Readers who have been paying attention to the news may have seen that a group of researchers led by Graziano Ranocchia of the University of Pisa in Italy have recently used modern technology to read portions of a carbonized scroll from the library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum bearing a history of Plato’s Akademia written by the Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemos of Gadara, who lived in the first century BCE and died sometime between c. 40 and c. 35 BCE. The newly-readable parts of the scroll include an anecdote about how Plato supposedly died and more specific information than was previously known about where he was buried.
In this post, I will briefly discuss the actual historical, literary, and philosophical significance of these findings. While the findings are genuinely significant, a lot of media coverage has been rather sensationalistic and has perhaps raised some false assumptions and hopes about what these discoveries mean. This post will serve as a scholarly counterpoint to these assumptions.
Background
Scholars generally believe that Philodemos, the author of the history of Akademia himself, was the original owner of at least the majority of the scrolls that have been found so far at Herculaneum.
Somehow or another, this collection of scrolls ended up in a massive luxury villa in Herculaneum, which modern scholars have dubbed the Villa dei Papiri in Italian or “Villa of the Papyri” in English. The owner of this villa is generally believed to have been Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a Roman senator and father-in-law of Julius Caesar who was an admirer of Epicurean teachings and is thought to have been Philodemos’s sponsor until his death around 43 BCE.
How exactly the scrolls wound up in the villa is uncertain; it is possible that Calpurnius Piso allowed Philodemos to reside in his villa, that he appointed Philodemos to select scrolls for his own library, or that he or one of his heirs acquired Philodemos’s own scrolls after his death.
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, both Philodemos and Calpurnius Piso were already long dead. The residents of Pompeii and Herculaneum had plenty of warning that the volcano was going to erupt and many or even most of the residents seem to have evacuated before the eruption. The scrolls of the Villa of the Papyri were packed into containers to be taken to a safe location.
Before the scrolls could be removed, however, the volcano erupted. The pyroclastic flows from the eruption carbonized the scrolls and buried the entire Villa of the Papyri, along with the rest of the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, in ash. The carbonization and burial of the scrolls preserved them for millennia. As a result, these scrolls constitute the only library from the classical Mediterranean world that has survived to the present-day in any state near completion.
In 1738, King Charles VII of Naples ordered the excavation of Herculaneum. Twelve years later, in 1750, farmers digging a well accidentally discovered part of the Villa of the Papyri. In 1752 and 1753, excavators working under Charles VII’s patronage unearthed much of the villa and found the remains over 1,800 carbonized scrolls, of which 341 were virtually complete.
At first, the excavators mistook some of the papyri for lumps of charcoal and threw them away thinking that they were worthless. Later, though, someone noticed writing on one of the scrolls and the excavators realized their true nature and significance.
Unfortunately, although the fact that the scrolls were carbonized preserved them, it also made them extremely difficult to read. The scrolls were rolled up when they were carbonized, they are now extremely brittle and fragile, and physically unrolling them is a destructive process. Over the past 272 years, attempts to unroll and transcribe the scrolls have met with varying degrees of success. Now, however, digital technologies are enabling scholars to read the scrolls without destroying them and to recover more of the texts they contain.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the entrance to the Villa of the Papyri, an enormous luxury villa in the Roman city of Herculaneum that contained a private library of over 1,800 scrolls
The scroll containing the history of Plato’s Akademia
According to The Guardian article I linked above, the scroll Ranocchia’s team has examined contains a previously unknown anecdote about the death of the Athenian philosopher Plato, who died around 348 BCE. According to the scroll, when Plato was dying of a fever, he spent his final evening listening to a Thrakian slave girl play the aulos, a kind of woodwind instrument which consists of two pipes held in the mouth. The scroll says that Plato, despite his severe ill health, was still lucid enough to criticize the slave girl for her poor rhythm.
Although news reports translate the word aulos into English as “flute,” this is misleading, since the aulos was actually a double-reeded instrument like an oboe and it produced a shrill, dissonant sound closer to that of a bagpipe than the instrument known today as a flute.
The same scroll also gives more specific information than was previously known about the site of Plato’s burial. Previously, scholars knew that Plato was buried somewhere in the Akademia, the area outside the ancient walls of Athens where his school was located. The scroll, however, specifically states that he was buried in the garden adjacent to the Mouseion.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing detail of the tondo of an Attic red-figure kylix dating to roughly between c. 460 and c. 450 BCE depicting a boy playing an aulos
What does this mean?
