AI deciphers ancient scroll to pinpoint Plato's burial site at Athens Academy

In the spring of 2024, Italian researchers announced they had solved a puzzle that had lingered for more than two thousand years: where, exactly, Plato was buried. The answer came not from fresh excavation but from a charred scroll that had been waiting in a library vault, and from machines trained to read what human eyes could not.

The scroll in question was recovered from Herculaneum, the Roman town buried alongside Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. The eruption carbonized everything—buildings, bodies, and papyri. Among those papyri was a text written by Philodemus of Gadara, an Epicurean philosopher who lived roughly from 110 to 30 B.C. Philodemus had studied in Athens and later settled in Italy, and he left behind a work titled the "History of the Academy," an account of the school Plato founded in the fourth century B.C. This scroll, now held at the National Library of Naples, contained biographical details about Plato himself, including the location of his grave.

Graziano Ranocchia, a philosopher at the University of Pisa, led the effort to unlock the text. Working with colleagues and drawing on resources from Italy's National Research Council, the team deployed a suite of technologies that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago: infrared and ultraviolet optical imaging, thermal imaging, and tomography. These tools allowed them to read the carbonized papyrus without unrolling it, without risking its destruction. Artificial intelligence processed the images, deciphering letters and words that had been invisible to the naked eye.

Historians had long known that Plato died in Athens in 348 or 347 B.C. and that he was buried somewhere at the Academy he had founded. But "somewhere" was the operative word. The Academy's grounds were vast, and no ancient source had pinpointed his exact resting place—until now. The deciphered text revealed that Plato lay in a garden reserved for him, a private area set aside for his school. More specifically, he was buried near a structure called the Museion, a shrine dedicated to the Muses. This was not a generic statement about the Academy. This was a location.

So far, the researchers have successfully read approximately one thousand words from Philodemus's text, representing roughly thirty percent of the whole. The work has already yielded other historical details. The scroll indicates that Plato was sold into slavery sometime between 404 and 399 B.C.—earlier than the previously accepted date of 387 B.C. The text also contains a dialogue in which Plato expresses contempt for the musical abilities of a Thracian musician, a small but telling window into the philosopher's character and his attitudes toward non-Greek peoples.

The Academy itself did not survive antiquity. The Roman general Sulla destroyed it in 86 B.C., more than four centuries after Plato's death. Whatever physical markers once identified his burial site were lost. For nearly two thousand years, his grave became a matter of historical speculation. Now, through the convergence of ancient writing, modern imaging, and machine learning, the location has been recovered from the ash of Vesuvius—not the philosopher's remains, but the words that tell us where to look. The work continues. Seventy percent of Philodemus's text remains to be read, and with it, likely more details about Plato, his Academy, and the intellectual life of ancient Athens.