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Uncovered Euripides fragments are 'kind of a big deal'
- rwmj 2y agoThere'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 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.
- tivert 2y ago> 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. There's such a volume of lost everything. Original masters taped over, archive fires, etc. Now we have new problems like obsolete formats and failing to pay your cloud bills (no more recovering something from an old tape forgotten in a warehouse). In 2000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if no contemporary television managed to survive.
- AdmiralAsshat 2y agoAll that survives is The Love Boat, and future humans will fashion their entire understanding of ancient American history, culture, and religion around this show.
- whythre 2y agoThat honestly doesn’t sound too bad.
- mystified5016 2y agoCould be Jersey Shore...
- klodolph 2y agoAt least Jersey Shore is anthropological in nature
- flenserboy 2y ago"On The Tastes of Women in the Hamburger Kingdom: Doc as the Personification of Female Desire"
- jhbadger 2y agoThere is a satirical (paper) RPG called "Diana: Warrior Princess" that takes its inspiration from this idea. The idea is it is a representation of the idea of 20th century culture as viewed from a millennium into the future, focusing on Princess Di who is depicted as a great leader who fights against Hitler and has advisors like Charles Darwin. It's mocking how "historical fiction" often takes great liberties with fact and mixes people who never lived at the same time together.
- 082349872349872 2y agoUpon seeing "Warrior Princess" I had first been expecting they'd given DFS an ambiguous (sororal or sapphistical?) companion: In short, when I can tell you how I break the laws of gravity, And why my togs expose my intermammary concavity, And why my comrade changed her dress from one that fit more comfily To one that shows her omphalos (as cute as that of Omphale), And why the tale of Spartacus appears in Homer's version, And where we found examples of the genus Lycopersicon, And why this Grecian scenery looks more like the Antipodes, You'll say I'm twice the heroine of any in Euripides! [full text, footnoted: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~valkyrie/parody/xena.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~valkyrie/parody/xena.html ]
- pfdietz 2y agoI am reminded of the Perry Bible Fellowship strip "Now Showing". https://pbfcomics.com/comics/now-showing/ https://pbfcomics.com/comics/now-showing/
- narag 2y agoIn 2000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if no contemporary television managed to survive. Maybe most everything doesn't deserve to survive. Future humans will be busy enough living their lives, to learn an ever growing history of long dead ancestors. For them, it'll be mildly interesting to know that something was invented one thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand years ago, maybe the name of a chosen few relevant persons that first did something. But a complete record of everything that ever happened? I don't think so. Most TV and movies feel horriby dated in a few decades. Actually, I watch TV and movies done now that seem horribly dated.
- mmcdermott 2y agoI remember watching stuff during the pandemic with allusions to distancing or masking and thinking "I'm going to have to explain this to my grandchildren."
- bawolff 2y agoI imagine our grandchildren will think of covid the way we think of the spanish flu - as a minor historical footnote.
- qingcharles 2y agoWe lost the entirety of MySpace, which was a significant cultural moment. I know people who have almost zero photos of their entire childhoods because they were all digital and stored on computers/online and have been lost to the ether.
- adolph 2y ago> There's such a volume of lost everything. Original masters taped over . . . Michael Bond deftly develops this problem in Chapter 5, "Paddington and 'The Old Master'", of the masterpiece "A Bear Called Paddington." [0] Even a read of the linked synopsis brings to light the combinatorial Ship of Theseus nature of all human-interpretation. The pathos brings tears to my eyes: Paddington's failure to recreate a present scrambled by a search for the past is victorious-by-proxy, despite the judges viewing it upside down--just as an artist might draw. [1] 0. https://paddingtonbear.fandom.com/wiki/Paddington_and_%22The_Old_Master%22 https://paddingtonbear.fandom.com/wiki/Paddington_and_%22The... 1. https://www.allaboutdrawings.com/upside-down-drawing.html https://www.allaboutdrawings.com/upside-down-drawing.html
- iosonofuturista 2y agoMy understanding from reading the article, is that the issue is not so much matching the deciphered lines, but the interpretation of that deciphering. So they want the scholarship agreement on what is actually written on the papyrus. I imagine there are plenty of missing words being inserted, unreadable letters being guessed and so on. So the way to do it for now, has to rely more on experience and intuition than a database search.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoI just hope there are good archival structures in place in society nowadays, because there are a lot of theaters worldwide performing plays known and unknown every day, but AFAIK only the best known ones get statues made and I don't believe they contain a list of their works (for example). I mean that would make sense; make sturdy statues of authors / playwrights / etc, and embed copies of their work in a compartiment inside of them or in the material itself. Lose a few in interesting looking hills.
