The title of a 2,000-year-old Greek philosophical text has been read by computer scientists using AI to study scrolls buried by the eruption of Vesuvius.
On Vices was written by Philodemus, a Greek philosopher who lived at Pompeii nearly 200 years before Vesuvius’ eruption, and several centuries after the life of Epicurus, a prominent Athenian thinker whose ideas have been discovered among the scrolls before.
Around 800 unreadable papyri were found more than 200 years ago by farmers in the ruins of Herculaneum, a city destroyed by Vesuvius’ eruption, in a villa that may have belonged to Julius Caeser’s father-in-law.
GNN has previously reported on the initiative called the Vesuvius Challenge, organized by Silicon Valley figures Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, who offered a total of $1,000,000 in prizes to anyone who can map out the words on the husks of papyrus charred into obscurity by the volcano.
Prizes were given out in 2023/2024 to Julian, a Swiss robotics student at ETH Zürich, who enabled the 3D mapping of the papyrus scrolls which can’t be unraveled without turning to ash; Youssef Nader, an Egyptian Ph.D. student in Berlin who decoded the first letters; and Luke Farritor, a college student and SpaceX intern from Nebraska, who decoded the first word (which was ‘purple’).
Then, the three young men formed a “superteam” and read the first sentence to be gleaned from this lost literary treasure in over 2,000 years.
“…as too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant,” were what was revealed. The thoughts likely belong to an Epicurean philosopher.
In this new discovery, On Vices was read out independently by two separate teams, and confirmed by other words to be the work known as On Vices and Their Opposite Virtues and In Whom They Are and About What.
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The winners of the $60,000 First Title Prize are Marcel Roth and Micha Nowak, computer scientists at Germany’s University of Würzburg.
According to Michael McOsker from University College London and Oxford University where the scrolls are kept, it’s generally been understood that the first book of On Vices was On Flattery (known from physically unrolled papyri). A statement from the Vesuvius Challenge says that the text of PHerc. 172, the scroll found to contain On Vices, does not seem to correspond with that of On Flattery, suggesting that if this is indeed book one, we will improve our general understanding of the work.
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On Vices has received special attention over the decades, not only because of its philosophical content, but also because in one of its books, Philodemus addresses some of his friends, namely Quintilius Varus, Varius Rufus, Plotius Tucca, and the great Vergil.
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