Uncovered Euripides fragments are 'kind of a big deal'

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 <i>would</i> be a big deal).<p>Then there’s this:<p><i>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.</i><p>Percy Bysshe Shelley is practically shouting from the grave.<p>I MET A TRAVELER FROM AN ANTIQUE LAND…

My favorite play is the Herakles of Euripides, which ends on these lines:<p><pre><code> The man who would prefer great wealth or strength more than love, more than friends is diseased of soul</code></pre>

There&#x27;s such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual festivals where you&#x27;d have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies over 5 days[1]. That&#x27;s just one city state. Only 32 full plays survive.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dionysia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dionysia</a><p>Edit: Reading the article, I&#x27;m surprised they don&#x27;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&#x27;t be too difficult.

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.”

&gt; Using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a comprehensive, digitized database of ancient Greek texts maintained by the University of California, Irvine<p>I always love to hear about a school or organization that says &quot;Hey everyone! We are going to store the central digital index and database of the thing we care about. Come check it out!&quot;

Euripedes fragments, Youpayfordes fragments!

It&#x27;s really a miracle that we have as much as we do from antiquity, but I&#x27;m still excited whenever something new comes uip.

Tangentially related, but I recently read Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon [1]<p>It&#x27;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.<p>Really enjoyable tragi-comedy.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penguin.co.uk&#x2F;authors&#x2F;295543&#x2F;ferdia-lennon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penguin.co.uk&#x2F;authors&#x2F;295543&#x2F;ferdia-lennon</a>

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.

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

How did they manage to squeeze 98 lines on 10.5 square inches? That&#x27;s less than 68cm². For 5mm×5mm characters that area can fit 272 characters, so not even 3 characters per line.

Euripides trousers, Umendades trousors.