The Library of the Villa Dei Papiri at Herculaneum

"It’s another remarkable and curious accident in some ways. And it’s one of the things I think that, for me at least, makes Epicureanism a really challenging and interesting area to work on because we have this variety of kinds of evidence. We’ve got Diogenes, we’ve got Lucretius, and we have a range of other secondary texts. The town of Herculaneum, in southern Italy, was one of those that was completely destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, and when it was excavated it was discovered that there was a rather opulent villa just a little outside the town that had a library, and in that library were preserved—albeit in a scorched, carbonized form—papyrus rolls of ancient books. Quite a lot of them in fact. It’s likely that we haven’t excavated fully the extent of the library. There may well be texts still remaining to be discovered. So this book by David Sider about that villa is a lovely introduction. It’s detailed, but accessible and it talks about how papyrus is made, how ancient books were made and used, and then describes the history of the excavation of this villa and the recovery of these texts, first of all in the 18th century. It’s a fascinating story that continues now with people who are interested in novel ways of reading and unrolling these papyri. They’re a bit like a tightly packed loo roll, with a kind of core and then the rolls of papyrus wound around it. But the papyrus has completely carbonized as a result of the eruption. So it’s very difficult, first of all to unpeel one layer from another. Previous attempts to do so have often resulted in damage to the roll. Then, even when you unroll it, what you’re faced with is black text on a black background, which is extremely difficult to read. For a long time people had to just hold it to the light so that the light reflected slightly differently off the ink than off the base papyrus and gradually and carefully and meticulously transcribe what was there. “There may well be texts still remaining to be discovered” People are now developing really interesting technological ways of CT scanning these papyri and digitally unrolling it, if they can, which does less violence to the thing that’s there and may well be a way of proceeding in the future that will give us better and better readings of these texts. Anyway, David Sider sets out all of these challenges and the interest of the texts. What might matter for the study of Epicureanism is that many of these texts, in fact the majority of them, are indeed quite technical and detailed philosophical texts by members of the Epicurean school, including Epicurus himself. We have bits of works by Epicurus that we didn’t have through the indirect transmission from people like Diogenes or people quoting him in later antiquity. These are direct texts from antiquity, which is a very unusual. It’s the largest find of papyri outside Egypt and through an enormous painstaking effort by scholars, especially since the 1970s, we are now beginning to produce more and more and better understood editions of these works, and they really are transforming our understanding of the richness of what Epicureans were doing as well. One example is lots of works by an Epicurean author called Philodemus who was a rough contemporary of Lucretius, but who wrote in Greek rather than Latin. From him we’ve got all sorts of works on aesthetic theory, which is a gap that we otherwise wouldn’t know anything about from the other kinds of texts that have survived one way or another. You can, but they’re really quite hard to read, in the sense that what you’ll find is even in areas where the text is legible, it’s often damaged. What papyrologists have to do is work out precisely what can be read and then depending on how optimistic they are, they often suggest what went in the gaps, based on their understanding of the overall text. There are various bits where we’ve got a more or less continuous text, where you can you can actually translate it. So there are editions available, but they tend to be not just quite technical to read but also the ancient texts themselves are often rather more specialised and technical in their subject matter. Yes, that’s quite likely. Lucretius seems to have based his work on Epicurus’s On Nature , which was an enormous multi-volume work, bits of which we have surviving on these papyri, but we don’t have the full work by any means. In fact, we’ve got good reason to believe there were multiple copies of Epicurus’s On Nature in that villa; often there are multiple papyri that have the same parts of Epicurus’s On Nature on them. It may be that some of them are copies they themselves had commissioned. It does seem it might have been a matter of conspicuous learning to have multiple copies. It looks like some people were deliberately trying to source better copies than the ones that they had, because it was known there were textual variants and so on, and maybe they were trying to source older copies as antiquarians might search out first editions of things. Oh, yes, and this is similar. That same villa is also famous for the enormous range of sculpture that it contained. Yes, and the other interesting thing is if you want to get a sense of what the villa was like, the Getty Villa in Malibu, California is modelled directly on that floor plan. So you can go and pretend to wander around the Villa of the Papyri. That’s right. The last two books I’ve chosen are discursive critical engagements with Epicureanism, so ways of presenting the material but also getting to grips with it in the sense of trying to evaluate the arguments, trying to evaluate the cogency of the arguments and so on. These are the kind of books that I would set my students to read once they’ve read the primary texts. So these are ways of getting them to work out where they might direct their fire if they’re interested in getting to grips with this stuff."