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For a long time, I've been fascinated by the idea that there are a countless number of invaluable works by Aristotle and others that - as far as we know - are no longer extant. Are they lost forever to the ravages of time? Perhaps. Still, enough works of tremendous importance have turned up in recent times to suggest that there is plenty still waiting to be found. The Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt are probably the best known example. A great effort to retrieve lost texts is going on under the name 'The Philodemus Project'. According to its website:

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., it buried two towns. One of these was Pompeii, now among the most familiar archaeological sites in the world. The other was Herculaneum, a seaside resort which was home to the villas of wealthy Romans who would come to the beautiful Bay of Naples to escape the heat and hubbub of the capital. Herculaneum has proved difficult to excavate, buried as it is beneath ca. 20 meters of concrete-like material, the hardened volcanic mud which covered it 2,000 years ago and to whose thickness subsequent lava flows have added. Early excavations in the city were conducted by digging wells and tunnels into this rock and exploring for ancient treasures. In 1752 workers tunneling into a large, wealthy villa which would have overlooked the Bay in antiquity discovered a large number of what appeared to be sticks of charcoal, some of them bundled together. Upon closer inspection, these sticks proved to be rolls of the ancient writing material papyrus. Numerous attempts to open these rolls and read their contents failed, due to their extreme fragility and the fact that they were burnt by the ca. 300 degree Celsius volcanic flow, compressed by the weight of rubble and mud, and congealed by water. Eventually, several hundred of the rolls were partly cut apart and partly unrolled. Most turned out to be works of Epicurean philosophy, with books by the first century B.C. Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara, who came to Italy around 80 B.C., especially well represented. Apparently, the Villa of the Papyri contained an extensive library, a significant part of which was formed by a library of Epicurean texts, some of which were present in more than one copy. The difficulties involved in unrolling, reading, and interpreting these texts were formidable. Naples was not a particularly hospitable destination for classical scholars. Finally, the philosophies of the Hellenistic schools were neither well-known nor highly regarded until quite recently. These factors combined to cripple scholarly interest in and use of the Herculaneum papyri. Recently, however, in part due to the efforts of the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri, these rolls have been the object of renewed scholarly work and have yielded many findings indispensable for the study of Hellenistic philosophy. The Philodemus Project is an international effort which aims, supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the generous contributions of individuals and participating universities, to reconstruct new texts of Philodemus' works on Poetics, Rhetoric, and Music. These texts will be published, along with translations and notes, in a series of volumes by Oxford University Press.