mwh wrote:I am still at a loss to comprehend how, with multitudes of goodies to choose from, we should have had not one but two votes for Panyassis.
Qimmik wrote:We don't need any more long hexameter poems, in Greek or in Latin. In Latin we already have too many of these cacata charta.
Scribo wrote:Ok, here's one: the book on Gynaecology. Domitianic period. Soranus?
John W. wrote:In exchange I'd offer up the letters of St Paul.
Qimmik wrote:If you could exhume one Greek and/or one Latin text in good shape, what would you choose?
What would you give up, if you had to, to obtain these works?
daivid wrote:What to drop?
Having being taken in by talk that Lucian's "True History" was easy and then being utterly defeated by the fist two sentences - absurdly long and complicated - that's my current candidate for the flames.
John W. wrote:In exchange for this batch I'd offer up the non-Pauline NT letters...
Markos wrote:But if you did this, John, I would have to get them back, and I would then be forced to offer up the Catalogue of Ships.![]()
Just for fun...
John W. wrote:I've been thinking of a few more items. I'd like to have:
(i) the start of Aeschylus' Libation Bearers;
(ii) the end of Euripides' Bacchae;
(iii) more of Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 3894 (included in Volume LVII of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, as one of our colleagues certainly knows!), which gives most of Thucydides 3.83. Unfortunately it ends just before the start of 3.84, which many editors have regarded as spurious, and it would be fascinating to see the papyrus' evidence (or lack of it) for that chapter.
Qimmik wrote:I wouldn't swap Herodotus for a papyrus copy of a text we already have in reasonably good shape. Herodotus may be unreliable in the earlier books, but we would know very little of archaic Greece (including Asia Minor) and the Persian War era without him, even if correctives are sometimes necessary. Also, many of the "stories" crop up in later Greek and Roman literature, and our understanding of later authors would be impoverished without Herodotus. Even if the "stories" are questionable, Herodotus is key to understanding Greek thinking throughout antiquity but especially in the 5th-4th centuries. And most of the lost historians probably have even less credibility.
Qimmik wrote:Anyone who would swap Vergil for anything else--especially minor historical works that are probably no better and likely worse than Herodotus for accuracy--hasn't really engaged with Vergil.
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