Doom scrolling

We used to play this game in graduate school: find one, lose one. Find one referred to finding a lost ancient text, something that we know existed at one time because other ancient sources talk about it, but which has been lost to the ages. What if someone was digging somewhere in Egypt and found an ancient Greco-Roman trash dump with a complete copy of a precious text – which one would we wish into survival? Lose one referred to some ancient text we have, but we would give up in some Faustian bargain to resurrect the former text from the dead. Of course there is a bit of the butterfly effect; that’s what made it fun. As budding classicists, we grew up in an academic world where we didn’t have A, but did have B. How different would classical scholarship be if that switched? If we had had A all along, but never had B? For me, the text I always chose to find was a little-known pamphlet circulated in the late fourth century by a deposed Spartan king named Pausanias. It’s one of the few texts about Sparta written by a Spartan while Sparta was still hegemonic. I always lost the Gospel of Matthew. It’s basically a copy of Mark, right down to the grammar and syntax. Do we really need two?

What would you choose? Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.

The problem is more complex than the fact that many texts were lost to the annals of history. Most people just see the most recent translation of the Iliad or works of Cicero on the shelf at a bookstore, and assume that these texts have been handed down in a fairly predictable way generation after generation: scribes faithfully made copies from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and eventually, with the advent of the printing press, reliable versions of these texts were made available in the vernacular of the time and place to everyone who wanted them. Onward and upward goes the intellectual arc of history! That’s what I thought, too.

But the fact is, many of even the most famous works we have from antiquity have a long and complicated history. Almost no text is decoded easily; the process of bringing readable translations of ancient texts into the hands of modern readers requires the cooperation of scholars across numerous disciplines. This means hours of hard work by those who find the texts, those who preserve the texts, and those who translate them, to name a few. Even with this commitment, many texts were lost – the usual estimate is 99 percent – so we have no copies of most of the works from antiquity.¹ Despite this sobering statistic, every once in a while, something new is discovered. That promise, that some prominent text from the ancient world might be just under the next sand dune, is what has preserved scholars’ passion to keep searching in the hope of finding new sources that solve mysteries of the past.

And scholars’ suffering paid off! Consider the Villa of the Papyri, where in the eighteenth century hundreds, if not thousands, of scrolls were discovered carbonized in the wreckage of the Mount Vesuvius eruption (79 AD), in a town called Herculaneum near Pompeii. For over a century, scholars have hoped that future science might help them read these scrolls. Just in the last few months – through advances in computer imaging and digital unwrapping – we have read the first lines. This was due, in large part, to the hard work of Dr. Brent Seales, the support of the Vesuvius Challenge, and scholars who answered the call. We are now poised to read thousands of new ancient texts over the coming years.

But first, a bit of background on the provenance of ancient texts. We don’t have original copies of anything, not of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Herodotus, or the Bible. Instead of originals, we find ourselves dealing with copies. These were first written on scrolls but later in books – the Romans called books codexes – starting in the first century AD.

Did I say copies? That’s actually not correct either. We don’t have first copies of anything. What we do have is copies of copies, most of which date hundreds of years after the original was penned. Even many of our copies are not complete copies. Take, for example, the earliest surviving piece of the New Testament: a fragment from the Gospel of John known as P52. Far from a complete copy of the book, this fragment is about the size of a credit card and dates to, in the earliest estimation, 125 AD. That is over 100 years after Christ was crucified. The fragment is without a doubt at least a copy of a copy because its dating is too late to be either an original or a first copy. It was also found in Egypt, far from both Judea or Syria, where John is thought to have originated. Finding a complete copy of a text – let alone an early Christian Bible – is a home run. We have only found two such Bibles, the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both dating to the mid-fourth century.

More often than finding such complete copies, scholars instead compile the various fragments of copies and try to reconstruct the original work. Once scholars agree on what the original text should be, and in some cases they never reach agreement, the text is ready for publication in the original language. Where there are still variants in the text, scholars will include an apparatus criticus citing the manuscript from which the text is published and listing manuscripts with variant readings. The last step is to add a translation in the vernacular, and there are bilingual and even polyglot editions. These could range from the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a magnificent, six-volume work printed in Madrid in 1519 giving the scriptural text in no less than four languages – Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Aramaic – to the popular Loeb editions printed with both the ancient text and an English translation, for those with some limited knowledge of the ancient languages.

