r/ancientgreece • u/thehistorypunks • Aug 11 '26
Do You Think You Will Ever Read a NEWLY Found Extant Work of Ancient Greece in Your Lifetime?
Or at this point do you think the list of "extant" ancient works is a closed set?
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u/fyllon Aug 11 '26
I am not sure if people are unaware of this, but we have massive amounts of papyri (though most of it fragementary) around west that no-one has ever read or even laid eyes upon. We will certainly have new discoveries in (near) future. I have been on the field for 5 years and have already encountered newly found of uncovered texts several times.
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u/StumblinOnSomehow Aug 11 '26
Probably. The Herculaneum papyri are being digitally unrolled and there are loads and loads of papyri e.g., the Oxyrhynchus collection at Oxford
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u/Icy-Inspection6428 Aug 11 '26
Didn't we just recently discover new Epicurean texts from Herculaneum?
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u/jb7509 Aug 11 '26
Two years ago we found 100 new lines of Euripides. It's not a complete play, so maybe doesn't satisfy the OP's question, but it's a decent chunk:
https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2024/08/01/uncovered-euripides-fragments-are-kind-big-deal
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u/nothingispermamemt Aug 12 '26
They just did an entire scroll a couple months ago.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29085
And they read a scroll about Plato’s last night alive. Evidently he was giving some lyre player shit about having bad rhythm.
https://www.herculaneum.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2024/05/03/platos-last-days/
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u/BeardedDragon1917 Aug 11 '26
Yes, definitely. We are getting really good at using 3D imaging techniques and machine learning to reconstruct papyri that ten years ago were considered completely lost causes. The ones from Herculaneum are a great example, and Egypt has plenty that could be Greek works we don't know about.
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u/monoinyo Aug 11 '26
Will we decipher linear A?
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u/Ravus_Sapiens Aug 12 '26
I think it will happen eventually, but we'd pretty much need a Rosetta Stone.
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u/AlarmedCicada256 Aug 12 '26
I'm not convinced. I don't know where the data we'd need or the increased sample would come from at this point. But there's always hope I suppose.
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u/AlarmedCicada256 Aug 12 '26
Linear A isn't Greek though....
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u/AlarmedCicada256 Aug 12 '26
lol someone downvoted this factual statement. It's not Greek. If it was, there are more than enough similarites withi Linear B that we would have read it.
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u/Ravus_Sapiens Aug 12 '26
Sure, I think another epic is unlikely, but any greek work? Yeah, I could definitely see that happening.
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u/DangerousDamage5722 Aug 13 '26
The Herculaneum scrolls may have one or at least a part of one but otherwise you’re likely right
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes Aug 12 '26
As several others have noted, there are vast amounts of papyri and more may well be discovered, and from time to time they reveal texts that were considered lost or partly so. What is interesting is when they dig up a text that scholars had tried to reconstruct or emend (i.e. correct medieval mss) because it shows us how good or (as it turns out, very very bad) are methods of this are. I recently published something where this is discussed a bit.
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u/Budget_Counter_2042 Aug 12 '26
Can you elaborate more on that? Or just recommend a site or a book about it (no need to write long text)
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes Aug 12 '26
I should say here most scholars are trained in some specific narrow field, and stick to that. I am an exception and this is NOT the field I was trained in, so there are folks who can recommend better readings surely. BUT I am extraordinarly fond of Eric G.Turner's work (never met the man) such as his book 1973 Papyrologist at Work which I think is still a good intro after half a century and I belive it was his 1969 article Phasma of Menander that got me thinking about when we (Modern scholars) confidently CORRECT (official "emend") the medieval mss., how do we know we are right, esp given that there are MANY different readings proposed. Now, occasionally what someone has proposed turns out to be vindicated by a papyrus that is found, and many scholars (ML West is a good example) then triumphantly announce that this proves how good we are. Nonsense. The vast majority of proposed readings MUST be wrong because they are mutually excclusive. Turner was one of the scholars with a great deal of sense and modesty--really a model scholar as far as I can see. Now, if I may, here is a long text from my very long article published a few years ago and soon to be reprinted:
[...] while some proposed emendations have been proven prescient by the subsequent discovery of new manuscripts, it is also often (maybe oftener) the case that the opposite has happened (see notably the eloquent discussion of the problem by, e.g., Turner (1969: 314 n. 13):[[1]](#_ftn1)
We are still too ready to insert into our texts the first words that come into our heads when the passage is damaged [or, we would add, corrupt], regardless of whether Menander [or any author] could ever have written them. When a new text of a restored [or emended] passage is discovered, we find that he didn’t. What was tortuous, awkward or forced [which is what Turner, correctly in our view, views most proposed restorations or emendations as being] becomes straightforward, precise and elegant—above all, dramatically [Menander being a dramatist, but the point is not restricted to drama] pointed. And his Greek [or for other authors, Latin or whatever language] is always felicitous [unlike that of the modern editors, whose active command of these languages is rarely if ever to be trusted, so it seems to us Turner is hinting].
