But it was sorry work; for ever and again the dream-woven mist would break, and the present--stern, unchanging, joyless--she would see, and that only.
Cornelia was thrown more and more back on her books.

In fact, had she been deprived of that diversion, she must have succumbed in sheer wretchedness; but Phaon, for all his crafty guile, did not realize that a roll of AEschylus did almost as much to undo his jailer's work as a traitor among his underlings.
The library was a capacious, well-lighted room, prettily frescoed, and provided with comfortably upholstered couches.

In the niches were a few choice busts: a Sophocles, a Xenophon, an Ennius, and one or two others.

Around the room in wooden presses were the rolled volumes on Egyptian papyrus, each labelled with author and title in bright red marked on the tablet attached to the cylinder of the roll.

Here were the poets and historians of Hellas; the works of Plato, Aristotle, Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius and the later Greek philosophers.
Here, too, were books which the Greek-hating young lady loved best of all--the rough metres of Livius Andronicus and Cnaeus Naevius, whose uncouth lines of the old Saturnian verse breathed of the hale, hearty, uncultured, uncorrupted life of the period of the First Punic War.
Beside them were the other great Latinists: Ennius, Plautus, Terence, and furthermore, Pacuvius and Cato Major, Lucilius, the memoirs of Sulla, the orations of Antonius "the orator" and Gracchus, and the histories of Claudius Quadrigarius and Valerius Antias.
The library became virtually Cornelia's prison.