Bibiliopath PING!
Posted on 01/23/2005 11:33:31 AM PST by RightWingAtheist
Even in our age of hyperbole, it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of what is at stake here: nothing less than the lost intellectual inheritance of western civilisation
Down a side street in the seedy Italian town of Ercolano, wafted by the scent of uncollected rubbish and the fumes of passing motor-scooters, lies a waterlogged hole. A track leads from it to a high fence and a locked gate. Dogs defecate in the undergrowth where addicts discard their needles.
Peering into the dark, stagnant water it is hard to imagine that this was once one of the greatest villas in the Roman world, the size of Blenheim Palace, extending for more than 250 yards along the Bay of Naples. (An impression of what it must have looked like is provided by the Getty Museum in California, which is an exact replica.) Its nemesis, Vesuvius, still looms over it less than four miles away. When the mountain erupted on August 24, AD79 it buried the villa under a mantle of volcanic rock 100ft thick, altering the coastline and pushing the sea back by hundreds of yards.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Bibiliopath PING!
I've heard of loosing a library book before, but the whole library? Wonder what the over-due fees are on that?
Just don't fall, and break your glasses!
Just the tiniest fraction of what may be found.
So9
Wow, that is so cool! This is (pardon the expression) HUGH! Can you imagine if they found the rest of Sophocles' works, or Aristophanes'? In about 20 years, when they've dug everything out and got some good translations, I'll go back to school!
Might be some changes on the way in our history of philosophy.
Fingers crossed. It's hard to think of all those "lumps of coal" that were "unthinkingly" dumped into the sea. Let's hope they didn't include those lost treatises of Aristotle or additional plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus.
The article illustrates it well: we have only seven plays by Sophocles, including mighty pillars of Western culture like Oedipus Rex and Antigone. God only knows what might be in the missing 113 plays!
I think every classicist has their "if only we could find" list, and most of the stuff might potentially be in the Villa of the Papyri. I know one classicist who spent years trying to reconstruct what might have been in the Memoirs of Sulla. Actually finding and being able to read a copy would be stunning.
50 pounds is about $120? Maybe if we have some left from the tax refund, after we pay the charge bill and build the pergola ... I wonder whether they publish a magazine.
Facsimile edition of the papyri are online here:
http://163.1.169.40:8081/gsdl/cgi-bin/library?site=localhost&a=p&p=about&c=P.Herc.&ct=0&l=en&w=utf-8
This deals with the foundation of the whole western tradition. I hope this dig gets done. Why isn't the government of Italy chipping in? It's their own history.
Really cool education article!
Uncontroversial ping.
The government of Italy, unfortunately, is saddled with a tremendous number of historical sites and artifacts to preserve. Consider that they have to keep up everything from Etruscan ruins to 20th-century monuments. Consequently, their budget is stretched razor-thin.
"God only knows what might be in the missing 113 plays!"
Probably the BEST of the plays by these authors were the ones that were copied over and over (and over and over. . .), so that the rest are probably of lesser value.
BUT, that said, this may be the best deal since we started looked at mumified Ibis birds in Egypt. (The wrappings were made in late antiquity of shreds of books, among other things. From there we have some Greek plays, the earliest scrap of the gospel of John, and much else.)
How about finding a copy of Claudius' History of Carthage? Or a history of the Etruscans? (Much of what we "know" is only guesswork)
Or. . . ?
Although philosophy never saved a soul (no Jesus was not a philosopher), it is cool to imagine what was in the minds of thinking folks in those days.
It follows the first detailed analysis of the 1,800 papyri, now largely unrolled and deciphered thanks to a technique known as multi-spectral imaging (MSI). What appear to the naked eye as jet-black cinders are transformed by MSI into readable text. Thirty thousand images are now legible on CD-Rom; suddenly poems and works of philosophy are speaking again, 2,000 years after they were sealed in their cedar-wood cabinets in the summer of AD79.
Dangit!
I hate it when they do that.
Arrange it so that one can't download and save the entire article, just print it. That is unkind to trees and very inefficient.
Plus it wasted hours of people's time when one is determined to preserve the entire article.
The above paragraph is very interesting, in that not only have translations been made, but they are available to someone on CD ROM. The following may be of further value in that regard:
Membership of the Herculaneum Society costs £50 per year. Contact: Friends of the Herculaneum Society, Classics Centre, Old Boys’ School, George Street, Oxford 0X1 2RL.
Website: www.herculaneum.ox.ac.uk
e-mail: herculaneum@classics.ox.ac.uk
On the other hand, Aeschylus won the first prize at the Greater Dionysia thirteen times, but we only have seven of his plays surviving. In any case, even finding a cartload of rubbishy Plautus knock-offs would at least improve our understanding of Roman society and the Latin language.
How about finding a copy of Claudius' History of Carthage? Or a history of the Etruscans? (Much of what we "know" is only guesswork)
My personal prize would be Cato's legendary History of Rome. He is said to have been disgusted by the hero-worship which had arisen in his own times, and so in his History he referred to nobody at all by name. The only exception was Hannibal's elephant, Surus, whom Cato conceded had done more than could be reasonably expected of any elephant.
The truly determined to preserve would print it all out, roll it up, and incinerate it. :-)
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