By Aanya S., Y12
This academic year’s Rosewell Lecture series had an amazing start on 16 September 2025, when Professor Llewelyn Morgan, Chair of the Oxford Classics Faculty Board, came to Wimbledon High to talk to us about the recent developments in the study of the Herculaneum papyri.
These ‘papyri’, or book scrolls, were found in the 18th century in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum (near to the slightly later excavated town of Pompeii). Like its more famous neighbour, it was in the path of the pyroclastic flow produced by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD, leading everything in it to be rather morbidly, but fascinatingly, preserved. During the excavations of Herculaneum, a luxurious villa was discovered. The quality of the statues found inside caused workers to pass by seemingly useless lumps of charcoal, until one was dropped and writing was spotted where it cracked to reveal the inside. Professor Llewelyn Morgan came to tell us about the challenges of, and solutions to, accessing the text in what turned out to be a library full of carbonised papyri.
The papyri are very tightly rolled scrolls, now both carbonised and encased in layers of volcanic ash and debris. Despite the difficulty of unrolling these books, the excitement of discovering the only complete library we have from antiquity led many to attempt it. In 1756, Antonio Piaggio, a conserver for the Vatican Library, used a machine of his invention to unroll papyri by a few millimetres per day. With the scripts being around 11 metres long when unrolled, this took years, and the text had to be copied down quickly as it was revealed, before the ink was exposed to air and faded away. Using methods like these, and many less successful, many papyri have been unrolled and often destroyed, with varying levels of text collected from them. Though some were readable, with 150 deciphered by the 20th century (out of around 1,800 discovered) many were destroyed before any information could be collected from them.
Professor Llewelyn Morgan came to talk to us not only about the difficulty of accessing the text in the papyri, but also about a recent breakthrough. A new method, virtual unrolling, involves scanning the scrolls and then separating the layers on a computer program – a difficult task very few people can do. This is made even more complex as the writing cannot be easily distinguished from the paper as both materials are carbon-based, so another step must be added: artificial intelligence is used to detect the different depths in the material and determine where the writing is. Once all this is complete, a papyrologist must engage with this unclear text and attempt to decipher it.
This new breakthrough, however, is not a magic bullet: transporting, scanning, and deciphering the texts is extremely expensive. Classics receives less funding than subjects such as science, as its discoveries may seem less exciting to those who have money to finance them, and tend to lose interest when the author of the scrolls was discovered: not a famous figure, but a ‘house philosopher’ called Philodemus. Although this disappointed many (including William Wordsworth in his poem ‘September 1819′), Professor Morgan was not among them: he explained how Philodemus’ writing can reveal many parts of the classical word to us. He and the house’s owners were Epicureans: a misunderstood and often very criticised school of philosophy. Philodemus, in turn, criticised other philosophies – quoting them and describing their arguments in order to disprove them, and therefore providing us with possibly unseen material. We also have not yet unrolled all (or even many) of the scrolls: it is very possible, and even probable, that other author’s works were stored in this library, leaving much more to be discovered with this exciting development in unrolling the papyri.
We are very grateful to Professor Morgan for taking the time to tell us about this fascinating topic as it progresses, and to Libby and Valentina, our heads of academia and scholarship, for hosting the lecture. We look forward to the rest of this year’s Roswell lecture programme after an incredible start!