How do Greek archaeologists comment on the Italians who announced that they had located the exact burial place of Plato

“That Plato’s tomb was in the Academy is not unknown to archaeologists. Diogenes Laertius at the beginning of the 3rd c. AD states that Plato was buried in the Academy where he lived most of his life.

Pausanias says the same, that is, Plato was buried not far from the Academy.

The SEA for Plato’s tomb

The important thing is that we have a technology with which people have succeeded in reading a text 1,000 words longer than previous people who read the text from the same papyrus with another technology. And that we may live to learn unknown texts from the library of Peisons – the wealthy owner of the villa – which will be philosophical because he was mainly interested in philosophy and in particular epicureanism,” Dr. Kostas Paschalidis, archaeologist and president, told APE-MPE of the Association of Greek Archaeologists (SEA), on the occasion of the news about the new reading of a papyrus of Philodimus of Epicureus found in the “Villa of the Papyri” in Herculaneum, today’s Herculaneum, Italy.

“The papyrus purports to say that Plato’s tomb is near the temple of the Muses in his Academy. Olympiodorus of Alexandria in his commentary on Plato is quoted as saying that, on arriving in Athens, Plato established a teaching school in the Academy and in part of it a mosque for the Muses. In fact, the entire Academy is considered a mosque of the Muses, the place of knowledge, so to speak”, added K. Paschalidis. And he emphasized: “What we can say as SEA is that there is a need to protect and supervise every possible project in a declared zone, such as the zone of the Plato Academy, that staff is needed and that it is of great importance to give respect and preventive attention to such spaces ».

The luxurious Roman mansion at Ancient Heraklion (Herculaneum) in Campania, also known as the “Villa of the Papyri”, with its impressive library, was razed to the ground by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, which destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii. The villa was found by chance in 1750 and from 1752 to 1754, through the excavation process, numerous papyrus scrolls came to light. The attempt to decipher them continues with modern methods of digital technology.

RES-EMP