What has been deciphered in the past ( c 1750 ) has been disappointing. Calpurnius Piso seems to have been a patron of a minor Greek philosopher named Philodemus.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/1...le-library
Of course, that is not to say that there might not be lost works of other more important writers but so far it seems that have merely broken into the "P" section of the library.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/1...le-library
Quote:It was four years before the first scrolls were successfully unwrapped, but eventually Piaggio managed to unwrap fifty more, some dozens of feet long, with his machine. And what lost masterpieces did he reveal? Not Livy, or Sappho, or Simonides, the Greek lyric poet whom William Wordsworth invoked in his poem “September, 1819”:
Quote:O ye, who patiently exploreMost of the scrolls, including the first one unwrapped by Piaggio, “On Music, Book 4,” were written by the same person—a minor Greek poet and philosopher named Philodemus. Who was he? A nineteenth-century commentator called him “an obscure, verbose, inauthentic Epicurean from Cicero’s time.” Thanks to decades of painstaking work by Father Piaggio and his successors, we have the final book of Philodemus’ multivolume “On Music,” large parts of his “Rhetoric,” and his “On the Stoics,” “On the Good King According to Homer,” “On Flattery,” “On Wealth,” and “On Anger,” among many others. In some cases, there are multiple copies of the same book.
The wreck of Herculaneum lore,
What rapture! could ye seize
Some Theban fragment, or unroll
One precious, tender-hearted scroll
Of pure Simonides.
Of course, that is not to say that there might not be lost works of other more important writers but so far it seems that have merely broken into the "P" section of the library.
