Illustration was not typical of Roman papyri in antiquity at all, although that isn’t to say it never happened. Pliny describes some authors who illustrated treatises on plants (Plin. HN. 25.4), and some examples survive, but they are rare.

One very well preserved example is P.Oxy. 22.2331, a third century illustrated account of the labors of Hercules. The papyrus intersperses writing and illustration, keeping the images in line with the columns and giving visuals for the story as it is narrated. While the outlines in ink stand out most clearly from the pictures in the current state of the papyrus, in antiquity you would still have been able to see colors used to fill in the illustrations, and traces remain of the hero’s yellow hair and the green ground. If you want to get a better idea of what a more full color illustration looks like, P. Köln IV 179 (late second century) is a good one to look at.

The Hercules papyrus is also remarkable in another way, though. Its simple vocabulary and style, large text size, and word gaps (Greek and Roman scriptio continua did not normally leave gaps between words) all indicate that P.Oxy. 22.2331 was an educational text, aimed at less experienced readers. This is an incredible rarity, however. While we do find texts aimed at children, generally identifiable because they present simplified or less sophisticated versions of other texts, like a poem about a war between a weasel and a mouse, to find a text aimed at entertaining new readers that also contains illustrations is highly unusual.

This isn’t to say that text and illustration didn’t appear together anywhere in the ancient world, and we have examples and attestations of their existence in bookrolls as well as in epigraphic contexts. But it wasn’t typical of a papyrus roll to contain illustrations, and there was no tradition or cultural expectation that these be included.