The latest scroll to emerge from the ash of Vesuvius does not tidy up Stoicism so much as complicate it, by setting a rival philosophy’s private doubts alongside the public ideal of unshakable virtue. What has been decoded from a 2,000-year-old library near Pompeii exposes an Epicurean critic dissecting human weakness, forcing a fresh look at how Stoic self-mastery actually played out in the messy world of Roman elites. I see this new text less as a betrayal of Stoic ideals than as a rare backstage pass to the arguments, temptations, and anxieties that Stoics and their opponents shared.
The volcanic time capsule that froze a philosophical feud
Any attempt to understand the “forbidden” side of Stoicism has to start with the physical setting that preserved its critics. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it buried not only Pompeii but also the nearby seaside town of Herculaneum, where a luxurious villa housed what is now known as the Herculaneum Papyri. Those carbonized rolls, part of the wider collection of Herculaneum Papyrus Scrolls, became one of the most inaccessible archives in the ancient world, a literal “invisible library” that locked away first century debates about ethics, pleasure, and virtue.
For centuries, scholars knew that these rolls likely contained works by Epicurean philosophers who sparred with Stoic ideas in the villas of Roman aristocrats, but the scrolls were too fragile to unroll. The papyri were so tightly wound and charred that any physical attempt to open them risked destroying what little remained. That is why the library was often described as a window into the classical world that nobody could actually look through, a cache of texts that might illuminate how Stoic doctrines were received, resisted, or quietly adapted in private circles, yet remained effectively sealed off from modern readers.
From unreadable relics to AI-readable texts
The breakthrough that turned this philosophical time capsule into a readable archive came from a fusion of computer vision, machine learning, and prize-driven research. A global competition known as the Vesuvius Challenge set out to solve the technical problem of reading ink on rolled papyri without opening them, inviting coders and classicists to collaborate on virtual unwrapping and pattern recognition. The contest framed the scrolls as a grand test case for noninvasive imaging, with the promise that whoever cracked the code would not only win prize money but also unlock a lost chapter of ancient thought.
According to organizers, the challenge focused on scrolls buried by the same eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD that entombed Pompeii and Herculaneum, and it unfolded over months of iterative model-building and data sharing. Reports describe how, as the competition advanced, teams refined algorithms that could detect subtle differences in density within the carbonized layers, gradually turning what looked like uniform charcoal into legible Greek letters. The result was a new kind of philology, one in which the first step toward understanding Stoic-era debates was not deciphering grammar, but training neural networks to see ink where the human eye saw only ash.
The “2,000-Year-Old” scroll and its provocative framing
When news broke that a 2,000-Year-Old scroll from the Vesuvius region had yielded new text, coverage leaned into the idea that it exposed a hidden or “forbidden” side of Stoic philosophy. Reports dated Nov 19, 2025, described how a “Nov, Year, Old Scroll Uncovered, Pompeii Divulges the Forbidden Side of Ancient Stoic Philosophy,” framing the discovery as a revelation about Stoic ethics that had been long assumed lost to history. The language was dramatic, but the underlying story was more nuanced, because the work itself came from a philosophical rival.
Follow-up descriptions of the same find, again tied to Nov 19, 2025, repeated that a “Nov, Year, Old Scroll Uncovered, Pompeii Divulges the Forbidden Side of Ancient Stoic Philosophy, Sealed” in volcanic debris had finally been opened to scrutiny. Yet the decoded text is not a Stoic manual but an Epicurean critique, which means the “forbidden” angle is less about secret Stoic doctrine and more about how Stoic ideals looked when filtered through the eyes of opponents. In other words, the scroll complicates Stoicism by showing how its claims to rational self-control were contested in the very households where Stoic and Epicurean ideas competed for influence.
How AI first learned to read the Herculaneum ink
The technical path to this latest scroll ran through earlier experiments that proved AI could detect ink in what seemed like blank carbon. In work reported on Oct 11, 2023, researchers showed that roughly 1,800 papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum, long assumed to be lost forever, could be imaged and virtually unwrapped using high resolution scans. That effort, described as beginning in Oct and relying on “Roughly” that number of scrolls, demonstrated that machine learning could highlight ink patterns invisible to conventional photography.
Another milestone came when a team used a neural network to read text from a single ancient roll, work that was also detailed on Oct 11, 2023, as “AI reads text from ancient Herculaneum scroll for the first time.” That project, which circulated on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Email, relied on a Machine learning model trained to distinguish ink from papyrus fibers in three dimensional scans. By proving that even a few words could be extracted from a sealed roll, these early efforts set the stage for more ambitious attempts to reconstruct entire philosophical treatises.
The tech-first moment that turned a scroll into a story
The leap from proof of concept to sustained reading came when competition teams began to treat the scroll as a full scale computer vision problem rather than a one off curiosity. Reporting from Oct 16, 2023, described how “AI Reads Ancient Scroll Charred by Mount Vesuvius in Tech First,” highlighting how the same eruption that destroyed cities had inadvertently created a benchmark dataset for modern algorithms. The phrase “Tech First” captured the sense that this was not just a classics story but a demonstration of what noninvasive imaging and AI could do together.
