The International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri (C.I.S.P.E.) was founded in Naples in 1969 on the initiative of Prof. Marcello Gigante, who became its Secretary. The President was Prof. Vittorio De Falco, and its members were the most famous scholars working on texts from Herculaneum, including Bruno Snell, Reinhold Merkelbach, and Wolfgang Schmid. The current President is Prof. Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli, while Prof. Gigante is Vice-President, and Prof. Francesca Longo Auricchio is Secretary; alongside a number of well-known Italian and foreign scholars, the Center's ex officio members are the Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Naples 'Federico II', the Director of the National Library 'Vittorio Emanuele III' of Naples, the Director of the Officina dei papiri ercolanesi, the Director of the Istituto di Patologia del libro, and the Archaeological Superintendent of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The legal home of the C.I.S.P.E. is the Department of Classical Philology 'Francesco Arnaldi' of the University of Naples 'Federico II'.

The C.I.S.P.E. was formed with the dual purpose of working toward the resumption of the excavation of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum and of promoting the renewal of studies on the texts of Herculaneum, which are now housed in the Officina dei Papiri of the National Library 'Vittorio Emanuele III' of Naples.

It is well known that the papyri were discovered, beginning in 1752, by workmen of the Bourbon royal family in the Herculanean Villa which probably belonged to the Roman family of the Pisos. At that time the building had been entered only via well-shafts and tunnels, and it was never uncovered; for this reason scholars are now pressing for a complete excavation which, they hope, will yield further texts and works of art which had escaped the eighteenth-century exploration. In 1986 the Archaeological Superintendency of Pompeii began a new exploration of the Villa, starting with identifying and precisely locating the old wells dating from the Bourbon era, and preparing for a genuine modern excavation. The excavation of the Western zone of Herculaneum, between the city and the Villa, has got under way, and has brought to light part of the atrium, and has also revealed that the building includes more storeys, at least three, which underlie the part already known and which were not explored in the eighteenth century.

Beginning in 1970 the C.I.S.P.E. has awarded scholarships to Italian and foreign researchers who wanted to work on Herculanean texts. We can say that a generation of young, and less young, scholars has had experience of these papyri: from the Japanese Eiko Kondo, who inaugurated the series, to David Sedley, Claire Millot, Annick Monet, Daniel Delattre, Simon Laursen, Edeltraud Dürr, Jürgen Hammerstaedt, Jeffrey Fish, and Kirk Sanders; and also many mature scholars, such as Albert Henrichs, Richard Janko, Dirk Obbink, Elizabeth Asmis, David Armstrong, Jim Porter, David Blank, and Catherine Atherton (one could cite even more of them, and the many Italians and Neapolitans also not listed here).

The private library found in the Villa contains works of Epicurus and his disciples which are not known from other sources and which—for this reason as well—have great significance. Today we possess large parts of certain books of the magnum opus of Epicurus, On Nature , the most extensive of which are the remains of Books XIV, XV, XXV, and XXVIII.

Books by Epicureans of the first generation have been discovered: Colotes' Against the Lysis of Plato , Against the Euthydemus of Plato ; Polystratus' On Irrational Contempt for Popular Opinions , On Philosophy ; Carneiscus' Philista ; also works by the somewhat later Epicureans: Demetrius Laco's On Poetry , On Geometry , On the Size of the Sun , On the Common Researches concerning the Way to Live , Textual and Exegetical Aporiai in Epicurus , The Form of God ; and, especially, there are the works of Philodemus of Gadara, the author best represented in the Library, which was probably put together by him.

The works of Philodemus range from the history of philosophy, poetics, rhetoric, music, to ethics, logic, and theology. This rich production was studied at the time of its discovery in the second half of the 18th century, by the respected members of the Herculanean Academy, who, entrusted with this task by the Bourbon King Charles III, published the Herculanensium voluminum quae supersunt Collectio Prior in eleven volumes (1793-1855) and later, after the Unification of Italy, the second series or Collectio Altera , also in eleven volumes. The editions were then re-done in a more mature and modern fashion by some of the great philologists, especially of German origin, who flourished between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.

Nonetheless, in the course of the last thirty years it has become necessary to revise this critical work. The most important factor was the need for first-hand examination of the original papyri which, carbonized and otherwise damaged in the course of the centuries, are quite difficult to decipher. Nowadays they can be read more easily, with the aid of microscopes and of excellent photographic techniques, so that the original papyri must be the basis of any proposed edition. Further, recent progress in the study of Hellenistic philosophy has required that themes and problems in the Herculanean texts be restudied from a new and better informed perspective.

