Sick and annoyed by the melody. Grave identified
The sweet melodies of a flute played by a woman originally from Thrace they should have cheered the last hours of Plato’s life, but the well-known Greek philosopher did not appreciate them at all: despite being feverish and on the verge of death, he was lucid enough to criticize the foreign musician for her poor sense of rhythm, under the eyes of a Chaldean guest from Mesopotamia. Revealing this unpublished scene from over two thousand years ago are the newly deciphered fragments of the Herculaneum papyri survived the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. In all, a thousand words, new or differently interpreted, which for the first time made it possible to precisely locate Plato’s burial, which took place in the Academy of Athens in the garden dedicated to him, near the so-called Museion, the sacred sanctuary of the Muses. An extraordinary result that enriches our understanding of ancient history, as explained by papyrologist Graziano Ranocchia of the University of Pisa, presenting the intermediate results of the ‘GreekSchools’ research project at the National Library of Naples. The study, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), is conducted together with the Institute of Cultural Heritage Sciences (ISPC) and the Institute of Computational Linguistics (ILC) of the National Research Council (CNR). “Thanks to the most advanced diagnostic imaging techniques, we are finally being able to read and decipher new parts of texts that until now seemed inaccessible“, underlines Ranocchia. The most fascinating discoveries emerged from the papyrus containing the ‘History of the Academy’ by Philodemus of Gadara.
The increase in the deciphered text, equal to 30% compared to the previous edition of 1991, corresponds approximately to the discovery of 10 new medium-sized papyrus fragments. In addition to shedding light on the death of Plato, the text also reveals that the philosopher was sold into slavery on the island of Aegina perhaps as early as 404 BC, when the Spartans conquered the island, or, alternatively, in 399 BC, immediately after the death of Socrates. “Until now it was believed that Plato was sold into slavery in 387 BC during his stay in Sicily at the court of Dionysius I of Syracuse“, points out the papyrologist. But the surprises don’t end there. Several new readings offer a new perspective on the circumstances of the academic philosopher’s corruption of the Delphic oracle Heraclides Ponticus. Furthermore, the name of Philo of Larissa is corrected to ‘Philion’ (student of the grammarian Apollodorus of Athens and the stoic Mnesarchus), who died at the age of 63 in Italy during an influenza pandemic. The joint work of papyrologists, philologists, historians and physicists continues, opening up new research perspectives. “For the first time we were able to read some sequences of letters from the papyrus which were hidden within multiple layers, which remained attached to each other after the unrolling done in the past centuries with a mechanical technique which caused the dislocation of entire text fragments“, adds Ranocchia. This “huge leap in quality” was achieved by combining two innovative techniques: optical coherence tomography and infrared hyperspectral imaging, thanks to a mobile laboratory provided by Nottingham Trent University. “The multiple layers represent a dramatic problem for the reading of almost all the scrolls that have been unrolled, approximately 1,560 out of the 1,840 total that survived the eruption of Vesuvius“, recalls Ranocchia. “These serious stratifications distort a large part of the texts, making them impossible to read. Finally being able to identify these layers and virtually relocate them to their original position to restore the continuity of the text means gathering an enormous amount of information compared to the past. The work, however, is still in its initial stages: we will only see the real impact in terms of knowledge in the coming years”.
