From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Wed Sep 10 2003 - 10:56:33 MDT
Discovered something...
Brett Paatsch:
>How far did you get towards concluding there might actually have
>been such a book?
I think a trip to the National Library in Naples is in my future
from:
http://www.oup.co.uk/academic/humanities/classical_studies/viewpoint/janko/
Richard Janko on Philodemus
Understanding one of the richest periods in the history of human thought
<begin quote>
In 1986, browsing among the new periodicals in a college library in
America, I came across an article by a recently deceased Italian
scholar. In it he lamented that nobody had noticed his work on a
papyrus from Herculaneum, first published in 1955. In his edition he
had shown that new fragments of Aristotle's lost dialogue On Poets
are cited in a work on literary theory by the poet and philosopher
Philodemus, who was the teacher of Vergil and, probably, of Horace,
the greatest poets of Augustan Rome.
Two years earlier I had published a book, Aristotle on Comedy,
arguing that the lost second Book of Aristotle's Poetics, on comedy
and laughter (celebrated in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the
Rose), had not actually perished entirely, but survived in a summary
in a medieval manuscript in Paris. So new fragments of Aristotle's
poetic theory, wherever they might be found, were of the greatest
interest to me. Hence I went for the first time to the National
Library in Naples, the home of the papyri preserved by the eruption
of Vesuvius, to restudy this text. Fragile, brittle, black as coal,
it was the hardest thing which I had ever tried to read. But my
excitement was great as I managed, using a microscope, to read more
of the text and thus to confirm the Italian scholar's theory.
While I was there, I looked at a few other manuscripts in the
collection. Many were very extensive indeed-and completely
unpublished. Looking at one which was full of quotations of Greek
poetry, I said to one of the local scholars that he ought to publish
it. He said he was too busy with other papyri, and I had to confess
that I was also. But this made me aware of how much remains to be
done, even in the absence of finds of more texts from resumed
excavations at Herculaneum.
This is the only scholarly library from Greek and Roman antiquity to
have been preserved in conditions which ensured its physical
survival. Other ancient texts, like Aristotle's Poetics, survive
because they were copied and recopied by monks; but not these. They
are unique in every sense, and do much to bridge the gulf in ancient
philosophical writing between the time of Aristotle and that of
Cicero. Philodemus' On Poems, in particular, opens a window onto a
lost age of scholarship-the period between Aristotle's Poetics and
Horace's Art of Poetry, the works which define classicism for the
ancient and modern worlds. I felt that it was time for the On Poems
to be restored to the world in as complete a state as possible.
New techniques for reading the papyri-better microscopes, better
photographs, digital enhancement, infra-red images-came along at
just the right time. In France and America, two scholars had
independently rediscovered the key to putting the mutilated
fragments back into the correct order. The work remained laborious
and terribly difficult; but it was now possible. As I prepared the
first volume in Oxford's new series, which aims to edit all the
aesthetic treatises of Philodemus, the team of scholars whom I
brought together to undertake this exciting task made other
discoveries which all contribute to our ability to reconstruct this
lost library, and with it to understand one of the richest periods
in the history of human thought.
Richard Janko
<end quote>
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "We came whirling out of Nothingness scattering stars like dust." --Rumi
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