To most fully acclimate the reader to how tenuous this process is, this essay will focus on three different texts. The first will be a very well-known work that was never lost. Nevertheless, almost no one read it in earnest until the nineteenth century. I will then focus on a text that was lost to history, but that we were able to recover from the annals of time. Such examples are fortuitous. Our third example will be a text that we know existed, but of which we have no copies, and consider what important ramifications its discovery could hold. Finally, we’ll turn our attention again to the Villa of the Papyri and the gold mine of texts discovered there that new technologies are currently making available to classicists. By examining the history of the first three texts, I hope to sketch out a picture of how new discoveries from the villa might change our understanding of the ancient world.

The first text we will examine is the Politics of Aristotle. The Politics is Aristotle’s treatise on the various governing structures of fifth and fourth century BC Greece. In the work, Aristotle analyzes not only actual constitutions, but also hypothetical ones, such as Plato’s ideal state detailed in the Republic (of which he was not a fan). The Politics is a famous and storied text, not just among classicists, but among the educated public. It’s where famous lines like ‘Man is by nature a political animal’ originate. It’s a text whose history is more or less complete, containing very few holes. One might think that any ancient text so famous now would have been even more so in the past. But Aristotle’s Politics is a classic counterpoint to that assumption. While it’s not accurate to say, as one of Aristotle’s unpublished works, the Politics was ever lost, it was certainly rediscovered.

First, Aristotle’s writings are divided into two groups: published and unpublished works. The former are works Aristotle wrote for and distributed among the wider Greek public. The latter are works that were written for and restricted to students in the Lyceum, home of the Peripatetic school Aristotle founded in Athens in the late fourth century BC.² Aristotle’s writings were limited only by his interests, and he was interested in everything: science, math, metaphysics, biology, politics, logic, music, and astronomy. The Politics was one of Aristotle’s unpublished works. Plutarch and Strabo both testify that Aristotle’s unpublished works were passed down from headmaster to headmaster of the Lyceum until they found their way into the hands of a private collector, Neleus of Scepsis. That’s where Aristotle’s unpublished library stayed, locked away in a cellar, until Apellicon of Teos discovered the texts and brought them back to Athens, where Andronicus of Rhodes published them in the middle of the first century BC.³

In the case of the Politics, the content was either Aristotle’s personal lecture notes, or those of a brilliant student, or perhaps served as a textbook Aristotle wrote on the discipline that rested in the library of the Lyceum. The work was not made available to the general Greek public until Andronicus’s publication, around 60–50 BC. This was during what is called the Hellenistic period, after the world was made small following the conquests of Alexander the Great. Greek was the lingua franca of much of the world, meaning Greek texts like those of Aristotle could be appreciated by a wide audience. It was also the dawn of the era of Roman occupation of Greece and most of the Northern Mediterranean. Upper-class Romans were desperate to acquaint themselves with all things Greek. Most patricians would have spoken and been able to read in both Greek and Latin.

In general, the ancient Greek and Roman world was Platonist, not Aristotelian. That means Plato’s theory of the forms, as well as his general emphasis on the metaphysical and eternal, held much more social and cultural real estate, as opposed to Aristotle’s very grounded philosophy that dealt in the mechanical, even when addressing the metaphysical. Put another way, Plato’s head was always in the clouds. Questions like ‘What is love?’, ‘Is there life after death?’, and ‘What is the good life?’ dominated Plato’s philosophy. Aristotle cared more about how one writes a good tragedy, or how squid reproduce. That’s the great distinction between the two philosophers. Plato was mostly about why, Aristotle was mostly about how. One can always tell which is which when looking at Raphael’s famous School of Athens in the Vatican Museum. Both philosophers stand side by side: Plato is pointing up, to where he thinks mankind should focus his attention, Aristotle points down toward the Earth. Plato’s intellectual dominance continued into the Middle Ages. Aristotle was all but forgotten in the West after the Roman Empire collapsed. However, the Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who lived in modern-day Cordoba, in Spain, had written an extensive commentary on Aristotelian writings. These eventually made their way to Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), whom Aristotle greatly influenced. Finally, after some 1,500 years after its penning, the Politics began to be read widely and considered as a viable alternative to Plato’s Republic.

