I don't remember which I got first, a few volumes of
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri I came across in a used-book store, or a copy of the 1990 third edition of Solmson, Merklebach and West's Oxford Classical Texts Hesiod. Both happened around 2003 to 2005. I'm very bad at recalling exactly when things happened.
It just occurs to me, just at this very moment, while writing this, that perhaps the reason I'm so fascinated by learning and memorizing historical dates is because I'm so bad at remembering dates in my own life. Maybe the obsession with historical dates is in part overcompensation for the weakness in recalling dates in my own life.
It's remarkable, how many insights I have while writing essays.
Onward. I do remember that finding the volumes of
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri in that bookstore, was the first that I had ever heard of the city of Oxyrhynchus. Like so many others before and after me, I looked into the subject and became enthralled by the story of the largest single find, by far, of ancient Classical texts.
I know: most of the texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus and edited so far have been of a quotidian nature, and that these glimpses into everyday life in the eastern Roman Empire from the 3rd century BC to the 6th century AD are the main attraction of the papyri for many historians. And for Biblical scholars, the Biblical, apocryphal and other early Christian papyri found at Oxyrhynchus are so important that, in some cases, they do not seem to realize, or in any case to particularly care, that these Christian papyri are only a small fraction of the entire find.
That's one of many pleasant aspects of the Oxyrhynchus find: it's so huge and varied that many different groups of scholars have each found their own field transformed.
For me, the most exciting Oxyrhynchus finds are the Classical texts, and especially the re-discoveries of missing Classical texts, and to me, right from the very first volumes of
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri which I ever saw, the most spectacular of these have seemed to be the many fragments of missing text of Hesiod's
Catalogue of Women, which, before Oxyrhynchus, had been more of a rumor than an ancient text, a dubious attribution to Hesiod, and which, after Oxyrhynchus, occupies 79 pages in that 1990 OCT edition of Hesiod. The reason why there was a third edition of the Oxford Classical Texts Hesiod by 1990, not to mention numerous revisions of other editions by Oxford and other publishers, was that more and more papyri kept coming to light, giving occasion to update not just the text of the
Catalogue of Woman, but also of Hesiod's
Theogony and
Works and Days, which had never been lost, but which, before the great finds of papyri beginning late in the 19th century, were known mostly from 15th-century manuscripts, and from no manuscript older than a solitary one from the 10th century. The Oxyrhyncus papyri of Hesiod, by contrast, are all 6th century or older, mostly 3rd century or older, and a few of them are BC.
Until very recently, I thought that Hesiod had flourished around 800 BC, because two different editions of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, that of 1951 and also that of 1972, told me so. I came across the date of fl ca 700BC in other sources, but I assumed, for a long time, that they were mistaken and Britannica was correct. I finally figured out that Britannica was mistaken, and, as you can see if you consult the newest Britannica in paper or online, someone at Britannica finally noticed the error as well and fixed the typo.
For me, it was very disappointing to find out that Hesiod had flourished a century later than I had thought, and it required that I considerably revised my imagining of the earliest alphabetic Greek writing. And then I learned that the great unearthing of fragments of the
Catalogue of Women, although doing away with the earlier controversy over whether or not the work had actually ever existed, had by no means convinced everyone that Hesiod had written it. More recently still, within just a few days, I've had to do some more mental revision, upon learning that the experts no longer all agree that Hesiod was a real person, any more real than Homer (assuming, as some but not all do, that there was no Homer).
Should I assume that still more Hesiodic papyri will be found and will shed more light on the Hesiodic Question and other questions? Over the course of my life I have tended to become more cautious about assuming anything. I will continue to try to catch up with the work of others, and wait and see what further evidence comes to light. On the other hand, it is very hard for me to believe that there will be no further finds of text of Hesiod -- or, if you prefer to emphasize your doubt of his existence, of "Hesiod."
