The old notebook was a gift from his father, a banker, arriving by post a few months after Ian Asquith entered university. With luck, his father explained, the gift would interest one of the professors of Greek at the University of Edinburgh, or some other high-up who could assist Ian’s candid ambition to finish his undergraduate career as a medallist. One of his father’s clients, an antiquarian and an investor in British consols, had passed on this pocket journal as part of the informal currency traded between people in business. Like his father, Asquith had no real friends; like his mother, the young man wore glasses, and further impaired his sight by late reading in bad light. At night he burned oily rags in the fireplace of his student apartment—rags he acquired without charge from a townsman, a train mechanic. This fuel burned intensely and sent up a thick, irregular smoke from the chimney. The bookshelves in young Asquith’s apartment were sunk into and formed part of the wall.

This notebook had originally belonged to the classical scholar Christoph Ziegler (1814–1888), and was half filled with transcriptions of Greek texts and Ziegler’s own notes in German. Ian’s copy of The Biographical Encyclopaedia of Classical Scholars listed the two chief accomplishments of this Ziegler, a philologist and schoolmaster in Stuttgart, as, first, his long essay on satyr plays and tragic tetralogies, and second, the three volumes of Greek Bucolic Poets, which best represented Ziegler’s scholarly tastes and presented all his discoveries in the Ambrosian Library. In his will, Ziegler left instructions for the sale of his private library and papers to fund stipends for students from Stuttgart and Ulm.

After a series of unprofitable transactions on the antiquarian market, the notebook came into Ian’s possession. Asquith wrote a letter of thanks to his father’s business associate, and this man replied with further details of the gift. Ziegler’s journal, a combination of diary, transcription and commentary, had had a single purpose and was used during a few weeks in 1863: it concerned Ziegler’s visit to the city of Smyrna, where he expected to find an undiscovered play by an ancient Greek bucolic poet known as Bion. Word had reached Ziegler that a comedy—on paper, with parchment scraps of a previous copy—was kept at someone’s home as an heirloom, and he went to Smyrna hoping this comedy would place Bion in the ranks of Aristophanes or Theocritus. The play’s subject was the myth of Polydeuces and Kastor, the twins who feuded with their twin cousins.

Bion was born in Asia Minor and died by poisoning in Sicily. There was little information to settle his date: a common estimate being the second century BC. He wrote the line:

We waste our lives on gainful work and yearning for wealth.