April 18, 2005

• Fascinating. I'm going to need the rest of the day to read this properly...
• Arrhh! Ye beat me to it, quid!! Heh! Something fishy about this! Excellent links, thanks, quidnunc! I'm eager to see what works emerge from this. Exciting.
• I thought I'd better get in quick, bees - Wolof was (no doubt) hot on our trail!
• ...and the Muses do the happy dance. Weird how no one thought to use infrared on these fragments before. But how incredibly cool that they're doing so now. Go go go!!
• I was saying to a friend over dinner that you would hardly have bet on a new play from Sophocles being the literary event of the year. This is so sweet.
• Abiezer- Except that it looks like only fragments survive from Sophocles. Three lines isn't much of a play. Unless you're Mamet, and two of those lines are "Fuck you!"
• The article seems to claim that all of The Progeny is now extant. I can't quite articulate how happy this makes me. I hope Sophocles starts winning literary prizes again.
• OK, strike that. It states "part of". But there is hope in philological reconstruction. I watch and wait.
• I'd be interested in Aristotle's lost second book of the Poetics dealing with the theory of comedy.
• Athena, it goes to show how much more we can learn from the discoveries that we already have. If we could get folks to look at material already logged and stored with a fresh eye...
• This just rocks so hard. Just imagine being the first actor in two and a half millennia to speak words by Euripides ... *swoons* And like squid says, if this leads to re-examination of other material as well, who knows what else might be found?
• Oh, God, Squidranch, the Comedy's book would be like, the holy grail of dramatic theory. I get all a-twitter. It would be so cool! Of course, we'll find out that Aristotle had rules like "There should be a loutish husband, who shall from time to time, yell for his wife 'Peggy.'" Or that he predicted the rise of Ray Romano. What other books are there that are lost to antiquity that people would like to see? I know there are plenty of histories out there that have been lost (like the histories that accompanied Alexander's march through Persia). And, man, some new work on the Trojan War would be pretty tits (imagine if there was a new work from Homer— though that's totally unlikely— but wow!)
• I suppose I'll have to renew my Library of Alexandria card now - catching up on all that reading will be a chore and a delight.
• I find it amusing (and perhaps not entirely unjust) that the Library of Alexandria turned out to be a vastly less efficient sepulchre of knowledge than the rubbish dump of Oxyrhynchus.
• I feel I must point out that there may not be a second book of poetics. The assumption that there is one (and which Umberto Eco played so well on) is based on a doubtful reference to it in the book we know as Poetics.
• And Homer didn't write his epics. That was another writer by the same name.
• "I say, Aristotle, what's the secret of..." "Timing." "...comedy?" ah, an oldie, but a goodie.
• The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt Aahhh, it's probably just a bunch of expired coupons. Kidding aside, this is monumental!
• Another great post, quid!
• Another example of when I should have checked your blog first, mate! ;)
• Uh oh. The newest volume of Oxyrhynchus Papyri contains a fragmentary papyrus of Revelation. This papyrus assigns to the Beast: 616, rather than the usual 666. Bad omen: guess this means 10 more years of God-awful horror flick remakes to correct the erroneous numerical assignment.
• I'd be interested in science books and books of mechanical diagrams from the Alexandrian library. I saw a special on the History Channel about this ancient artifact that was found in greece that turned out (they think) to be a gear-based computer capable of predicting the motions of the planets into the future and the past. Stuff that took us another couple thousand years to do right. Can't help wondering what technology would be like now had that knowledge not been lost...
• but are there puppies?
• For you, SideDish, there are always puppies.
• My grandfather's favorite Classics joke: Euripedese, ya pay for dese. Seriously, this is amazing. It puts a happy spin on an otherwise grumpy day!
• No, no, it's: Euripides? Yes. Eumenides? OK.
• Holy sh*t. Whoa! It'd be interesting to see what the pulp fiction of ancient greece looks like.
