A very different kind of scrolling: Why we’re obsessed with ancient texts
A Herculaneum scroll is seen in the National Library of Naples in Italy in 2019. Antonio Masiello/Getty Images
by Eric Siblin
The Globe & Mail
May 10, 2025
Plato, it might be presumed, was a big reader, but never turned the pages of a book. The Greek philosopher unrolled a scroll. For Julius Caesar, reading in Latin several centuries later, it was the same literary experience: his “books” were rolled-up papyrus.
The paper of antiquity goes back a long time. Some time around the year 3,000 BC, a blank roll of papyrus was discovered in the tomb of an Egyptian vizier, presumably to give the dead man something to scribble on in the afterlife.
Made from reeds harvested from the Nile River, papyrus enjoyed major advantages over other writing surfaces like stone, clay, shards of pottery and wood-framed wax tablets. Measuring as long as 10 metres, a papyrus scroll could contain an entire play by Sophocles or a dialogue of Plato’s. It could be conveniently read, rolled up, carried, and stored on a shelf.
And yet, its life on most shelves was limited. The perishable material almost never survived more than 200 years in a humid climate. Which explains why an estimated 90 per cent of the writing of antiquity vanished. (Scrolls were eventually supplanted by the codex format of the modern book, with its bound pages, by the 5th century A.D.) But even then, scrolls did not entirely disappear.
Until the mid-18th century, not a single papyrus scroll had been discovered. That changed in 1752, when a magnificent villa was unearthed in southern Italy. Along with bronze and marble statues of exquisite beauty were papyrus scrolls that had been buried for 2,000 years.
These ancient books were found in the Roman town of Herculaneum, which had been overwhelmed by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that more famously destroyed Pompeii. Incinerated by the superheated gases of the volcano, the papyrus scrolls were reduced to blackened objects resembling lumps of coal. They were both casualties and survivors: remnants of the only library to have survived the ancient classical world, but burnt to a crisp.
The challenge became: How can we unroll scrolls so fragile that, upon touch, could crumble to papyrus ash?
The King of Naples hired a painter from Rome, who cut many of the scrolls vertically in half, trying to salvage some scrap of writing to impress the monarch. He came up with bits and pieces of text, but in the process butchered countless scrolls.
Various other “experts” tried their hands at unrolling the scorched scrolls. The Prince of Sansevero, a brilliant if eccentric alchemist who’d invented a waterproof cape for the king, brewed a potion of mercury and other chemicals to unravel the papyri, but the scrolls fell apart. The chemist Gaetano Le Pira later used a vegetable gas so malodorous that it caused occupants to flee the royal palace. The experiment failed; more rolls were lost. Rosewater, glass jars, and steam were all tried with equally dismal results.
Progress was only made when a priest from the Vatican Library, a custodian of illuminated manuscripts, arrived on the scene. Father Antonio Piaggio devised an ingenious wood-framed machine that resembled a bookbinder’s press. Sheep intestines were glued to the exposed layer of a papyrus roll and pierced along its width with silk threads attached to a pulley. Piaggio slowly tightened keys like those used to tune a violin, hoisting a layer of the papyrus roll upwards. Working in the back room of a royal museum the tireless priest unrolled about half an inch per day.
European literati held their breath. What treasures from the past, in Greek or Latin, might be unveiled? A poem by Sappho, the poet who’d only bequeathed scraps of her genius? One of the many missing plays of Sophocles? A lost history by Livy? Every lover of antiquity had a wish list.
When Piaggio’s traction machine finally revealed its first scroll, the Greek prose turned out to be by an author nobody had wished for: Philodemus of Gadara, an all-but-unknown Epicurean philosopher and poet from the first century BC.
For nearly 40 years, Piaggio continued his solitary unrolling. There were upwards of 1,000 scrolls to be unwound. Some Stoic rivals of the Epicureans turned up. Epicurus himself. A historical work by Seneca the Elder. And in Latin, an epic poem, and a comic play by Caecilius. But Philodemus vastly outnumbered every other author.
Why so many books by an obscure writer of Epicurean philosophy?
Philodemus was the in-house philosopher for the villa’s owner, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a Roman consul and senator and a fellow Epicurean who was also Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. The villa, now known as the Villa dei Papiri, may have contained the working library of Philodemus.
