[HN Gopher] Uncovered Euripides fragments are 'kind of a big deal'
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Uncovered Euripides fragments are 'kind of a big deal'
Author : caf
Score : 191 points
Date : 2024-08-05 00:11 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.colorado.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.colorado.edu)
| rwmj wrote:
| There's such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual festivals
| where you'd have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies over 5
| days[1]. That's just one city state. Only 32 full plays survive.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysia
|
| Edit: Reading the article, I'm surprised they don't seem to have
| done any computer-based textual analysis of the authorship. We
| have other plays attributed to Euripides so matching 98 lines of
| text shouldn't be too difficult.
| tivert wrote:
| > There's such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual
| festivals where you'd have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies
| over 5 days[1]. That's just one city state. Only 32 full plays
| survive.
|
| There's such a volume of lost _everything_. Original masters
| taped over, archive fires, etc. Now we have new problems like
| obsolete formats and failing to pay your cloud bills (no more
| recovering something from an old tape forgotten in a
| warehouse).
|
| In 2000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if _no_ contemporary
| television managed to survive.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| All that survives is _The Love Boat_ , and future humans will
| fashion their entire understanding of ancient American
| history, culture, and religion around this show.
| whythre wrote:
| That honestly doesn't sound too bad.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Could be Jersey Shore...
| klodolph wrote:
| At least Jersey Shore is anthropological in nature
| flenserboy wrote:
| "On The Tastes of Women in the Hamburger Kingdom: Doc as
| the Personification of Female Desire"
| jhbadger wrote:
| There is a satirical (paper) RPG called "Diana: Warrior
| Princess" that takes its inspiration from this idea. The
| idea is it is a representation of the idea of 20th century
| culture as viewed from a millennium into the future,
| focusing on Princess Di who is depicted as a great leader
| who fights against Hitler and has advisors like Charles
| Darwin. It's mocking how "historical fiction" often takes
| great liberties with fact and mixes people who never lived
| at the same time together.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Upon seeing "Warrior Princess" I had first been expecting
| they'd given DFS an ambiguous (sororal or sapphistical?)
| companion: In short, when I can tell you
| how I break the laws of gravity, And why my togs
| expose my intermammary concavity, And why my
| comrade changed her dress from one that fit more comfily
| To one that shows her omphalos (as cute as that of
| Omphale), And why the tale of Spartacus appears in
| Homer's version, And where we found examples of the
| genus Lycopersicon, And why this Grecian scenery
| looks more like the Antipodes, You'll say I'm twice
| the heroine of any in Euripides!
|
| [full text, footnoted:
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~valkyrie/parody/xena.html ]
| narag wrote:
| _In 2000 years, I wouldn 't be surprised if no contemporary
| television managed to survive._
|
| Maybe most everything doesn't deserve to survive. Future
| humans will be busy enough living their lives, to learn an
| ever growing history of long dead ancestors. For them, it'll
| be mildly interesting to know that something was invented one
| thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand years ago,
| maybe the name of a chosen few relevant persons that first
| did something. But a complete record of everything that ever
| happened? I don't think so.
|
| Most TV and movies feel horriby dated in a few decades.
|
| Actually, I watch TV and movies done _now_ that seem horribly
| dated.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| I remember watching stuff during the pandemic with
| allusions to distancing or masking and thinking "I'm going
| to have to explain this to my grandchildren."
| bawolff wrote:
| I imagine our grandchildren will think of covid the way
| we think of the spanish flu - as a minor historical
| footnote.
| iosonofuturista wrote:
| My understanding from reading the article, is that the issue is
| not so much matching the deciphered lines, but the
| interpretation of that deciphering. So they want the
| scholarship agreement on what is actually written on the
| papyrus.
|
| I imagine there are plenty of missing words being inserted,
| unreadable letters being guessed and so on.
|
| So the way to do it for now, has to rely more on experience and
| intuition than a database search.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I just hope there are good archival structures in place in
| society nowadays, because there are a lot of theaters worldwide
| performing plays known and unknown every day, but AFAIK only
| the best known ones get statues made and I don't believe they
| contain a list of their works (for example).
|
| I mean that would make sense; make sturdy statues of authors /
| playwrights / etc, and embed copies of their work in a
| compartiment inside of them or in the material itself. Lose a
| few in interesting looking hills.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| As a Classics major in college and with continuing love for that
| decaying old grande dame of a discipline, this is pretty cool and
| I hope the identification holds up to scrutiny (because it
| _would_ be a big deal).
|
| Then there's this:
|
| _The two scholars have also recently discovered the upper half
| of a colossal statue of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II
| in their joint excavation project at Hermopolis Magna._
|
| Percy Bysshe Shelley is practically shouting from the grave.
