Honestly, I do hope others are enjoying these little historical tours as much as I enjoy writing about them. There is something so wonderful about a good library. If I could, I would absolutely live in Beast’s library and never come out. I have always loved Greece and Greek mythology so I truly enjoyed writing about the Villa of the Papyri. To have been able to see these ancient libraries would have been incredible!
The Villa of the Papyri
While it wasn’t largest library of antiquity, the so-called “Villa of the Papyri”, Italian: Villa dei Papiri, is the only one whose collection has survived to the present day. It’s roughly 1,800 carbonized scrolls were located in the Roman city of Herculaneum, in what is now Ercolano, southern Italy, in a personal villa that was most likely built by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus.
It was situated on the ancient coastline below the volcano Vesuvius with nothing to obstruct the view of the sea. The Villa was considered to be one of the most luxurious houses in all of Herculaneum and in the Roman world. Its luxury is shown by its exquisite architecture and by the very large number of outstanding works of art discovered, including frescoes, bronzes and marble sculpture which constitute the largest collection of Greek and Roman sculptures ever discovered in a single context.
When nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., the library was buried—and exquisitely preserved—under a 30 meter or 98-foot layer of volcanic material from the pyroclastic flows. Herculaneum was first excavated in the years between 1750 and 1765 by Karl Weber by means of tunnels. The villa’s name derives from the discovery of its library, the only surviving library from the Graeco-Roman world that exists in its entirety. The villa had four levels beneath the main floor, arranged in terraces overlooking the sea.
The Villa of the Papyri, which is thought to have been built between about 40 and 20BC, occupied more than 220,000 square feet and overlooked the sea. The villa remains faithful in its general layout to the fundamental structural and architectural scheme of the suburban villa in the country around Pompeii. The atrium worked as an entrance hall and a means of communication with the various parts of the house. The entrance opened with a columned portico on the sea side. Around the atrium impluvium were 11 fountain statues depicting Satyrs pouring water from a pitcher and Amorini pouring water from the mouth of a dolphin. Other statues and busts were found in the corners around the atrium walls. The real living and reception quarters were grouped around the porticoes and terraces, giving occupants ample sunlight and a view of the countryside and sea.
According to the ground plan of the villa drawn up during the initial excavations in the 18th Century, the library was situated near the baths and gardens, suggesting that people would take the scrolls outside to read, if not to the plunge pools. “If you have a garden in your library,” as Cicero once said, “you’ll lack nothing”.
The House of Bourbon under King Charles VII of Naples issued excavations following the re-discovery of Herculaneum in 1738. Excavation work at Herculaneum was done through digging tunnels, and piercing walls, in an attempt to find treasures like paintings, statues and other ornaments to be exhibited in the Museum Herculanense, part of the King’s Royal Palace in Portici. The discovery of Villa dei Papiri in 1750 increased attention towards Herculaneum’s excavations. Over a decade after the excavations commenced, some workmen happened to be digging a well nearby when they came across a magnificent marble floor. To their astonishment they had chanced upon the grandest ancient villa yet found at Herculaneum.
The tunnelling was not only arduous but also dangerous, due to the build up of gases in the shafts. However, due to the excavators’ persistence 90 sculptures were eventually uncovered before pressure from the residents of Resina forced Alcubierre to abandon the excavations in 1765. Excavations were halted in 1765 due to complaints from the residents living above. The exact location of the villa was then lost for two centuries.
In 1780 the works were interrupted and concentrated in Pompeii mainly because of easier types of excavations due to different volcanic burial phenomena. The villa is recognized today as one of the most important buildings preserved by the volcanic eruption. The technique of building underground passages and wells was common and continued until 1828 before open air excavations became permitted and continually carried out even today. Most of the villa is still underground, but parts have been cleared of volcanic deposits. Many of the finds are displayed in the Naples National Archaeological Museum.
In the 1980s work on re-discovering the villa began by studying 18th century documentation on entrances to the tunnels and in 1986 the breakthrough was made through an ancient well. The backfill from some of the tunnels was cleared to allow re-exploration of the villa when it was found that the parts of the villa that survived the earlier excavations were still remarkable in quantity and quality. Excavation to expose part of the villa was done in the 1990s and revealed two previously undiscovered lower floors to the villa. These were found along the southwest-facing terrace of about 4 meters height. As of 2012, there are still 2,800 square meters left to be excavated of the villa. The remainder of the site has not been excavated because the Italian government is preferring conservation to excavation, and protecting what has already been uncovered.
The ground plan shows the western part of the complex leading from the grand peristyle (on the right of the plan) to a belvedere at its western extremity. The walls and structural elements are shown in red with the course of the tunnels dug by the excavators marked in grey/brown. The volcanic flow through the building was from east to west (right to left in the above plan).
