Who knows what we could find. So many books have been lost.
The ancient Roman elite often had extensive personal libraries which they shared with their friends, almost like a very primitive book publishing industry.
Epicureans aren't Platonists. We know that the library went heavy on Epicurean texts.
The word "pagan" is still used by Classicists today.
To call it a "pagan" library now fails to describe it in the context of what it was at the time as well as what it is today, and instead is needlessly and aimlessly anchoring the perspective to the Christian world. It would be as if I described the library as being a Goy library--sure, I can, and wouldn't be technically wrong, but it's a meaningless distinction, and one that's more concerned about expressing the speaker's context than the subject's context, and the speaker is not relevant.
it's just that the romans themselves had an identity crisis of "pagan" vs. "monothestic". So yes, you are right to call out the fact that situating it in the christian context would be follie.
But the original point still stands. Calling it pagan is still a correct classification of the works in the library.
So it doubly makes no sense.
It is definitely not correct, it's the equivalent of calling the ruins Italian instead of Roman.
To be honest this feels more like you have an axe to grind with Christianity or its dominance, similar to the people pushing for “BCE/CE” over BC/AD. I don’t know why, but don’t expect the rest of the world to carry that cross for you.
Who's "we"? - It doesn't apply to everyone in the world, so you're assuming some limitations in who you're referring to.
GP makes a fair point. If you mean by "pagan" simply non-Christian and non-Jewish, then to make it relevant to call it a pagan library you would need to establish that it was curated specifically to exclude Christain or Jewish themes. You might as well call it a "non-Mithraic library", if it happens to exclude mention of Mithras, which was also an up-and-coming cult among the Romans in the first century. Then it would be incorrect or presumptious to call it "non-Mithraic", unless you'd first established that it contained no mention of Mithras. And the only reason you'd do that is if Mithras held a particular parochial relevance to you. You understand that not everyone holds up an image of Mithras as a prism through which to view everything else.
OTOH, if you mean by "pagan" just that it's Roman, but from before Rome converted to Christianity, then just say it's a first century Roman library.
GP does not make a fair point. We're specifically talking about classical antiquity which was a fairly bounded world. Warrior god cults, like that of Mithras, didn't have a strong role in the overall state and direction of the empire. They weren't major players and it is actually perfectly fine for terminology and understanding to focus on those.
Christianity is the prism through which the Romans later viewed things and through which the heirs of classical antiquity did. This isn't parochial, this reflects your general dislike of Christianity's dominance. But I don't actually have to make a normative argument that it should be, just the positive point that it is.
"Pagan" is a widely-accepted way to refer to Rome's old polytheistic religious traditions, which existed, but not unchallenged, around the first century.
Yeah, ok. So an explicitly parochial prespective. This isn't compelling from a disinterested, objective perspective.
> Warrior god cults, like that of Mithras, didn't have a strong role in the overall state and direction of the empire. They weren't major players and it is actually perfectly fine for terminology and understanding to focus on those.
just like Christianity in 79AD Herculaneum
Christianity didn't have as strong an influence there and then, but it obviously did in the course of the Roman Empire, and this was around the time it started to grow. It's obviously relevant in a way cults of Mithras or Serapis or whomever else weren't.
Do you know for a fact that the library contained no mention of Jesus nor Judaism? If you don't know this, then why do you refer to it as pagan?
The point is: we have a Roman library from the first century AD. We don't know what it contains. To call it "pagan" tacitly assumes that (a) Christianity was not relevant to the collectors of the library, and (b) whether something is Christian or not is of primary interest whenever we discuss an artefact from the past.
We don't know whether (a) is true, and (b) is only true from a particularly dogmatic and insular perspective
Tbh, I'm struggling to understand what your point is apart from you're asserting that you view the world as centered on your own particular dogmatic tradition and you find it hard to understand why other's don't share that perspective
Yes, which is why I don't use those words unless they are immediately relevant to the subject.
The word "pagan" adds nothing to the original post. "An entire library from the first century" conveys just as much information.
