Plato’s final criticism
A newly deciphered papyrus scroll may have revealed how Plato spent his last hours, reports The Guardian (U.K.). It says the Greek philosopher, who died in Athens in 348 B.C., lay in bed listening to a Thracian slave girl play the flute. Despite battling a fever, he was lucid enough to complain that the girl’s playing lacked proper rhythm. The scroll also clears up some mysteries about his life and death: It says he may have been sold into slavery in 404 B.C., much earlier than thought, and that he was buried in his personal garden at the Academy of Athens. The scroll is one of tens of thousands from the Villa of the Papyri, a private Roman library thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, which was buried in volcanic ash along with the rest of the town of Herculaneum in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. New techniques combining infrared and ultraviolet optical imaging, tomography, and AI have allowed scientists to virtually unroll and read the scorched, delicate papers. “For the first time, we have been able to read sequences of hidden letters from the papyri that were enfolded within multiple layers, stuck to each other over the centuries,” says project leader Graziano Ranocchia, from the University of Pisa. It’s an “extraordinary outcome that enriches our understanding of ancient history.”