BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Locating Plato’s Burial

Deciphered Herculaneum Scroll offers new information

The School of Athens with Plato and Aristotle in the center. Painted by Raphael. Courtesy Husamu-d-din alp, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Although scholars have long suspected that Plato, one of the most famous philosophers of antiquity, was buried within the grounds of the school he helped found, a newly deciphered scroll from Herculaneum could offer clues as to the precise location. At an event in the National Library of Naples, researchers announced the early results of their decipherment of a carbonized scroll containing a copy of History of the Academy¸ penned by Philodemus of Gadara (c. 110–35 BCE). According to the research team, the scroll contains intriguing new details about Plato’s life and death.

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The Life and Times of Plato

While decipherment is still in its early stages and has not yet gone through peer review, the 2,000-year-old text promises to offer a new window into the life and times of Plato and his famous academy, which is sometimes called the world’s first university. According to the team, the scroll describes how Plato suffered from a high fever and, upon his death in 348 or 347 BCE, was buried in the academy within a private garden near the sacred shrine to the Muses. Plato, a student of Socrates, founded the academy in Athens around 387 BCE, with its most famous student being Aristotle, who himself was the teacher of Alexander the Great. The academy was destroyed by the Roman General Sulla in 86 BCE.

In addition to giving the location of his death, the scroll also appears to provide new information on Plato’s eventual enslavement, suggesting that it occurred much earlier than previously believed. According to Graziano Ranocchia, one of the lead researchers, “It appears that Plato was sold as a slave as early as 404 BCE, when the Spartans conquered Aegina, or, alternatively, in 399 BCE, immediately after the death of Socrates,” reports The Telegraph. “Until now, it was believed that Plato was sold into slavery in 387 BCE during his sojourn in Sicily at the court of Dionysius I of Syracuse.”

The scroll itself has been known since 1750 when it was excavated in a Roman villa in the city of Herculaneum. The scroll makes up one of the thousands known as the Herculaneum Scrolls, which were carbonized during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. Today, the scrolls make up one of the ancient world’s largest extant libraries, although the eruption of Vesuvius made them largely unreadable, as they are too brittle to open without severely damaging them. In 2023, however, the Vesuvius Challenge was launched to use high-tech imaging technology and AI to digitally unwrap the scrolls and bring out the lost text. In 2024, a team of college students won the challenge—and nearly a million dollars—when they successfully created a program capable of reconstructing one of the charred scrolls, revealing another text thought to be written by the villa’s philosopher in residence, Philodemus.

History of the Academy, however, was not one of the scrolls from the challenge and had previously been painstakingly unwrapped, but was still illegible due to its carbonization. Using new imaging techniques, the team was able to tease out letters from the text and begin to piece them back together.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle

Stoa Poikile Excavations in the Athenian Agora

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library:

Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle

Greeks vs. Hittites

Did Jesus Speak Greek?

The Semites or the Greeks?

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