Anything Aquinas approved of was held in high regard by the Catholic Church. The Church continued to copy and preserve Aristotle’s works, including the Politics, until the advent of the Aldine Press in Venice. Aldus Manutius, founder of the press, published the Politics in 1498. Even after that point, other ancient authors such as Plato and Cicero were still favored over Aristotle, but by this time, the elite political philosophers of the day would have been familiar with the Politics. It wasn’t until 1832, and the Prussian Academy’s publication of the Berlin corpus of Aristotelian works that the Politics specifically, and Aristotle in general, garnered notoriety among a much broader swathe of the educated public. And this for one who was known as ‘the Master’ in his own lifetime.

The history of the Politics has many twists and turns, but it is complete. In other words, we can draw a straight line from its writing by Aristotle to copies, translated into the vernacular, on the shelf of your local bookstore. Furthermore, the renown of Aristotle today is a testament to the influence of the man and his writings. One need not be a classical scholar or even be a college graduate to acknowledge the intellectual acumen the name Aristotle evokes. Yet the story of the Politics is a clear and obvious example of how, even when everything goes right – the text never disappeared for 500 years, and we have complete copies as opposed to fragments – texts can still fall in and out of vogue, so their reemergence can lead to several smaller rediscoveries, such as Aristotle’s criticisms of the Spartan state, which were widely unknown before the Prussian publication (more on those later). Even if the educated populace knows that a particular work exists, if it is not in demand enough to necessitate translations, or if those translations are not readily available, it is effectively lost. For the Politics, it was ‘rediscovered’ when first published in the ancient world in the first century BC, then again by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. It enjoyed a revival when published by Aldus Manutius. But only within the last couple hundred years, with its publication by the Prussian Academy, did it see the zenith of its reach and popularity. Today, you can find popular editions in almost any bookstore, usually translated from the text published by the Prussian Academy.

Now let’s look at a text with a very different history, the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. The Hellenica Oxyrhynchia is the name given to a group of papyrus fragments found in 1906 at the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, modern Al-Bahnasa, Egypt (about a third of the way down the Nile from Cairo to the Aswan Dam). These fragments were found in an ancient trash heap. They cover Greek political and military history from the closing years of the Peloponnesian War into the middle of the fourth century BC. In his Hellenica, Xenophon covers the exact same time frame and many of the same events.⁴ Both accounts pick up where Thucydides, the leading historian of the Peloponnesian War (fought between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC), leaves off.

While no author has been identified for the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, the grammar and style date the text to the era of the events it describes. This is a recovered text, meaning it was completely lost to history and only discovered in the early twentieth century. Here, the word discovered is appropriately used, as this was not a text that was renowned in ancient times. No ancient historians reference it, and it did not seem to have a lasting impact in its day. What is dismissible in the past is forgotten in the present. The text is written in Attic Greek. This implies that whoever wrote the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia must have been an elite familiar enough with the popular Attic style to replicate it, and likely intended for the history to equal those of Thucydides and Xenophon. There were other styles available to use at the time but Attic Greek was the style of both the aforementioned historians, as well as the writing style of the elite originating in Athens. Any history not written in Attic would have been seen as inferior. Given that the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia was lost for thousands of years, it would seem our author failed in his endeavor to mirror the great historians of classical Greece.

The Hellenica Oxyrhynchia serves as a reminder that the modern discovery of ancient texts continues. Many times, these are additional copies of texts we already have. This is not to say these copies are not important. Such was the case of the aforementioned Codex Siniaticus, discovered by biblical scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf in a trash basket, waiting to be burned, in a monastery near Mount Sinai in Egypt in 1844. Upon closer examination, Tischendorf discovered this ‘trash’ was in fact a nearly complete copy of the Christian Bible, containing the earliest complete New Testament we have. One major discrepancy is that the famous story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery – from which the oft-quoted passage ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ originates – is not found in the Codex Sinaiticus.

Yet, sometimes something truly new to us, that no one has seen for thousands of years, is unearthed. In the case of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, no one seemingly had looked at this text for at least 1,500 years, maybe more. This demonstrates that there is always the possibility that buried in some ancient scrap heap in the desert might be a completely new text that, once published for wider scholarship, greatly increases our knowledge of the ancients.

