April 17, 2005
More Classics to Read
This is incredibly exciting news:
For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.. . .
In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it [infra-red technology] to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.
It would be absolutely wonderful if they managed to recover a large number of lost works. Not only would it force Classical scholars to adjust their understanding of practically the entire corpus (itself an exciting proposition for scholars), but the world would be granted more worthy literature from the beginning of Western civilization. I'm convinced that, had the Greeks not owned slaves and thus associated all manual labor with slavery, they and not the Romans would have been the dominant power in the West for a thousand years. Couple that with an Alexandrian library that doesn't burn down and we'd probably already have colonies on the moon.