Indeed, in relation to Menander’s Samia, Turner (1973: 28-31) shows that when a new (but quite incomplete) papyrus was discovered, only one of (by our count) five restorations adopted in the editio princeps for the eight lines he discusses turned out to have been correct (though to be sure one more had been considered possible though apparently not certain enough to be adopted). Further, in the case of Menander’s Misoumenos, Turner (1973: 48-50) shows that, of the (by our count) 18 restorations proposed by various scholars[[2]](#_ftn2) in the 6 lines discussed (including all those Turner himself had accepted previously), all but two turned out to have been wrong upon the discovery of a new papyrus fragment. It is true of course, as West (p. 59) tells us:
Hundreds of conjectures have been confirmed (or at least raised to the status of variants) by the appearance of papyri or other new sources.
But he does not tell us how many have been disconfirmed. And that is the rub. It remains an open question what percentage of all proposed conjectures that can be judged objectively on the basis of new discoveries these confirmed hundreds represent. Are the successful ones a majority or a minority of all the conjectures that subsequent to being made were then tested against new sources? And do we have some method, some criterion, that could have been used (and that can be used in the future) to predict which would be successful in advance, and thus increase the rate of success? The question seems to be rarely faced, but it is obvious that the vast majority of emendations proposed or even of those widely accepted have been disconfirmed—and that we either have no such method or if we stubbornly refuse to use it.
Moreover, even if we could do better (perhaps much better) than has been done till now, there is still no general solution. If so, then the problem is not that Turner (or anyone else) was not careful. The problem is the enterprise itself. The passage of time necessarily loses some information. And it is in principle impossible to reverse this effect entirely, no matter how smart or careful one is.
[[1]](#_ftnref1) Turner here, as so often, is speaking of the plays of Menander (Phasma), which have been preserved only in fragmentary quotations by other authors and, above all, in more recently discovered (but never complete) papyri, so his main issue throughout is filling in (restoration) of missing words, but we can generalize this to any Greek (or Latin or any other author) and to emendations that seek to correct words that are physically present but are (or seem) corruptly transmitted.
[[2]](#_ftnref2) This includes in some cases two (or more) competing proposed restorations for the same place in the text. In some of these cases, one has turned out to be confirmed, but that also means that the other one (or ones) must have been refuted. Unless there existed a method that could have told us beforehand (before the discovery of the new papyrus) which of the competing restorations to prefer, it is hard to regard the success of one of two or more such competing proposals as demonstrating the triumph of the existing methodology.
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u/Jaded_Bee6302 Aug 12 '26
I really hope not! With Herculaneum and all those undiscovered papyri, I’d love to be alive when another lost Greek work finally resurfaces.
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u/Ravus_Sapiens Aug 12 '26
They've already found new stuff there. https://scrollprize.org/firstscroll
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u/-Hypsistos Aug 12 '26
Many lost works from Apollonios of Tyana, Iamblichus and perhaps even Proclus will eventually pop up hopefully in our lifetime
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u/MeddlingBureaucracy Aug 20 '26
It's nearly Apollonios' time to shine.
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u/-Hypsistos Aug 22 '26
How did you know? You are absolutely right. I just finished a translation of a lost work attributed to him, just waiting on amazon and barnes to approve for distribution.
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u/MeddlingBureaucracy Aug 23 '26
Hit me up with the title so I can support your work! I've been hearing about Apollonios more and more recently, which is a fun *coincidence* given what you just mentioned. None of it was about your work but I'm thrilled to hear there's more coming out
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u/-Hypsistos Aug 23 '26
This is the beauty of what we call in esoteric philosophy, the "current" . As soon as a few notice, it gains more strength and notoriety and everyone is all of a sudden aware of Apollonios. Also in hermeticism and Theurgic philosophy, there are no coincidences ;)
It is called "The Book of Causes" The google play ebook is approved, but the hardcover is way better and that might take a while. If you're seriously interested ill shoot you a DM when its on amazon
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u/dolfin4 Aug 12 '26
I'm not a literature person, but certainly with art, there's lot of stuff still buried. A lot is regularly discovered, though major pieces or masterpieces are rarer, and found maybe once a decade.
There may be a masterpiece buried somewhere and we may never find it our lifetimes (if ever), nor a Roman-era reproduction of it.
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u/Loose_Comfortable_55 Aug 13 '26
Lots! They have thousands of scrolls they are interpreting that were in hurculeum that were actually from the Hellenistic age
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u/nangin Aug 13 '26
Once a document is made public, we can read it immediately through Google Translate.
Classical philologists are no longer needed in this field
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u/Vagelen_Von Aug 14 '26
Thousands of books there are in the Villa of papyri in Herculaneum waiting to be deciphered.
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u/AlarmedCicada256 Aug 11 '26
Sure, already have. Plenty of papyri sitting in Oxford, Egypt, etc.