Still, the idea that a Roman grandee of Calpurnius Piso’s stature would have lots of Philodemus in his library and not much else seems unlikely. Where was the Homer? Virgil?The historian Livy? The household archives?
Many papyrologists maintain that the Villa dei Papiri is more likely than anywhere else in Europe to yield lost masterpieces from the distant past. Legions of charred books – perhaps even a separate Latin library – may well lie underground in the ruins of the multistorey villa, which remains to this day largely unexcavated.
After Piaggio’s death in 1796, the unrolling on his machine continued, as did other ill-fated attempts. In England, 20 scrolls were sent to the future King George lV in exchange for, among other things, 18 kangaroos. Another half-dozen scrolls were sent to France as diplomatic gifts to Napoleon. Yet the efforts of famous scientists like the chemist Sir Humphrey Davy came to naught. Later attempts to loosen layers of the compressed scrolls using methods such as cooking the material in paraffin wax did not end well. A delightful idea to loosen the scrolls with actual papyrus juice was no more successful.
Nothing worked as well as Piaggio’s machine, though that method also sadly damaged the scrolls it unrolled. Several of the machines were still operating in the early years of the 20th century.
For those scrolls that had already been opened on the machine, technological advances like binocular microscopes and multispectral imaging enhanced the ability of scholars to distinguish the black letters written in carbon ink from their blackened papyrus background. Papyrologists were improving their reading of the old papyri.
Better scholarship revealed a more readable Philodemus. On the Good King According to Homer advises rulers on how to wield power without being despotic. On Death is a small jewel of prose, exhorting readers to live in the moment unperturbed by mortality. Through Philodemus, we learn a great deal about the Epicurean system of thought in the Roman Republic. And his poems are well-crafted, witty, often ribald.
Meanwhile, unopened papyri lie mutely in the gun-metal grey cabinets of the Officina dei Papiri in Naples. Something like 300 scrolls were too damaged by the volcano to even be candidates for the Piaggio machine
If anything was to work on these impenetrable scrolls, it would have to be non-invasive. In the digital era, talk of “virtual unwrapping” became a much-ballyhooed concept. A few scrolls were scanned on CT machines. Images were produced, data compiled. But success felt light-years away.
Then came a great digital leap forward. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nat Friedman, who was hunkered down during the pandemic, became smitten with the idea of virtual unwrapping. Why not make high-resolution scans available online and open the contest for those with AI and machine-learning chops? Throw in US$1-million in prize money.
The lucrative contest in a crowdsource setting got more traction than a Piaggio machine. Last year, the Vesuvius Challenge awarded US$700,000 to three students from the U.S., Germany, and Belgium working remotely as a team. They had succeeded in virtually unwrapping about five per cent of one unopened scroll.
It was no mean feat, and no small measure of excitement once again percolated among classics enthusiasts.
Why go to all this trouble to find, unroll, and decipher such stubbornly difficult old books? It’s not an unreasonable question. One answer is that ancient philosophies like Epicureanism and its main rival, Stoicism, were systems of thought that guided how best to live a good life. Unlike most of what gets written as philosophy in universities today, these creeds spoke to the common man (and in many cases), woman, and slave.
Then there’s the pure challenge of unlocking the scrolls.
Papyrologists are still at work on the winning text about the nature of life’s pleasures. Virtual unrolling is one thing, but even when such texts come to light, the scholarly work of papyrologists is required to make sense of the content. (Alas, the prizewinning text also seems to be by Philodemus.) The Vesuvius Challenge has been renewed with new prize money and a bar set much higher; the current goal is to read 90 per cent of four scrolls.
Two months ago, 20 Herculaneum scrolls were nestled in 3D printed containers and placed in crushproof polymer cases that protected against fire, water, and dust. They were flown by private jet to Oxfordshire, in Britain, where for three days they were scanned at a synchrotron particle accelerator. (No kangaroos were exchanged.)
The data from the scrolls will soon be downloaded by the Vesuvius Challenge and made available for Piaggio’s heirs using software and algorithms. The material digitally deciphered is expected to keep papyrologists busy for a long time. They won’t be unrolling words as Plato, Cicero, and Philodemus did. But they will be reading scrolls long lost to history.
