🏺 Herculaneum: From Hercules to Artificial Intelligence

Pompeii got the fame, Herculaneum got everything else. It was smaller, home to some four to five thousand people, and it was richer. And because Vesuvius buried it differently from Pompeii, things survived here that burned or rotted everywhere else: wooden doors, beds, roofs, upper floors, even food. Here is its story, from Hercules to artificial intelligence.

A town with a hero in its name

According to a legend recorded by the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the town was founded by Heracles himself, Hercules to the Romans, on his way home from Spain after one of his twelve labours. Hence the name.

The reality is less heroic and more crowded. According to the geographer Strabo, the place passed from Oscans to Etruscans and Pelasgians, and in the 4th century BC to the Samnites. Then came Rome. In the Social War, Herculaneum sided against Rome and lost. In 89 BC it became a Roman municipium, and its men received Roman citizenship.

The little town by the sea turned into a resort. Wealthy Romans built villas here with views over the bay. The biggest of them, the Villa of the Papyri, probably belonged to Caesar's father-in-law, Piso.

A warning nobody understood

In February of the year 62, or 63 according to some sources, a strong earthquake shook Campania. Pompeii was badly damaged, Herculaneum less so. The philosopher Seneca devoted a whole section of his Natural Questions to it. Nobody thought of connecting it with the vine-covered hill above the town. Seventeen years later, everybody did.

The day the wind blew the right way, and the night it wasn't enough

In 79, Vesuvius blew open. The date traditionally given is 24 August, but newer finds point rather to the autumn. A column of ash and pumice rose into the sky, and the wind drove it south-east, onto Pompeii. Herculaneum, on the western side of the volcano, at first got only a little ash. Thanks to that, many people managed to get away.

Those who stayed moved down to the beach during the night and waited for boats. From Misenum, where the Roman fleet was based, its commander Pliny the Elder set sail to rescue people around the bay. He himself died near Stabiae. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, then seventeen, described it all in two letters to the historian Tacitus. They are the first detailed account of a volcanic eruption in history.

Then pyroclastic flows came down the slope onto Herculaneum: avalanches of glowing gas, ash and rock. Several came one after another and left about twenty metres of material that set almost as hard as stone. The town vanished underground. And because the flows buried it fast and cut off the air, the wood didn't rot but carbonised and kept its shape.

Sixteen hundred years of silence and a well

On top of Herculaneum a new little town grew up, called Resina. Nobody knew what lay under their feet.

Only in 1709 did men digging a well strike marble. The Prince d'Elbeuf had tunnels driven out from the bottom of the well to haul out statues. He had no idea he had dug straight into an ancient theatre. From 1738, on the orders of King Charles of Bourbon of Naples, the military engineer Alcubierre dug here, still in tunnels like a mine, mainly looking for statues and frescoes for the royal collections. The famous antiquarian Winckelmann wrote that Alcubierre knew about as much about antiquities as the moon knows about crayfish.

In 1750 the tunnels hit the Villa of the Papyri. Between 1752 and 1754 about 1,800 pieces of carbonised scrolls were found there: the only library to survive from antiquity. From the 1750s on, the priest Antonio Piaggio unrolled them on a machine of his own invention, millimetre by millimetre. Many scrolls crumbled in the process.

Digging in the open air

Real archaeology only began in 1927. Amedeo Maiuri started uncovering the town from above, street by street, and led the work for more than thirty years. Herculaneum became a town you can walk through.

But one thing still didn't add up. Only a handful of bodies had been found in the streets, so people believed the inhabitants had escaped. In the 1980s, archaeologists finally reached the ancient beach. In the vaulted chambers by the sea and on the sand lay the remains of about three hundred people. Women and children in the chambers, men outside. They were waiting for a rescue that never came. Nearby lay an overturned wooden boat.

In 1997 Herculaneum, together with Pompeii, was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Since 2001 the Herculaneum Conservation Project, funded by the American Packard Humanities Institute, has been helping the Italian state look after the site. Since June 2024 you can even walk down to the ancient beach.

The library that spoke

The scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri look like burnt logs, and most of them nobody could ever open. So in 2023 the Vesuvius Challenge was launched: the scrolls were scanned with X-rays and artificial intelligence searched them for traces of ink. In February 2024 the grand prize went to three students who had read more than 2,000 characters from a scroll that was still rolled up. The text was about pleasure, and about whether food is better when it's scarce. In 2025 the title of a scroll was read for the first time too: Philodemus, On Vices.

So two thousand years after the eruption, Herculaneum is still talking. All it takes is a little time and a lot of computing power.

What to remember

- Hercules gave the town its name, at least according to legend. - 79: a day of ash on Pompeii, a night of avalanches on Herculaneum, twenty metres above the town. - 1709: a well, some marble, and by accident a whole theatre. - 1969: Resina renamed itself Ercolano so tourists would finally realise Herculaneum was here, instead of heading straight to Pompeii. - 2024: artificial intelligence read the first lines of a scroll nobody had opened since the eruption.