New texts from Greek antiquity continue to emerge on scraps of
papyrus from the sands of Egypt, not only adding to the surviving
corpus of classical and Hellenistic literature, but also
occasionally offering a glimpse into how these poems were studied
in antiquity. "New Literary Papyri from the Michigan Collection:
Mythographic Lyric and a Catalogue of Poetic First Lines" presents
three such new texts: an innovative lyric poem on the Trojan cycle,
a scholarly anthology of lyric verses, and a brief but enigmatic
third text. Cassandra Borges and C. Michael Sampson offer the
original Greek text of these pieces, along with their scholarly
commentary, analyzing their features in a variety of
contexts--historical, cultural, poetic, mythological, religious,
and scholarly.
The fragments collected here are of considerable antiquity (late
third to second century BCE) a fact that is significant inasmuch as
it places them among the oldest Greek papyri, but all the more so
because in this period, a scholarly community was thriving in
Ptolemaic Alexandria, the political and cultural capital of
Hellenistic Egypt. The fragments bear witness to that scholarly
activity: not only is their anthology of poetic verses consistent
with other scholarly selections, but the very survival of these
texts may well be at least partially indebted to the work of the
Alexandrians in studying and propagating Greek literature in
Egypt.
This edition supplements the 1970s work of Reinhold Merkelbach
and Denys Page. Recent digitizing for the APIS project revealed a
previously unsuspected join with other material, however, which
alone warrants a new, comprehensive edition and analysis.
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