ABSTRACT
The Loves of the Plants was published only eight years after the first major scholarly edition of a papyrus text, and I do not know whether Darwin himself was aware of it. But his taxonomic mind would certainly have appreciated that the pluralist society of Gr~co-Roman Egypt is a unique challenge to anybody who seeks to examine it. Egypt offers the historian a range of primary sources unparalleled from anywhere else in the ancient world. There are the enormous numbers of papyri and other textual materials that have been yielded up by abandoned town sites, rubbish dumps and even mummy cases, and preserved by the dry Egyptian climate. (See Plate I.) Something over 30,000 texts have been published so far, and an indeterminably large number lurk in museum collections, still untouched by scholars. Their range is extraordinary, everything 'from mundane wage bills for labour on the road I to fragments of a long-lost Sapphic ode.'2 These papyri are primarily in Greek, the official bureaucratic language of Egypt from the fourth century BCE when the country became part of Alexander's eastern Mediterranean empire, to be ruled after Alexander's death by his general, Ptolemy, and his descendants. When Egypt became a province of Rome after the defeat of Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra at Actium in 3 I BCE, some Latin texts began to appear, though they were never numerous and Greek remained the lingua franca. The imported languages, however, never entirely supplanted the native Egyptian tongue, and both literature and documents continued to be written in Demotic, the penultimate phase of the indigenous language, during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.
