HOWZAT

Frankly, it would be cheap at almost any price. Even in our age of hyperbole it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of what is at stake here: nothing less than the lost intellectual inheritance of western civilisation. We have, for example, a mere seven plays by Sophocles, yet we know that he wrote 120; Euripides wrote 90 plays, of which only 19 survive; Aeschylus wrote between 70 and 90, of which we have just seven.

We also know that at the time when Philodemus was teaching Virgil on the Bay of Naples, the lost dialogues of Aristotle were circulating in Rome (Cicero called them “a golden river”: the essence of ancient Greek philosophy); they, too, have vanished.

Then there are the missing Latin texts. Is it really likely that a palace on the scale of the Villa of the Papyri would not have had contemporary copies of Virgil’s Aeneid or the poems of Horace? Scholars have dreamt of making such discoveries for centuries, but until the last couple of years they were understandably dismissed as fantasies. Books in the ancient world were written on papyrus — strips of plant grown in Egypt and glued together — and papyrus simply cannot survive for 2,000 years except in freak conditions.

The paradox of the Vesuvius eruption is that its destructiveness caused it to act as a giant preservative. When the great library at Alexandria caught fire 1,600 years ago, more than half a million scrolls were destroyed: the greatest intellectual catastrophe in history. But the tightly rolled papyri caught in the eruption of AD79 — not only in Herculaneum but also in Pompeii — were first carbonised and then, when the pumice and ash moulded around them, effectively sealed in airtight stone vaults.

Now, technology that the great classical scholars of the 19th century could never have imagined can make sense out of what looks like a chunk of charcoal. Last weekend when members of the Herculaneum Society were given a demonstration of MSI technology “they gasped”, according to one witness, “like spectators at a firework display”.

The Herculaneum Society, it should be said, is not without its opponents, among them the highly respected director of the British School at Rome, Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. For a start he doubts whether a new dig will find anything. Weber, he said, whose mapping of the site was sufficiently detailed to enable the creation of the Getty Museum, was a meticulous Swiss engineer: “That type of man doesn’t miss anything.” But even if he did it would be a “scandal ”, in his opinion, to open up a vast new site while Herculaneum itself is so inadequately cared for.

I walked round Herculaneum last May with Wallace-Hadrill and can vouch for the accuracy of his description of its lamentable condition: “Restored roofs are in collapse, broken tiles litter mosaic floors, the precious carbonised wood crumbles constantly . . . Pigeons roost under the eaves and the walls are smeared with their excrement.” The Italian authorities have so much heritage to protect that they simply cannot do it.

To this the Herculaneum Society has three answers. The first is that the renewed seismic activity, detected recently around Vesuvius, makes it imperative that the villa is re-entered soon and any treasures removed to safety. Second, they believe it may be possible to complete the excavation by tunnelling rather than by exposing the villa to the elements.

Their third answer is the one hardest to resist. Wallace-Hadrill is up against a group of determined men and women fired by one of the most potent of all human dreams: buried treasure. In the words of Fowler: “So long as there is a chance of finding the rest of the library — and everyone admits there is a chance, however strong or weak they rate it — we owe it to the world to dig.”

How modern science retrieves ancient wisdom

The technique used to decode the decaying and carbonised papyri was developed by Nasa to analyse the light from distant stars and planets, writes Jonathan Leake.

When the light is broken into components by multi-spectral imaging (MSI), scientists can detect the unique signatures of the elements and compounds in the body that emitted it.

Steve Booras, an imaging expert at Brigham Young University in Utah, used the technique on scrolls at the National Archeological Museum in Naples. The ink characters could be seen in places, but were impossible to read because there was no contrast between the ink and the paper under visible light.

Booras’s tool was a digital camera sensitive to a far wider spectrum of light and which could range deep into infra-red wavelengths.

When he and his wife Susan, a fellow researcher, applied a filter that allowed only infrared light of 900-950 nanometres into the camera, the long-lost texts reappeared.

The ink had apparently retained a characteristic that made it absorb infrared light differently from the surrounding burnt papyrus.

“It was a wonderful moment,” Booras said.

Membership of the Herculaneum Society costs £50 per year. Contact: Friends of the Herculaneum Society, Classics Centre, Old Boys’ School, George Street, Oxford 0X1 2RL. Website: www.herculaneum.ox.ac.uk; e-mail: herculaneum@classics.ox.ac.uk

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