Long before men’s daily thoughts about ancient Rome became a TikTok meme, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman’s mind was regularly turning toward the Roman Empire.
In the early pandemic months of 2020, he ripped through Philip Matyszak’s “24 Hours in Ancient Rome,” a book that, by his own admission, was “written for eighth graders.” Friedman went down a Roman rabbit hole, diving into Wikipedia articles about the ruins of Pompeii and learning how to bake Panis Quadratus, an ancient sourdough. But nothing piqued his interest like a trove of burnt scrolls discovered 270 years ago in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.
The Herculaneum papyri—roughly 600 scrolls, each around 30 feet long when unrolled—had been charred beyond recognition during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E.. The scrolls, now kept at both the Institut de France in Paris and the National Library of Naples, are in such a deteriorated condition that they cannot be physically opened, as they would crumble into ash. “If we could read them, it would double the total corpus of literature we have from antiquity,” Friedman said. “And, like, wow, those are big stakes.”
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