The Digital Dig: How AI Revived a Philosopher’s Voice
Enter the Vesuvius Challenge, a global initiative launched in 2023 with a mission as ambitious as any archaeological excavation: decode the unreadable using artificial intelligence. Scholars, scientists, and tech enthusiasts from around the world were invited to virtually unwrap these scrolls using machine learning and advanced imaging.
It was through this challenge that Marcel Roth and Micha Nowak, graduate students at the University of Würzburg, made their groundbreaking discovery. Independently verified and supported by Vesuvius Challenge researcher Sean Johnson, the scroll has been identified as a work by Greek philosopher Philodemus, titled “On Vices.”
This is the first time in history that a title has been read from one of the unopened Herculaneum scrolls.
Who Was Philodemus—and Why Does It Matter?
Philodemus was no ordinary writer. A student of Epicurus, he championed the pursuit of pleasure and reasoned living as the path to a good life. His ethical treatise On Vices and Their Opposite Virtues and In Whom They Are and About What delves into human behavior with surprising modern relevance. The Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University, where the scroll is now housed, speculate that this newly identified work could be the first in the series—though the Greek letter that indicates its place is still open to interpretation. Michael McOsker, a papyrologist from University College London and a member of the Vesuvius Challenge team, called the discovery “a very exciting development.” Other texts from the same series—such as On Property Management and On Arrogance—have previously been physically unrolled, but this new digital find provides a missing piece in Philodemus’ philosophical puzzle.
Reading the Invisible: A Digital Renaissance
The revelations don’t end there. In October 2023, AI helped researchers decode the first full word—“porphyras”, meaning purple—from one of the unopened papyri. Then, in February, the word “disgust” was found twice in PHerc. 172, adding emotional depth to the ethical discourse within.
Each decoded word, phrase, and paragraph is a step closer to reconstructing a lost world of thought, discourse, and intellectual richness that lay dormant beneath the earth for centuries.
This discovery is not just a win for historians and classicists—it’s a triumph for humanity’s eternal quest to know itself. As artificial intelligence breathes life into ancient ashes, the voices of long-dead philosophers echo once more, reminding us that the search for meaning, virtue, and truth is as timeless as the words now being revealed—letter by digital letter.