Herculaneum
her-kyoo-LAY-nee-um
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesThe town on the bay of Naples buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, and the site of the Villa of the Papyri, the only library to survive from the ancient world as a library rather than as copies.
The scrolls there were carbonised rather than destroyed. They are unreadable by ordinary means and have been worked on for two and a half centuries, most recently by imaging rather than unrolling.
PHerc. 1667, translated here, came out of that library. The carbonisation, and the difficulty of reading anything through it, are why so little of what the villa held has been recovered.
Sources
- Plin. Ep. 6.16
- Plin. Ep. 6.20
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
Discussed in the papers
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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