A
fragment containing the beginning of a letter from Brocchus to Cerialis. We
would normally expect this to be the left-hand side of a diptych but the
right-hand edge appears to contain two v-shaped notches, which would indicate
that this is the right-hand half. If these are deliberate, it may be that the
message was a short one and was written on half a tablet (cf. 247). An
alternative explanation is that we have a letter like that of Octavius (343) which
began on the right-hand side of the leaf. The hand which wrote this fragment,
however, seems to us very likely to be that of 244, 248 and 291, and if
this is correct, the scribe surely would not have begun at the right, contrary
to his normal habit. That the writers of both 248 and 243 put the
words