Euripides Unbound

If you want​ to get to know someone, especially if you’re an ancient historian, you should go through their rubbish. At the end of the 19th century, two Oxford academics, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, set off for the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in search of Greek texts written on papyrus. Over six seasons, assisted by scores of local workmen, they excavated thousands of papyri from the city’s rubbish mounds and transported them to Oxford, where the collection still resides. They uncovered enough material to occupy generations of scholars. 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. Papyri have played a decisive role in rewriting the history of the ancient Mediterranean.

But sometimes it’s not enough to root around in the bin; you have to look in the cemetery. In November 2022, the archaeologist Heba Adly uncovered a clump of papyri while excavating a shallow grave in the tombs at the ancient city of Philadelphia in the Faiyum Oasis, two hours’ drive south of Cairo. She didn’t need to unfold it to know it could be significant. Philadelphia, founded in the early third century bce by Ptolemy II, had already yielded another remarkable cache of papyri: Zenon’s archive, which consists of two thousand documents that attest in extraordinary detail to the finances and logistics of a large estate between 261 and 229 BCE. The cemetery sits to the east of the city in a wadi, a desert valley where the sand forms eddies and currents, a river in negative. Adly’s team, led by Basem Gehad, has been studying the necropolis for the past decade. Their research has revealed new information about the way burial practices changed over time, as Egypt underwent a series of transitions from the rule of the pharaohs to that of the Macedonian Greek successors of Alexander the Great and, eventually, the Romans. Now they can add to that list of finds a signal contribution to the study of Greek tragedy. One of the papyri excavated by Adly contains 97 lines of two plays by Euripides – Ino and Polyidus – that were known to us only through scattered quotations and summaries of their plots. In terms of number of lines alone, this is the most substantial discovery of Euripides in half a century.

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). The papyrus was probably produced in the third century ce at the height of the Roman Empire. Like almost all papyri, the Philadelphia Euripides is an imperfect witness to the original as well as an invaluable source: many papyri are the only evidence of their texts. It dates to more than six hundred years after the plays were first performed, but this was a period when far more Greek tragedy could be read than is known today. After Alexander’s conquest, Egypt became both a consumer and a leading producer of Greek literature, and in the intervening two thousand years its arid climate has preserved papyri better than anywhere else in the Greek-speaking world.

For almost two years, I have been part of a new archaeological mission led by Gehad and Trnka-Amrhein in the ancient city of Hermopolis Magna, about three hours south of Philadelphia, and I have followed the progress of the Euripides papyrus. Work on papyri begins in a rush, as letters reveal themselves, words come into focus, hypotheses form, parallels are found and texts are identified. But then the pace slows: what remain are the most difficult sections, the loci desperandi. When I visited Boulder last summer, Gibert and Trnka-Amrhein were focused on one such passage. Like Shakespeare, Euripides made his characters speak in iambs, but they also sang and danced in complex metres to the accompaniment of musical instruments. This papyrus has only the words themselves, however, and a few ‘reading marks’: a horizontal line called a paragraphos that often indicates a change in speaker, and a curious variant with a hook known as a forked paragraphos whose function is still debated. There are no stage directions and no speaker attributions. Three experts in Greek could easily spend a whole day working on just two or three tricky lines of poetry. The excavation of the papyrus might take an afternoon, but producing a full account and interpretation of its contents can take years. For this papyrus, the commentary runs to more than twenty thousand words.

Every edition of a classical text is a minor miracle. Euripides’ dramas have travelled from stage to page, from scroll to codex and finally to printed book. They survived for centuries on papyrus and then on animal skin (even today, a parchment codex smells of flesh). Time is the enemy of all substrates. The writing becomes abraded; sand, soot and tar stick to the surface; pieces break off; insects and worms extract their price; exposure to the air makes the pages brittle and water accelerates the process of decay. Although there must have been tens of thousands of copies produced, we have full texts of fewer than forty of the nine hundred tragedies we know were performed in Athens in the fifth century bce.

Euripides is the best represented of the Greek tragedians, which would have annoyed his contemporaries. He was lampooned in his day for his novel sonic effects, his corruption of Athenian values and his penchant for female protagonists and characters dressed in rags – an innovator, according to his critics, but not necessarily in a good way. In the end, he got the last laugh. We have seven plays each from Aeschylus and Sophocles, but Euripides’ corpus was augmented by the chance survival of a Byzantine manuscript which contained nine of his plays arranged in alphabetical order. Nineteen plays have been attributed to him, of which eighteen seem to be definitively his – more than twice as many as survive from any of his contemporaries. This is partly a matter of luck, but the signs point to Euripides’ popularity in antiquity. He is second only to Homer and Demosthenes in the number of ancient copies of his texts that survive. All three were regularly read at school in antiquity. Still, we have lost far more of Euripides than we will ever recover.

