There are many reasons why I love to teach ancient Greek, but one of the best by far is the fact that every so often someone stumbles upon a forgotten manuscript or lost papyrus scroll and adds something new to the study of a so-called "dead" language. According to today's New York Times, 112 collected works of the Alexandrian Greek poet Posidippus of Pella, from the 3rd Century BC, have been discovered in the material used to mummify an Egyptian body a century after the poems were written (we're not the first culture to recycle - papyrus was sufficiently expensive that it was used over and over again, first as stationery, then as whatever was needed, like mummy wrapping). Posidippus wrote epigrams, pithy little poems kept intentionally short for inscriptions that gradually became their own established art form, and this recent find, aside from increasing his corpus of known material by a factor of five, sheds light in general on the rise of the epigrammatist in Greek literature. It's so exciting to imagine what else might be waiting to found out there- few people know that more than ninety-five percent of the literature from the ancient Graeco-Roman world was lost, and only known to us as footnotes or marginalia in some other long-dead author's text, making Classics more a field of filling in the blanks than anything else. Sure, we have Homer's works handed down to us intact (miracle of miracles!), but round up the tragedians and you will find that only ten percent of the total works of Euripides, Sophocles, or Aeschylus have survived the intervening centuries. Less than ten percent! Compound that with the knowledge that the "Big Three" of Greek tragedy were only a small fraction of the playwrights practicing their craft during the heydey of Attic drama, then afterwards, when tragedy spread to the entire Greek-speaking world, and you suddenly wonder how even the most learned professor can speak on the subject of this art form with any authority whatsoever. The same problem exists with every genre of Greek literature - we get a lot of hearsay from the ancient lit-crit crowd about what's good and what's not so good, but woefully little in the way of primary source materials, by which we might judge ourselves. Particularly maddening is the thought that there may have been authors just as worthy of our consideration as the ones handed down to us who simply didn't make the Alexandrian critics' "cut", for whatever reason. For instance, until now the surviving epigrams of Posidippus were all of a racy nature, leading Classicists to believe that erotic poetry was his thing. The discovery of this collection, with not one poem about love or sex in the hundred-plus collected works, shatters that assumption into a million pieces, and makes you wonder if the Hellenistic-age editor who gave us nothing but Posidippus' erotica just didn't have a dirty mind. Who knows how other future chance finds might change what we think we know about the ancient literature?