Doomscrolling

How do we know what AristotleA student of Plato, tutor to Alexander the Great and the father of political philosophy. thought? The answer is more complicated than you might think. When the Western Roman Empire fell in the 5th Century, all of his works were lost.

But further east, Arab philosophers were translating his works, which they brought with them when they conquered Spain and made available to the monks there.

So preserving ancient texts is a difficult matter. Little wonder scholars estimate only around 1% of the works that we know about written in ancient Greek and Latin have survived.¹ There will be many, many more that we do not even know existed, now lost forever.

But for three centuries now, scholars have been sitting on a treasure trove. In the archaeological site at HerculaneumAn ancient city that was buried under volcanic ash after the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79. It is close to Pompeii. , one of the towns buried by the eruption of Vesuviusa volcano near Naples, southern Italy. It erupted in 79 AD, destroying the Ancient Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. in 79 AD, 18th Century diggers found a whole library in a luxury villa buried under the ash, with more than 1,800 papyrus scrolls.²

The problem? They had been burnt to a crisp by the heat of the eruption. Only a few of them could be decipheredDecoded or understood. .

Researchers had the secrets of the ancient world in their grasp. But if they tried to read them, they would destroy them. The scrolls were locked away in hope of a miracle.

This week that miracle arrived. On Monday it was announced that three students had managed to read 2,000 Greek letters from one of the scrolls using a CT scanA computed tomography scan - a medical imaging technique usually used to make images of inside the body. and an AIA computer programme that has been designed to think.  programme.³

Based on this, experts have already been able to identify the author of the scroll: Philodemus, an EpicureanA student or follower of Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher. philosopher who wrote about ethics and theology but also the arts.⁴

This text is about sources of pleasure, including music but also fine food (he seems to have liked capersThe pickled flower bud of a European shrub. especially).

It is the first time in almost 20 centuries that anyone has read it. And it is based on just 2,000 letters of one scroll in a library of hundreds of books.

If we can translate the whole thing, who knows what lost works we might find? What ideas that could revolutionise our understanding of philosophy?

But wisdom comes at a price. The technique used to decipher this one text at Herculaneum cost $100 (£79) per square centimetre. A whole scroll could come in at as much as $5m (£4m).⁵

Could this rewrite our history?

Yes: We are on the cusp of getting access to hundreds of works that we never even knew existed. This could change everything we think we know about ancient thought.

No: Most of the texts are probably relatively minor works by second-rate philosophers. We can probably assume the most important texts are the ones that were saved by mediaeval scholars, so we already have them.

Or... For classicists, this is definitely a revolution. But the way we think about the world has changed since the 1st Century. We are unlikely to find anything that will be of more contemporary use.