It also wasn't exactly part of the classical hellenistic civilization we talk about as the root of the western tradition, something of which I'm sure you're fully aware, making this a moot point.
My main gripe with it is the low entropy. In BC/AD each letter is unique. Even if you only heared 1 letter you still know what was said.
Do you understand why the phrase "Christian BS", aside from not really being much of an argument, ensures probably nine people in ten will immediately close off to what you say and refuse to take you seriously?
Why do you think one should get away with trying to rewrite the very acronym that exists to not reference a religion into being a direct reference to a religion?
The alternative acronyms are neologisms created specifically out of anti-Christian sentiment.
If y'all were operating in good faith, these would catch the same level of attention:
- Sabbatical, originating from Sabbath, a Judeo-Christian day of rest,
- The use of "karma", "zen", and "avatar" as terms and concepts, which come mostly from eastern religion,
- The use of "kosher", "mazel tov", and "golem" outside religious contexts due to their Judaic roots,
- and the use of "assassin", from a group of Shiite militants during the Crusades.
Of course, none of these catch the sort of attention that BC and AD do, because this is an example of explicitly anti-Christian thought, word, and deed. If you are particularly averse to it as opposed to other religions, that is your personal bigotry to work through, not ours to placate.
BC/AD already exists, there is no reason for Christian activists to try and neologize our neologism.
That’s as nested as you’ll get me to go today. Blessings!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era#History
It say AD "was conceived around the year 525 by the Christian monk Dionysius Exiguus. He did this to replace the then dominant Era of Martyrs system, because he did not wish to continue the memory of a tyrant who persecuted Christians." So AD itself was a neologism to avoid mentioning something offensive (or someone offensive, Diocletian).
I say correct, this of course depends on how embattled you are, how unfair it all is, and on the general moral situation.
"So since Philodemus makes up most of the library here, it's pretty safe to call it a "pagan" library."
You're confusing the tiny number of scrolls which have been preserved with what was likely in the complete library.
The complete library was much larger and likely contained the typical mix of philosophy, drama, poetry, and speeches copied over centuries from all over the Roman and Greek world.
That's not what the latin origin of pagan ever meant, it meant peasant or rural usually in the negative connotation common for city folks referring to people who lived outside of cities\. Were there ever any recorded instances of Romans referring to themselves as "pagan" as a group? Maybe one.
>"Rome"
Weird usage of scare quotes, especially in the time frame you are referring to, the name of the empire or the city was never ambiguous.
"Foreign religions" weren't really much of a thing either, there were lots of gods and each village and city (and family really) would have their own versions of gods. Sometimes when you'd conquer a city you'd go to the most prominent temple and steal the statue or alter or whatever and bring it back to Rome with the vibe that you were stealing the god of the place you conquered.
It causes me physical pain when scientists change their practice to appease pearl clutching amateurs
Clearly modern scholars disagree with you, and it's not a matter of pearl clutching.
It just doesn't make sense to, for example, define an ancient Roman library as "pagan" (or even "pre-Christian") as if that is its defining characteristic. Unless you happen to be a medieval Christian monk of course, and then it makes complete sense.
The content of Roman libraries is likely to depend on their pre-Christian vs. Christian characters.
Christianity wasnt the official state religion of Rome until 380 CE at which point it only had legal status for 67 years. Christianity wasn't done covering europe until iceland in 1000 CE.
What might count as prechristian wasn't at all clear and depended on where you were and how official you want things to be, it also was absolutely not like flipping a switch or even gradual, it was rocky and complicated.
If anything, that seems to prove people's point that the term is of questionable value, except perhaps when discussing early Christians or I suppose if one is writing about Christianity.
I don’t know anything about paganism but it seems like if the grouping excludes Jews and Christians non-Christian describes Jews and pagans.
I'm not sure whether atheists count as pagans. (Buddhists probably are…? But really, the term was designed for the religious practices of southern and (north-)western Europe that the early-ish Christian church wanted to wipe out.)
