A charred scroll, unearthed from a Roman villa entombed at Herculaneum by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago, has been revealed to contain a lost work by the ancient Greek philosopher Philodemus, a key figure in the Epicurean tradition.
Thanks to cutting-edge X-ray imaging and digital unwrapping techniques, researchers have identified the scroll as part of Philodemus’s multi-volume treatise On Vices, marking the first time that a scroll from Herculaneum has yielded such precise authorial and textual information through non-invasive methods.
We found the title of a scroll for the first time!
This cylinder of charcoal turns out to be "On Vices, Book 1" by Philodemus pic.twitter.com/3RrM0a4M2n
— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) May 5, 2025
Philodemus, a 1st-century BC philosopher and poet, was instrumental in transmitting Epicurean thought to the Roman world. He studied under the Epicurean philosopher, Zeno of Sidon, the head of the Epicurean school, in Athens, before settling in Rome about 80 BC.
His writings, long buried and carbonized in the Villa of the Papyri, offer invaluable insight into Hellenistic philosophy and ethics. The scroll, one of three housed at Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, had remained unreadable until the recent breakthrough.
“It’s the first scroll where the ink could just be seen on the scan,” Dr. Michael McOsker, a papyrologist at University College London working with Oxford researchers, told The Guardian. “Nobody knew what it was about. We didn’t even know if it had writing on it.”
Philodemus’ Herculaneum scroll is the first to be recovered
🪷 Experts are deciphering yet another scroll by philosopher Philodemus from the eruption of #Vesuvius on 24 Oct 79 AD. Artificial intelligence & X-ray tomography offer hope for those hopelessly charred papyrus scrolls found at #Herculaneum's #VilladeiPapiri. They unroll their… pic.twitter.com/jttkk6xso3
— Antinous the Gay God (@antinousgaygod) March 24, 2025
This discovery not only restores a fragment of lost Greek philosophical heritage but also opens new possibilities for recovering more texts from the only surviving ancient library from classical antiquity.
The scroll is one of hundreds found in the library of a luxury Roman villa thought to have been owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. The villa was buried under ash and pumice when Herculaneum, near Naples, was destroyed along with Pompeii in the eruption of AD79.
Excavations in the 18th century recovered many of the ancient scrolls, most of which are held at the National Library of Naples. But the documents are so badly burnt that they crumble when researchers try to unroll them and the ink is unreadable on the carbonised papyrus.
The latest work builds on earlier breakthroughs from the Vesuvius Challenge, a global competition launched in 2023, which offers prizes for progress in reading the scrolls from 3D X-rays. Last year, a team of computer-savvy students shared the $700,000 (£527,350) grand prize for developing artificial intelligence software that enabled them to read 2,000 ancient Greek letters from another scroll.
The scroll from the Bodleian, named PHerc. 172, was scanned last July at Diamond, the UK’s national synchrotron facility in Oxfordshire. Unusually, some ink was visible in the X-ray images, with researchers spotting the ancient Greek word for “disgust” at least twice in the document.
Further work by Sean Johnson at the Vesuvius Challenge, and separately by Marcel Roth and Micha Nowak at the University of Würzburg, found the title and author of the text in the innermost section of the scroll, earning them the challenge’s $60,000 (£45,200) first title prize.
Alongside “On Vices” and “Philodemus,” a book number on the scroll may be an alpha, suggesting it could be the first instalment of the work. On Vices contains at least 10 books with others covering topics such as arrogance, greed, flattery and household management.
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