In June 2026, a team of papyrologists and AI researchers achieved something once thought impossible: reading an entire ancient scroll, carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, from beginning to end, without ever physically opening it.In this episode of the Via Stoica Podcast, I'm joined by Federica Nicolardi, lead papyrologist of the Vesuvius Challenge and Associate Professor of Papyrology at the University of Naples Federico II, and Maria Chiara Robustelli, a member of the Vesuvius Challenge papyrology team and postdoctoral scholar at the same university, currently preparing a critical edition of a Herculaneum scroll on the Stoics.We talk about how they each found their way into papyrology, what Pompeii and Herculaneum actually are and how differently they were buried by the eruption, the history of the Villa dei Papiri and its library, and how the Vesuvius Challenge used X-ray imaging and machine learning to virtually unwrap scrolls no one has been able to read in nearly two thousand years.At the heart of the conversation is PHerc. 1667: a philosophical treatise on impulse, human nature, and practical wisdom, found in a library that's almost entirely Epicurean, except for this one Stoic text. Its final surviving column names Aristocreon, the nephew and student of Chrysippus, raising the genuine possibility that this could be connected to Chrysippus himself, one of the most influential Stoic philosophers whose own writing has otherwise been lost to history.We close, as I do with most guests, by asking about their own personal philosophy of life.Topics covered: the Vesuvius Challenge, virtual unwrapping, Herculaneum papyri, the Villa dei Papiri, Pompeii vs Herculaneum, Philodemus, Stoic philosophy, Chrysippus, papyrology, and what it means to recover a voice from the ancient world.Learn more about the project:🏺 The Vesuvius Challenge: scrollprize.org📜 The PHerc. 1667 announcement: scrollprize.org/firstscrollSupport the show🌐 viastoica.com▶️ YouTube: @viastoicaProduced by: Badmic.com

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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