Greek, Greek, and more Greek.

A few items of interest today for the Philhellene:

1. The BBC reports that a lost trilogy by Aeschylus about the Greek hero Achilles, excerpts of which were discovered in the papryus wrappings of an Egyptian mummy, has been reconstructed from the fragments by a modern Greek poet and will be performed for the first time since antiquity in Cyprus next summer. This on the heels of last year's amazing find of about a hundred epigrams of the Hellenestic poet Poseiddipus, also from a mummy's wrapping, also in Egypt. As classicists my colleagues and I would often play the big "what if" game - what we turned up a Greek or Roman library that was mostly intact still somewhere out in the deserts of North Africa? What lost treasures we'd recover! Well, perhaps we were always thinking a little too big. Perhaps the corpus of Greek literature is still to be found, only piece by piece. It's a funny thing. In medieval and even Renaissance times, the Egyptian mummy became a highly valued commodity due to the belief that dried ground mummy was a powerful medicine; many mummies were destroyed as a result. Now again the mummy appears to be a potential resource for us philologists - at least we only have to unwrap them this time!

2. There was a really funny filler spot on NPR's "All Things Considered" about the Greek national baseball team for the 2004 Olympics. As Greece automatically qualifies for every event, there's been a desperate attempt to cobble together a baseball team that won't completely and totally disgrace the Hellenic race. The Greeks have gone so far as to allow the children and grandchildren of their diaspora population to play, and have tapped no less than the Baltimore Orioles' owner Peter Angelos to whip the team into shape. I haven't been able to find the NPR bit on their website, probably because it was so short, but if anyone can provide me a link, I'd be much obliged.

3. This morning I read in my weekly Harvard Gazette about the Archimedes Project, an ambitious effort employing state-of-the-art technology to better understand Latin, Greek, and Arabic scientific manuscripts. Aside from the ability to parse each and every word with the click of a mouse - similar to Perseus, the magnum opus of Tuft University's Department of Classics - the Archimedes Project offers the tantalizing possibility of being able to reconstruct lost Greek manuscripts from their extant Arabic translations, reproducing not only the content but the style of the ancient author! Purists may scoff at such an attempt at linguistic resurrection, but it's been done many times before (witness #1, above), albeit by human beings. Why not give a computer a chance, especially with the technical writers of the past?