You probably know the story: In 79 CE, the great Mount Vesuvius erupted, engulfing the people of Pompeii in deadly debris. Centuries later, their silhouettes were found cast in plaster as eerie figurines, relics of one of history’s most tragic, spellbinding catastrophes.
What you may not know is that there was another, less famous town caught up in the disaster: It was called Herculaneum, and it had its own mesmerizing treasures. One was the Villa dei Papyri, a villa full of papyrus scrolls excavated by agents of King Charles VII of Naples in the 1750s. It probably belonged to the statesman Lucius Calpurnius Piso, father-in-law of Julius Caesar.
When Charles’ men started digging up the villa’s archives, the breathtaking scale of the discovery soon became apparent. So did the maddening complications it presented. The scrolls were carbonized and caked shut, keeping some of their writing intact but leaving them hair-raisingly brittle. There might be lost plays by Euripides packed in those folds, or a Latin epic by the long-neglected father of Roman literature, Quintus Ennius. But one careless slip of the fingers, and all that glorious text would crumble to powder and be gone for good.
