Based on the handwriting style, Nicolardi thinks that PHerc. 1667 dates to the second or third century B.C.E., which would make it one of the oldest scrolls in the library. The title and author have been lost to history, but experts suspect it wasn’t written by Philodemus. Perhaps, they theorize, Chrysippus was the author.
Chrysippus was a foundational figure in Stoicism, but modern scholars only know of his writings from references in other works. “To have access to a source text rather than quotes and summaries, which can be modified or interpreted by other writers, is very important,” Thomas Coward, a classicist at the University of Bristol in England who isn’t part of the Vesuvius Challenge, tells New Scientist’s Hayley Bennett.
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