Philodemos wrote his history of the Akademia in the first century BCE, centuries after Plato’s lifetime. The majority of stories that ancient authors writing long after the deaths of famous philosophers tell about their lives are apocryphal; they tell us more about how later audiences perceived those philosophers’ teachings and the role of philosophers in general than about the real events of those philosophers’ lives.
This point is especially true when it comes to stories about famous philosophers’ deaths, since ancient authors tell all kinds of fantastic, definitely apocryphal tales about how famous philosophers and poets supposedly died, some of which I summarize in this post I wrote in January 2019.
Given this context, the story about Plato’s death recounted in the Herculaneum scroll is most likely apocryphal. Nonetheless, it is still an interesting story and it reveals valuable information about how later philosophical writers imagined an ideal death for a great philosopher: remaining lucid and retaining a concern for musical harmony to his final breath.
The new, more specific information about Plato’s burial site is also exciting, but, unfortunately, it will not help archaeologists in actually locating the site for several reasons. First, we don’t even know if the scroll’s information is correct, since, as I have noted above, Philodemos was writing long after Plato’s own time. Although information about a philosopher’s final resting place is more likely to be factually correct than stories about his life and death, since some form of physical marker of the site may have existed in Philodemos’s time that he could have seen himself, the accuracy of the information is still uncertain.
Second, even if the information is correct, numerous later events may have destroyed Plato’s burial. In 86 BCE, the Roman general Sulla sacked Athens and destroyed much of the city and its environs. Later, in 267 CE, the Heruli sacked Athens and again caused great destruction in and around the city. It is also possible that someone may have moved the burial from its original location.
Third, although the general area of the ancient Akademia is known and the modern city of Athens has designated it as an archaeological park, scholars don’t know where either the garden or the Mouseion of the Akademia in Plato’s time was located. In fact, no structures that can be reliably dated to Plato’s time in the fourth century BCE are known to have survived within the Akademia. Archaeologists have excavated the foundation stones of a late Hellenistic and Roman-era gymnasion, but this was most likely built long after Plato’s death.
Since we don’t know the location of the garden or Mouseion, we aren’t really any closer to finding Plato’s tomb than we were before this scroll was read.
ABOVE: Photo I took last summer when I visited Plato’s Akademia showing the site of the late Hellenistic and Roman-era gymnasion
Conclusion
It is likely that, over the rest of this year and the next several years, media outlets will continue to publish stories about the Herculaneum Papyri. Although the discoveries that have already come from these papyri are genuinely exciting and future discoveries will undoubtedly be exciting as well, readers should be aware that media outlets are likely to hype and sensationalize the discoveries as they happen, especially in headlines. Always make sure to consider the publisher and sources of any news article you read, consider its reliability, read past the headline, and think critically about what the article claims.
Do you think we will find lost works in the Herculaneum Papyri
They’ve already found previously lost works in the Herculaneum Papyri. In fact, the vast majority of what researchers have found in the collection are works that were previously lost. So far what they’ve found are mostly works of Epicurean philosophy; they’ve been able to recover a large number of prose works of Philodemos of Gadara and substantial fragments of Epikouros’s On Nature, which was all previously completely lost. They’ve also found fragments of Seneca the Elder’s lost Histories and a lost history of the wars of the Diadochoi. The history of Plato’s Akademia that I discuss in this post is itself a previously lost work. The likelihood that the unread scrolls contain more lost works is extremely high.
Moreover, there is a fairly high likelihood that even more scrolls are still buried. The excavators back in the eighteenth century only excavated part of the Villa of the Papyri and much of it still remains unexcavated. The scrolls that have been excavated are ones that were apparently removed from the main library (which is probably still buried) for transportation elsewhere. It is possible that the main library contains even more scrolls that were not removed. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the rest of the villa will be excavated anytime in the near future. There are multiple houses built over the unexcavated parts of the villa and, in order for the villa to be excavated, the people living in those houses would have to move and their homes would have to be demolished. Excavating the rest of the villa would also probably cost over US$150 million at least, which archaeologists don’t have.
Thanks for the reply it’s truly sad on how much has been and I hope we can find more in the future
I guess now has never been a better time to be an Epicurean.
Or a scholar who specializes in Epicureanism!
I’m very glad you wrote an article about this (and sorry for not keeping up with the blog for a while)!
