Herculaneum: New Technologies and New Discoveries in Art and Text

This paper presents a revised text of a number of relatively well preserved columns (I0 to 15) of Philodemus' first book of De dis (On the Gods). It uses this revised text to clarify his arguments as to why the fears of animals and humans are similar but not the same. There is currently no modern, English-language edition of this text. Knut Kleve worked on the text in the 1990s, and published findings showing that the text is more than 11 columns longer than once thought.

Over fifteen years, the concept of virtual unwrapping as only a possibility has moved to a demonstrated process that has produced text from a scroll that cannot be physically opened (Seales et al. 2016). The intact Herculaneum scrolls, of which there are almost 300, however, continue to elude successful analysis and, as of this writing, remain unread. There are three primary challenges which, as the presentation will explain, will imminently be overcome, clearing the way for complete texts to be extracted from intact Herculaneum scrolls.

The lost-wax technique offered ancient bronze-workers opportunities for both replication and variation. Evidence for the process has frequently been documented, but the careful and nuanced planning that occurred when working with a wax model deserves closer scrutiny. Through a close collaboration with the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, we have examined three bronze sculptures from the Bay of Naples - the Apollo and Diana from Pompeii (MANN Inv. 5629 and 4895), and the Tiberius from Herculaneum (MANN Inv. 5615).

This paper investigates the possible activities and cultural experience of the domestic room known as the tablinum in the atrium houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Directly visible from the street, the tablinum was a pivotal room within the house acting as visual shorthand for the dominus in presenting himself as bonus vir (that is, as a good citizen).

This paper focuses on the landscape paintings, which were integrated in the decorative schemes featuring on walls of early Imperial houses and villas, to address the ways in which these representations related to contemporary architecture and landscape architecture design. Whereas the early surviving representations of landscape show inland pastoral scenes in their majority, from the beginning of the first century CE the bulk of landscape paintings portray littoral scenes featuring porticoes and villas hovering over bays and harbours.