A volcano destroyed these books nearly two thousand years ago and turned them into charcoal. A bunch of engineers with machine learning just read them anyway. What they found inside is genuinely blowing the minds of classicists who thought they already knew what ancient philosophy looked like.
The Library That Shouldn't Exist
Here's the setup. In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the Roman city of Herculaneum under a superheated pyroclastic surge that carbonized everything it touched, including a villa full of books. The villa may have belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law. Nobody knows for certain, but the books are real, they survived in some form, and they represent the only intact library we have from the entire Classical world.
About 800 scrolls were found there roughly 275 years ago. The problem, as Good News Network reports, is that they're essentially scrolls of charcoal now. Every attempt to physically unroll them over the decades either failed completely or caused irreparable damage. You can't unscroll ash. The whole collection sat there, tantalizingly close to being readable, and completely inaccessible.
That's not a metaphor for anything. That's just the literal situation these researchers inherited.
Three Nerds, a Particle Accelerator, and $700,000
In 2023, Silicon Valley figures Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman cooked up something called the Vesuvius Challenge alongside Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. The pitch was simple: here are CT scans of the burned scrolls, taken at the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator near Oxford, now posted online for anyone to try. Crack the code and collect up to a million dollars in prizes.
Three people won the grand prize. Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger built a deep learning program that could take a rolled-up charcoal tube, virtually peel it apart layer by layer, and pull legible text out of the mess. According to Good News Network, their system decoded four passages of 140 characters each, with at least 85 percent of the characters legible. They split a $700,000 bounty. Not bad for reading someone's ancient book collection.
What they found in those early scans included text from a work called On Vices by an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus, a Greek who actually lived near Pompeii about 200 years before the eruption killed everyone. One book in that series is particularly notable because Philodemus namedrops his friends in it, including the poet Vergil. Which is wild. Vergil had a book club and we almost never knew.
Now They've Actually Unrolled One
The latest development is bigger. Researchers from the University of Naples Federico II have succeeded in fully virtually unwrapping one scroll, exposing almost 1.5 meters of text across 20 columns. Good News Network reports that work to render those columns fully legible is still ongoing, but the jump in capability is dramatic.
Lead researcher Federica Nicolardi, an assistant professor in papyrology, put it plainly at an international press conference. "While a few isolated letters were visible, overlapping layers obscured the writing, and the scroll was assigned a readability score of zero. But now, with virtual unwrapping, we can follow sustained arguments across multiple columns. That's a transformational shift."
A readability score of zero. Now they can read whole arguments. That is not a small upgrade.
What the Scroll Actually Says
The newly unwrapped scroll appears to date from the second century BC, possibly even the late third century BC, which would make it one of the oldest in the collection. The handwriting and internal references both point that direction, according to Good News Network. The author is unknown.
What's legible so far deals with two concepts from Greek philosophy. The first is "horme," which translates roughly as impulse, something the author treats as a danger to be guarded against. The second is "phronesis," practical wisdom, which the Stoics considered one of the highest human virtues. The text that's come through so far includes this line: "We will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature."
That's a 2,300-year-old sentence about self-knowledge that Vesuvius buried, that charcoal preserved by accident, that a particle accelerator imaged, and that machine learning finally pulled back into the light. Read that chain of events slowly. It's absurd and incredible in equal measure.
Oh, and There's an Entire Book Series Nobody Knew About
Separately from the Stoic scroll, researchers also cracked enough of another scroll to read its title: On Gods, Book 8. That's from another Philodemus work. Good News Network reports that On Gods was not previously known to be a series, and certainly wasn't known to be long enough to require eight installments.
So we now know that a philosophical text we thought was a single work is actually at least an eight-volume series. Seven of those volumes were completely unknown to exist until a CT scan of a carbonized tube read the title page. Classical scholars spent centuries building their understanding of ancient Greek thought on whatever survived the chaos of history, and it turns out there's just a pile of more books sitting in a villa waiting to be read.
The methods being used are still young, as Good News Network puts it, and they will only get sharper. More of these scrolls will almost certainly give up their secrets as the years go on.
The Dingo Take
Look, we spend a lot of time in this publication documenting the ways technology is being used to make things worse. Surveillance systems that track protesters. Algorithms that radicalize teenagers. Chatbots deployed to gaslight workers. So it's worth pausing on a story where the application of machine learning is just straightforwardly, uncomplicatedly good. Three engineers built something that reads books a volcano burned in 79 AD. That's it. That's the whole thing. Nobody got hurt. Ancient philosophy got recovered.
The part of this story that keeps landing is the sheer contingency of it. Philodemus writes his books. Caesar's father-in-law maybe buys them for his library. Vesuvius turns everything to charcoal in a single afternoon. The charcoal sits underground for 1,700 years. Somebody digs it up. Everybody fails to read it for 275 years. A Silicon Valley guy posts the CT scans online and offers a cash prize. A 23-year-old builds a neural network that finally cracks it. And now we know there are at least eight books in a series nobody knew existed, and an unknown Stoic philosopher's thoughts on impulse and practical wisdom are back in the world.
The scroll's line about not grasping something if we depart from our own nature is going to echo around a few philosophy departments this week. It should probably echo around a few other places too. We are, as a civilization, deeply in the business of departing from our own nature right now. Maybe the charcoal library has notes.
