When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79, it buried various cities at the Gulf of Naples under massive volcanic material—including Herculaneum, located near Pompeii. In the 18th century, an exceptionally luxurious Roman villa was excavated there, close to the ancient city walls and shoreline. The villa's marvelous wall paintings, mosaics, busts and statues had been conserved by the ashes.

This building, Villa of the Papyri, is named after its most remarkable treasure. It housed the only preserved library from antiquity: around 1,000 papyrus scrolls that were not destroyed by the eruption, but carbonized (turned into a kind of charcoal) and sealed in the earth until their rediscovery.

The villa probably belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a Roman consul and Julius Caesar's father-in-law. He was the patron of the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara (110–30BC), who may have lived in the villa.

Before moving to Italy, Philodemus was educated in Athens at the philosophical center of the Epicureans. Its founder, Epicurus, proclaimed the world was made up of atoms and considered pleasure, friendship and atheism as essentials for a happy life.

The original Greek texts of the Epicureans were lost in late antiquity, but a Latin poetic version of Epicurus's philosophical views survived. It dealt with ethics and especially physics, and was titled "On The Nature Of Things."