Herculaneum and the Villa of the Papyri

Where it is #

Herculaneum (modern Ercolano) lay on the shore at the western foot of Vesuvius, about eight kilometres south-east of Naples. In 79 CE the eruption of Vesuvius buried it, and it lay hidden, and in places remarkably well preserved, for centuries. The depth is often given as twenty metres or more, and sources differ on the exact figure.¹

The shore has moved since then, because the eruption laid down new land, so the ancient waterfront lay farther inland than today’s coast. Reconstructions of the pre-79 coastline are still argued over.² In the early 1980s excavators found the skeletons of hundreds of people in the stone boat sheds by the old shore.³

The villa #

In 1750 a mosaic floor turned up at the bottom of a well. It proved to be the floor of a belvedere at the end of a promenade leading to a very large villa on the edge of the town.⁴ The Bourbon excavators dug a maze of tunnels, under the direction of the Swiss engineer Karl Weber, who drew careful plans of the villa and recorded where each find lay. The plans are our best guide to its layout.⁵ Weber’s team met the first papyri in 1752.⁶

Most of the villa has never been dug. The tunnels reached part of it and some areas were later cleared, but the rest lies under the modern town, and several obstacles stand in the way of going further.⁷ The villa is named after its books, Villa dei Papiri. It is also sometimes called the Villa of the Pisones, for its probable owner.

The library #

Most of the readable texts are by Philodemus of Gadara, an Epicurean philosopher and poet who worked in Italy in the first century BCE.⁸ The library has many of his works, in finished copies, duplicates and drafts, which suggests to many scholars that the collection was built up around him.⁹

The likely owner was Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a leading Roman politician and Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Philodemus is known to have been close to him.¹⁰ Cicero attacked Piso in a speech for keeping a Greek philosopher in his house and for living by Epicurean pleasure. He does not name the man, and the identification with Philodemus is a later scholars’ inference.¹¹

Philodemus was roughly a contemporary of Lucretius, whose poem you can read here in Book III. Between them they show Epicureanism being written about, in Greek and in Latin, in Italy in the first century BCE.

Reading the scrolls #

The scrolls were carbonised by the heat and are brittle, and for most of the time since 1752 opening them has meant damaging them. Hundreds remain unopened; the European Synchrotron puts the number at more than 600.¹² Over the past few years X-ray scanning and machine learning have made it possible to read some of them without unrolling.

On 25 June 2026 the Vesuvius Challenge team and its papyrologists announced several results. One scroll, PHerc. 1667, was virtually unwrapped along its surviving length, about 1.5 metres and 20 columns of text. Its author is unknown and the date suggests a writer other than Philodemus; the researchers describe it as touching on Stoic ideas such as impulse and practical wisdom.¹³ Another, PHerc. 139, was found to carry the end-title Philodemus, On the Gods, Book 8.¹⁴ More than 70 columns of PHerc. 172 have been read, and it has been identified as a copy of Philodemus’s On Vices.¹⁵ These are announcements, and the scholarly editions are still to come, so treat the details as provisional. The Stoic connection is a reminder of the subject of the essay on Epicurus and the Stoics.

What is uncertain #

• The owner. Piso is the most likely candidate but this is inference.
• The coastline. The map shows today’s coast, not the Roman one.
• The new readings. They are very recent and come from press releases and news reports.
• Positions. The villa and the town are given to within a few hundred metres, so the two markers nearly overlap.