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February 21, 2005
Villa of the Papyri
"He began to work long before daybreak.…He read nothing without making extracts; he used even to say that there was no book so bad as not to contain something of value. In the country it was only the time when he was actually in his bath that was exempted from study. When travelling, as though freed from every other care, he devoted himself to study alone. In short, he deemed all time wasted that was not employed in study."
- Pliny the Younger writing of his uncle
On August 24, AD 79, Gaius Plinius Secundus, now known as Pliny the Elder, was admiral of the western Roman fleet at Misenum. With the eruption of Vesuvius, Pliny commanded a relief expedition "to observe the phenomenon directly, and also to rescue some of his friends from their perilous position on the shore of the Bay of Naples." And, in Robert Harris' telling of the tale, to rescue a library. To my mind, something worth dying for.
The Villa of Papyri, thought to be the home of the library at Herculaneum, is now to be excavated properly thanks to funding from David W. Packard. So, thank you Dr. Packard.
The scrolls were in crates and it appears that slaves were removing them from the libraries when they were inundated with ash from the eruption. Although the scrolls appeared to be in a poor state, scientists at Oxford University have been able to read them after subjecting them to imaging techniques.
It is believed that there are thousands more scrolls in the building, much of which lies beneath the modern town of Ercolano, and that they may include lost works by Aristotle, Livy and Sappho.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at February 21, 2005 07:12 AM
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