• caution
• Ah, I always heard it with Euripides pants, you-a buy-a these pants...
• Was it this, TP?
• I love thinking about the great rush being experienced right now by the classicists at Oxford who are reading this stuff.
• Well, bits and pieces have been coming out of Oxyrhynchus for a good century or so - we have bits of Menander and all sorts of fragments already. This is very exciting, though - Epigonoi _and_ Archilochus. Yay! I wonder if the same techniques will be able to get more out of the currently incomprehensible Vindolanda postcards? The Vindolanda postcards are actually quite a useful reminder that, although the finds like Sappho and Menander make the headlines, areas like Oxyrhynchus provide us with the written material that nobody thought to preserve for a day, much less a generation. The notes to shopkeepers, shopping lists, letters - fragments of a culture which give us an insight into what life in the Roman Empire was like if you weren't a member of the upper classes. Which might be quite an interesting question to think about - what should we be looking to get out of Oxyrhynchus?
• Uh-oh. Wait a second, a skeptical caveat.
• This is (slightly) offtopic, but speaking of records that aren't normally kept: I've heard that one of the greatest finds for historians of medieval China and inner Asia were all sorts of paper trading records, which hadn't been kept, but had been used as scrap paper to make funereal clothing for bodies. This was preserved in the dry climate of western China and Central Asia, which is the only reason we have it today. So in other words - save your shopping lists and receipts to entertain social historians in the centuries to come.
• Oxyrhynchus schmoxyrhynchus...
• You have to pay to get to that link, Pleg.
• *confused*
• That's strange. I'm sure I've never registered with the Independent, let alone subscribed, but there don't seem to be any barriers between me and the article. The link works at home as well as at work, so it can't be some corporate subscription. Could it be some annoying UK-only thing? Sorry, anyway. The piece is about the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, where the entire library of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Cesoninus, Julius Caesar's father-in-law, lies carbonised but recoverable. 1,800 volumes have in fact been recovered, but that appears to represent only a section of it. No further work is being done at the moment. One group of archaologists is agitating for the rest to be dug out; another says they have their hands full already just trying to stop the excavated parts of Herculaneum rotting away.
• Nor do I in North America have any difficulty accessing The Independent via the blogroll here.
• *tries again* Nope. Independent Portfolio Article, please send 1 quid.
• Face it, Wolof, The Independent just doesn't like Aussies.
• On the contrary, they want 1 of me.
• I didn't have any problem either. Great article (in fact, it would have been a good post in itself). One paragraph: It is highly probable that Piso also possessed a large library, as became someone of his wealth and culture: not merely the works of Epicurean philosophy that reflected the special interest of Philodemus, but all the other works, Greek and Roman, with which a man of his civilised tastes could be expected to be familiar: the plays of the Greek tragedians, for example, or the dialogues of Aristotle, or Livy's History of Rome. And given the freakish survival of Philodemus's collection, it is argued, the rest of the library may be in a similar condition: carbonised but accessible. The figure that has been suggested as the likely cost of bringing them back to civilisation is between €20m (£13.6m) and €30m. But the prize, Robert Harris, author of the novel Pompeii, and the scholars argue could be quite literally priceless: our knowledge of the literature of the ancient world could double overnight, with this single excavation.
• hmm, I'm in the same boat as Wolof for both the original article link and the link from Arts & Letters. thanks for the excerpt, languagehat!
• Incidentally, you can see the Vindolanda tablets alluded to by Tannhauser online here.
• No Oxyryhnchus breakthrough. Sigh.
• Bugger. What a pity.
• Good followup article Plegmund. It echoes some of the concerns raised in the skeptical posting I linked to above. It's a shame but on the other hand I wouldn't have heard about Oxyryhnchus otherwise...
• The unique library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried beneath lava by Vesuvius's eruption in AD79, is slowly revealing its long-held secrets
• This villa features in Robert Harris's Pompeii, iirc.