Ancient Roman Villa May Hold World's Richest Literary Treasure

Two thousand years ago, on the Bay of Naples, in the outskirts of the luxurious resort of Herculaneum, stood one of the grandest houses of the Roman world.

The Blenheim Palace extended more than 200 metres along the shoreline and included an Olympic-sized pool. The extraordinary construction, which has never been fully excavated, is now the subject of an academic controversy.

Eight of the world's leading scholars of ancient literature, including four professors of Greek (from the universities of Bristol, Harvard, London and Oxford) have launched a campaign to recover what they believe the villa may still contain: one of the greatest cultural treasures of all time. Unless work starts soon, they warn, it could be lost for ever.

The villa probably belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso, father-in-law of Julius Caesar and one of the rulers of the Roman republic. In AD79, a century after his death, it was buried under 30 metres of volcanic debris by the same Vesuvius eruption that wiped out Pompeii and Herculaneum.

In 1738, it was rediscovered and the excavators removed statues and objets d'art. In the process, they threw away many lumps of what they took to be coal or charcoal. It was not until 1752 when they discovered the villa's library - neatly lined with 1800 rolls of papyrus - that they realised the discarded material had been books.

It remains the only intact library to have survived from the ancient world and the palace became known as "the Villa of the Papyri".

These rolls of papyri were difficult to decipher and it was not until the 1970s that they began to receive proper scientific study from an international team of scholars led by Professor Marcello Gigante of the University of Naples.

Hundreds of Greek works - including half of Epicurus' entire opus, missing for 2300 years - and some Roman odes were read for the first time.

The author most commonly represented turned out to be Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher attached to Piso's household, who taught the greatest Latin poet, Virgil, and probably Horace.

It was increasingly Professor Gigante's conviction that only about half of Piso's collection had been retrieved and that much more awaited discovery.

Fresh attempts were made in the 1990s to explore the old excavations and these yielded an astonishing discovery. The villa was not merely built on one level, as had been previously thought, but was terraced down to the sea. It appeared that slaves had been trying to carry crates of books to safety when they were overwhelmed by the eruption.

And the mosaic floors, frescoes and painted ceilings of these lower storeys supported Professor Gigante's belief in the existence of a second library.

Unfortunately, the project ran out of money and Professor Gigante died in November. All that now remains of the exploration is a huge waterlogged hole in which float the syringes of local heroin addicts.

Several of the experts involved in the campaign to save the villa agree there may be lost plays by Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, or even the lost dialogues of Aristotle, as well as works by many other Greek writers, in the lower level.

A contemporary copy of the Lucretius poem On the Nature of Things - which has been recovered - suggests that the villa may yield copies of Virgil's Aeneid, or copies of Horace, or even Catullus.

And it is possible that a family capable of owning such a villa also possessed a copy of Livy's History of Rome, of which more than 100 of the original 142 books are missing.

In the words of the campaigners: "We can expect to find good contemporary copies of known masterpieces and to recover works lost to humanity for two millennia. A treasure of greater cultural importance can scarcely be imagined."

In the meantime, the buried villa is threatened, in the short term by flooding, in the long term by renewed volcanic activity. What is needed is money to restart the excavation and sufficient will on the part of the Italian authorities to see the project through.

I hope this isn't too long. At least it's on topic...

Modern Egypt Revives Ancient "Great Library"

Insight on the News
August 6, 2001

                   Down by the coastal shelf in Alexandria, Egypt, a
                   legend of classical antiquity is rising from the ashes as
                   miraculously as a phoenix. This June, the new
                   Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a spectacular piece of
                   architecture billed as the revival of its ancient
                   namesake, opened quietly to the public, more than 20
                   years after the idea was conceived and seven years
                   after construction began.

The formal grand opening—with presidents, kings
and sultans—is due next April.

                   "I want it to be true to the spirit of the old Library of
                   Alexandria—a vibrant intellectual center, a meeting
                   place for civilizations," says Ismail Serageldin, who
                   recently resigned as vice president of the World Bank
                   to become acting director-general of the library.

                   As part of his program, Serageldin has arranged an
                   international board of trustees, and the library has
                   strong support from international educational and
                   cultural organizations such as UNESCO. In 1990, at a
                   meeting in Aswan, Arab leaders competed to make the
                   largest cash contribution to the project. Sheik Zaid bin
                   Sultan of the United Arab Emirates offered U.S. $20
                   million, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein put up $21
                   million and Saudi Arabia contributed $23 million.
                   (Saddam's check cleared days before the beginning of
                   the Persian Gulf War.)

                   By any measure, re-establishing the stature enjoyed by
                   the ancient library will be a tall order. Two millennia
                   ago, Alexandria was one of the greatest cities on Earth,
                   and its library was the beacon of Hellenistic civilization.
                   It was at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, its Greek name,
                   that Euclid devised his geometry, Archimedes
                   formulated basic principles of physics, Aristarchus
                   concluded that the Earth revolves around the sun and
                   Erastosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth
                   with astonishing accuracy.