How does this specific text increase our knowledge? Bear in mind that before this period of Greek history, we have just one historian per era. Herodotus is the only source we have for the Greco-Persian Wars (480–479), and the aforementioned Thucydides picks up from there and quickly covers the political climate before beginning his history proper with the advent of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. But Thucydides’s history is unfinished – one ancient biography claims he was murdered on his way back to Athens around 404 BC. Many doubt this, citing evidence that he lived into the early fourth century BC. Either way, his narrative ends abruptly. Xenophon picks it up from there, and later we get a more brief history of this period from Diodorus, who wrote much later, between 60 and 30 BC. While describing the same time frame and many of the same events, these two sources vary widely in their descriptions of certain events. In some cases, they make mutually exclusive claims. One historian must have got it wrong.

For centuries, Xenophon’s account was the preferred text. That is not to say Diodorus’s history was dismissed, but when the two accounts were in conflict, Xenophon’s testimony got the nod. This was partially because Xenophon actually lived during the times he wrote about, whereas Diodorus lived 200 years after these events in Greek history. Consider if there were two conflicting accounts of the Battle of Gettysburg from two different historians: one actually lived during and participated in the war, while the other was a twenty-first century scholar living 150 years after the events he describes. They disagree on key elements of the battle. Who do you believe? This was precisely the case with Xenophon and Diodorus. Yet, once the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia was published, it corroborated Diodorus’s history far more than that of Xenophon, forcing historians to reconsider their bias toward the older of the two accounts.

As I tell my students all the time, just because an old book says something happened, doesn’t mean it did. Nor does it mean that it happened in the way it’s described in the text. Often we face competing narratives from ancient texts and much like someone sifting through the news cycle in modern times, bearing in mind the biases and limitations of those reporting and trying to figure out what is the truth, so must classicists compare sources and decide which are more reliable than others. It’s not magic, nor is it simple. But we can construct a more complete and accurate narrative of the past by diligently studying the texts we have, tirelessly searching for texts we do not, and ruthlessly applying ourselves to the principle of seeking truth in our ancient sources. The corroborating evidence provided when a new text is discovered is a foundational building block in that process. And that is to say nothing of texts that tell us a completely new story from antiquity, one for which there are no contemporaries, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.⁵

The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk – modern Iraq – and his quest for immortality, or, as he puts it, to write his ‘name in the bricks’. Along the way, Gilgamesh meets all kinds of strange people, including a wild man named Enkidu, who is only finally tamed after Gilgamesh hires a prostitute to sleep with him, and the oldest man alive, Utnapishtim, who survived a great flood that covered the whole world. The discovery of this text in the nineteenth century – found etched in tablets in the ancient city of Nineveh – caused no minor controversy as those who sought to discredit the biblical account of Noah’s ark now had a document from which the biblical tale was, according to them, plagiarized. But those seeking to validate the account simultaneously now had a source, far older than the Genesis text, corroborating the Noah saga.

For our final texts, I have chosen one that is close to my heart by returning to a previous author: the Constitution of the Spartans by Aristotle. This is a work that was attested to many times by ancient authors, so we know it existed but lack a single fragment from it. Sparta has always been a subject of fascination. In spite of the popularity of ancient Sparta, we know shockingly little about the city-state. We have no texts written about Sparta by Spartans. They were all written by foreigners, mostly Athenians, mostly enemies of Sparta. Herodotus, who tells the story of the 300, was not Spartan. Nor was Thucydides; on the contrary, he fought against them in the second Peloponnesian War.

Imagine an alternate universe where all sources about America were written by Soviets at the height of the Cold War. The historians of the future might get a warped sense of reality. That’s exactly the case with ancient Sparta. Furthermore, because the Spartans’ treasure was their culture, not their art or buildings, there is very little archaeology can tell us about how the Spartans lived. Thucydides put this best when, at the outset of his History of the Peloponnesian War, he states that future historians will find it difficult to believe that Athens was seen as the underdog and Sparta the overwhelming favorite when they consider the great temples and agorae of Athens, in juxtaposition to the little developed infrastructure of Sparta. But not all infrastructure is physical or leaves material remains. The city of Sparta did not have a defensive wall in the classical age. Yet, according to Plutarch’s Sayings of the Spartans, the men were their wall. Therefore, in studying Sparta, we have only the written record to guide us.

