Plato's burial place finally revealed after AI deciphers ancient scroll carbonized in Mount Vesuvius eruption
Plato's burial place finally revealed after AI deciphers ancient scroll carbonized in Mount Vesuvius eruption
Researchers used AI to decipher an ancient papyrus that includes details about where Greek philosopher is buried.
The decipherment of an ancient scroll has revealed where the Greek philosopher Plato is buried, Italian researchers suggest.
Graziano Ranocchia, a philosopher at the University of Pisa, and colleagues used artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher text preserved on charred pieces of papyrus recovered in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town located near Pompeii, according to a translated statement from Italy's National Research Council.
Like Pompeii, Herculaneum was destroyed in A.D. 79 when Mount Vesuvius erupted, cloaking the region in ash and pyroclastic flows.
One of the scrolls carbonized by the eruption includes the writings of Philodemus of Gadara (lived circa 110 to 30 B.C.), an Epicurean philosopher who studied in Athens and later lived in Italy. This text, known as the "History of the Academy," details the academy that Plato founded in the fourth century B.C. and gives details about Plato's life, including his burial place.
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"Among the most important news, we read that Plato was buried in the garden reserved for him (a private area intended for the Platonic school) of the Academy in Athens, near the so-called Museion or sacellum sacred to the Muses," researchers wrote in the statement. "Until now it was only known that he was buried generically in the Academy."
The text also detailed how Plato was "sold into slavery" sometime between 404 and 399 B.C. (It was previously thought that this occurred in 387 B.C.)
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This is awesome and all, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about Plato’s life, death, or anything else except what people in Herculaneum maybe thought about him, which should be taken with an erupting mountain of salt.
Keep in mind there was half a
centurymillennium (I can’t math) between these stories and Plato’s life, and Plato didn’t even live on this island. Taking these stories at face value is like believing the stories of King Arthur today – the stories of Paul Bunyan in the US are far more credible, being far more recent and having happened in a time and place in which such stories were more reliably documented. We’ve mostly decided Paul Bunyan wasn’t ten stories tall and didn’t have a giant neon blue ox, though some theme rides still want to claim so. We’re talking about fables written 500 years after the fact here.This is a wonderful find, but its veracity wrt Plato’s actual burial place is highly suspect.
A century is 100 years, half a century is 50 not 500.
And the writings are from roughly 250 years from his death, and are from a writer who lived in studied philosophy in Athens were Plato did all those years earlier.
So this is more akin to a blog post from a person who attended a university in a town where 250 years ago a famous person lived and died in their same field of work. They’d probably learnt some retained knowledge (or had access to first hand writings) and shared this, potentially with some misinformation to creep in but most likely a lot of truth as well.
Numbers and I aren’t friends; not even acquaintances, really, more like antagonists. Thanks for catching that.
Yeah, that’s why I mentioned Paul Bunyan. The time difference is equivalent-ish, and Plato would have fallen into legend by that time. The problem with legendary figures is their stories mix truth and fable so liberally, it becomes impossible to tease them apart.
Every plausible city will have wanted to claim the burial place of such a legendary figure, so until someone actually finds his tomb, it seems extremely premature to claim it’s been found based on a scroll written far after the fact. Look at the huge numbers of Catholic churches claiming to have relics of saints that, with even mild scrutiny, turn out to be hoaxes, or the number of people selling bits of Lincoln’s hair in the decades after he died (if they were true, the man would have to have been a yeti).
It could be true, but it’s a pretty bold claim.
Agree, agree and agree.