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Euripedes Unbound
The Euripides papyrus was uncovered using basic archaeological tools – a trowel, a brush and an instinct for reading...
Alongside works such as Sophocles’ Trackers and the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, a sensation in the early years of the collection, Oxyrhynchus has yielded a student’s whiny letter to his father, legal petitions alleging everything from high crimes to petty acts of violence and endless accounts and receipts. Once the artefacts had been cleaned, documented, photographed and mounted under glass, Gehad turned to his colleague Yvona Trnka-Amrhein and the Euripides expert John Gibert, both professors of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder, to decipher the text (it has just been published in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik). Polyidus, however, sees Minos’ threat as the vain boast of a bereaved father and a petty despot: ‘Don’t offer me wealth in exchange for my life.’ The lines from Ino are somewhat more obscure, but if the editors are right they come from the section of the play after Themisto has unwittingly killed her own children.
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