Apparently, he was listening to a Thracian slave girl playing the flute, and he was even lucid enough to critique the girl's lack of rhythm despite being in the throes of a fever. That's according to some newly deciphered passages from a papyrus scroll which had been buried after Mount Vesuvius' eruption in AD 79.
Plato is said to have died around 348 BC at the age of 80 or 81. He was said to have been buried within the Academy of Athens, the world's first university. The specific location was not known until new research about the papyrus has revealed that his burial site was in the garden of the Academy of Athens.
The team of Prof. Graziano Ranocchia, a senior researcher and Italian papyrologist at the University of Pisa, has recently uncovered these details with the use of the most advanced imaging diagnostic techniques which enabled them to reconstruct the layers of text within the papyrus which is stuck to each other.
Other information recovered from the papyrus included the fact that Plato was sold into slavery in the 4th century BC, either at the time when the Spartans invaded the island of Aegina or shortly after Socrates' passing in 399 BC. Before, it was believed that Plato had been sold into slavery in 387 BC, but once the team unfolded the papyrus and found sequences of hidden letters, the details of these events in Plato's life became clearer.
Currently, the technique that they are using is still in its early stages but it may prove very useful for other papyri that may have sequences in them which cannot easily be read without unfurling it, realigning the fragments of text, and virtually putting them back to their original positions, so as to restore the flow of thought and context of the passages.
Thankfully, the scroll had been preserved at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, which was discovered in 1750. Scholars have been attempting to decipher the scrolls for years, but due to the condition that the scrolls are in, only the most identifiable parts could be read and translated.
According to archaeologist Domenico Camardo, the impact of the Vesuvius eruption could be compared to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the second world war, because the heat of the pyroclastic surge led to the instantaneous death of many in Pompeii.
(Image credit: GeArtAp/Wikimedia Commons)
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