Until the discovery at Philadelphia, Polyidus was known to us only from the 38 lines quoted by other authors and from ancient summaries. Thanks to the papyrus, our knowledge of the play has grown considerably. The plot goes like this: Polyidus, a seer whose name means ‘much knowing’ or ‘seeing many things’, has been summoned by King Minos to find his missing son, Glaucus (in most accounts young Glaucus has fallen into a jar of honey). The play turns on a second request: that Polyidus bring him back to life. When he refuses, Minos entombs him alive with Glaucus. While interred, he learns from two snakes how to use herbs to revive the boy. They are rescued when a passer-by hears them shouting.

Ino is the darker of the two plays, and if the summaries are correct, it is one of the bloodiest tragedies on record. Ino was the second wife of Athamas, king of Thessaly, with whom she had two children, Learchus and Melicertes, before her sudden disappearance (to Mount Parnassus, possibly against her will, to become a follower of Dionysus). In her absence, Athamas has remarried and had twins with his new wife, Themisto. The play probably begins when Ino returns in disguise and becomes nursemaid to all four children. Themisto enlists her help to kill Learchus and Melicertes, but Ino outwits her and tricks her into killing her own sons. The play culminates in a further series of deaths – Themisto takes her own life; Athamas accidentally kills Learchus while hunting; Ino leaps into the sea carrying Melicertes – and concludes with a deus ex machina: Dionysus appears to explain how Ino and her son became the recipients of cult worship. This aetiological ending, in which past mythological suffering is converted into contemporary worship, is characteristic of Euripides, though not unique to him. The play has resonances with his Medea, another tale of remarriage, divine intervention and child murder. It is an accident of history that the stages of London and New York have seen so many Medeas and no Inos.

The Philadelphia papyrus contains 37 lines from Ino and 60 from Polyidus, arranged in two columns of text and divided by an inset title, ‘From Polyidus’. Of these, about twenty are known from other papyrus fragments, quotations or, in one case, Greek letters carved in stone. (These quotations have been crucial for identifying the plays and helping the editors to understand who is speaking to whom.) The Polyidus selection preserves an argument between Polyidus and Minos over whether Polyidus should use his powers to revive Glaucus. Their discussion hinges on the limits of human knowledge and the abuse of power. Minos advances a theory of natural kingship: just as the dolphin rules over the sea, the eagle over birds and Zeus over the gods, the tyrant commands those on land. 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. One character, possibly Ino, says: ‘There is no reprieve of groans in the house.’ Neither excerpt seems to come from the beginning or end of the play. Rather than a collection of complete dramas, the papyrus may contain a selection of greatest hits.

Both passages are unmistakably by Euripides. They share his love of aphorisms, his obsession with the overreach of the powerful and the dangers of cleverness. In one passage, Polyidus rebuffs Minos’ demands: ‘So you’re rich. Don’t think you understand anything else. Wealth makes you useless. It is poverty that produces wisdom.’ His defiance is expressed in a crafty reversal of terms: wealth becomes a deficiency and poverty a virtue; tyranny is a slippery, ‘unreliable thing’. But even as he refuses to revive the boy, Polyidus acknowledges Minos’ predicament: ‘You’re childless … But you are overturning established law and upsetting custom with your thoughtlessness.’ Grief demands sympathy, but Minos has taken it too far.

There are some astonishing lines in the papyrus. A lyric passage from Ino, probably belonging to Themisto, imagines ‘the ephemeral, changeable god working in secret, moving this way and that, obscurely through the clouds’. The image, uttered in a moment of abject grief, is as striking for its expression of the opacity of the divine as for its mixing of worlds – ephemerality and changeability are the defining characteristics of the mortal condition. Here, for perhaps the first time in extant Greek literature, an unnamed divinity takes on the human attributes for which he or she is responsible. The Ino passages have a wider emotional and technical range than those from Polyidus, combining the metres of speech and song as two mothers, one who has lost her children and the other who is responsible for their death, confront each other for what may be the last time. This portion has been among the hardest to reconstruct. Near the end, the editors can make out only a word or two per line: ‘after a long time … lifting up … bloody … Indeed when you ought … to have come into the light, you have come … and hateful to the gods … stop … providing me little benefit and much pain … foolish … follies’. Suggestive as they are, we cannot be confident about more than their general meaning. As in Polyidus, the two characters spar over the death of children, argue about the proper way to cope with an unjust fate and find themselves confronted with the limits of the mortal condition.