Finally, the Spartans themselves had an incentive to perpetuate stories that supported their reputation as invincible warriors. If you thought you might go to war with Athens, and you knew the Athenians thought you were crazy, why divest them of that belief? This is known to historians as the Spartan mirage.⁶ The mirage was even more prominent in ancient times because so many among the later Greeks and Romans were Laconiphiles, or, lovers of Sparta. This is what would make Aristotle’s Constitution so useful. Although still an outsider and Athenian, Aristotle wrote about the Spartan state in the Politics, and he did not have good things to say. It is safe to assume that whatever Aristotle’s Constitution said, its testimony was not influenced by the Spartan mirage, giving us perhaps a more accurate picture of life inside the city-state.

Some 500 years after Aristotle’s Constitution of the Spartans, the ancient biographer Plutarch claims to have visited the archives in Sparta. Plutarch was not a historian. As a biographer, his primary interest was to tell a compelling story of his subject. But in absence of an ethnography of the Spartans, Plutarch fills in the gaps. Historian Richard Talbert believed Aristotle’s Constitution to be Plutarch’s main source, more so even than Xenophon’s work by the same name, the oldest and most complete treatise on Spartan government and culture, one which has survived to our time.

While not an exact contemporary of the times he describes, Xenophon lived but a generation after, and saw Sparta at the zenith of her glory before she began to decline. In his account, Xenophon attempts to explain to wider Greek audiences what types of cultural habits and practices allowed the Spartans to ‘rule over all Greece, despite being the smallest of Greek states’, such as the public education system, termed the agoge, communal living, and nonmonogamous marriages. If Talbert is right, this would mean that the lost work of Aristotle was the primary source for what has come to be one of the most authoritative works on ancient Sparta: Plutarch’s biography of the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus. This biography forms much of what we know about Sparta. But it’s a confusing text, contradicting itself on many important points. Moreover, it’s a biography, not a history or political treatise, and makes some outrageous claims that many modern scholars find unconvincing.

Take property inheritance, for example. Plutarch states that all Spartan men were granted a plot of land from the state on which to sustain themselves and their families. When the man died, this plot would return to the state treasury of land and be redistributed. But Stephen Hodkinson thinks this is nonsense, being not only drastically out of step for the times, but also contradicted by other ancient sources, Aristotle himself among them.⁷ Another example would be that of the agoge. While Plutarch paints a picture in which parents completely give up the individual rights to their sons to be educated by the state, Nigel Kennell cites numerous travelogues that show that the sons of Spartans traveled with their parents and spent much time with them during the year. Hardly the rigorous, military-style upbringing Plutarch suggests.⁸

Many of Plutarch’s more radical claims are dismissed by historians who believe he was blinded by the Spartan mirage. It is also a fact that he wrote almost half a millennium after Sparta’s hegemony. But if Aristotle’s Constitution was found, and if it corroborated Plutarch’s account of Spartan life, it could do for Plutarch what the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia did for Diodorus. It would be a game changer in Spartan studies.

Aristotle’s Constitution of the Spartans is not the only text like this. We know about dozens of Greek playwrights who were famous in antiquity, but of whose work we don’t have a single fragment. What of Ptolemy’s history of Alexander the Great? We know he wrote one because Arrian, who wrote the only full history of Alexander we have, claims to have used it as a source. What about the great culture of the Carthaginians, whose poetry and philosophy, we are told, were all over the Mediterranean prior to Rome’s final destruction of the city and erasure of their culture in 146 BC? What could we learn about the Punic Wars if we found a Carthaginian history of the conflict? What else might be waiting for us out there and how might that add to our perception of ancient history?

As much as we have discussed our fortune at both preserving and finding ancient texts, just having a physical copy of the work is only half the battle. One still has to read books and scrolls that are prone to crumple into dust the minute they are opened. For that, we turn to the treasure trove of texts found at the Villa of the Papyri. In 1750 AD, an Italian farmer went out to dig a well. He discovered a marble floor. He notified the Italian authorities and within days the field in which he was working was teeming with scholars.⁹ What the farmer had unwittingly discovered were the remains of an elegant villa in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, one of the cities buried under a smoldering flood of ash when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.

