In talking about the so-called Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, we have to distinguish between the building (the villa) and what was found inside the villa, the papyrus scrolls. The villa is said to be the largest Roman villa ever found. (Only a small portion has been excavated, and as recently as the 1990s two previously undiscovered floors, built as terraces overlooking the sea were discovered.) The villa probably belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso, and covered some 30,000 sq feet (2,790 sq meters). That is certainly significant, and many of the bronze and marble statues found on the premises have been moved to the Naples Archaeological museum.

Of more interest to scholars, however, is the fact the villa contained a “library,” a collection of about 1800 texts written on papyrus scrolls. It is the only ancient Roman book collection ever found intact. “Intact,” is relative, however; the scrolls were badly scorched where they lay— turned into what look like sticks of charcoal—during the great eruption that destroyed Herculaneum and nearby Pompeii in 79 AD. Many of the scrolls were of Epicurean writings, some by Epicurus, himself, but mainly by the philosopher Philodemus of Gadara (c. 110 BC-c.35 BC), who had as a patron the above mentioned Piso—thus, the conclusion that the villa belonged to Caesar’s father-in-law. (It might also have belonged to Philodemus, himself, but he would have had to be one very wealthy philosopher. Not likely.) Although some of Philodemus’ poetry was known, his prose was unknown until the discoveries at Herculaneum. The library—reading room, really—was 3.2 x 3.2 meters (10 x 10 feet) and contained the shelves that held the scrolls. Some scrolls were found elsewhere on the premises.

Herculaneum and the villa were first uncovered during the first wave of archaeological enthusiasm generated during the early Bourbon rule of Naples. The first systematic digger was Karl Weber. Attempts to simply unroll the scrolls were, of course, a disaster, and destroyed at least some of the material, and turned other sections into jigsaw fragments of text that have yet to be reassembled. Yet, some progress was made using an “unrolling device” invented by the Piarist monk, Antonio Piaggio (1713-1797), sent down from Rome expressly for the purpose of helping to decipher the scrolls. Reports on the contents of the library were published as early as the 1790s and a 2-volume facsimile edition was published in Oxford in 1825. Most current efforts at deciphering the rolls is based on the new technology of multi-spectral imaging. It is a technique developed in the early 1990s for imaging the earth from orbit, but other applications have included taking pictures of the illegible Herculaneum papyri with different filters in the infrared and ultraviolet range. Thus, what appears to be black ink on black charcoal can be teased apart at the proper frequencies of light into visible and legible ink on papyrus.

It may be that further excavation (almost 3,000 square meters has not been touched) will bring to light additional volumes of other Greek and Roman writers, plus more bronze and marble treasures. It may also be that that will never happen because most of ancient Herculaneum is beneath modern Ercolano. There are plans—or least talk of making some plans (so-called “feasibilty studies”). You certainly can’t move an entire population so you can dig.

There are various organizations dedicated to the study of the papyri. Among them are the National Library of Naples (which has owned the papyri since 1910); the “Marcello Gigante” International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri; the Center for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (CPART) of Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah; and the Philodemus Project of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).