The history of the Roman Empire can be divided into two overarching periods - the pagan era and the Christian era. A pagan library is significantly more valuable than a Christian library, as we have far fewer pagan texts than Christian ones, and the few we do have were often corrupted by later Christian copyists. The word pagan is doing meaningful work in the sentence.
Just because the technical use of a term is not familiar to lay people doesn't mean it is unclear or unhelpful. Here on HN, we all know what C-style strings are, even if an ordinary person might hear that and picture some kind of nautical rope.
* In English, at least. The Latin word paganus did change meaning (the original sense was 'rural'), but this occurred centuries before the emergence of English.
I have decided that I, too, shall use obscure things as benchmarks and references. It's pretty good fun. In this post-Ragnarok-Online world one can imagine we need more such milestones to judge other things by.
One of the reasons only a fraction of a percent of the classical texts reached our days is the fact that Christians suppressed those texts, directly (by destroying them) and indirectly (by closing the libraries and temples and institutions of learning which preserved those texts).
Sure you could argue the terminology is very christian-centric, perhaps even offensive to pre-christian romans, but quite frankly that's a very uninteresting debate compared to the topic at hand.
Can you provide some citations on the technology being used in situ without digging up? As far as I understood this is the application of technology widely popularized by the Herculaneum Challenge, where scrolls are still physically dug up, and x-rayed (which will slowly still damage the scrolls) but without physically breaking them open as was repeatedly attempted in the past.
I don't care much about the slow damage from x-rays: as long as the content is succesfully extracted, one can imagine little other use for the scrolls as is.
I mostly hope some lost works on mathematics will be recovered..
So they have the scans of the rolled up scrolls, this is "just" (ha!) using the scan data with lots of algorithms and compute (AI? I presume so) to virtually unroll the scrolls and read the ink off the page.
You are right about not unrolling them though. Many scrolls were destroyed in previous attempts to unroll them physically, so it is fascinating to see how the technology has progressed to allow reading without unrolling.
So much for the global internet.
https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine-books-news/inside-her...
In particular this part:
Researchers are further refining the image using a new segmentation approach in the hopes that it will improve the coherence and clarity of the lines of text currently visible, and perhaps reach the end of the papyrus, the innermost part of the carbonised scroll, where the colophon with the title of the work may be preserved.
So the new article is indicating they were able now to decipher the title, and also indicates maybe why the title was not the first thing deciphered (presumably it is hardest to read the innermost parts.)
I'm curious why the title is in the inside of the scroll. That implies you have to completely open it to read the title - is that the way scrolls are usually written?
You have 2 teams using the same data, getting to the same conclusion. You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have". Then you have a team of experts reviewing this. Chances are these are real findings and not "hallucinations". Not everything in ML is gen-ai...
All interpretation of ink as Greek letters is done purely by human inference. This may lead to errors, especially in parts where the ink is preserved especially poorly or where the text is totally different from expectations, but it would be classic human error instead of AI hallucination.
> You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have".
> Then you have a team of experts reviewing this.
Only the first of those points is evidence against the result being hallucinated.
Well, that's exactly what you'd expect from a hallucination no? If the model is overfit enough on the relevant corpus, a title that already exists should be much more likely.
(Also, this is heavily-damaged handwriting, not clear print, so each letter isn't even uniform in shape. A model trying to cheat at ink detection would have an uphill battle trying to guess what all the variant letter shapes might be.)
[0] https://scrollprize.org/grandprize#how-accurate-are-these-pi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philodemus
Neat
As a history nerd and jaded software developer, I've been wondering a lot lately how I can use my tech skills for archeological research. Is there any way for someone with most of a bachelors to get into this kind of thing?
One might even say it's Herculanean ;)
As a layman admirer of Epicurean thought, I’m so glad that even after so many wars, destruction and tragedy over the centuries, such wonderful works have survived.
About vices - part A
I tried emailing Dang, to remove my account with no response. HN administrators, if you read this can please remove my account?