ABSTRACT
Sixty years ago, when I was a schoolboy privileged to study the old Greek authors in the original, the world of classical scholarship was briefly shaken by the apparent discovery, somewhere in Egypt I think, of a new text; it seemed to be part of a tragedy by one of the three great poets, Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides. The fragment seemed kosher, with phraseology, vocabulary, metaphor, style and expression of apparent authenticity and verisimilitude. Runners were described as ‘rowing their legs to a rapid tempo’, or something of that sort, just the sort of improbable turn of phrase which was in fact beloved by the classical baroque. But so many even more outrageous expressions followed thick and fast, that it became evident as a spoof, a deliberate ‘con’. The perpetrator was someone at the end of his career, who without malice aforethought, wanted some innocent fun at the expense of his too-serious colleagues.
