On August 24, 79 AD, Italy’s Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii in ash and Herculaneum in super-hot mud. Among the buildings entombed in Herculaneum was a great villa, built more than a century earlier by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso.
Under 30 metres of rock-hard mud, the villa was forgotten–until well-digging workmen rediscovered it in 1738. Too deep to excavate, the villa was explored via a network of tunnels built by Karl Weber, a Swiss military engineer.
Sculptures and other treasures were hauled out for the King of Naples, while various blackened lumps of “coal” were dumped into the sea–until, in 1752, workmen discovered a library, lined with 1,800 rolls of papyrus, carbonized by heat, but intact. The “lumps of coal” were, in fact, ancient books–many of which we’ve recently been able to read for the first time, thanks to space-age technology.
Multi-spectral imaging (MSI) was developed by NASA to study the surfaces of other planets. Sometimes details lost to the naked eye are visible to sensors that can “see” a wider range of electromagnetic radiation, from the deep infrared to the high ultraviolet.
Researchers at Brigham Young University have adapted MSI to the study of ancient documents, and in 1999, they were invited to see what they could do with the recovered papyri from Herculaneum. They discovered that when they used a filter that passed only infrared light in the 900 to 950-nanometre range to a digital camera, text suddenly appeared, black on white, on fragments that to the naked eye were blank and black.
In 2002, an archive of about 30,000 digital images of all the opened papyri was made available on CD-ROM to scholars all over the world. (Next year, they’ll be widely available on the Web.)
Most of the books are by Philodemus, a first-century BC Epicurean philosopher who probably taught both Virgil and Horace. Among the other works are hundreds of lost books of Greek philosophy, including half of all the works of Epicurus, missing for 2,300 years.
The late Professor Marcello Gigante of the University of Naples launched the first systematic investigation of the scrolls in the 1970s (he’s the one who brought the BYU team on board). Over the years he became convinced that there must be many more books in the villa. For one thing, there are far fewer books in Latin than would normally be expected, and for another, it seems odd the collection is so focused on the works of a single philosopher.
Gigante managed to arrange further excavation in the 1990s, but work halted in 1998. No new library was discovered–but researchers did determine that the villa was much larger than had previously been assumed, with four terraces stretching down to the sea, most of which have never been explored.
Gigante died in November of 2001, but last week in Oxford, a group of the world’s leading classical scholars, the Friends of Herculaneum Society, met to demand that the site be reopened. They’re trying to raise the estimated $20 million U.S. required. They dream of discovering, in the possible second library, lost plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus, the lost dialogues of Aristotle, additional works by Virgil and Horace, the missing books of Livy’s History of Rome, and more.
There are opponents. Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, director of the British School at Rome thinks it would be irresponsible to conduct a new excavation when the portion of the villa exposed in the 1990s is waterlogged and pigeon-infested. He thinks preservation of what has already been uncovered is more important than looking for more, especially when half of the papyri originally discovered have yet to even be opened.
The Friends of Herculaneum Society suggest that tunneling rather than traditional excavation could mitigate the problem of opening up the long-buried villa to the elements–and get around the inconvenient fact that the modern town of Ercolano, a suburb of Naples, has been built on top of the hidden parts of the villa. They feel there is some urgency, considering Mount Vesuvius is still there and still active, and could put the site out of reach forever with a fresh eruption or earthquake. And they worry that water now getting into the villa could seep into any hidden library, destroying the preserved papyri.
“We owe it to the world to dig,” says Professor Robert Fowler, a Greek specialist at the University of Bristol. Should we fail to do so, “posterity will not judge us kindly.”
And as the Villa of the Papyri proves, posterity can have a very long memory.
