14 COMMENTARY

TLS MARCH 27 2015

That dress I want

At a time when it is becoming moreand more difficult to learn ancientGreek at a British state school,the public appetite for information

about the papyrus texts from Oxyrhynchus, aGreek-speaking community in ancient Egypt,remains undiminished. As was shown by thepacked and enthusiastic audience for “PulpFiction: The Ancient Greeks and theirleisure reading”, a public event at the BritishAcademy last month, Oxyrhynchus, howeveroffputting its name, continues to exert itsfascination.

And so it should. The Oxyrhynchus textsoffer an unparalleled window on the way anancient community recorded its everyday lifeand relationships. They have put the livedexperience of non-elite people, from semi-literate shopkeepers to much-sold slave girls,at the centre of the academic radar. They haverequired scholars to acknowledge the com-plex ethnic identities of an ostensibly“Greek” community. They have preservedliterary texts lost to the Byzantine manuscripttradition because they were not deemedappropriate for inclusion in the ancient schoolcurriculum. They have helped drag the Victo-rian Classical syllabus, with its narrow philo-logical focus and idolatry of the elevatedgenres produced by venerated Great Men ofAthens, into the modern world. They haveeven been instrumental in the genesis of awhole new academic discipline – Garbology,first pioneered at the University of Arizona inthe 1970s – whose practitioners assume that awhole society can be analysed from the per-spective of what it discards.

Even that unappetizing name, Oxy-rhynchus, once explained, is educational. It isevidence of the cultural complexity of thecommunity which it labelled. Greek citieswere often named after Greek gods andheroes (Athens, Heraclea) or Greek founders(Alexandria). But the name Oxyrhynchusmeans the city named for the sharp-nosed(oxy-rhynchos) fish which flourished in thelocal waters and which had a starring role inEgyptian mythology, having eaten the dis-membered Osiris’ penis. That antique mythreminds us that the identity of the “Greeks” ofOxyrhynchus was only a thin sedimentarylayer resting on a much older Egyptiansubsoil. Oxyrhynchus is more than 100miles south-west of Cairo, at what is nowel-Behnesa. It prospered for twenty-fivecenturies. It was already active from theEgyptian New Kingdom in the second millen-nium BC until at least AD 1200. The archaicEgyptian religion of the area can still beglimpsed not only in the toponymic sharp-nosed fish, but in references to Thoeris, thehippopotamus goddess.

Oxyrhynchus survived the rise and fall ofseveral administrations – Persian, Ptolemaicafter Alexander’s conquest of Egypt, Roman,Byzantine, Arab. But from the late medievalMamluk sultanate until the late nineteenthcentury, it was an insignificant village. Itsleap into the consciousness of the modernworld came in 1897 when the curious moundsencircling the sandy lunar landscape of thesite of the ancient city were opened up by twoBritish excavators. Bernard Pyne Grenfell

and Arthur Surridge Hunt were both clas-sicists educated at the Queen’s College,Oxford. Supported by the Egypt ExplorationFund, they arrived to test their intuition thatthis significant centre of early Christianity(indeed, Coptic and Arabic traditions heldthat it had been visited by the Holy Family)might have preserved the kind of papyrustexts produced by early Christians.

They were soon rewarded by a page ofpapyrus containing previously unknown“Sayings of Jesus”, subsequently identifiedas belonging to the apocryphal Gospel ofThomas. Hundreds of papyri began to emergefrom the hillocks. The Oxyrhynchites seem tohave used special dumps for papyri; in onecase the basket in which a whole armful hadbeen discarded was found preserved alongwith them. Within three months the two Brit-ons, aided by a large team of workmen hiredlocally, had stuffed 280 boxes with crumblingpapyri.

Grenfell and Hunt returned to the area ineach of the winters between 1903 and 1907,when they retrieved parts of works by famous

ancient authors, including several which hadbeen missing since the early Middle Ages:songs by the lyric poets Sappho, Alcaeus,Pindar and Bacchylides, a tragedy by Euripi-des, and learned poems by the doyen of Alex-andrian aesthetics and inventor of the ancientlibrary classification system, Callimachus ofCyrene in Libya. Altogether, more than50,000 pieces of papyrus were amassed,ranging from rolls to tiny scraps. The majorityof them are housed in the Sackler Library inOxford. The task of deciphering and publish-ing them has been keeping the new species ofclassical scholar known as the “papyrologist”quiet ever since. The project has been led formore than two decades by Peter Parsons, the

former Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford,author of City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greeklives in Roman Egypt (2007; the first and bestintroduction to Oxyrhynchus and its texts),and the leading speaker at the British Aca-demy’s event (he was joined by Professor IanRutherford and myself).

