If you have visited Herculaneum, one of the towns buried when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, you will be familiar with the Villa of the Papyri, owned at the time by Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a politician and father-in-law of Julius Caesar. It was a seaside villa on a palatial scale – the width of its beach frontage alone exceeds 220m (721ft). When it was excavated in the middle of the 18th Century, it was found to hold more than 80 bronze and marble statues of the highest quality and the only library to have survived from the classical world. A blast of furnace-like gas from the volcano at 400C (752F) carbonised the 2000 papyrus scrolls, before the town was buried in a fine volcanic ash which later cooled and solidified into rock.

When excavators and treasure hunters set about exploring the villa in the 18th Century, they mistook the scrolls for lumps of charcoal and burnt logs. But once it was realised what they were – possibly because of the umbilicus, the stick at the centre of the scrolls – the challenge was to find a way to open them. A conservator from the Vatican, Father Antonio Piaggio (1713-1796), devised a machine to delicately open the scrolls. But it was slow work and the scrolls tended to go to pieces. “They are as black as burnt newspaper,” says Dirk Obbink, a lecturer in Papyrology at Oxford University, who has been working on the Herculaneum papyri since 1983.

This began to change 15 years ago with the use of infra-red light technology, and now with multi-spectral imaging. Instead of taking a single (“monospectral”) image of a fragment of papyrus under infrared light (at typically 800 nanometres) the new technology takes 16 different images of each fragment at different light levels and then creates a composite image. Now the detail of the new images is so good that the handwriting on the different fragments can be easily compared, which should help reconstruct the lost texts out of the various orphan fragments. Of the 2000 scrolls about 1,600 to 1,700 have now been unrolled.

What has this to do with Epicurus? Well, firstly, a major discovery is a third of “On Nature”, a previously lost work by Epicurus. But many of the texts that have emerged so far are written on Epicureanism by a follower of Epicurus, the philosopher and poet Philodemus of Gadara (c.110-c.40/35BC). The exciting and frustrating thing is, though, that only part of the villa has been excavated. Indeed, when you go there you can see that most of the ancient town lies under modern buildings. What other treasures lie under the volcanic rock? If only we could discover more of the works of Epicurus, lying tantalisingly close, and yet so far! (An edited version of an article in the BBC News Magazine, December 2013)