THE LIBRARY FROM HERCULANEUM is the subject of a long article in the Times today. It was buried by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 C.E., recovered in the 1700s, and only recently have many of the carbonized scrolls become readable with the help of new technologies. I don't know that the scrolls have ever been called the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Classical world, but if not, they should be. Now there is a move to reopen the excavation to try to find more texts.

Focus: The search for the lost library of Rome
Robert Harris
Even in our age of hyperbole, it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of what is at stake here: nothing less than the lost intellectual inheritance of western civilisation

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Once the villa had been stripped, 200 years ago, the tunnels were sealed. But last week a group of the world�s leading classical scholars gathered in Oxford to demand that the site be reopened. They believe that there is a better-than-evens chance � �quite likely�, is how Robert Fowler, professor of Greek at Bristol University, puts it � that the villa may have possessed at least one other library still to be uncovered.

These are scholars, cautious by nature. Their optimism is therefore worth taking seriously. It follows the first detailed analysis of the 1,800 papyri, now largely unrolled and deciphered thanks to a technique known as multi-spectral imaging (MSI). What appear to the naked eye as jet-black cinders are transformed by MSI into readable text. Thirty thousand images are now legible on CD-Rom; suddenly poems and works of philosophy are speaking again, 2,000 years after they were sealed in their cedar-wood cabinets in the summer of AD79.

The author chiefly represented in the collection is Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher of the 1st century BC who taught Virgil, the greatest Latin poet, and probably also Horace. He may indeed have given lessons to both beneath the porticoes of the Villa of the Papyri, for it is known that Philodemus was employed in the household of a powerful Roman senator, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, father-in-law of the dictator Julius Caesar. And it is now regarded as almost certain that Piso � who died more than a century before the eruption of Vesuvius � was the original owner of the Villa of the Papyri.

Apart from the texts of Philodemus, hundreds of other lost works of Greek philosophy � including half of Epicurus�s entire opus, missing for 2,300 years � have been rediscovered. Among them is a treatise by Zeno of Sidon, who Cicero saw lecture in Athens in 79BC. According to Richard Janko, professor of classics at Michigan University: �This is the first copy of Zeno�s writings to come to light; they had all been lost in later antiquity.�

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... Eight of the world�s leading scholars of ancient history, including professors from Harvard, Oxford and London, wrote to The Times in the spring of 2002 demanding action: �We can expect to find good contemporary copies of known masterpieces and to recover works lost to humanity for two millennia. A treasure of greater cultural importance can scarcely be imagined.�

The signatories have now formed a pressure group, The Herculaneum Society, which convened in Oxford last weekend, and moves have begun to raise the $20m (�10.6m) or so needed to dig.

Frankly, it would be cheap at almost any price. Even in our age of hyperbole it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of what is at stake here: nothing less than the lost intellectual inheritance of western civilisation. We have, for example, a mere seven plays by Sophocles, yet we know that he wrote 120; Euripides wrote 90 plays, of which only 19 survive; Aeschylus wrote between 70 and 90, of which we have just seven.

We also know that at the time when Philodemus was teaching Virgil on the Bay of Naples, the lost dialogues of Aristotle were circulating in Rome (Cicero called them �a golden river�: the essence of ancient Greek philosophy); they, too, have vanished.

Then there are the missing Latin texts. Is it really likely that a palace on the scale of the Villa of the Papyri would not have had contemporary copies of Virgil�s Aeneid or the poems of Horace? Scholars have dreamt of making such discoveries for centuries, but until the last couple of years they were understandably dismissed as fantasies. Books in the ancient world were written on papyrus � strips of plant grown in Egypt and glued together � and papyrus simply cannot survive for 2,000 years except in freak conditions.

Conditions like being sealed in hot volcanic ash. I wonder if it's optimistic to hope that such a well-stocked library might have included the Septuagint or maybe even Greek translations of some of the Enochic books. In any case, it sounds to me like a possibility worth checking out.

The article also gives the web address of the Herculaneum Society: www.herculaneum.ox.ac.uk.