From the Times of London, which has belatedly ceased hiding its Web site behind an impenetrable registration wall, comes the most hopeful story of the new year, and it has nothing to do with contemporary political squabbles.
One of the greatest recent examples of the application of science to the humanities is the decipherment of 1,800 badly scorched scrolls excavated from Herculaneum (destroyed, like Pompeii, in the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.). Over two hundred years after their discovery, they were made legible through a technique that distinguishes the spectral patterns of ancient inks. Thirty thousand pages of ancient writings, almost all from works lost since antiquity, have been recovered in this manner over the past 20 years. The only discouraging side to this amazing story is that most of them are treatises by Epicurean philosophers. Happy as one is to be able to peruse first hand the writings of Philodemos of Gadara, who served as a philosophical ornament to upper class Roman households, most scholars would probably be willing to exchange all of his suave popularizations for a single one of the lost dialogues of Aristotle, not to mention a few of the hundreds of classical tragedies and comedies that are known to us only by title.
According to the Times, a considerable number of scholars now believe that more scrolls are waiting to be found and have begun a drive to renew excavation of the villa where the surviving cache was discovered in 1752. The site was sealed two centuries ago, after everything that appeared worth taking had been removed.
But last week a group of the world’s leading classical scholars gathered in Oxford to demand that the site be reopened. They believe that there is a better-than-evens chance — “quite likely”, is how Robert Fowler, professor of Greek at Bristol University, puts it — that the villa may have possessed at least one other library still to be
uncovered. . . .
Most of the work on the Philodemus texts was carried out by the late Professor Marcello Gigante of the University of Naples: a small (despite his surname) and dynamic figure, he gradually became convinced that the 1,800 rolls so far discovered represented perhaps only one half of the books that the villa contained. Certainly it does seem unlikely that Piso [Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (d. c. 44 B.C.), Philodemos’ patron and the probable owner of the site] — an educated man who was joint ruler [sic; the writer means “consul”, of course] of Rome in 58BC — should have confined himself to this one, narrow collection. Or that his heirs, equally highly educated, would not have added to it over the decades.
In the 1990s, on Gigante’s initiative, an abortive attempt was made to reopen the old 18th-century excavations. The project was eventually abandoned when its funding ran out, but not before the archeologists had established that the villa was larger than had been thought.
It seems that it was built on two or possibly three levels, terraced down to the sea. It also appears that slaves were in the act of carrying crates of books to safety when they were overwhelmed by the eruption. These lower storeys, with their mosaic floors, frescoes and painted ceilings — clearly an integral part of the house — all lend support to Gigante’s theory that the villa had at least one other library.
Gigante died in November 2001 but his campaign for renewed excavation, far from dying with him, gathered strength. Eight of the world’s leading scholars of ancient history, including professors from Harvard, Oxford and London, wrote to The Times in the spring of 2002 demanding action: “We can expect to find good contemporary copies of known masterpieces and to recover works lost to humanity for two millennia. A treasure of greater cultural importance can scarcely be imagined.”
The signatories have now formed a pressure group, The Herculaneum Society, which convened in Oxford last weekend, and moves have begun to raise the $20m (£10.6m) or so needed to dig.
The Friends of the Herculaneum Society accepts donations but unfortunately has yet to discover PayPal.
There is, one must pessimistically observe, a disappointingly high chance that the contents of the “second library”, if it existed at all, may have been destroyed beyond reconstruction or discarded by the original excavators. To the casual eye, the scrolls look like lumps of coal. Many were in fact thrown out before their true nature was realized. Still, the remains of Greek and Latin literature as so fragmentary that, as Professor Fowler puts it, “So long as there is a chance of finding the rest of the library — and everyone admits there is a chance, however strong or weak they rate it — we owe it to the world to dig.”
Update (2/14/05): Cronaca reports that philanthropist David W. Packard has offered funding for renewed excavations of the Villa of the Papyri and provides further speculation (optimistic and pessimistic) on what is likely to be uncovered.
In contemporary exegesis, nothing is known of the many followers of Jesus (not simply the 12 apostles). I am certain one or two had writing implements and used them. A prophet does not go unrecorded. Writings can be destroyed. Sources lost--as is evident here.
Posted by: Patrick Gibbons | Monday, April 18, 2005 at 01:08 AM