                   It was there that a team of 70 rabbis translated the
                   Pentateuch of the Old Testament from Hebrew into the
                   Greek Septuagint—and Herophilus dissected the human
                   body and concluded that the brain, not the heart, was
                   the seat of intelligence.

                   Then, mysteriously, the library vanished into history.
                   Scholars still are divided over its fate. Julius Caesar, the
                   Christians and the Arabs have all been blamed for its
                   disappearance.

                   In 48 B.C., Caesar, having entered the Alexandrian War
                   on the side of Cleopatra, found himself under attack
                   from sea. "When the enemy tried to cut off his fleet,
                   Caesar was forced to repel the danger by using fire,
                   which spread from the dockyards and destroyed the
                   Great Library," the Greek historian Plutarch wrote.
                   Around A.D. 391, Christians destroyed Alexandria's
                   Sarapeum, a pagan temple that housed a daughter
                   branch of the Great Library. In A.D. 642, Arabs heated
                   bathhouses of Alexandria for six months by burning
                   scrolls, according to a 12th-century account of the Arab
                   conquest of Egypt.

                   Whatever the truth, the Great Library, wrapped in
                   myths and legend, has come to epitomize the ideal of
                   free thought and independent scholarship. "One ghostly
                   image haunts all of us charged with preserving the
                   creative heritage of humanity: the specter of the great,
                   lost Library of Alexandria," said James H. Billington, the
                   US. Librarian of Congress, in a 1993 speech.

Global Competition

                   The idea to revive the ancient library was born among
                   scholars at the city's university in the 1970s. As the scale
                   and ambition of the project grew, planners announced a
                   global competition for the library building, prompting
                   500 entries from architects in some 40 countries. A jury
                   selected a design by a group of young, unknown
                   architects from the Norwegian firm Snohetta.

                   The architects at Snohetta—three Norwegians, an
                   Austrian and an American—designed a cylindrical
                   building sunk halfway into the ground. Some of the
                   world's most famous libraries, such as the old British
                   Library, are round. The circle symbolizes the unity and
                   perfection of knowledge, according to Christoph
                   Kapeller, the Austrian member of the design group.

                   The building also acts as a sundial rising from Earth,
                   tilted and frozen at an angle of 16 degrees. The roof,
                   inspired by a computer microchip and symbolizing the
                   future, is made of aluminum and glass, insulated against
                   the strong sun with the same material and technology
                   used for aircraft wings.

                   The outer wall along the building's perimeter is clad with
                   unpolished Aswan granite, upon which Norwegian artist
                   Jorunn Sannes, with the help of computers and
                   automated machinery, has engraved signs and letters in
                   different sizes from every known system of writing.

                   "I see the library as a window for the world on Egypt
                   and a window for Egypt on the world," says Serageldin.
                   "One question we will have to answer is: 'What does it
                   mean to be a research library in the age of the
                   Internet?'"

                   One thing is for sure: The Information Age has made
                   the old dream of a universal library, with the creative
                   heritage of humankind gathered under one roof,
                   impossible as well as unnecessary. The world's largest
                   library, the Library of Congress in Washington, with
                   more than 120 million items in its collections, is hardly
                   complete.

                   Two millennia ago, however, the Library of Alexandria,
                   with 700,000 scrolls, came close to being universal,
                   lacking mainly scholarly works in Chinese and Sanskrit.
                   The hunger for books of the Ptolemaic kings was
                   legendary. According to one story, every ship calling at
                   Alexandria was ordered to hand over its books to the
                   library, where experts inspected them as to their worth.

                   Ptolemy III, in his quest to obtain manuscripts of the
                   Greek tragedians Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, is
                   said to have tendered the enormous sum of 15 talents as
                   security for permission to borrow and copy them; as
                   soon as he received the literary treasures, he informed
                   the governors of Athens that they could keep the money,
                   since he intended to keep the original manuscripts.

                   With the new library open informally, its collection,
                   numbering about 500,000 items, is taking shape. The
                   city of Alexandria has handed over 5,000 original
                   manuscripts from its archives. France has donated
                   copies of documents from the Suez Canal Co. Spain has
                   sent copies of the famous Escorial and Cordoba
                   collections, with thousands of important documents in
                   Arabic relating to Moorish Spain. Norway, Brazil, the
                   United States, Russia, China, Japan, Oman, Turkey, and
                   many other countries have donated books, manuscripts,
                   and other items. Greece has donated a facsimile copy of
                   Claudius Ptolemy's famous world map, which
                   Christopher Columbus used 1,500 years later as he
                   searched for a passage to India but discovered America
                   instead.

                   "It is a beginning," says Mohsen Zahran, director of the
                   Bibliotheca Alexandrina Project. "It is a big baby which
                   is being born. We will make it into what we want it to
                   be."

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.