As a foundation for this new work, in 1972 the C.I.S.P.E. published a re-edition of the still fundamental work of Domenico Comparetti and Giulio De Petra, La Villa ercolanese dei Pisoni. I suoi monumenti e la sua biblioteca. At the same time, it founded the journal Cronache Ercolanesi , of which there are twenty-nine volumes to date, edited by M. Gigante and published by Macchiaroli, as a forum for editions and articles on numerous texts; it allows a comprehensive approach to the Epicurean authors found in the Library of Herculaneum; and each volume also contains an article on the archaeology of Herculaneum. Two supplements to the journal appeared in 1983: one on the Villa itself, with archaeological articles by various hands, and the other on the palaeography and scribal hands of the papyri, by Gugliemo Cavallo; a third supplement, published in 1995 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal, offers an index locorum of the Herculaneum papyri treated in the journal.

Since 1978 the C.I.S.P.E. has collaborated with the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in the production of, to date, sixteen volumes of the series La scuola di Epicuro , a collection of editions of the major Herculanean texts supervised by Marcello Gigante and published by Francesco del Franco's Bibliopolis. These modern editions, accompanied by translation into a modern language and an exhaustive commentary, allow a fresh and much deeper access to all aspects of Epicurean philosophy. Philodemus, who had been considered a dull repeater of his masters' thought, now reveals himself to be a thinker of great acuity and broad interests: from logic to ethics, theology, the history of philosophy, and the liberal arts, he was a lively contributor to debates with his contemporaries and rivals. Given the near total loss of their work, Philodemus is a precious source for these thinkers. The interest in Herculanean texts among contemporary scholars of classical philology and philosophy—Italians, British, Americans, French, Germans—shows that these texts have now gained their rightful place in the canons of classical culture.

In 1988 McIlwaine published a bibliographical guide to Herculaneum, Herculaneum. A Guide to Printed Sources , which forms a pendant to the Catalogo dei papiri ercolanesi published in 1979 and updated (in Cronache Ercolanesi ) in 1989. The latter constitutes the starting point for anyone wishing to work on Herculanean texts, providing for each piece of papyrus the necessary technical details and an ample bibliography.

It is well known that the papyri are in a more or less advanced state of carbonization which makes them difficult to handle and to read. In 1753, after various unfortunate experiments, and at the request of Charles III, the Jesuit Antonio Piaggio was summoned to Naples from the Vatican Library, where he was Latin calligrapher and custodian of illuminated manuscripts; it was he who invented the famous machine, with which the majority of the rolls which can be read today were unrolled. Later, other techniques, including chemicals, were tried, but with little success.

As a result of the persistent work of Knut Kleve, Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Oslo, the Officina dei Papiri now has a new method for unrolling the papyri and excellent techniques for photographing even the most inaccessible pieces of them. The possibility of unrolling the volumina will obviously be even more important when it will be possible to open and photograph new papyri recovered from the excavation of the Villa. Meanwhile, however, the photographic and analytical techniques applied by the Norwegian team have already given good results on materials in the Officina which had not been approached by the traditional methods. Fragments of Lucretius' poem De Rerum Natura , of the Annales of Ennius, and a comedy of Caecilius Statius, Obolostates sive Faenerator ('The Usurer') have come to light. As Marcello Gigante had said so often, before the Norwegians' work, an Epicurean library could not fail to contain copies of works by Ennius and Lucretius. Further, the names of the Augustan poets Vergil, Plotius, Quintilius, and Varius, have been found in a papyrus of an ethical work by Philodemus of which they may well have been the dedicatees. The presence of their names was already suspected in other Herculanean rolls, but now, expressly cited and known for certain, they have expanded our knowledge of the cultural environment in which Philodemus worked and, consequently, of Epicureanism in Italy; finally, this discovery has also added weight to the hypothesis that another Herculanean text, the poem on the battle of Actium, might be attributed to Varius.

For some years the C.I.S.P.E. has been collaborating with the Philodemus Translation Project, coordinated by Professors David Blank of the University of California at Los Angeles and Ricahrd Janko of University College London, which aims to produce new texts, along with English translations, of Philodemus' works on Poems , Rhetoric , and Music . This will provide for greater knowledge of the texts from Herculaneum in the Anglo-American world.

For all these reasons, Naples has been the rightful location of two international congresses: the XVII Congress of Papyrology in 1983 and the Congress on Greek and Roman Epicureanism in 1993, twenty-five years after the Congress of the Association Budé held in Paris on the same topic.