Papyrology​ stands at a crossroads. Texts on papyrus have revolutionised the study of ancient Greek literature, but their reputation has suffered in recent years as discovery after discovery has been called into question. In 2016, the journalist Ariel Sabar proved that a matchbox-sized fragment which depicted Jesus as married was a forgery.* Questions have been raised about the provenance of a poem attributed to Sappho that was published to much fanfare a decade ago. These revelations have been difficult for scholars. ‘This is not the kind of research I ever imagined myself undertaking,’ the papyrologist Michael Sampson wrote at the end of a long discussion of the source of the Sappho papyrus, ‘and it’s not research that should have been necessary in the first place.’

Even in the best of circumstances, a scholar who works with ancient Egyptian artefacts must grapple with ethical questions about the history of archaeology and colonialism, American and European soft power and the relationship between scholarship and the antiquities market (not least because the work of identifying and authenticating artefacts can affect their value). The problem is compounded when the provenance of a particular object is missing, disputed or improbable. As recent history has shown, even distinguished academics can fall prey to temptation.

There is good news, however. Artificial intelligence promises to recover texts from scrolls thought to be beyond repair. Earlier this year, three young researchers revealed that they had used AI to read a papyrus scroll carbonised during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 ce. The scroll was one of many discovered in Herculaneum in 1752 among the remains of a large seaside villa, believed to have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar and a follower of the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara. Although Cicero claimed that Piso had so perverted the Epicurean principle of pleasure that he was not a ‘teacher of virtue, but an enabler of lust’, the Herculaneum papyri have almost exclusively yielded Epicurean philosophy, and many of the texts are works by Philodemus himself. They remain the largest collection of Greek and Latin papyri discovered outside Egypt.

The only problem has been reading them. Between 800 and 815 scrolls were removed, but many of them have since broken: 1830 items have been catalogued as ‘Herculaneum papyri’. As Camillo Paderni, the head of the Herculaneum expedition, wrote in November 1752, the scrolls had turned ‘to a sort of charcoal, so brittle, that being touched, it falls readily into ashes’. At first they were mistaken for actual pieces of charcoal and taken home by local labourers. It was only when one of the briquettes broke open and revealed ancient writing that Paderni realised what they were. The first attempts to open the scrolls involved chopping them in half and pulling apart the layers of papyrus sheets like orange segments. Antonio Piaggio’s device that unrolled them millimetre by millimetre was an improvement, but it was tremendously slow and risked destroying the papyri in the process. After nearly a century of work, only 423 papyri had been opened.

For decades, Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, has attempted to find a non-destructive, virtual process to ‘unwrap’ the scrolls. In 2019 he was part of a team of researchers who took two scrolls to be scanned at the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator in Oxford. The scans revealed the surface of the papyrus, but the text remained invisible to the naked eye: the carbon-based ink and the carbonised papyrus had the same density, so weren’t distinguished by the scanner. A second intervention came from Nat Friedman, an American tech entrepreneur. In 2023 he launched the Vesuvius Challenge, which offered prizes for anyone who could read the scrolls. It took less than a year for Luke Farritor, Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger to train a machine-learning model to recognise subtle changes to the texture of the papyrus where ink had saturated. Last October, the letters πορφυραϲ emerged: a form of the Greek for ‘purple’. Since then, the project has released a reconstruction of some fifteen columns of text. They appear to derive from a philosophical treatise on sensation and pleasure. One section reads: ‘We do not immediately believe that scarce things are absolutely more pleasurable than abundant things … Such questions will be considered frequently.’ The implications of the work are promising not only for the remaining scrolls from Herculaneum, but for other cases, such as papyrus used during the process of mummification.

The Philadelphia papyrus is no less important for papyrology. In a field that is as much an art as a science, technology will only get us so far. Papyrology requires years of specialised training of the type that is available only at a few universities, most of them in the US and Europe. The quantity of papyrus legally exported from Egypt and available for study in those institutions is limited and the collections are not always easy to access. For papyrology to continue, techniques and expertise must be shared. It is likely that a far greater quantity of papyrus remains to be discovered in Egypt. The Euripides papyrus was uncovered using basic archaeological tools – a trowel, a brush and an instinct for reading the sand – but its deciphering required collaboration between American and Egyptian scholars. In just under two years these passages from Euripides have gone from papyrus buried in the sand to being printed on paper. It is still possible to bring the dead back to life.