But there is an exquisite edge to the discovery of this Epicurean library in Herculaneum, and it is honed not so much by the knowledge of what has been found as the fear of what might be lost. An alliance of mainly British and American scholars, convinced that more texts remain to be found at the Villa of the Papyri, are calling for its urgent excavation. They cite the threat posed to the villa, which has never been completely liberated from its prison of rock, by a further eruption of Vesuvius. The volcano's bellows were heard as recently as 1998.This is curious, because I thought new excavation at the site had already started. Does anyone out there know what the story is?
Richard Janko, head of classical studies at the University of Michigan, believes the Villa of the Papyri promises to yield the greatest number of new texts since the discoveries in the 16th century that nourished the High Renaissance and fashioned Western secular humanism. "This is the only place in the world where we know for certain that a Greco-Roman library was entombed in a manner that ensured its preservation," Janko says.
"There are almost certainly more books to be found there."
Background at that last link and here.
UPDATE: The Australian has the much longer original article (via the Agade list). This part is of interest:
When I meet the archeological superintendent of the region, Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, at his office in Pompeii, the curtains are partly drawn across a hard, bright Neapolitan sky. The author of several books on the region's antiquities, Guzzo is a genial man with a professorial air who speaks in heavily accented English.I take Superintendent Guzzo's point, but I think it has to be balanced against the importance of getting any remaining scrolls out of the ground and into the hands of conservators before those scrolls deteriorate further. It's going to take a long time to edit them all in any case, but that has been true of many major manuscript discoveries, including (somewhat unfairly infamously) the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Cairo Geniza, and the Oxyrhynchus papyri. The editing of the last two sets of texts is nowhere near finished. That said, in the coming years new technology is likely to speed the process up considerably.
"So you have seen the villa," he says, lighting a pipe, a lifted brow accenting his playful tone. "They make this cavity, this cave. It is not soclear, and they bring into view only a small part. And when they finish we have to manage the cave."
The chief impediment to further excavation, Guzzo adds, is not so much financial as political. "Our task is to preserve what is found but it is very difficult to project an entire excavation. Digging at the villa, that's a huge undertaking. We would have to change streets, demolish houses and change the lives of thousands of people in Ercolano and Portici. It is a problem for the mayors. It is a political decision in the true sense of the word."
Guzzo points out that barely half of the scrolls found at the villa have been read by scholars, and questions the motivation of those pushing for an excavation in search of antiquity's lost works. "For me they must open and read all the papyri they have had for centuries, before we look for others," he says. "If I want to eat a meal at my home I don't go to the supermarket if I have a full fridge."
He concedes, on the other hand, the strong possibility that more remains to be found in "parts of the villa where the ancient diggers don't go". And this seems to add weight to the claim by scholars such as Fowler and Janko that another wing of the library, perhaps a separate Latin collection, awaits discovery.
Vesuvius last erupted in 1944 as Allied soldiers were thrusting up the Sorrentine coast against the retreating Reich. It remains a restive, brooding presence. Scholars with a passionate concern for the Villa of the Papyri hear the ticking of the volcano's geological clock.
Guzzo, however, regards the threat with a combination of Neapolitan fatalism and incorrigible pragmatism. "Earthquakes are possible," he says. "But they are not. What can we do about nature?
"Today I think the method of archeology is not to find treasures," he concludes. "It's to solve historical problems."
Janko, not surprisingly, bridles at the likening of his scholarly impulse to the exploits of a tomb raider. "It is amazing to claim that it is treasure hunting when one asks to have the papyri excavated before Vesuvius buries them definitively," he says. "If lava flows over the site again, I doubt we will ever have access to them.
"As for the publication of all the papyri being demanded before more are excavated, might one ask that the whole of Pompeii and Herculaneum be properly published before anything more there is unearthed? It seems to me to be arrogance to deny future generations the opportunity to read more such books, just because there are at present very few classical scholars with the competence and the energy to decipher and bring out those that we do have."