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 European thinkers rediscovered Aristotle not in his original Greek, but in Arabic. Only later did the Greek texts start to show up again.

As this suggests, preserving ancient texts is a difficult matter. Even someone as important as Aristotle was only narrowly saved thanks to the efforts of dedicated scholars writing in a different language from his own.

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. When scholars tried to open the scrolls they fell to pieces in their hands. Only a few of them could be deciphered.

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). Philodemus asks if the pleasure we get from mixed things comes from the major elements, the minor elements, or the mix itself.

It might not seem like the biggest idea in the world, but this is the first time in almost 20 centuries that anyone has read it. And that 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?

Previous discoveries of ancient scrolls have brought us progress in leaps and bounds. In the 1950s, scrolls in Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Greek and Arabic were discovered buried in pots in a cave in PalestineAn area located in the Southern Levant region of Western Asia. , most of them copies of the Old TestamentThe first part of the Christian Bible, and is mainly based on the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)..

The so-called Dead Sea Scrolls proved that the text of the Old Testament, transmitted over thousands of years, had changed remarkably little. And they helped scholars to make small corrections to bring the modern text in line with the original.

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.