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PaperclipPerfector  22hr ago (text post)   2794 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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Time for some positive culture news, free of gloom, doom and blackpill. Are there any?

Yes. The Vesuvius project to digitally decipher ancient scrolls from Herculaneum - discussed here previously - yielded first fruits.

First rather badly mangled scroll read.

Here is it.

It seems to be not Epicurean, as expected, but Stoic philosophical work.

PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the nineteenth century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm. From that surviving portion we have now recovered and read the text in full — the lower parts of some twenty-two columns, transcribed and reviewed by papyrologists. It is the first time the preserved text of a rolled Herculaneum scroll has been read continuously, end to end, rather than in isolated words or patches.

The recovered text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, and the evidence points to a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its final preserved column names Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, together with the language and themes of the text, places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century BC.

What it means? It means fears that the recovered heap of scrolls is remnant of purely Epicurean collection were overblown, that the library was general philosophical library and we can expect works of all ancient philosophical schools - those known whose works survives, those known only by name and those completely forgotten.

Remember, the villa - nothing fancy like Nero's house, just average dwelling of top 1% of top 1% of Roman Empire - was expected to contain just as basic barebone fixtures, among masterpieces of sculpture, painting and other arts, two complete libraries (one Greek, one Latin). There is chance that they are still there and were properly carbonized to withstand millenia.

(to excavate the whole site properly would mean to demolish modern town of Ercolano, but this is problem solvable by modern billionaire emptying his pockets for spare change)

Time for degenerate moderns to shut up and listen to the ancients.

Remember, mechanical arts might be nice, but are lacking something.

… being practical wisdom about that, is also about this. This [person? aspect?] that concerns the mechanical arts seems to me to be very distant from such a [conception?], and to have the technical fulfilment that is, so to speak, lame and something of such type lacking, and in regard to the …

It's a great achievement and I'm looking forward to more scrolls but it will be a tremendous disappointment if it's just philosophical or scientific scrolls. As far as I am concerned, philosophy has made almost no progress on the central question of human life (how does one live a good life?) since the ancient greeks and I doubt that uncovering some minor scribblers' writings will suddenly reveal the answer to that. As for science, the ancients were basically wrong about everything (see Aristotle on the number of teeth in humans) except for the things in which we've long far exceeded them.

Fingers crossed for something actually useful like missing history or literature or a treatise on Etruscan.

I would read Poetics 2 by Aristotle in a heartbeat

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