- romaaeterna 2y agoThey didn't have to, several of the lines matched existing fragments. Also, the classical corpus is so small that humans still beat the computers for authorship analysis.
- dmvdoug 2y agoAs 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…
- shadowgovt 2y ago"Sssh, love, go back to bed." ~Mary
- 1-more 2y agoThis is how I find out they were married. Huh.
- globalise83 2y agoEnough opium Percy, time for bed
- greenhearth 2y agoObviously not decaying, but alive and well
- codeofficer 2y agoEuripides trousers, Umendades trousors.
- nescioquid 2y agoEumenides trousers?
- hk__2 2y agoUmendades trousors.
- _a_a_a_ 2y agoEssplain? Am lost.
- bennyg 2y agoSay it out loud - it's a play on words. "You rip a dese trousers, you mend a dese trousers"
- noelwelsh 2y ago'Tis true, but it's also true that Eumenides is an actual Greek deity (and The Eumenides is a play) that sounds the same (at least when pronounced by this monolingual English speaker.) So I feel "Eumenides trousers!" is a slightly better variant of the joke.
- _a_a_a_ 2y agoYeah, I thought that was a direction too. Slightly over thinking it.
- ruined 2y agoeuripedes nuts
- mtsolitary 2y agoEuripedes fragments, Youpayfordes fragments!
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agoit's a shame cartalk isn't still around. imagine how much fun they would have had with cybertruck
- dudeinjapan 2y agoBest comment on HN. As true in Euripedes' time as it is in ours.
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- mandevil 2y agoEuripedes fragments or Eumenides fragments!
- alexpotato 2y ago> 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!"
- baruz 2y agoIt used to be distributed as a CD to university libraries, but these CDs were supposed to be surrendered when the online version came out. I have heard that at least one of these copies (perhaps “out of date” in terms of “new” texts added since the web version debut) exists on some sort of distributed distribution network.
- laichzeit0 2y agoTLG is pretty easy to get hold of. You also want Diogenes, an app that allows you to use that database. It’s very useful if you study Latin or Greek, even as a hobby.
- bjornsing 2y agoI 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.”
- dmvdoug 2y agoI named my Linux box sisyphus because I had so many problems installing distros other than Mint that I became convinced I’d never succeed. And then kde neon Just Worked.
- 4gotunameagain 2y agohaha, love it. although I have to say, Linux installations are a walk in the park these days ;)
- dmvdoug 2y agoYeah, it’s an old Dell desktop box from 2015, what can I say.
- INTPenis 2y agoI should name a server bureaucracy because it's the one word I haven't learned how to spell yet.
- lordleft 2y agoMy 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
- infotainment 2y agoWow, some things never change!
- debacle 2y agoIf you are a student of history, you realize that human nature has always been a constant. We should teach kids in K-12 "Most people are crap, but some of the crap people did amazing things and there were also a few non-crap people out there, of varying impact."
- doctorwho42 2y agoAnd that you should strive to be a non-crap person because it is a valuable trait.
- lukan 2y agoI guess allmost everyone tries that - it is just that our definition of "crap people" is quite different.
- nyokodo 2y ago> everyone tries that They don’t really. People try and fit in publicly so that they’re seen to be good by their group, whereas fitting in to any group at any level in any age requires accepting some things that you know are bad and when things aren’t visible people commonly indulge in a lot of bad that even their group would publicly object to often with the moral license they feel they’ve earned from the performative good they do in public. Being a truly good person by our own standards is hard to the point of almost being impossible.
- loughnane 2y agoIt's really a miracle that we have as much as we do from antiquity, but I'm still excited whenever something new comes uip.
- lmpdev 2y agoIt always makes me a bit sad though So much is still lost and we rely on such tiny fragments or worse hearsay by other authors rehashing their ideas
- dmvdoug 2y agoEspecially notes of Aristotle’s oral ramblings about others’ works, when we know those are wildly casual about accuracy when we can actually compare them to pieces of text.
- gadders 2y agoTangentially 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 https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/295543/ferdia-lennon
- complaintdept 2y agoRe: 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.
- kombookcha 2y agoIt would be so insanely cool. Such a strange situation too - they're right there in front of us, but we can't have them, and it almost feels too good to be true that we might be able to read them one day.
- persnickety 2y agoHow 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.
- peterclary 2y agoI only regret that several of my old Classics masters are no longer around to celebrate this.