Two-thousand year-old papyri written by a first-century B.C. philosopher and lost in the volcanic eruption that destroyed the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum are yielding new insights into the ancient world.
The scrolls were excavated in the eighteenth century after being buried from some 1700 years. Now, for the first time, they are being translated into English and analyzed by a team of scholars led by UCLA Classics Professor David Blank. Co-directors of the project are Richard Janko (University College, London) and Dirk Obbink (Christ Church, Oxford).
The research team is studying the writings of a philosopher and poet named Philodemus, a follower of Epicurus from the first century B.C. who summarized nearly three centuries of wisdom on literary matters that were otherwise lost.
"Philodemus is virtually our only source on poetry and literary criticsm from 300 B.C. to the time of Christ, and those were very important centuries," said Prof. Richard Janko, a member of the team from University College, London.
Blank, chair of the UCLA Department of Classics and an expert on ancient philosophy, said the documents are "comparable to the Dead Sea Scrolls in the insight they give into the ancient world."
In the 1750s, excavators hoping to recover lost literary and artistic treasures dug through the volcanic ash covering Pompeii and Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples. Buried under tons of thick, concrete-like mud in a villa in Herculaneum (the very villa that J. Paul Getty used as the model of his museum in nearby Malibu, California), a library was found containing some 1500 papyri rolls.
"The scrolls were in terrible condition," Blank said, "burned, damaged, hard to decipher, with many of the outer layers stuck together. When the scrolls were re-discovered, people originally thought they were lumps of coal and couldn't figure out how to get them apart." Because the scrolls were difficult to unroll, they were cut apart with a knife in the eighteenth century, and fragments were peeled off. Blank said the task of actually interpreting the texts is "treacherous."
"The texts have been misedited for most of the past 200 years," said Janko. "Until recently, many sections have been published in either reverse order, or in no order at all. People saw in them what they wanted to see."
It took until the mid-1980s to discover how to put the surviving fragments back together in anything approximating the correct sequence. Researchers work from photographs, photocopies, and 18th-century drawings of the documents. The actual texts are in the National Library in Naples, whose staff have lent great support to the Philodemus Project.
The research by the UCLA-led international team is sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The researchers, who include scholars from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas, in addition to London and UCLA, estimate that they can piece together about 60% of the scrolls on which they are working. The UCLA staff includes graduate students as well as Prof. Blank, who runs an ongoing research seminar on editorial theory and practice in which the graduate students receive the training they need to contribute to the project. The Philodemus Project is expected to open up many new research vistas for UCLA graduate students, who have the chance to be in on the ground floor of one of the most important research projects going on in the field of Classics around the world.
As for their contents, the scrolls contain writings from a number of ancient philosophers, especially Philodemus, who is known for his witty epigrams. Philodemus' philosophical works generally are organized as running critiques of the views of philosophers whose ideas he opposed. The detailed summaries Philodemus provides of the (usually lost) works of his foes will sometimes be of greater interest to scholars than Philodemus' own views, according to Prof. Janko.
The UCLA scholars are working on 13 of 16 scrolls Philodemus wrote on poetry, music, and rhetoric. The works on poetry are particularly interesting in view of the fact that Philodemus was himself a poet. This was rare for Epicureans, who generally disliked poetry and considered it a waste of time for the wise man. Still, Philodemus opposed devoting too much time or effort to the study of poetry because he believed such labor detracted from pursuing peace of mind that should be the true goal of life.
What would Philodemus think of the intensive effort to reconstruct his writings? "He definitely would not approve of our work," said Prof. Blank. Be that as it may, the kudos received by the Philodemus Project from Classicists around the world shows that contemporary scholars do very much appreciate the painstaking efforts being made at UCLA and elsewhere to reconstruct these precious documents.