Numerous news outlets have recently announced that scientists have improved technology to read Greek scrolls using medical X-rays.
This is not entirely new; over the last decade, scholars have recovered several books of Greek philosophy from the libraries of Herculaneum, a commune near Pompeii on the Bay of Naples that was devastated by the same eruption of Vesuvius that preserved the more famous city in 79 C.E. Unlike Pompeii, which was destroyed by a flood of molten rock and volcanic ash, Herculaneum was covered in an avalanche of mud.
This, in addition to protecting some of the most vibrantly colored frescos we have from antiquity, also encased a whole library of scrolls contained in the library of Philodemus. Now no more than blocks of charcoal, numerous scrolls were burnt for heat during the original excavations of the city in the late nineteenth century. It was not until much later that archeologists realized they were texts that could possibly be deciphered.
In addition to the information contained in the texts themselves, the very salvaging of Philodemus’ library is itself a phenomenon we can use to think about classical texts.
Firstly, it illustrates how tenuous our relationship to “the past” actually is. Rather than being a solid, deeply-rooted narrative off of which we may pick the fruits of heritage, ancient history is no more than a series of texts, some well-kept, others caked in volcanic mud.
Furthermore, the distance between us and the Greek writings of the char-scolls puts memory itself in perspective. The ancients fetishized memorialization: the goal of the Homeric hero was to be virtuous and excellent enough to attain kleos aphthiton: “unwilting glory.”
That unwilting glory, the Iliad makes clear, is the Iliad itself (indeed, Homer is that meta). Romans had a similar conception; only they sought fama. We the readers and scholars of Homer and Cicero are assuring that Achilles, his Myrmidons and the great citizens of Rome keep hold of that glorious fame, both in our generation and in the generation of our students.
It is hardly an accident of history that Homer survived — his texts were faithfully copied and cherished throughout western history. However, no author’s kleos was so well cultivated.
For example, the adherents of Epicurean philosophy, a Hellenistic school that taught materialism and criticized the notion of an afterlife,were all but forgotten during the medieval period since their philosophy conflicted with the Christianity of the church who funded the preservation of the texts.
Philodemus was one of those Epicureans,and it was not the copying program of the medieval that preserved him, but a natural disaster and a flood of hot mud.
The Epicureans did not strive for kleos: they embraced their mortality and chose rather to focus on cultivating a tranquil life and rich friendships. I find it to be an elegant instance of poetry that these Epicurean texts and the vibrant paintings of their commune are the recipients of the most sophisticated technologies of kleos maintenance we’ve ever had.