 it is safe to say that, for the late Republic, the patronal-class dedicated text was very rarely merely a patronal-class dedicated text. The phenomenon of a text being, at least potentially, more than just a text – the phenomenon of the received value of the whole (volume) transcending in value the sum of its material and intellectual components – is one likely naturalized by most readers of this text. But as the fact of this naturalization might be considered to be the single most important contribution of the textual community of the late Republic, it will be useful to finish our study with those aspects of the late Republican community that speak most strongly to those periods that follow, from the obsessively textual worlds of the Principate and Empire to the social and intellectual engagement with textual materiality as it continues into our time.