Just as the discovery of the Alexandrianmimes of Herodas in the Faiyum desert,published in 1891, informed ConstantineCavafy’s poetic evocations of demi-mondesocial life in ancient Alexandria, so the Oxy-rhynchus papyri have stimulated poetic crea-tivity. Inspired by the shreds of a satyr dramaby Sophocles, his Trackers, which tells thestory of the rediscovery of the stolen cattle ofApollo by satyrs who track the animals’ dung,Tony Harrison wrote a tragicomedy incorpo-rating Sophocles’ fragments but also dra-matizing their discovery. The Trackers ofOxyrhynchus, voted one of the best plays ofthe twentieth century by the National TheatreMillennium Poll, premiered at Delphi in 1988and was revived at the National Theatre, inrevised form, in 1990. Harrison’s play makesGrenfell change into an Apollo of astoundingintellectual snobbery. He is horrified to dis-

cover that high poetry has become noisomerefuse, “Converted into dust and bookwormexcreta, / riddled lines with just ghost of theirmetre. / All my speeches, all my preciouswords / mounting mounds of dust and milli-pede turds”. He disdains the carnivalesque,boisterous satyrs, who begin the play asEgyptian labourers hired to work at Oxyrhyn-chus. Harrison thus used the very history ofthe papyri to explore, through creative ad-aptation of Sophocles’ precious text, thecontrasts between “low” entertainment and“high” art – intellectual property monopo-lized by elites and used to exclude their inferi-ors from education, power and privilege.

Most years since 1907 have seen the publi-

cation of new texts, ranging from passages ofHomer to contracts for the sale of donkeys:seventy-nine volumes of The OxyrhynchusPapyri are available. The twenty-first centuryalone has already given us a stunning series ofmythological narratives, in elegiac couplets,about handsome youths (Narcissus, Adonis)and the nymph who turned into the Cycladicisland of Delos; what connects them is thatthey all underwent metamorphosis. Theseelegant verses may well have been used byOvid, the peerless poet of transformation,in his Metamorphoses. Earlier discoveriesincluded the anonymous historical narrativeknown as the “Oxyrhynchus Historian” orHellenica Oxyrhynchia, which continuesthe story of the Peloponnesian War and itsaftermath from where Thucydides leaves off.Oxyrhynchus has also produced the majorityof the significant Christian papyri and trans-formed our understanding of law, society andcommerce. The papyri have introduced us toa prosperous class of shipowners and skippersand to pubic doctors. We can overhear offi-cials squabbling over salary advances, andtenant farmers over rent rises. We perhapsglimpse marital infidelity in a letter from amarried man to someone else’s wife, wherethe tone seems inappropriately steamy. Weoverhear negotiations between a father andhis discontented son, who has enlisted in alegion but now wants to be a cavalry officer.We appreciate the many different skillsinvolved in viticulture, the minutiae of thelaws on wheat prices and the sale of mort-gaged land, and the vast amounts of oilneeded to run a gymnasium. We salivate at thelist of goods for sale at a bakery outlet. Ourattention is drawn to powerful female land-owners and employers, such as Platonis, whoapprenticed her female slave to a weaver; adaughter writes to her mother about procuringexpensive saffron-coloured robes for a festi-val. There is evidence that girls could attendschool.

My own favourite papyri furnish real-world experiences of Oxyrhynchites whichilluminate scenes in important ancient litera-ture: several papyri describing slaves demon-strate the importance of scars in a societybefore photography or DNA tests. Slaves aresaid to have a scar on the left shin, or over theeyebrow, reminding us that when Odysseus’nurse recognizes him by his scar after twodecades, the poet was drawing on familiarpractice. The Odyssey’s absent husband isalso brought to mind by the sad petition of awife, asking the local magistrate to punish asailor whom she accuses of complicity in herhusband’s mysterious disappearance. Thedomestic arrangements of Tryphon theweaver resemble the plot of a comedy byMenander, whose plays were themselvesrecovered on Egyptian papyri, some of themfrom Oxyrhynchus.

Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy:Aspects of working-class life (1957), thefoundation text of Cultural Studies, is rarelycelebrated by classical scholars. And yet thephrase “the uses of literacy” was central toPeter Parsons’s opening presentation at theBritish Academy. The papyri have demandedthat we think about the functions that written

EDITH HALL

Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 2652 (2nd or 3rd century AD); an ink drawing showing the goddess Agnoia from an illustrated edition of Menander’s comedy Perikeiromene

COMMENTARY 15

TLS MARCH 27 2015

documents performed in ancient society asmuch as about their intellectual or aestheticqualities. Some even contain accounts fromadministrative archives, including informa-tion about the cost of writing materials; somereveal widely varying degrees of competencein grammar and spelling. The aspect ofOxyrhynchite life under the microscope inFebruary – one of the Oxyrhynchites’ moststriking “uses of literacy” – was leisure read-ing. Parsons kicked off with the art of fallingin love. Libidinous Oxyrhynchites could con-sult a manual attributed to Philaenis, withadvice on seduction techniques, includingadopting an appearance of careful self-ne-glect so that the desired person does not sus-pect. Fleas and garlic are mentioned in amagical handbook, showing that “magic”was involved in tips to help both affairs of theheart and household management. Oxyrhyn-chites could cure garlic-tainted breath by eat-ing baked beetroot. They could also calculatetheir chances of success in love by throwingdice and relating the number to a verse inHomer, or consult a manual on dream inter-pretation. If they wanted to ensure that thetruth was revealed in their dreams, theyneeded to pray to the goddess Neith (equatedwith Athena). If desperate, they could recite amagic spell asking Hecate, goddess of witch-craft, to wake their beloved and bring her totheir bed.

If at bedtime they preferred a good book, awide range was available, some enhanced byillustrations. Plutarch, the highly readablemoralist and biographer, was much enjoyed;but those with short attention spans couldconsume philosophy in summaries and selec-tions of maxims resembling an edition ofReader’s Digest. The lives of the renownedphilosophers could be read in collectedexcerpts. The gospels were read, perhaps lessas devotional literature and more as comfort-ing tales of the moral triumph of poor fisher-folk and carpenters over adversity and theRoman Empire. The same narrative arc wasoffered by the ever-popular Life of the fable-teller Aesop, an ill-favoured slave whosesuperior intellect allowed him to win severalsatisfying victories over cruel overlords andladies.

Such texts raise the question whether therewas something approaching a “mass market”in relatively inexpensive books available to awide cross-section of the population. Therewas certainly a taste for sensational narrativefiction – novels – in Oxyrhynchus. Ian Ruth-erford explored some of the more racy andexotic, including a version of the archetypaltale in which a woman has sex with an ass.Two versions of this story have also survivedin the manuscript tradition, the North AfricanApuleius’ Latin Golden Ass or Metamorpho-ses, and an abbreviated form of a Greek man-ass novel attributed to Lucian of Samosata inSyria. Some Oxyrhynchus novel fragmentshave opened up new vistas on the hybridGreek-Egyptian culture of the town. Thereare variant narratives about a world-conquer-ing Egyptian hero with the non-Greek nameSesonchosis. Some of the stories may havebeen translated from Egyptian texts, whichmay themselves have been produced as aresult of contact with Greek mythology; weare witnessing a complex and long-standingprocess of cultural cross-fertilization, whichRutherford is to illuminate in the forthcomingvolume he has edited entitled Aegypto-

Graeca: Interaction and translation betweenGreek literature and Egypt.

Several forms of public entertainmentwere available in Oxyrhynchus – athleticscontests, races, and musical and theatricalperformances. The Oxyrhynchites were pre-pared to pay substantial sums for entertain-ment. One second-century account details496 drachmae for a day’s performance by amime actor, 448 drachmae for a reciter ofHomer, and payments to a dancer. One localofficial curried favour with his public bysubsidizing theatre tickets. This tallies withthe size of the theatre, apparently designedto include large numbers and thereforelower-class audience members. The theatrehas disappeared, but when the archaeologistFlinders Petrie saw it in 1922, he estimated itscapacity at 11,000 spectators, out of a popula-tion of between 15,000 and 30,000. This size-able civic space was the scene of festivalswhere the whole city greeted the proclama-tion of a new emperor or applauded militarydisplays.

