Location of Plato’s Grave Revealed in Newly Translated Papyrus Scroll Found Vesuvian Ash
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Reported by the Smithsonian Magazine:
Thanks to an ancient text and specialized scanning technology, researchers say they have solved the mystery of Plato’s burial place: The Greek philosopher was interred in the garden of his Athens academy, where he once tutored a young Aristotle.
“We knew Plato was buried at the academy, which was very large,” says Graziano Ranocchia, a philosopher at the University of Pisa who is leading the research, per the London Times’ Tom Kington. “But thanks to the scans, we now know he was buried in a garden in a private area, near the sacred shrine to the muses.”
Some 2,000 years ago, the famous philosopher’s burial was recorded on a papyrus scroll housed in the Roman city of Herculaneum, according to a statement from Italy’s National Research Council. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., famously extinguishing the town of Pompeii to its southeast, it also destroyed Herculaneum, located at the volcano’s western base. A villa in the city—possibly belonging to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law—was full of scrolls, and while the volcano’s blast damaged and buried the papyri, it didn’t destroy them.
Researchers only discovered the trove of texts in the mid-18th century. Now known as the Herculaneum scrolls, they are “the only large-scale library from the classical world that has survived in its entirety,” as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) writes.