Image technology has deciphered a manuscript written about the Greek philosopher’s final hours, in which he criticizes the musical skills of a slave girl. She doesn’t keep a rhythm…
The scroll contains a previously unknown account of how one of history’s most influential figures spent his last evening. It describes how Plato listened to music played on the flute by a Thracian slave girl. He was not impressed and found her sense of rhythm inadequate.
According to Professor Graziano Ranocchia of the University of Pisa, who led the team that recovered the scroll, the story suggests that Plato was mentally lucid until the end. “Until his very last hour he was able to make an aesthetic judgment,” he said
The description is part of the History of the Academy by Philodemus, a poet and philosopher who lived in the 1st century BC. “It is the oldest history of Greek philosophy in our possession,” Ranocchia said.
Until now, however, it has been illegible: it was written on a papyrus scroll that became charred and almost completely illegible when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 1979, burying both Pompeii and the nearby Roman city of Herculaneum under meters of pumice and ash.
The scroll was kept in a large villa in Herculaneum. Discovered in 1750, the building is said to have once belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Since then, generations of scholars have sought ways to read the library’s contents. Although the “Villa of the Papyri” remains only partially excavated, hundreds of scrolls have been found, many of which have been turned into brittle rods of black carbon by the heat of the volcano.
Some of the individual layers of the Philodemus Scroll, which describes Plato’s life, had been taken apart in the 18th century – a process that was later abandoned because the charred papyrus was often completely destroyed.
But even when the scroll was unraveled, most of the writings were indistinguishable. Ranocchia and his colleagues are the first in 20 centuries to decipher the scroll. They used a range of techniques, including hyperspectral short-wave infrared imaging, which detected tiny differences in the way light reflected off the black ink and blackened papyrus on which it was written.
Short-wavelength hyperspectral imaging produces readable writing of the charred manuscript
Shortwave hyperspectral imaging provides readable writing of the charred manuscript
Ranocchia believes that Philodemus would have had access to better sources than Diogenes Laertius, a biographer of the Greek philosophers who lived in the 3rd century AD and whose account of Plato’s life was influential.
The History of Philodemus also records that Plato received a visitor, referred to only as the “Chaldean guest”, on his last evening alive, possibly at his apartment in the Academy. This was despite the fact that he was suffering from bouts of fever. “He did his duty; hospitality was sacred to the Greeks,” Ranocchia said.
Ancient ruins at Herculaneum, the smaller settlement destroyed by the volcano along with Pompeii.
Last week it was announced that the Philodemus Scroll also revealed new details about how Plato was buried in a garden at the Academy of Athens, near a shrine to the Muses. It also seems to rewrite an important part of his biography. Plato was thought to have written in 387 B.C. had been sold into slavery by Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, to curb his growing influence.
