A scroll detailing the final hours of Plato, found in a cache in a villa belonging to Julius Caesar's father-in-law in Herculaneum (near Pompeii), has now been deciphered.

theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/29/herculaneum-scroll-plato-final-hours-burial-site

He was not overly fond of the entertainment that evening, but I would also like to spend my final hours entertained by the flute playing of a Thracian slave girl.

The scrolls - hundreds of them - are, as you might expect given what happened to Herculaneum, mere lumps of charcoal, and it is only with modern CT scanning techniques and computer-aided reconstruction that we are able to read them. In fact, it's only last year that the first words were read this way.

theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/05/ai-helps-scholars-read-scroll-buried-when-vesuvius-erupted-in-ad79