CLA260H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Dyskolos, Euripides
Document Summary
When classicists talk about fragments" they may possibly mean literal, physical fragments of text preserved (usually on papyrus) in archaeological contexts (usually. Egypt, although many were also preserved (carbonised) in herculaneum). The vast majority of surviving papyrus documents from hellenistic and roman. Egypt are not literary texts but more mundane documents (which does not make them less interesting if anything the reverse is true). Most of the literary papyri from egypt come from oxyrhynchus. Note in passing that most inscriptions (the subject of chapter 17 in the textbook) survive in a physically fragmentary state. Consider the example of menander (a comic poet of the later 4th century bce), who wrote more than 100 plays; all of them were lost in the 7th & 8th centuries ce. However, in other surviving works he was quoted over 900 times (often only a single line, but sometimes passages up to 16 lines long).
