The New Hyperides

The Times this morning has a nice article on the Archimedes Palimpsest, which turns out to contain more than just important works on early mathematics:

An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from the fourth century B.C. What is slowly coming to light, scholars say, represents the most significant discovery of Hyperides text since 1891, illuminating some fascinating, time-shrouded insights into Athenian law and social history.

“This helps to fill in critical moments in ancient classical Greece,” said William Noel, the curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum here and the director of the Archimedes Palimpsest project. Hyperides “is one of the great foundational figures of Greek democracy and the golden age of Athenian democracy, the foundational democracy of all democracy.”

There are a bunch of quotes later in the article from historians and classicists who are obviously doing the Happy Dance over the new texts. There’s some fascinating stuff under that medieval prayer text.

My sister has an undergraduate degree in Classics, and spent a couple of years in Classics grad school, and I recall asking her once how people find research projects, given that nobody is writing new Sophocles plays these days. It’s really difficult, which is why you get a lot of really microscopic examinations of the same texts in the light of some new critical fad. A discovery of genuinely new texts, even if it’s only a handful of pages, will keep scholars happily occupied for a generation or so.

It’s a big deal. It’s also a nice reminder of why I’m happy to do small-scale lab science…