from Hacker News

Uncovered Euripides fragments are 'kind of a big deal'

by caf on 8/5/24, 12:11 AM with 90 comments

  • by dmvdoug on 8/5/24, 1:06 PM

    As a Classics major in college and with continuing love for that decaying old grande dame of a discipline, this is pretty cool and I hope the identification holds up to scrutiny (because it would be a big deal).

    Then there’s this:

    The two scholars have also recently discovered the upper half of a colossal statue of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II in their joint excavation project at Hermopolis Magna.

    Percy Bysshe Shelley is practically shouting from the grave.

    I MET A TRAVELER FROM AN ANTIQUE LAND…

  • by lordleft on 8/5/24, 2:14 PM

    My favorite play is the Herakles of Euripides, which ends on these lines:

        The man who would prefer great wealth or strength

    more than love, more than friends

    is diseased of soul

  • by rwmj on 8/5/24, 12:49 PM

    There's such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual festivals where you'd have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies over 5 days[1]. That's just one city state. Only 32 full plays survive.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysia

    Edit: Reading the article, I'm surprised they don't seem to have done any computer-based textual analysis of the authorship. We have other plays attributed to Euripides so matching 98 lines of text shouldn't be too difficult.

  • by bjornsing on 8/5/24, 1:51 PM

    I named my home server (that I mostly run machine learning experiments on) euripides, because I found a quote by him very insightful: “Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”

  • by alexpotato on 8/5/24, 1:33 PM

    > Using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a comprehensive, digitized database of ancient Greek texts maintained by the University of California, Irvine

    I always love to hear about a school or organization that says "Hey everyone! We are going to store the central digital index and database of the thing we care about. Come check it out!"

  • by mtsolitary on 8/5/24, 1:32 PM

    Euripedes fragments, Youpayfordes fragments!

  • by loughnane on 8/5/24, 3:40 PM

    It's really a miracle that we have as much as we do from antiquity, but I'm still excited whenever something new comes uip.

  • by gadders on 8/5/24, 3:57 PM

    Tangentially related, but I recently read Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon [1]

    It's set after Sicily defeats Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Two unemployed potters decide to stage two plays by Euripides using the Athenian prisoners kept in the infamous quarry.

    Really enjoyable tragi-comedy.

    [1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/295543/ferdia-lennon

  • by complaintdept on 8/5/24, 5:15 PM

    Re: lost classics, I hope we can recover an intact work by Heraclitus from those burnt scrolls in Herculaneum, that would make me lose my shit.

  • by peterclary on 8/5/24, 11:45 PM

    I only regret that several of my old Classics masters are no longer around to celebrate this.

  • by persnickety on 8/5/24, 5:34 PM

    How did they manage to squeeze 98 lines on 10.5 square inches? That's less than 68cm². For 5mm×5mm characters that area can fit 272 characters, so not even 3 characters per line.

  • by codeofficer on 8/5/24, 1:21 PM

    Euripides trousers, Umendades trousors.