Theatrical performances were cer-tainly attractive at both ends of thesocial scale. One ambitious youthhad gone as a student to Alexandria

intending to study Rhetoric. In the letter hewrote to his prominent father (who held theoffice of High Priest of the Nile), there areominous references to a scandal “about thetheatre” in which they had both beenembroiled. There is evidence not only ofbook-learning at Oxyrhynchus, but of indi-viduals specifically interested in the aca-demic study of drama and of booksellers whoprovided them with services. The writer ofone letter of the second century AD asked hiscorrespondent to make copies of parts ofHypsicrates’ treatise Characters in Comedyand Thersagoras’ On the Myths of Tragedy.The important biography of the tragedianEuripides by Satyrus the Peripatetic wasunearthed at Oxyrhynchus.

The rubbish dumps have also yieldeddetailed information about the style and con-tent of theatrical entertainments the Oxyrhyn-chites enjoyed, and facilitated progress in our understanding of the way that ancientactors learned their roles and rehearsed. Thiswas a complicated business in ancient trag-edy, where just three actors normally took allthe parts in a play, changing masks as theychanged each role. Several papyri containingthe texts of tragedies feature signs in the mar-gins indicating changes of speaker, with num-bers keyed to indicate which actor spokewhich lines. These marks suggest they wereused during rehearsals for performance. Thebest example contains six fragments of Eurip-ides’ lost tragedy Cresphontes; the marginalnotations indicate the several different partsin the play assumed by a single actor. Anda recently published papyrus has thrownunprecedented light on the self-preparation ofindividual actors.

Most scholars used to think that both cho-rusmen and individual actors learned theirroles by repeating them antiphonally withtheir trainer. But the new papyrus proves thatactors could be given texts of their own linesin a play. Dated to between 100 BC and 50AD, it contains the thirty lines spoken byAdmetus at Euripides’ Alcestis 344–82. But itexcludes the lines delivered by his interlocu-tors, in this case the actor playing Admetus’

wife Alcestis and the chorus. The script is inlarge, clear handwriting, designed to be readeasily by an actor who needed to practisemovements as well as oral delivery. It alsosuggests that actors may have altered parts tosuit their own or local tastes. The Admetus“part” contains a fascinating textual discrep-ancy from the version of the speech which hascome down to us through the medieval manu-script tradition. In the manuscripts, Admetusannounces his plan to have a craftsman carvea statue of his wife to lie with him in their mar-riage bed. But in the papyrus part, the simula-crum is, rather, to be a painted portrait. Thisalteration might reflect the expectations ofthe local audience, who were of course accus-tomed to seeing beautiful portraits of theirdead loved ones on painted mummy boards.

One thrilling theatrical papyrus contains arehearsal text for a comic musical drama, aburlesque of Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia inTauris. In the tragedy, three Greeks (Iphi-genia, her brother and his friend) escape toGreece from barbarians in Crimea. The newcomic text features a heroine named Chari-tion, escaping with her brother and othersfrom barbarians in India. The Indians speak astrange language, painstakingly recordedphonetically in the papyrus, which soundsboth ridiculous and perhaps plausibly Indianto an Oxyrhynchite ear. There are also severalintriguing references to India in the fictionaltales found at Oxyrhynchus, which mentionan Indian divinity named Maia and the “Mis-tress of Ganges”. A story about the hero

Inaros may be connected with the ancientassociation of Alexander the Great, as con-queror of parts of India, with the god Diony-sus bringing his cult to far distant easternpeoples.

The awareness of India at Oxyrhynchusraises important questions about ethnic andcultural interaction in the southern and east-ern parts of the Roman Empire. Could the bar-barians in the Charition drama be speaking anancient Indian tongue? Some scholars havenoted similarities with words in Old Tamil,Prakrit and Tulu. Were Indian luxury goodsregularly on the market in Oxyrhynchus?Trade in spices, silk and other luxury goodsflourished between the Roman Empire andsouthern India; some were brought to tradingcentres on the Red Sea coast of Egypt (whereinscriptions in south Indian scripts have cer-tainly been found), and carried westwardacross the desert along the old route to Quft(Coptos) on the Nile, which flowed only tenmiles west of Oxyrhynchus. The Oxyrhyn-chites, themselves hybrid Greek-Egyptians,were always likely to enjoy a play aboutthe comic aspects of an inter-ethnic encoun-ter. Had the author of Charition changed thebarbarians from Black Sea Taurians to south-ern Indians because some of his Oxyrhyn-chite audience had encountered Indiantraders, visited India themselves, or evenenjoyed performances by visiting Indianactors? We must hope that the answers to suchenthralling questions lie waiting in the Oxy-rhynchus papyri yet to be published.