|
| I MET A TRAVELER FROM AN ANTIQUE LAND...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| "Sssh, love, go back to bed." ~Mary
| 1-more wrote:
| This is how I find out they were married. Huh.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Enough opium Percy, time for bed
| greenhearth wrote:
| Obviously not decaying, but alive and well
| codeofficer wrote:
| Euripides trousers, Umendades trousors.
| nescioquid wrote:
| Eumenides trousers?
| hk__2 wrote:
| Umendades trousors.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Essplain? Am lost.
| bennyg wrote:
| Say it out loud - it's a play on words. "You rip a dese
| trousers, you mend a dese trousers"
| noelwelsh wrote:
| 'Tis true, but it's also true that Eumenides is an actual
| Greek deity (and The Eumenides is a play) that sounds the
| same (at least when pronounced by this monolingual
| English speaker.)
|
| So I feel "Eumenides trousers!" is a slightly better
| variant of the joke.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Yeah, I thought that was a direction too. Slightly over
| thinking it.
| mtsolitary wrote:
| Euripedes fragments, Youpayfordes fragments!
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| it's a shame cartalk isn't still around. imagine how much fun
| they would have had with cybertruck
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Best comment on HN. As true in Euripedes' time as it is in
| ours.
| mandevil wrote:
| Euripedes fragments or Eumenides fragments!
| alexpotato wrote:
| > Using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a comprehensive, digitized
| database of ancient Greek texts maintained by the University of
| California, Irvine
|
| I always love to hear about a school or organization that says
| "Hey everyone! We are going to store the central digital index
| and database of the thing we care about. Come check it out!"
| baruz wrote:
| It used to be distributed as a CD to university libraries, but
| these CDs were supposed to be surrendered when the online
| version came out. I have heard that at least one of these
| copies (perhaps "out of date" in terms of "new" texts added
| since the web version debut) exists on some sort of distributed
| distribution network.
| bjornsing wrote:
| I named my home server (that I mostly run machine learning
| experiments on) euripides, because I found a quote by him very
| insightful: "Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of
| what not to believe."
| lordleft wrote:
| My favorite play is the Herakles of Euripides, which ends on
| these lines: The man who would prefer great
| wealth or strength more than love, more than friends
| is diseased of soul
| infotainment wrote:
| Wow, some things never change!
| debacle wrote:
| If you are a student of history, you realize that human
| nature has always been a constant.
|
| We should teach kids in K-12 "Most people are crap, but some
| of the crap people did amazing things and there were also a
| few non-crap people out there, of varying impact."
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| And that you should strive to be a non-crap person because
| it is a valuable trait.
| lukan wrote:
| I guess allmost everyone tries that - it is just that our
| definition of "crap people" is quite different.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > everyone tries that
|
| They don't really. People try and fit in publicly so that
| they're seen to be good by their group, whereas fitting
| in to any group at any level in any age requires
| accepting some things that you know are bad and when
| things aren't visible people commonly indulge in a lot of
| bad that even their group would publicly object to often
| with the moral license they feel they've earned from the
| performative good they do in public. Being a truly good
| person _by our own standards_ is hard to the point of
| almost being impossible.
| lukan wrote:
| "Being a truly good person by our own standards is hard
| to the point of almost being impossible."
|
| My favorite trope, the snark knight.
|
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSnarkKnigh
| t
|
| Still, I don't think it is impossible. It just depends on
| the standards one sets. Some seem to be doing fine, being
| assholes. But I also suffer from setting my standards
| impossible high. But I cannot really change them without
| giving up myself.
| debacle wrote:
| Crap people with initiative have done more good for the
| world that the non-crap people ever will.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Let's remember that at least half of what is to be
| contemplated lies in those who are judging what they see.
|
| I wouldn't be that quick to misjudge individuals by the
| prisme of shallow knowledge provided by history at whole
| societies scale.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| One of the biggest reasons I love Shakespeare (and other
| older literature) is that it really highlights how human
| nature hasn't changed. The good and bad of mankind, as well
| as the struggles we face, are largely the same as they were
| centuries ago. It really makes me feel a kinship with these
| people who died long before I was born, to know that they
| had to face the same kind of insecurities and challenges I
| do today.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| "Money can't buy you love but it lets you rent it by the hour"
| - Max Headroom (from memory)
| maCDzP wrote:
| I was born after Max Headroom aired, but for those of you
| that saw it while it aired, how was it?
| yanowitz wrote:
| Absolutely amazing. American TV was a desolate landscape
| with occasional stuff so good you couldn't believe the
| oasis wasn't a mirage. Max Headroom was in that category.
| And of course it didn't start in the States.
|
| Dunno if it would hold up today though
| jl6 wrote:
| Your description of American TV certainly holds up today.
| settsu wrote:
| Personally, I don't think it _has_ to hold up.