I actually saw the news about this today, and though I found it fascinating, the one thing that I kept wondering (but none of the news sources shared) was if there are any proposals for a date or authorship to the fragment. As you say reports about the deaths of philosophers are seldom reliable, but if it was from for instance Speusippus it could possibly be historical.
At any rate, I suppose this is a case where one can look towards a brighter future when more of the scrolls are deciphered!
I was mistaken when I originally wrote that the author of the text is unknown. The author is believed to be Philodemos, who was writing in the first century BCE.
In more recent times I’ve seen aulos translated as “pipes” and players as “pipers”, which seems better than flutes. Reconstructions of the aulos have featured in recordings of ancient Greek music (as best can be reconstructed) and one is also played in a scene in the film “Agora”. It *does* sound much like an oboe! Or even a Scottish Highland bagpipe chanter.
I think my favorite post facto story about an ancient writer or philosopher is the one about the fellow — I’ve forgotten exactly who this was! — who died because a hungry bird dropped a turtle on his bald head, mistaking it for a stone (to crack open the turtle’s shell)!
I need to look up who this story is about….
Aha! Spencer already related that story, in the linked article above! So it was Aeschylus!
The story you’re thinking of is told about the Athenian tragic playwright Aischylos. It’s certainly apocryphal, but probably inspired by a prediction that the seer Teiresias makes about the death of Odysseus in Aischylos’s lost tragedy Psychagōgoi or Ghost-Raisers. In a surviving fragment of the play, Teiresias says that a heron flying on high will strike Odysseus with its dung and the spine of a sea-beast will corrupt his skin (Aischylos fr. 275 Radt). In the original context of the play, this is most likely meant as an allegorical prophecy, but it seems that someone later interpreted it very literally and made it a prediction of Aischylos’s own death.
I guess it’s like if, long after his death, people started saying that Steven Spielberg was eaten by a shark.
That’s an excellent analogy and it gives a good sense of what ancient biographers of famous poets were mostly doing; they had access to extremely little genuine information about famous poets’ lives, but they desperately wanted more information, so they tried to interpret those poets’ works biographically, assuming that their characters’ personalities reflect aspects of the poets’ own personalities and that events the poets portray as happening to their characters reflect actual events that happened to the poets themselves in real life.
The theoretical justification for this approach is the fact that authors do inevitably draw either consciously or unconsciously on their own experiences in their literary work. For instance, it is likely that the plague in Sophokles’s Oidipous Tyrannos draws inspiration on some level from the historical Plague of Athens, which struck Athens in 430 BCE and was still devastating the city at the time of the play’s performance c. 429 BCE.
The problem is that, in the absence of reliable biographical information about the author of a given work, it is impossible to reliably distinguish which aspects of the work are inspired by the author’s real life and which aspects are purely fictional with no basis in reality. Moreover, even when events in a play do probably draw inspiration from real-life events, they also draw from the literary tradition. For instance, although Sophokles’s depiction of the plague in the Oidipous Tyrannos does probably owe some inspiration to the real-life Plague of Athens, it almost certainly also draws inspiration from the Iliad, which similarly begins with a plague sent by Apollon devastating the Achaian troops.
At the very least, we have Plato’s documents. What would his tomb even offer?
Finding Plato’s grave could do several things. First of all, if there were any kind of tomb marker, inscriptions, or grave goods, these could provide information about his life. If we found his skeletal remains and could identify them securely as his, they could also provide information about his life, such as aspects of his genetics, his lifestyle and general health, physical injuries he might have suffered, diseases he may have had while he was alive, his cause of death, etc. All of these things could, in turn, potentially shed information on his biography, the broader social history of philosophers in his time, and maybe even his philosophical ideas.
Right but that’s one tomb out of what? Thousands? How would anyone conclusively even do a deoxyribonucleic acid test to be sure it’s that Plato?
I’ve been hearing news concerning advancements in the virtual unrolling these scrolls, deciphering and later translating the texts within. Seems like it will be the discovery of this century, much like the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran were in the 20th century.
Great post! I thought that the History of Akademia was authored by Philodemus himself, as an edition and translation of two section of the whole work (Historia Academicorum and Historia Stoicorum) by Tiziano Dorandi were attributed to him, so I’m surprised to read that the author is actually unknown… In another comment you mentioned that we also found fragments of a history of the Diadochi, are there any hypotheses about the work they belonged to (Timagenes, Pompeius Trogus, Polybius?)
Thanks
My statement that the author is unknown was a mistake. You are correct that it is a work of Philodemos. I have now edited the post above to correct my error.