“It is a small miracle” comments the president of the Association of Greek Archaeologists Kostas Paschalidis for the discovery of Italian researchers, who claim to have located the exact spot where the Plato.
The great discovery was based on ancient papyri, which researchers were able to decipher using a bionic eye.
“The most important thing is that with the use of new technologies the charred papyri from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum are being read. It is an ancient library with charred – and not cremated – papyri of enormous importance and incalculable knowledge” Kostas Paschalidis points out to CNN Greece.
“An attempt has been made in the past to read the papyri and unfortunately it will take many more years to read all the writings in the library and probably not in the time we live in. The alleged reading of an ancient text referring to Plato’s burial place is valuable mainly for the way it was done. Because as information, if you asked any classical archaeologist, he would tell you that it is very likely that Plato was actually buried in the Academy where he lived and taught”, tells us the president of the Association of Greek Archaeologists, who emphasizes that “the validity of the information is an object consideration of other sources as well as the ancient topography”.
In any case, he says that reading text from the Villa of Papyri documents is “a minor miracle” primarily for philologists and secondarily for archaeologists.
The research
The research carried out to identify the site was based on papyri from the site of Hercolano, near Naples.
The study led by the Italian papyrologist Graziano Ranocchia, shows that Plato was buried in the “Academy” that bears his name in Athens, in a garden near the “temple of the Muses”.
This great discovery, according to what has become known, is due to a new reading of a papyrus of Philodemus of Epicurean which contains the History of the “Academy”.
The papyri were “read” by a bionic eye, which managed to decipher a thousand new words compared to the previous reading in 1991, i.e. 30% more text.
The Villa of the Papyri
The library of about 1,100 papyri was discovered around 1750-1752 inside a Roman villa that came to be known as the Villa dei Papiri, in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman city destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 .
The thousands of papyri are the only surviving library of the classical period and are Greek philosophical treatises mainly by a follower of Epicurus.
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