[Viggen]

Greek and foreign experts have used cutting-edge technology to decode the Greek text of the world

[Andrew Dalby]

Greek and foreign experts have used cutting-edge technology to decode the Greek text of the world

[Rameses the Great]

Wouldn't the Greeks have to import the papyrus from Egypt. I don't think they had access to it in Greece.

[Viggen]

Greek and foreign experts have used cutting-edge technology to decode the Greek text of the world's oldest literary papyrus more than four decades after its discovery, it was revealed yesterday. The Derveni Papyrus

[Virgil61]

...

What's interesting about it is that it comes from the period when Greek literature was at its finest and most exciting, but this text belongs to a kind of literature that (until its discovery) we would hardly have believed existed at that time -- rather comparable to modern low-level astrology or psychobabble or something in between. Nonsense, more or less.

 

I've tried to keep up with what I thought was an exciting find, the Herculaneum Papyri, but I read about some disappointment that all it's given up so far was a minor philosopher named Philodemus' works. Interesting but not really everyone's hoped for treasure trove. There's hope that there might be more in the same villa's library but no plans to dig yet. I'd hope someday that some lost histories were found.

[Andrew Dalby]

I've tried to keep up with what I thought was an exciting find, the Herculaneum Papyri, but I read about some disappointment that all it's given up so far was a minor philosopher named Philodemus' works. Interesting but not really everyone's hoped for treasure trove. There's hope that there might be more in the same villa's library but no plans to dig yet. I'd hope someday that some lost histories were found.

 

Incidentally (re-reading what I said, a week later!) I ought not to be too dismissive of 'popular literature'. It's very good for us, if we want to know about ancient societies, to know the kinds of things that interested all those many people who found Thucydides and Aristotle very hard going. (I mean, I find them hard going too.)

 

But Philodemus didn't come into that category at all. You're exactly right about him. Imagine him as a college professor, a good one, a philosophy specialist, who may never write anything brilliant but whose textbooks are well worth reading and who writes poetry for the college magazine. It is fascinating to have (some of) that man's personal, working library, the only such survival from the whole of antiquity: his copies of Epicurus and other related works, his own writings including quotation and discussion of lost works by others. Unfortunately, some of the rolls were lost before anyone realised that they were books; some were destroyed in attempting to unroll them; and the remainder are full of missing words and lines, so they are pretty difficult to read.

 

Some classicists long for the lost books of Livy. And some classicists pray that the lost books of Livy will never be found, there's enough Livy already. I pray (metaphorically) for the lost books of Tacitus.

 

 

 

 

Wouldn't the Greeks have to import the papyrus from Egypt. I don't think they had access to it in Greece.

 

Yes, I'm sure that's right, Rameses. Papyrus was always an Egyptian export.