In parallel, organizers emphasized that the scrolls were charred by Mount Vesuvius and that the goal was to identify and date text without ever unrolling the fragile artifacts. That shift in mindset, from conservation as a barrier to reading into conservation as a partner of computation, is what allowed the philosophical content to emerge. Once the models could reliably map the internal layers and highlight ink, the scroll stopped being a mute relic and became a narrative source, one that could show how Stoic ideals of indifference to pleasure were challenged by writers who saw desire and “vices” as central to human life.
“On Vices” and the Epicurean voice behind the scroll
The most striking confirmation that the newly readable scroll is Epicurean, not Stoic, came when researchers managed to identify its title and author. On Jun 1, 2025, reports announced that “Jun, They” had succeeded in reading the title in a rolled 2000-year-old papyrus scroll, winning $60,000 for their work. The decoded heading, “On Vices,” was attributed to the philosopher Philodemus, a prominent Epicurean whose writings were already known from other Herculaneum texts.
Further confirmation came when Two researchers in the field of machine learning were reported on May 5, 2025, to have won another $60,000 prize for revealing the title and author of the same work by the Greek philosopher Philodemus. That double attribution makes it clear that the scroll’s voice is Epicurean, focused on cataloging and analyzing “vices” rather than preaching Stoic indifference. The mislabeling of the discovery as a Stoic revelation is therefore misleading, but the text still matters for Stoicism because it shows how a contemporary critic framed the moral failings that Stoics claimed to overcome.
What the decoded text actually says about pleasure and scarcity
When researchers began to translate longer passages, the content turned out to be less about abstract metaphysics and more about everyday temptations. Reports from Feb 4, 2024, noted that the deciphered text focuses on how the scarcity or abundance of food and other goods impacts the pleasure they deliver, a finding highlighted in coverage of an ancient Herculaneum scroll piece. That emphasis on how context shapes enjoyment fits squarely within Epicurean ethics, which treated pleasure and pain as central to the good life, but it also brushes up against Stoic claims that virtue, not pleasure, is the only true good.
The same reports stressed that the newly readable lines are part of a broader discussion of “vices,” suggesting that Philodemus was dissecting how people misjudge the value of luxuries when they are rare or plentiful. For a Stoic, such misjudgment would be a failure of rational assent, a sign that the person has allowed externals to disturb inner tranquility. By reading an Epicurean analysis of these failings, modern scholars gain a sharper sense of what Stoic self control was up against in practice: not just raw desire, but a sophisticated rival theory that treated calibrated pleasure as a rational goal.
From competition rules to philosophical stakes
The path from competition announcement to philosophical insight was not instantaneous. Coverage on Feb 7, 2024, recalled that “Feb, Ten” months earlier, organizers had launched the Vesuvius Challenge to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri. That report emphasized that the library of Herculaneum Papyri had been buried by Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and that the group used AI to decipher text from a scroll, according to the organizers. The timeline underscores how quickly the field moved from raw scans to legible Greek, compressing what might once have been decades of painstaking work into a few competition cycles.
Another account from Feb 6, 2024, highlighted how, for centuries, these “unreadable” scrolls had stumped experts, as the University of Kentucky noted in a news release. That same report explained that experts with the Vesuvius Challenge had managed to produce a translation of the Greek text from a 2,000-year-old scroll preserved by a volcano. The speed and scale of this progress matter because they suggest that what we are seeing now, in Philodemus’s “On Vices,” may be only the first wave of texts that will reshape how we understand Stoic and Epicurean ethics in their original social context.
Why an Epicurean critique still reshapes Stoic history
Even though the newly decoded scroll is Epicurean, it still forces a revision of the story we tell about Stoicism in the Roman world. By cataloging “vices” and analyzing how pleasure fluctuates with scarcity, Philodemus implicitly targets the same behaviors that Stoics claimed to transcend, from gluttony at elite banquets to status anxiety in competitive politics. The fact that such a detailed critique circulated in the same villas where Stoic texts were read suggests that Roman elites were not passively absorbing a single moral code, but actively weighing competing visions of the good life.
In that sense, the “forbidden” angle is less about secret Stoic doctrines and more about the private tensions that official Stoic rhetoric tended to smooth over. Publicly, Stoic figures could present themselves as immune to luxury, committed to virtue alone. Privately, as this Epicurean scroll hints, they moved in circles where pleasure, scarcity, and vice were dissected with clinical interest, and where rival schools argued that carefully managed enjoyment was not a moral failure but a rational strategy. By reading Philodemus alongside Stoic authors, I see a more contested, and more human, picture of what it meant to pursue virtue in a world of volcanic risk and everyday temptation.
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