The Text
A small number of verses from these three of Aeschylus' lost works have been saved: fifty-four from Myrmidons, seven from Nereids and twenty-one from Phrygians. A sense of the pace at which additions to this corpus are made can be gleaned from the fact that a papyrus fragment containing seven letters on three lines that could be fitted over a two-line quote from Justin Martyr's dialogue Trypho, to show that the quote was in fact from the opening of Myrmidons was worth publishing in a note in Classical Philology, 1971.
Read more about this topic: Achilleis (trilogy)
Famous quotes containing the word text:
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“If ever I should condescend to prose,
I’ll write poetical commandments, which
Shall supersede beyond all doubt all those
That went before; in these I shall enrich
My text with many things that no one knows,
And carry precept to the highest pitch:
I’ll call the work ‘Longinus o’er a Bottle,
Or, Every Poet his own Aristotle.’”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)