|
| At least not necessarily in the way that this is
| generally meant, i.e., a timeless classic that more or
| less transcends the historical context that produced it
| and, probably most importantly, does not require the
| audience to know or grasp that historical context to
| appreciate it (even if understanding the context would
| _add_ to the appreciation.)
|
| However that doesn't mean it can be no less entertaining
| and interesting, just that it probably requires some
| context. This isn't an uncommon issue for popular media
| which, by definition, is a product of and for its time.
| Humor/comedy is especially notable for this. In my
| experience, very little comedy is truly timeless.
|
| However, relevance can of course resurge (and I would
| make a distinction from more cyclical trends as is seen
| in fashion, for example.)
|
| And thus I'd say Max Headroom was very much a product of
| its time and, aside from "ha-ha-old-tech!", you'd most
| likely need to have at least some knowledge of the social
| and political landscapes of the time to understand what
| and who it was satirizing.
|
| But also, sometimes--often?--it's just capitalizing on
| the cultural moment.
| shuntress wrote:
| > very little comedy is truly timeless
|
| This depends almost entirely on the type of comedy.
| Things like reference, satire, or shock are obviously
| dependent on the specific context of time in which they
| were made and of course become less meaningful as times
| change.
|
| But comedy is not inherently less "timeless" than any
| other art. _Who 's on First_ is genuinely still funny
| almost a century later.
|
| The little bits of surviving ancient comedy may seem
| trite but being simple does not make the jokes less
| "timeless".
| morsch wrote:
| What other stuff comes to mind?
| finnh wrote:
| Twin Peaks
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _American TV was a desolate landscape_
|
| not really, culturally the 70's was more desolate where
| the 80's was a rebirth.
|
| The 80s spawned Cheers, LA Law, Hill Street Blues,
| Dynasty, Dallas, The Cosby Show, Murphy Brown, The Golden
| Girls, Family Ties, The Wonder Years, The Facts of Life,
| St. Elsewhere. I didn't watch all of them, but you can't
| sneer at so many shows with such tremendous production
| values, appeal, and staying power. A number of the actors
| have continued to be popular up to the present day.
|
| and that's not even including my personal favorite, ALF.
| You want edgy? try making a show today with a star who
| eats cats
|
| https://fanfest.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Alf-
| Gif.gif
|
| https://c.tenor.com/ELf9Bd2Ho94AAAAC/alf-cat-sandwich.gif
|
| https://media3.giphy.com/media/PS89uO8ZFOXE4/giphy.gif
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I enjoyed it a lot, though was a kid. It made a statement
| similar to the movie Network (1976), that I somewhat
| understood at a young age--they'll do _anything_ for
| ratings.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Add to this Cronenberg's "Videodrome" and you'll have a
| great movie night.
| KingMob wrote:
| Fun fact: the creators of Max Headroom were the creators
| behind the original 1993 Super Mario Bros movie with Dennis
| Hopper, Bob Hoskins, and John Leguizamo.
|
| The making of that film is a bit crazy. Part of the issue
| was, Disney bought the distribution rights shortly before
| filming was supposed to start, and demanded all these
| rewrites. Probably also demanded that the stripper scenes
| be cut. :P
|
| Hoskins claimed that he and Leguizamo started drinking
| every day before, and between, takes.
| andrepd wrote:
| I found it an absolute gem. Definitely a product of its
| time, but very enjoyable world and characters.
| dleink wrote:
| It taught a young me that advertisements can make your head
| explode, a lesson I carry to this day.
| swayvil wrote:
| BLIPVERT!! That word came to me a couple days ago. Now I
| have made the connection.
|
| https://youtu.be/PJP-Ilw_xaY?si=THvq0HE-5GisP7FG
|
| That sound reminds me of the howl of a billion demons.
| Lovecraftian or Goetian or a forest full of screaming
| bugs or whatever.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The movie came first, "20 minutes into the future." It's on
| YouTube and very good, if you like art films.
| loughnane wrote:
| It's really a miracle that we have as much as we do from
| antiquity, but I'm still excited whenever something new comes
| uip.
| gadders wrote:
| Tangentially related, but I recently read Glorious Exploits by
| Ferdia Lennon [1]
|
| It's set after Sicily defeats Athens in the Peloponnesian War.
| Two unemployed potters decide to stage two plays by Euripides
| using the Athenian prisoners kept in the infamous quarry.
|
| Really enjoyable tragi-comedy.
|
| [1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/295543/ferdia-lennon
| complaintdept wrote:
| Re: lost classics, I hope we can recover an intact work by
| Heraclitus from those burnt scrolls in Herculaneum, that would
| make me lose my shit.
| persnickety wrote:
| How did they manage to squeeze 98 lines on 10.5 square inches?
| That's less than 68cm2. For 5mmx5mm characters that area can fit
| 272 characters, so not even 3 characters per line.
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