Title: Seneca the Elder and his rediscovered ›Historiae ab initio bellorum civilium‹
Abstract: When tiny scraps cause new chapters of Latin literature to be writtenIn the spring of 2014, the binders of the archive of Robert Marichal were dusted off in response to Tiziano Dorandi's recollections of a series of unpublished notes on Latin texts on papyrus.Among these was an in-progress edition of the Latin rolls from Herculaneum, together with Marichal's intuition that one of them had to be ascribed to a certain 'Annaeus Seneca'.In that period, the project PLATINUM was taking shape, and the support of the European Research Council soon brought into existence a long planned project on Latin texts on papyrus.PLATINUM -Papyri and LAtin Texts: INsights and Updated Methodologies.Towards a philological, literary, and historical approach to Latin papyri (ERC-StG 2014 n°636983) is a project dealing with texts in the Latin language on papyrus, both documentary and literary. 1It is a project that moves from the technicalities of the writing material itself to a textual and contextual exegesis of these texts, in order to open new perspectives on the history and culture, especially in its literary forms, of Roman society.The writing material of papyrus obviously implies documents of Eastern provenience -mainly from Egyptcoming from a multilingual and multicultural literate society.With the exception of Late Antique Ravenna, the only Western context preserving papyrus voluminaalbeit charred -is the Library of the Herculaneum Villa.Taking these texts as a focus, PLATINUM followed the unpublished intuition by Robert Marichal as one path of investigation in its own research and work.This work on the Latin P.Herc.1067, including its editio princeps, was published in the specialist review Cronache Ercolanesi in 2017.Working on this papyrus led us to confirm Marichal's intuitions and to go beyond it: P.Herc.1067 is the only extant direct witness to Seneca the Elder's Historiae.Bringing a new and important chapter of Latin literature arise out of a charred papyrus is significant.It is a further demonstration how, with up-to-date methodology, an undervalued research speciality can produce impressive results, in this case by identifying an historiographical work only known from a 1 On the project PLATINUM and its major outputs on literary Latin texts on papyrus see Scappaticcio (2019); more has been and is being done, and the status of the research of the ERC-project PLATINUM can be followed on the website www.platinum-erc.com.