While the villa was a cornucopia of ancient Roman art and architecture, the most bountiful treasure found buried in the countryside was a full library of over 1,800 books and scrolls. Hence the name. This remains the largest single discovery of ancient writings to date. In particular, many of the texts were identified as the writing of Epicurus, a Greek philosopher in the late fourth and early third century. His famous tetrapharmakos, the four drugs, or four guidelines to live a happy life, were discovered there.¹⁰ Many of the scrolls were damaged, and there are many more that have not been deciphered. But these scrolls and resources proved invaluable in scaffolding the larger portions of Epicurus’s work that remains. Prior to this discovery, all we had of Epicurus were three summaries of his work via Diogenes Laertius in his Lives and Sayings of Famous Philosophers. Our knowledge of one of the largest and most vibrant philosophical schools of thought among both the later Greeks and Romans would be greatly compromised had it not been for our fortuitous farmer and his necessity for a well.

However, many of the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri remain not only unread, but also unopened. This is because the eruption of Vesuvius left the scrolls carbonized, making it nearly impossible to open them. Despite this obstacle, Dr. Brent Seales pioneered a new technology in 2015 that allowed him and his team to read a scroll without opening it. The technique, using X-ray tomography and computer vision, is known as virtual unwrapping, and it was first used on one of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically the En-Gedi scroll, the earliest known copy of the Book of Leviticus (likely 210–390 CE). The X-rays allow scholars to create a virtual copy of the text that can then be read like any other ancient document by those with the proper language and paleography skills. Using Dr. Seales’s technique, scholars have been able to upload many of the texts online. A group of donors led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross have offered cash prizes to teams of classicists who can decipher the writings. The race to read the virtually unwrapped scrolls is known as the Vesuvius Challenge.

By democratizing the translation of these texts, virtual unwrapping has created a type of Wild West for scholars, allowing them to pursue lasting glory in the field and no small amount of money as they compete to translate the scrolls. The first prize money was claimed last year, and there are many more scrolls to be translated and prizes to be claimed.

There is also this to consider: the villa isn’t fully excavated. This means there are large portions of it that have not been unearthed, and we don’t know what else might be buried there. Despite the site being discovered in the 1700s, excavations found new sections of the house first in the 1990s, then again in 2007. To this date, archaeologists estimate that there are 2,800 square meters left to be uncovered. Even if you consider just what we already have from the library, there are many scrolls still to be virtually unwrapped, and then read. Within the last few days of writing this article, it was announced that one of the scrolls disclosed the location of Plato’s tomb. Who knows what else might have been hiding among the scrolls of the Villa of the Papyri, and once translated and annexed into the wider corpus of ancient literature, what that might teach us about the ancient world. A copy of Aristotle’s Constitution of the Spartans may even be among the scrolls, waiting to be translated.

Resurrecting the dead is difficult; Jesus knew that. And the only reason we know that he knew that is because the church saw the preservation of scripture as a core duty. Not one scrap of text from the ancient world has come to us without untold numbers of heroes quietly working to hand down, from generation to generation, the texts that have primarily shaped the modern world. We are thankful for documents like the Politics, documents whose life cycle we can narrate from conception to the present moment. Even then, such texts can fall in and out of fashion, and their knowledge can be lost to entire generations. Texts such as the Hellenic Oxyrhynchia are windfalls of good fortune, ones that are completely forgotten in their own day, then lost a second time to history, buried in some ancient Egyptian trash heap. All the work necessary to make texts like the Politics accessible need also be done for texts like the Hellenica Oxyrhinchia.

Yet there is still another monumental step: the texts must first be discovered. Dwarfed in comparison to the first two groups are texts – such as Aristotle’s Constitution of the Spartans – that were attested to by ancient sources but have been completely lost to the annals of time, like the vast majority of Greek and Latin texts.¹¹ These sources, while now completely unavailable to us, might yet be discovered at any time, on any dig. On any given day the earth might bestow its blessing, uncovering wonders from the past, as was the case with many of the works of Epicurus, which would have fallen into this latter category of lost works, until we discovered the Villa of the Papyri. Yet even such a fortuitous discovery could not be taken advantage of were new techniques not developed for reading scrolls whose survival depends on not opening them. I always tell my Greek and Latin students that there is a point where the science of translating becomes pure art. Likewise, there is a point at which the recovery, translation, restoration, and, finally, the study of ancient texts becomes treasure seeking. You never know what treasure might be hiding in the next ancient Egyptian trash heap.