At the time of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, the valuable library was packed in cases ready to be moved to safety when it was overtaken by a pyroclastic flow; depositing volcanic ash over the site, charring the scrolls but preserving them- the only surviving library of antiquity. The scrolls had been carbonized by the pyroclastic flows to such an extent that they resembled tree bark. They were so blackened, in fact, that several were used as fuel in the mistaken belief that they were charcoal or logs. It was only when someone dropped one to expose the writing inside that they realized what they had found.
Its 1,800 blackened scrolls, now carbonized by the heat of the eruption, weren’t rediscovered until the 18th century, and modern researchers have since used everything from multispectral imaging to x-rays to try to read them. Initially the first papyri scrolls which were obtained in 1752 were thrown away due to the high number of unreadable charring, then Bernardo Tanucci advised the King to study them. The King subsequently established a commission for the study of the papyri, however, much of the catalogue has yet to be deciphered.
Other texts found in the villa’s library include several books of Epicurus’s On Nature, the writings of a Stoic philosopher named Chrysippus, and parts of the De Rerum Natura, an Epicurean poem by the Latin writer Lucretius. Around half the scrolls found, however, are still sealed. Given that Philodemus knew both Horace and Virgil, it is possible that more literary works are still waiting to be unravelled. The challenge is how to do so without destroying them in the process.
The papyri, unrolled and read, after various methods of manipulation, contain a number of Greek philosophical texts. When the scrolls were first found, many were simply sliced open like baguettes. While this enabled some of the writing to be read and copied, large chunks were consequently ruined. A few years after the villa was discovered, Father Antonio Piaggio, curator of manuscripts at the Vatican, designed a ‘papyrus unrolling machine’, which was used to unfurl hundreds more of the scrolls, but again the fragile paper often crumbled. Later, scientists attempted to pry open the scrolls using a variety of gases and glues, but with limited success.
More recently, scientists have discovered that when a scroll is placed under infrared light, the black ink will stand out from the blackened papyrus, so that it is legible. Using multi-spectral imaging, a technique developed in the early 1990s, it is possible to read the burned papyri. With multi-spectral imaging, many pictures of the illegible papyri are taken using different filters in the infrared or in the ultraviolet range, finely tuned to capture certain wavelengths of light. Thus, the optimum spectral portion can be found for distinguishing ink from paper on the blackened papyrus surface. Given the damage caused to scrolls by unwinding them, and the speed with which their ink fades when exposed to daylight, the preference today is for ‘virtual unwrapping’. Non-destructive CT scans will, it is hoped, provide breakthroughs in reading the fragile unopened scrolls without destroying them in the process. Scrolls that remain sealed are scanned – by Micro CT-scan, for example – and then ‘read’ using advanced computer software. Encouraging results along this line of research have been obtained, which use phase-contrast X-ray imaging.
The owner of the house, perhaps Calpurnius Piso, established a library of a mainly philosophical character. It is believed that the library might have been collected and selected by Piso’s family friend and client, the Epicurean Philodemus of Gadara, although this conclusion is not certain. Followers of Epicurus studied the teachings of this moral and natural philosopher. This philosophy taught that man is mortal, that the cosmos is the result of accident, that there is no providential god, and that the criteria of a good life are pleasure and temperance. Philodemus’ connections with Piso brought him an opportunity to influence the young students of Greek literature and philosophy who gathered around him at Herculaneum and Naples.
Much of his work was discovered in about a thousand papyrus rolls in the philosophical library recovered at Herculaneum. Although his prose work is detailed in the strung-out, non-periodic style typical of Hellenistic Greek prose before the revival of the Attic style after Cicero, Philodemus surpassed the average literary standard to which most epicureans aspired. Philodemus succeeded in influencing the most learned and distinguished Romans of his age. None of his prose work was known until the rolls of papyri were discovered among the ruins of the Villa of the Papyri. This seems to have been the professional library of Philodemus
Several scenes in Robert Harris’ bestselling novel Pompeii are set in the Villa of the Papyri, just before the eruption engulfed it. The villa is mentioned as belonging to Roman aristocrat Pedius Cascus and his wife Rectina. (Pliny the Younger mentions Rectina, whom he calls the wife of Tascius, in Letter 16 of book VI of his Letters.) At the start of the eruption Rectina prepares to have the library evacuated and sends urgent word to her old friend, Pliny the Elder, who commands the Roman Navy at Misenum on the other side of the Bay of Naples. Pliny immediately sets out in a warship, and gets in sight of the villa, but the eruption prevents him from landing and taking off Rectina and her library – which is thus left for modern archaeologists to find.
Much of the villa remains to be excavated (over 2500 sq m). Excavations in the 1990s revealed two previously undiscovered levels, but since then there has been little further progress. The Italian government has opted for conservation of what has already been discovered over excavation of what has yet to be discovered.
Interested in a topic of your own? Just ask here and I will be glad to post it!
Instagram: 3 Cats and Cauldron
TikTok: 3 Cats and a Cauldron
From our altar to yours, with love from the sea,
Click here for an Index to all posts
